Archive for category: #laprogressive

Traitor Trump, and his stooge Christopher Miller, and their co-conspirators at the Department of Defense, should be indicted for their involvement in the 1/6 insurrection.

This week’s House Select Committee hearing featured some footage shot by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra of the dramatic events that unfolded that day. The footage shows the Congressional leadership of both parties being hurriedly escorted out of the Capitol by their Security as the rioters penetrated the Capitol, screaming for Pelosi and Pence so they could kill them to prevent the electoral count from being finalized on 1/6, as the Constitution requires.

Speaker Pelosi was filmed stating, as word reached them that Trump may be coming to the Capitol, that if he comes, “I’m going to punch him out” for invading the Capitol grounds, her territory. Both Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, showed great presence of mind trying to contain the violence happening at the Capitol from their safe hideout at Fort McNair, two miles away. They were calling the Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, and later the Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, pleading for National Guard troops to immediately come to the Capitol to clear out the rioters, who had entered both the House and Senate chambers, defecating on the floor, and shouting and screaming. But all they were getting from Trump’s DoD civilian and military leaders was stalling.

Here is why:

At 1:49pm on 1/6, when the rioters were beginning to overpower the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metropolitan Police and enter the Capitol, the heads of these two organizations placed a conference call to the Defense Department conveying an “urgent, immediate request for National Guard assistance” for “boots on the ground” to help suppress the violence, so the certification process could continue.

On a later call, at 2:30pm, they reached three star Lt. General Walter E. Piatt, Director of the Army Staff, who initially replied that he could not recommend that the request be approved, because the presence of uniformed military personnel could inflame the situation, and that the police were better suited to handle the situation.

At the same time, Pelosi and Schumer were calling everyone they could reach, nearby state governors, the Mayor of Washington, D.C. and officials at the Defense Department, to urge military assistance at the Capitol to quell the rioters, whom they watched on television crashing windows, opening doors, entering the Capitol, and attacking and overwhelming the Capitol Police.

On the conference call between the heads of the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metropolitan Police with General Piatt, the general first denied that Brigadier General Charles A. Flynn was on the call, but later admitted that he did participate in the phone call. Flynn, incredibly, is the brother of coup plotter and retired General Michael Flynn, a key advisor to President Trump in plotting to overturn the 2022 election.

General Charles Flynn initially had a memory lapse, saying that he did not remember saying anything on the call, but others on the call recall hearing his voice and that both he and Piatt stated that “the optics” of having uniformed military personnel deployed to the Capitol was not good. In December, 2021, Col. Earl Mathews, an Army JAG lawyer, who also was on the call, accused Flynn of making willful distortions of the events on 1/6, describing he and Piatt as “absolute and unmitigated liars” and of giving “perjured testimony to Congress”.

Piatt and Flynn recommended that locations away from the Capitol be identified where D.C. National Guard personnel could relieve Metropolitan Police personnel of traffic duties, allowing more Metropolitan Police personnel to go to the Capitol. Flynn specifically stated that the best use of National Guard personnel would be to free up Metropolitan Police personnel by performing non-law enforcement duties away from the Capitol. They urged that a “plan” be developed. The call ended at approximately 3;55pm.

At the same time, Pelosi and Schumer were pleading for military support at the Capitol, stating that if it were the Pentagon or the White House being attacked, military forces would have been immediately deployed. They demanded that the forces be deployed while the “plan” was being developed.

At about 3:05pm, General Flynn was joined in a secure videoconference by retired Major General Willian J. Walker, the Commanding General of the D.C. National Guard, and by Col. Matthews and others. The videoconference was continuous until about 5:15pm, and was joined by many other high level DoD officials. It was not until 5:08pm that Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller authorized the D.C. National Guard to be deployed to the Capitol in support of the Capitol Police.

Why The Delay?

Mark Esper was Secretary of Defense from June 18, 2019 until he was abruptly fired by Trump on November 9, 2020, shortly after he lost the election. Trump replaced him with Christoper Miller, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a Trump loyalist. Miller was later accused by Biden’s staff of obstructing the transition to the Biden Administration. Miller’s chief of staff was Kash Patel, a former aide to Congressman Devin Nunes. Patel was notorious for his efforts to discredit investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

On January 3, 2021, all ten living former Secretaries of Defense raised concerns in an open letter that there could be a potential military coup to overturn the 2020 election results, warning Trump officials, and specifically naming Miller, that they would face grave consequences if they did this. Trump’s react to this open letter was to order Miller to “do whatever was necessary to protect the demonstrators” on January 6!

Consequently, on January 4, Miller issued orders prohibiting deploying National Guard members with weapons, helmets, body armor, or riot control agents without his personal approval. Miller was seen in the Alexandra Pelosi video footage on 1/6 talking with Pelosi and Schumer and other Congressional leaders stammering and stalling when these leaders demanded the the National Guard be deployed to protect the Capitol. Clearly, Miller was following the Traitor Trump’s orders not to deploy the National Guard to assist the Congressional leaders under attack.

In fact, Miller waited over three hours, until 5:08pm, before deploying the National Guard, which he did only after Traitor Trump finally emerged from the Oval Office dining room, where he was hiding doing nothing except joyfully watching the rioting at the Capitol on television, to urge the rioters to go home peacefully.

Traitor Trump, and his stooge Christopher Miller, and their co-conspirators at the Department of Defense, should be indicted for their involvement in the 1/6 insurrection. General Charles Flynn, who was later appointed head of the Army forces in the Pacific region, should be investigated at length for his own role in the 1/6 Insurrection.

It used to be that emotions were experienced as being invasion from the sacred world given to us by the goddesses and gods.

Emotions is one of those words that everyone thinks understand until you press them with questions. Broadly speaking, Western philosophers have not thought well of emotions. It was not until the time of the Romantics at the end of the 18^th century that the tide turned in favor of the emotions. Here is a history of how the leading lights of the West thought of emotions. For most of Western history:

Emotions were thought of as coming from supernatural forces outside the psyche. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that emotions were thought about as physiological
Emotions had no separate categorization of its own. It was rolled up into temperament and passions.

Plato was as distrustful of emotions as he was of pleasure. Emotions were part of appetite and a lower form of humanity. Rationality and mathematics were believed to be true. Aristotle, as he often did, struck a balance and said that reason and emotion went together. The Stoics, including Seneca, understood the passions to be dangerous and the cause of imbalances. Reason should put passions in their place. St. Augustine distinguished emotions of human frailty from emotions of God. Reason was separated from emotions since emotions could not be trusted. For Hobbes, the passions are bodily sensations and are the primary sources of action, which prompt both war and peace. Passions could go in two directions. One way was towards an object which was appetite and the other was away from object, which was aversion. Respite from passions make rational decisions possible and the basis for a social contract. Descartes, as most of us know, separated the mind from the body and believed emotion had no place in the mind, which was rational and mathematical.

The status of the emotions began to improve with Spinoza who wrote that both the mind and the emotions were part of nature. Locke added that emotions could be positive as well as negative and added the empathy people have with each other. Hume warned against the rising tide of passion, saying that passions controlled reason. Hume did not think that reason drove emotions. Rather, reason was just a calculator for a way out of predicaments that the passions had created. Rousseau championed natural feelings as more reliable than reason and despised “factious or sham feelings produced by civilization”.

How well do you know what emotions are?

To demonstrate how people’s understanding of emotions can be more confusing than you might suspect, try responding to the following statements below. Except for the eighth bullet, try to decide if each statement is mostly true, conflicted or mostly false. Don’t take more than a minute to answer each one, as my point for this article is to examine your spontaneous answers to these statements. After you’ve marked the bullets true or false, give a reason or two which justify each answer. Then answer bullet eight with a paragraph. The first part of this article is designed to address your answers before discussing other topics. Here are the statements:

Feelings and emotions are the same thing.
Emotions are irrational and are the opposite of thoughts.
Emotions are biological and out of our conscious control.
Emotions happen first and thoughts follow in order to explain them.
Negative emotions such as hostility and venting (screaming and throwing things) get those emotions out of your system so they don’t build up.
Changing your interpretations of thoughts about events that happen to you can change your emotions.
A two-year old cannot feel angry.
What kind of conditions might exist in which you wouldn’t know how you feel?
In general, women are more emotional than men.
Emotional ranges are universal regardless of one’s social class.
Non-verbal body language, like gestures and postures, are truer expressions of emotions than what people tell you about their emotions.
Regardless of the type of society, if a heterosexual woman finds her husband in bed with another women it is natural to feel jealous.

A Cognitive Theory of the Emotions

Are feelings and emotions the same thing?

Usually people use the terms “feelings” and “emotions” interchangeably. I think this is a loss of a great opportunity to differentiate physiological states of arousal (feelings) from cognitive interpretation of events (emotions). While most feelings are biological and out of our control, (fight-flight, pleasure-pain; frustration-contentment), our emotions are under our control. But what do I say, as a counselor, when a member of my Men Overcoming Violence support group says to me “but my anger is out of my control. What do you mean I have control of them?”. Feelings like dry mouth, sweaty palms, headache simply start the process. Which emotion results from these bodily conditions depends on how the physiological state is interpreted. One interpretation is a panic attack. Another is anxiety while still another is anticipating the happy unknown of a wedding ceremony.

Emotional reactions from thick to thin

In order to have interpretations, the person has to give meaning, and in order to do that the person has to think. “Wait a minute” the participant in Men Overcoming Violence, says “when I get angry it happens very fast, I don’t think about which emotion to have, I just have them. How do you explain that?”. The problem is many of us think of thinking as thick – weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of pants or trying to understand what is causing a leak in the pipe. We have less practice imagining thinking that is thin and happening quickly. How do we account for differences in the speed in which we think?

A child is not given a universal set of emotions which, like buttons, the child pushes on and off. She has physiological states of arousal and the child is slowly taught how to translate that state of arousal into emotions like hurt, confusion, or sadness. The time it takes to have an emotion is mediated by the set of interpretations the parent socializes in the child. As the child reacts to situations, the situations become more familiar, so both the thinking process and the emotional go faster. Soon the emotion is unconscious and automatic. It becomes so habitual that it seems “natural, that is, biological. No emotion is biological. Feelings are biological, emotions are ontogenetic (part of individual development), social, cultural and historical, as we shall see.

Emotional reactions from thin to thick

In the last section I said there that as people are presented with situations that are familiar and predictable their emotional reaction speeds up and eventually becomes unconscious. But what are the conditions under which your emotional reactions will slow down? This can happen when a person is put in an increasingly unusual situation. For example, suppose I broke up with someone I loved after five years. We had differences over wanting children, where we wanted to live and how much money we expected each other to make. So we break up. It is a relatively small town and we are at the point that the last thing either of us wants to do is run into each other. But errands are errands, so I head for downtown. In the distance about three blocks away I think I see her. I duck inside a storefront and watch as the figure moves towards me. How do I feel? Sad, disappointed, angry but relieved. I am frozen in place. Then I see another figure is joining her and they hold hands. Now I am filled with new emotions. Outrage, as I decide not enough time has passed by to justify this. Was she seeing this guy while we were still together? What the fuck?? It gets worse. About a block away I see her partner is a woman. Now all the gaskets are blown. Fortunately, the store front was a clothing store that I can enter to possibly avoid running into them. Fortunately for me she and her girlfriend don’t come in. I flee the scene for home. Do I know how I feel? There is only so much complexity that can be integrated. I friend calls later in the afternoon to see how I am doing. He asks, “how are you feeling?”. My true answer is that I don’t know how I feel. It will probably take me a few days to answer a question like this coherently.

Are emotions irrational and the opposite of thoughts?

Emotions are not irrational and the opposites of thoughts. There are rational and irrational thoughts, not rational or irrational emotions. Irrational thoughts are things like, “my boyfriend is cheating on me because he is talking to a female neighbor for 30 minutes. I am jealous”. The thought is irrational because the woman is jumping to specific conclusions without much evidence. Being jealous is only irrational because the thought is irrational. If the same woman claims that her husband is flirting with the neighbor and might be sleeping with her because she has many experiences of her husband having had casual sex is rational. Here, in this situation, the emotion of jealousy is rational. All emotions follow thought. Emotions are rational or irrational just as thoughts are. Feelings are biological and prerational but only emotions can be irrational or rational

Are emotions biological and out of our control?

Emotions are neither biological nor out of our control. Emotions are ontogenetic, social cultural and historical. Having a particular emotional reaction may be hard to change but that does not mean they are out of our control. As an Italian American man, I am socialized to express anger rather than hurt, sadness or confusion first. Can that be changed? Yes, but it requires a great deal of psychological work. Many men in the Men Overcoming Violence program learned how to do that, but it took them 40 weeks of meeting once a week for two hours. On the wall we had a large list of emotions on a 5×10 foot piece of butcher paper. At the top were seven kinds of emotion. But underneath each emotion there were seven other emotions going from strongest to weakest intensity. Every time a man in the program said he was angry, we would insist that he include at least 2-3 other emotions so he could become aware of the emotional variety of his emotional states that he was unaware of up to that point.

Thoughts precede and create emotions

As is probably obvious by now emotions don’t come first and thoughts follow. First comes interpretation of what events mean and then the emotion follows. The order is:

Interpretation of what the situation means – dangerous/safe; structured/loose;
Feelings sweaty palms, dry-mouth, heart racing;
Emotion – fear, anger, disappointment.

Does the hydraulic theory of emotions work?

Allowing yourself to vent—yell, scream and throw things does not make you have less emotion. What it does is help you form a habit of escalating to the point where it gets easier and easier. “Getting it of your system” is part of an old way of looking at emotions called the “cathartic theory of the emotions” that goes all the way back to Aristotle. It has been called the “hydraulic” theory because it pictures emotions as rising up like water in a bathtub which will overflow if it is not drained. Freud had this theory and so did humanistic psychologists like Fritz Perls during the early 1970s. Reichian therapists would give people tennis rackets and have them flail the couch of the therapist, hoping to get their anger out of their system. It was not until the 1980s when cognitive psychologists argued that emotions don’t work that way (see Carole Tavris, Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion).

Emotions emerge over the course of ontogenesis moving from simple to complex

Is anger present from birth or is it the product of a developmental process that only arises at a certain age level? Some theorists of emotion claim that there are universal emotions such has surprise, disgust, love, hurt, sadness. My point here isn’t to claim what the right batch is. Rather it is to say whatever the right batch is, it takes time for them to emerge. So to the question can a two-year old express anger, my answer is no. Let me give an example. If you are watching a two year old child play with a toy and you get up and put a barrier in front of the toy and you watch the child try to figure out how to get around the barrier to the toy the child may be frustrated, but they are not angry at you. In order to be angry the child has to perceive that there are a certain social roles and rules that are normal. Anger comes over the violation of these rules. If the child was six years old and you again placed a barrier between them and their toy, chances are good they would be spending more time challenging why you put the barrier up than they would trying to overcome the barrier. Why? Because as the child’s parent, it is highly unusual for you to behave in such a sadistic way. There are complex emotions like jealousy, envy and revenge which require the mastery of rules and roles before they make sense.

How Emotions are Socialized

Are women more emotional than men?

At least in Yankeedom, it is common to say that women are more emotional than men. This is really not the case at all. Socially, women and men are given a range of emotions that it are safe to express and another set that is more or less forbidden.

If we start out with straight women and straight men we can say, women are taught to express a wider set of emotions such as sadness, hurt, fear, confusion, humiliation and love. Men are socialized to be angry, brave and courageous. What is interesting is that if a woman crosses the line and expresses forbidden emotions, she is threatened by being called gay or a lesbian. We all know that when a woman is assertive at work she is called a bitch. On the other hand, can you imagine how a male attendant at a gas station would feel if after finally agreeing with his wife that they were lost came into the store and said:” I feel embarrassed, humiliated and confused because I can’t figure out how to get to such-and-such a place”? The guy might not give him the correct directions right away. He may first say “Get hold of yourself, man”.

There are at least two ways to think about having an emotion. The first is emotional impression and the second is emotional expression. An emotional impression is when an emotion is registered internally. An emotional expression is whether you decide to express the emotion to someone else. Often, women may express emotions more. But that does not mean women are more emotional than men.

Expression of emotions and social class

It is not true that all classes in capitalist societies have the same range of expression of emotions. In the first place, it matters what kind of religion the social class is committed to. If we consider the differences between men and women and we examine Catholic working-class women and men we will find they will express a greater range of emotions than the Protestants will. The protestant working class (at least the white working class) tend to be shut down emotionally. Working-class men and women generally have a hard life and it makes sense they will have thicker skins.

Middle class men and women have better jobs which requires less armoring. They will be more open emotionally than the working class. This is amplified by how committed middle class people are to therapy. Out-to-lunch, class-oblivious, humanistic psychology proclaims that the more open the person, the healthier they are. They fail to understand that if you live in rough neighborhoods, attend rough schools and take orders from a boss all day long, it pays to have a thick skin.

Upper-middle class men generally are the happiest in their work. Woman in upper middle-class positions at work have to be more careful, since they are in danger of being called a bitch for asserting their authority. They also have to be careful about being labelled as too emotional at the slightest turn.

The upper classes are generally old money conservatives. Both men and women tend to repress emotions and they generally feel that the very expression of emotion is bad taste. They carry on an aristocratic tradition which prides itself in never breaking down, whether in love or war.

Happiness and social class

Socialists would be very happy with the results of research about which social classes are happy and which aren’t and why. It seems intuitive to say that the upper classes are happier than the working class because they have an easier life. But research shows that this isn’t quite the case. What we know for sure is that money does bring happiness when money delivers the working class into a middle-class position. However, there is no necessary correlation that money buys happiness as one moves from middle class to upper class. It is not predictable that upper class people will claim to be happier than those who are middle class. All this means is that when money provides the foundation for a good life, people respond well. But beyond middle class there is no correlation between money and happiness. To say money can’t buy happiness is not true. Happiness can increase as we ascend from poor to middle class. A formula for a good economic social policy is that if you want happier people, try to make all workers middle class.

Differences between classes in becoming civilized and becoming disciplinedAs we will see shortly when we discuss the history of emotions, the process of becoming civilized brought with it a whole different range of social and psychological emotions. But for now we want to ask, does the process of becoming civilized apply to all social classes from the 17th through the 19th centuries? In my book Forging Promethean Psychology I argue that the working class and the poor in absolutist states or nation-states never became civilized, but they did become disciplined.

How was becoming disciplined different from becoming civilized? The first difference had to do with the population in question. Becoming civilized was the psychogenetic socialization process of the middle and upper classes. Being disciplined mostly applied to the working class and the poor. The second difference was in the types of influences used. The process of becoming civilized involved softer influences such as rhetoric, charisma, symbolic power, and legitimacy. Discipline, at least initially, involved hard influences such as physical force, the threat of force (coercion), economic deprivation, politics, and later, legitimation.

The third difference was the direction of the class forces operating. Becoming civilized, as Norbert Elias writes was a competitive process for status among classes who were roughly equal – aristocrats, merchants, and intellectuals. Becoming disciplined initially involved top-down orders. Poor or working class people had to obey the authorities or face consequences. Discipline came from the top: Calvinist and Lutheran theologians to their parishioners; from military authorities to their soldiers; and from the state to its subjects.

Following Elias, becoming civilized in the courts of Europe involved a new set of emotions for aristocrats such as shame, embarrassment, superiority and envy. For the working class under disciple, they had another set of emotions; fear, suspicion, paranoia and guilt. It is easy to think classes in other societies had the same set of emotions, but this is not true. Elias says that the situation in 16^th and 17^th century Europe was unique.

Cross-Cultural Emotions: How They vary from society to society

Collectivism vs Individualism

In his book Cultural Psychology, Steven J. Heine reports that broadly speaking individualists of industrial capitalist societies are more likely to express emotions than collectivists and they are certainly more likely to express negative emotions. This is not hard to understand. People in collectivist societies are interdependent upon each other and consider most as extended kin at work and in their villages. They cannot afford blow-ups. On the other hand, because the relationships between individuals in industrial capitalist societies are short-term and appear voluntary (following social-contract theory), they are more likely to tolerate a falling out.

Another common distinction is between cultures of honor (herding societies) and cultures that are not (farming societies). As has been pointed out in the book Cultures of Honor herders are far more suspectable to insult because: a) their wealth is mobile rather than stable; b) their population is sparse; and c) they have no protection from the state in terms of land disputes. Farmers are more likely to tolerate insult because their wealth in land is stable, they can count on the state for intervention and the land is densely populated. They are less likely to settle disputes with duels or shoot-outs. The differences between southerners and northerners in the United States follows.

Finally, Ruth Benedict characterized the difference between shame cultures and guilt cultures. Shame is embarrassment at letting the group down. Guilt has little to do with groups. Guilt is remorse over a volition of a law, or a holy book. Puritans show a great deal of guilt. She also made a distinction between Dionysian cultures which are expressive and Apollonian cultures which were more reserved.

Analogical messages: gestures, postures

Most people well understand that it is necessary to do emotional work on the job and at home. Emotional work means a) showing emotions you do not have and; b) hiding the emotion you do have. This is especially true in customer-service work. However, people also imagine that their analogical communication (gestures, postures) is somehow less deceptive and imagine they are a more reliable gage than verbal expression of emotions. But cross-cultural research shows this is not the case. For example, Yankees may think that the A-Okay sign is universally recognized when among Southern Europeans, it is a crude gesture. In our Men Overcoming Violence group, a Yankee man innocently propped up his feet on a stool in front of an Iraqi man sitting across the way. He soon found out the showing the sole of one’s foot to someone from Iraq is the greatest insult. If there are gestures and postures that are universal, they are few and far between. They may be harder to hide than the verbal expressions but their origins lie deep in the local context of the culture which vary from region to region.

Cross-cultural nature of jealousy

The following is paraphrased from the textbook Invitation to Psychology by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris. A young wife leaves her house one morning to draw water from the local well, as her husband watches from the porch. On her way back from the well, a male stranger stops her and asks for some water. She gives him a cupful and then invites him home for dinner. He accepts. The husband, wife and guest have a pleasant meal together. In a gesture of hospitality, the husband invites the guest to spend the night with his wife. The guest accepts. In the morning the husband leaves early to bring home breakfast. When he returns, be finds his wife again in bed with the visitor. At what point in this story will the husband feel angry? The answer depends on the culture.

A North American husband would feel very angry at a wife who had an extramarital affair.
A North American wife would feel very angry at being offered to a guest as if she were a lamb chop.
But a Pawnee husband of the 19th century would be enraged by any man who dared to ask his wife for water.
An Ammassalik Inuit husband finds it perfectly honorable to offer his wife to a stranger, but only once. He would be angry to find his wife and guest having a second encounter.
A century ago, a Toda husband in India would not feel angry at all because Todas allow both husband and wife to take lovers. However, both spouses would feel angry if one of them had a sneaky affair, without announcing it publicly.

In most cultures people feel angry in response to insult and the violation of social rules. But they often disagree about what an insult is or what the correct rule should be. Here we have four different cultures lined up on the political spectrum in their attitudes towards hospitality and sexuality.

The most extreme right wing is the Pawnee Indian who draws the line at talk at the well. In the center right is a Yankee husband who is outraged at his wife having a martial affair. But on the liberal side of the spectrum we have the Inuit who draws the line not at having an affair, but at having sex twice. The Toda, the most radical has no problem extramarital sex. The problem is if it is done in an underhanded manner.

History of the Emotions

Broadly speaking, it used to be that emotions were experienced as being invasion from the sacred world given to us by the goddesses and gods. It was only at the beginning of the 18^th century that emotions were thought of as originating from some part of the mind or the body. After 1860 emotions were seen as cultural, universal, inclusive of all species, biological, physiological and hard-wired.

What does it mean that emotions have a history? Does it mean that new emotions emerge in different historical periods? To say this is to challenge universalis ideas of emotions being static or possibly circulating in different historical periods. In my book Lucifer’s Labyrinth I follow Elias’ description of how differences from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe produced new sets of emotional reactions.

Emotions in the Middle Ages

As Elias says, people in the Middle Ages lived a life that was intense, brutal and short. They lived life to the fullest with the time they had. Their psychological life alternated between sensory saturation and religious mortification about what they had done. Middle Age people were more violent and could tolerate more pain. As Elias said, they live their life between the super-ego and the id. The ego was less developed.

The warrior class in the Middle Ages could be characterized as courageous, impetuous, wild, cruel and living in the present. But when these warriors were forced into the courts by the king and the merchants, they had to adapt themselves to court life. Above all, they needed to control themselves. Now their characteristics included being prudent, restrained, self-contained, timely, refined, more humane and more gossipy. Their every mood required foresight for the future, hindsight into the past (people they may have offended) and insight and self-reflection to make sure their behavior was not offensive. So within a century, the emotional life of one class significantly changed.

Emotional life in the Baroque and the 18th century

There are also major differences in the emotions between the Baroque 17^th century aristocrats and the 18thcentury merchants during the Enlightenment. The aristocrats of the 17th century had superiority complexes, were preoccupied with “keeping up with the Jones” and cultivated a cool nonchalant attitude. On the other hand, some 18^th century merchants strove openly to be happy, and were motivated by their quest for serenity. Their emotions were controlled by reason, not so much by what was expected of them. The emotional life between the aristocrats and merchants differed in many other areas such as attitude toward the senses; attitude towards pain; attitude towards animals; bodily conduct; sleeping patterns and attitude towards dying.

From honor and glory to avarice and ambition: warriors vs merchants

As we’ve said, the values of aristocrats in Europe were honor and glory. But for the merchants in the 18^thcentury these values would not do. As Albert Hirschman traces a movement from glory and honor to “interests” in his book Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray tells the story of how these values were undermined by two new values: avarice and ambition. Both these motivations were despised by all classes in the Middle Ages. But with the rise of merchants there was a slow process by which avarice and ambition were changed from vices to virtues, which supported merchant capitalism

Emotional life of Romantics: late 18th to mid 19th century

Lastly, in the 18^th century with the rise of romanticism, early romantics had a new attitude toward the emotions which differed drastically from the Enlighteners. Lionel Trigger in his book Sincerity, points out that with romanticism came new emotions: the importance of being sincere and the importance of being authentic. Being sincere was the exact opposite to the aristocratic of haughtiness and masquerading. It meant saying what you meant and meaning what you said. Being authentic came out of the romantic notion that everyone had a true self as opposed to the roles both aristocrats and merchants had to play. Being authentic meant showing people your true self. Sincerity and authenticity were hugely important to humanistic psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Summing Up: Evolution to an Emotion

We are now finally in a position to describe the evolution to an emotion. The first step, or point zero, is an external event that triggers the emotion. Let’s say you work as a cook in a restaurant and your ex shows up for dinner with her new boyfriend.

Physiological state of arousal:
- Physiological – sweaty palms, racing heart, dry mouth
- Feelings – confusion, frustration, pain, discomfort
Internalized socio-cultural, class and historical forces
- Type of society – industrial capitalist
- Social class – all working class
- Cross-cultural – Mexican American; Italian
- Gender – heterosexual – man – woman
- Point in history – 21st century crumbling Yankee empire
Cognitive appraisal
- Automatic thoughts; cognitive interpretations; explanatory styles
- Assumptions – all this from the cognitive psychology of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck
Analogical messages
- Gestures, posture, clothing
Situational constraints
- You are working and you can’t leave
Display rules and emotional work
- What feelings do you have to show that you don’t have?
- What feelings do you have that you can’t show?
Emotional impression
- Hurt, anger, fear, jealousy, disappointment, relief
Emotional expression
- Optional
- Act like you don’t care

Under normal circumstances which are routine, all eight of these steps could be processed in less than ten seconds because of years of practice. But because of the unusualness of this particular circumstance, our poor cook may take days to process what the situation means and what array of emotions he has.

As we have seen, the cognitive theory of the emotions has revolutionized the theory of emotions by arguing that emotions come from thoughts. But cognitive psychology implies that the individual makes up their own mind about which emotions they have. In the evolution to an emotion steps, the second step is entirely missing. A communist theory of the emotions would have social, cultural, class and historical mediators in place.

The hardest step for people in capitalist society to understand about this evolution is the second step. How could internalized socio-cultural, historical and class forces be inside of people rather than outside? Wouldn’t these forces come later, at the end?

The inclusion of step two attacks the idea that emotions are private, inside people and under their control. A communist theory of the emotions says that emotions are not private. They are products of a particular type of society, a particular social class, a particular kind of culture existing in a certain point in history. All these forces exist prior to the time you were born and they are socialized into you by your caretakers mostly unconsciously, especially in the first five years. The initial internalized socio-cultural, class and historical conditions are inside you whether you like it or not. That is our fate.

Later, as we mature, we become more active in dialectically reciprocating with these forces so that our class status might change. We might go to live in a different country (culture) or go to live in a socialist society. We might work as economic advisors to contribute to the world historical economy shifting Eastward in the 21^st century. Whereas fate are the conditions that we are given when we are born, destiny is what we make of those conditions. However, even if you are active on all these fronts, step two is the infrastructural plumbing of all emotions and its creates and sustains all the steps that follow. The content of the infrastructural plumbing may change, but the presence of a plumbing infrastructure will not.

What Capitalism Can Do to Our Emotions

Capitalist psychology splits the individual from his social, cultural, historical and class identity. Then it takes the stripped-down, isolated, alienated individual as human nature as its point of departure. Most every psychological problem is rooted in the chaotic and contradictory interactions of the four systems as they interact.

Alienation Under Capitalism

Alienation is the inversion of subject and object, creation and creator. It is a reversal of ends and means so that the means acquire a life if their own.

Members of capitalist society are alienated in:

the products of their labor;
the process of producing the products;
the other people they are producing with;
the power settings in which the product is distributed;
the biophysical environment; and
their self-identity

The products of their labor: commodity fetishism: hoarding, manic consumption

Marx talked about how under capitalism commodities acquire a life of their own, and become disengaged from the situation which produced them. Commodities, rather than becoming a means to an end for living, become an end in itself. Erich Fromm defined a particular kind of pathology which he called the hoarding mentality and the marketing pathology in which people are obsessed with the accumulation of commodities. The emotional life of a consumer is anxious and destabilized because their identity is centered around the acquisition of new commodities, whether they need them or not. Most capitalist psychologists treat accumulation of commodities and capitalist mania for accumulation as not worth identifying as a pathology as it’s not even in the diagnostic manual.

The process of producing the products: insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion Under capitalism, the workday has lengthened from 40 to at least 50 hours of work in the last 50 years. There is less security about having a job and the average worker is more likely to have two jobs with no benefits. For workers a job is just something to put up with. Life begins when an individual has leisure time. Work under capitalism still possesses a religious root as a way to repent from original sin. This adds extra distress for workers during a recession or a depression when workers cannot find a job but blame themselves for not having a good “work ethic.”

Other people they are producing with: competitive anxiety anti-group mentality Almost a hundred years ago neo-Freudian Karen Horney claimed that it was competition between workers and between workers and other social classes that produced anxiety. As I mentioned in my article What is Social Psychology Part II, that groups under capitalism are treated as:

no more than the sum of individuals;
less than the sum of individuals;
an entity that has a super-personally separate life from individuals.

To give you an example of the third framework, when people join a group at work, they often dissolve into it. They reify the group. They make the group a thing, above and beyond anything they can control. When an individual withdraws from the group, the group is renounced as a resource, as the individual believes their problems are so precious that no one could possibly understand them.

When the individual tolerates the members of a group, the individual renounces the capacity of the member being tolerated to change. The tolerating member does not consider that other members might be restless also, and they are not alone in putting up with members who are hard to manage. When individuals rebel against the group, they assume that other group members are conservative, never change or are stuck in their ways. If the individual tries to dominate the group, the dominating individual renounces their ability to get what they want through the collective creativity of the group. What withdrawing, toleration, rebelling or dominating have in common is that they are zero-sum game, with winners and losers. The best example of a group that is treated as less than the sum of individuals, is in the Lord of the Flies novel. A group being less than the sum of individuals exists in the hyper-conservative imagination of Gustave Le Bon in his books about crowds, or in mass media’s depiction of mass behavior during natural disasters where crowds develop a hive mentality.

The power-setting in which the product is distributed: apathy, myopia

Unions in the United States gave up a long time ago providing a vision for workers in terms of having a say in the decision making on the job. This leads to apathy. In addition, the specialization of labor discourages understanding what is going on in the entire production process. People do their job over and over and know nor care what is going on in other parts of the production process. “That’s none of my business”.

Alienation from nature: physical deterioration shortening life-span

This form of alienation under capitalism has reached a currant volatile form in the areas of pollution extreme weather. John Bellamy Foster has called this a “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature. Air pollution worsened breathing for people with lung problems and added new physical problems. Extreme weather has made both winter and summer conditions hazardous almost everywhere in Yankeedom. The lack of state planning over Covid has either killed millions of people or given them Long-Covid. The United States life span has declined 2.7 years since Covid began. The US is the worst at managing Covid, having the highest number of infections and deaths. Environmental psychologists have long known that getting out into nature reduces stress and has long-term benefits. But thanks to capitalism, communing with a nature which is unpolluted is getting harder and harder to find.

Alienation from self: the illusion of free will under capitalism – depression

Capitalist psychology assumes people are fundamentally selfish, as if we individuals are like Hobbes’ atoms, greedy, insensitive, grasping and mindlessly crashing into each other. Whether it is Freud’s ego or the behavioral motivation of pain or pleasure, individuals’ primary motivation is self-interest.

Under capitalism individuals have supposed “free will”, meaning they may more or less freely choose their situations. Religious institutions, educational expectations, economic and political propaganda, legitimation techniques, mystification and collusion in the end have no bearing on what happens. In spite of everything, free will wins over the type of society we are raised in, our social class, our culture or the historical period in which we live. With these unrealistic expectations about freedom, the individual is likely to internalize the real-life constraints and blame themselves for their less than idyllic life.

For a communist psychology, all these forms of socio-political control affect free will. While none of these processes by themselves or even all together determine a person’s free will, the options people choose to exercise are significantly constrained.

Capitalists eternalize capitalist relations Capitalists eternalize alien relations under capitalism and treat them as if they were always there. They project how people learn, think, emote and remember under capitalism into other historical periods. For example, they present narcissism, attention-deficit disorders or manic-depression as present in tribal or state civilizations just as much as they are under capitalism.

Emotions under Communism Everything that follows is based on the real experience of workers in worker cooperatives, behavior in natural disasters and workers’ experiences in revolutionary situations. These emotional states represent communists at their very bestrather than all the time. Under communism people are seen as primarily collectively creative. This is demonstrated in practice when workers are given the opportunity to operate cooperatives, create workers’ councils in revolutionary situations or even how they behave during natural disasters. Selfishness is a product of capitalism and not the primary way human beings operate. Consuming commodities are a means to an end. There is no hoarding or manic consumption in communism since the primary identity of a worker is fulfilled on the job because they love their work.

Workers are not anxious or insecure about work because there is more than enough work for everyone. The number of hours of work per day will shrunk because technology, no longer controlled by capitalist, is available to do mechanized part of the work, leaving people more time for the creative parts of the job.

Social unconscious: recalling the great moments in revolutionary situations

For a communist psychology, what is unconscious, at least for the working class is a “social” unconscious. It is the repressed memory of the human past, dead labor, that causes this individual to have “social amnesia” and not care about their own history. However, when the collective-creative memory is revived, out pours the wisdom that has accumulated from revolutionary situations: the heroic stance of the Paris Commune; the heroism of Russian factory councils and the workers’ self-management experiments in Spain from 1936-1939. To make this social unconscious conscious is to make the working class shapers of history rather than just being a product of it.

Pro-group basis of communist psychology

In all these examples the group attitude under capitalism is a whole never more than the sum of its parts. The goal of communist psychology is to cultivate a “social” individual who gradually comes to see the activity of building and sustaining groups as the key to emotional health. Even though in socialist psychology, the group as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, the group is still the creation of concrete individuals. The group has no mystical identity floating above individuals. While there is no group without individuals, through the collective creativity of members, the group acquires a synergy whose products are more than what any individual can do by themselves. A communist psychology creates these win-win situations through cooperation.

A socialist psychological group challenges people who withdraw or dissolve into the group by asking what the group can do to give then what they want. The group confronts those who tolerate others by asking them why they are putting up with other members – what would need to happen for things to be different. To those who rebel the group asks “what are you rebelling against and how could we change things to make the group more attractive to you?”. To those who try to dominate the group, socialist group therapy does not moralize against dominators. We simply say that you are losing out on the collective creativity of others by trying to subjugate them.

Our job involves exposing the unconscious commonalities between people that lie beneath our individual differences. It means making a long-term commitment based on the belief that the commonalities between most working-class and middle-class people far outweigh our differences.

The idea is that if you learn to build the collective power of a one group, you can then go out into the world and change it by your newfound capacity to change groups wherever we go, now and into the future. Learning how to change groups through the collective creative capacity of the group moves us from being products of history to being co-producers of it. A rich, co-creative group life is the key to emotional well-being under communism.

Under capitalism we have an emotional life with elements that include hoarding, manic consumption, narcissism, short-attention span, insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion, apathy, myopia, unnecessary physical deterioration, a shortened lifespan and depression. Under communism people are relaxed, serene, enthusiastic, creative, and happy and that goes with the research on happiness described earlier in this article.

Beyond Capitalism

Why aren’t we hearing more about corporate surveillance of employees in the United States?

Today’s New York Times has a story about Russia’s powerful internet regulator, Roskmnadzor, whose collection of personal data about average Russians has, in the Times’s words, “catapulted Russia, along with authoritarian countries like China and Iran, to the forefront of nations that aggressively use technology as a tool of repression.”

A few weeks ago, the Times ran a story about China’s collection of personal data on its citizens through phone-tracking devices, voice prints, one of the largest DNA databases in the world, facial recognition technology, and more than half of the world’s nearly one billion surveillance cameras.

This is important and useful reporting. But pardon me if I ask an impertinent question: Why aren’t we hearing more about corporate surveillance of employees in the United States? Or about corporate surveillance of Americans in general? Or how this corporate surveillance is being used by the US and state governments?

Even if Russia’s and China’s surveillance states are far more dangerously intrusive than America’s surveillance capitalism, shouldn’t we know more about how the same or very similar technologies are being utilized here?

Since I was secretary of labor, I’ve seen American companies load up on monitoring software — to watch what workers are doing every minute of the day. Workers are now subject to trackers, scores, and continuous surveillance of their hands, eyes, faces, and bodies. And increasingly, they’re paid only for the minutes (or seconds) when the systems detect they’re actively working.

Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers, and millions of others are monitored by the minute. Amazon measures seconds. J.P. Morgan — the largest bank in the United States — tracks how its workers spend time, from making phone calls to composing emails. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. In Amazon warehouses, some workers don’t get enough time to go to the bathrooms. ESW Capital, a Texas-based business software company, tracks workers in 10-minute intervals during which — at some moment that workers can’t anticipate — cameras take snapshots of their faces and screens.

“Digital productivity monitoring” — isn’t that an innocent-sounding phrase? — is spreading even to white-collar jobs requiring graduate degrees. Radiologists get scoreboards showing “inactivity” time and comparing productivity to their colleagues’. Doctors and nurses describe increasing electronic surveillance over workdays. Even lawyers are being closely monitored.

Firms selling all this monitoring technology gush with testimonials from supervisors describing newfound powers of “near X-ray vision” into what workers are doing other than working: watching porn, playing video games, using bots to mimic typing, two-timing. Dystopia now!

Russia’s and China’s growing surveillance systems seem more dangerous and intrusive than America’s increasing surveillance of our workers because the information Russia and China collect can stifle dissent.

But are the surveillance systems really that far apart? Big corporations that gather loads of data on exactly what their workers do all day (and sometimes into the night) — including in their purview the growing ranks of remote or gig workers — can stifle workers’ efforts to form labor unions or show any disgruntlement at all.

Russia’s and China’s surveillance of their inhabitants and America’s surveillance of our workers are starting to overlap because the technologies are starting to overlap.

A technology company in eastern China even designs “smart” cushions for office chairs that record when workers are absent from their desks. How long before we see smart cushions in American offices?

And more and more, we’re being surveilled without knowing it. Delta Air Lines boasts that its Atlanta airport’s Terminal F is the “first biometric terminal” in the United States where passengers can use facial recognition technology “from curb to gate.”

The Financial Times reports that a Microsoft facial recognition training database of 10 million images drawn from the internet without anyone’s knowledge is utilized by agencies that include the United States and Chinese military.

A new joint report from the Associated Press and Electronic Frontier Foundation highlights a major surveillance tool, known as “Fog Reveal,” now being used by dozens of local law enforcement agencies across the United States to collect personal data without a warrant. The tool makes use of advertising data — including location, timestamp, and a unique advertising ID tied to individual devices — to construct a searchable database that enables law enforcement to either track an individual device or see which devices passed through a certain area.

Where does this end?

A few years back, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that “Facebook will know every book, film, and song you ever consumed, and its predictive models will tell you what bar to go to when you arrive at a strange city, where the bartender will have your favorite drink waiting.”

Well, that day has just about arrived.

Google’s Eric Schmidt has said, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

With Google using my search data and its high-tech trucks surveilling my neighborhood, I’m sure Schmidt is right.

As Shoshana Zuboff noted in her brilliant The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, we once celebrated these new digital services as free but we are learning that the platforms are hyper-velocity global bloodstreams into which almost anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine, or from which big corporations and government can draw anything they’d like to know about us.

I’m not so sure we should be so disdainful of Russia’s and China’s surveillance systems, given what’s happening in the United States.

Isn’t it time we got serious about protecting our freedom from being watched, monitored, examined, and exposed? Otherwise, the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism merge — and we’ll have no place to hide.

One of this new coalition’s first tasks, and as difficult as it appears to be, is to find a way to end, or at least weaken, the tribalism that has left our country so divided.

I believe that for all the reasons I cite below, and more, we will likely lose what little is left of our democracy and find ourselves, as early as 2024, living in an Orwellian autocracy, or worse. And while this prospect is much discussed and written about, I see no evidence that, as of now, pro-democracy forces in America are preparing to organize a new coalition of forces that is sufficiently broad enough and powerful enough to prevent this slide into the political abyss. I firmly believe that unless we begin the process of creating such a coalition, a coalition for American democracy, it will be too late to turn the political tide in a new direction.

Before addressing how the kind of mass-movement oriented pro-democracy coalition that I think is essential could be organized and operate if we are to save what is left of our democracy, let me first cite some of the evidence for my dire prediction. But note: I will not in this piece, in any detail, address the decisive role that our capitalist system plays in creating the reasons for my alarm.

First, the recent Axios-Ipsos Two Americas Index public opinion poll of September 1-2, found that

33% of Americans would prefer a strong, unelected leader to a weak elected one;

35% believe Presidents should be able to remove judges whose decisions go against the “national interest”;

38% believe the government should side with the majority over ethnic/religious minority rights; and,

roughly 33% believe the federal government should be able to prosecute members of the media who make offensive or unpatriotic statements.

And the numbers vary little between registered Democrats and registered Republicans. A September 16^th NPR/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing,” yet an Article in September’s The Atlantic, cites a recent study that shows that less than 4% of voters will turn against a candidate whose policies they prefer, or who takes undemocratic actions, or makes undemocratic speeches.

Then there is the evidence provided by the growing nativism, and the tribalism it has spawned. The American people are more divided today than they’ve been since the Civil War. Red states are at political war with blue states. And isn’t it interesting, and depressing, that the same racism that played a central role in our Civil War is doing the same with respect to today’s ugly divide?

Nationalism and tribalism in the United States have advanced to such a degree that political and societal differences once settled in peaceful disputes, or at the ballot box, are now the excuse for violent confrontations. It’s a tribalism between those who understand and welcome the demographic changes flowing from the effects of globalization, and those who see these demographic changes as an existential assault on their so-called “traditional way of life.” Hence, the “replacement theory’s” emergence in the public debate; the fact that millions have been drawn to the ignorant insanity of “Q” with its warnings of Democratic Party pedophilia and Jewish aliens; the steady and well-organized growth of the already huge Christian nationalist, “ReAwaken America” movement, of which Gen. Flynn is a major proponent and star; the majority of Republican Party voters who still believe Trump, not Biden, was elected president again in 2020; and the millions of those who are supportive of the January 6^th insurrection who now believe it is appropriate to use violence to preserve their “traditional way of life” in America.

All of this, and more represents the coming together of an extremely large and well-funded radical right movement with complete disdain for any form of governance that allows the on-going immigration of non-white, non-Christians into America, or lets laws be passed that challenge its belief in the subservient place of women in society, or that benefit the rights of the poor and people of color, most particularly their voting rights.

Yes, Christian white privilege, racism and sexism, the fear of immigrants of color and Jews and Muslims, have created a tribalism, a political and cultural division in America, that has reached levels not seen since the days of our Civil War. As a result, many historians and political thinkers are warning that we may soon find ourselves in a new civil war, such is the depth of out and out hatred between the sides in this tribal war. As Max Fisher states in the article, “Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungry and Turkey” (New York Times, September 12, 2022), “The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding. First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust.” And he adds, “very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.”

Already the world ranking of democracies finds that of the United States sinking lower, now rating us only 26^th in the list of world’s democracies; and, listing us as only a “partial democracy.” This should not surprise us, given that we were not born as a truly democratic nation in the first place, and given how the impact of big money in elections, gerrymandering, the reduction of days to vote and places to vote, new voting ID requirements, and the influence of giant media companies, have combined to now make America an ever more limited democracy.

Further, ever since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision throwing out significant portions of the Voting Rights Act, election laws in a goodly number of states have quite openly set the stage for a stolen 2024 presidential election. They are aided by a number of Supreme Court rulings that show support for a bizarre new right-wing legal theory, the “independent State legislature theory.” This theory argues that state legislatures have unfettered authority over federal elections! And the new right-wing advocacy organization, Marble Freedom Trust, has just received $1.6 billion to advance this and other anti-democratic theories. Already Supreme Court Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and to a lesser extent Roberts, have evidenced support for this irrational “states’ rights” theory.

Make no mistake: our already limited democracy is hanging on by a thread. For I fully believe that given the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Voting Rights Act case, given the number of states that have already passed undemocratic election laws, and elected Trumpian candidates to the state offices controlling elections and the certification of presidential electors, we now face the very real likelihood that no matter which presidential candidate actually wins the popular vote in the 2024 presidential election, it is the Republican Party candidate that will be declared the winner, thus marking the official end of our flawed democracy.

If the many historians and political thinkers are right in their dire warnings, and I do believe they are, then, as always, the obvious question is the age-old one, “what is to be done?” I have given my answer to that question in the very first paragraph of this article: nothing short of the formation of a broad-based, pro-democracy, mass-action coalition, uniting our various existing progressive coalitions/movements, can save the day. And “yes,” I am fully aware of just hard it will be to put such a coalition together and shape it so as to employ the right strategies and tactics. But in considering the matter of the difficulty in putting such a coalition together, I would urge the leaders and members of current progressive coalitions to contemplate how poorly their causes will fare if America becomes governed by anti-progressive authoritarianism.

Surely, we have no time to lose. I urge the leaders of today’s various progressive movements to start the process of coming together now; coming together in unity because this is the only way we can organize a pro-democracy movement coalition powerful enough to defeat the authoritarian forces on the ascendancy in America; the only hope we have of saving our democracy, limited as it is.

One of this new coalition’s first tasks, and as difficult as it appears to be, is to find a way to end, or at least weaken, the tribalism that has left our country so divided. We’ve got to stop thinking of everyone who sharply disagrees with us as stupid, or immoral racists, and as the “enemy.” For truth be told, in some rather critical ways the “other side” is, like us, simply the victims of an economic system that has left so many of us in America struggling to get all of our human needs met. They are people who have been purposely mis-educated, mis-led and frightened into adopting an ugly nationalism, and who are now scared to death about their place in modern America.

To end this tribalism, we’ve got to talk to those on the other side of this tribal war. Reach out to them, listen to them, sympathize with those of their fears that are legitimate, while pointing out that what is really threatening their living standards is not the “other,” but the economic system we live under; a system that only works when there are winners and losers. In short, to help them understand that it is in the nature of the corporate capitalists and billionaires running this country to profit from keeping the people divided and distrustful of the immigrant or person of color who just moved in down the block; to explain that the only “other” they need to fear is the corporate oligarchy that now rules America. And why it is in their true interests to join us as we fight to save democracy.

Yes, first we’ve got to listen to each other…and then having listened, talk through our differences. For if we would do this, I am convinced that we would find there is more common ground between ourselves than we currently suspect. If we will do this, I believe we will find that “the other side” has some grievances and worries that are justified, even if they are blaming the wrong reasons and the wrong people for those grievances. Even if we can do no more than marginally reduce today’s tribalism in this way, it will be a boon to our pro-democracy movement.

And here are a few other things we should do. Our new coalition must promote the idea of doing what the right-wing has done for decades now and get involved in local school boards so as to have an impact on what America’s children are learning and reading in school. Today, America’s public schools are failing to adequately teach an honest history of America, or why democracy is essential to a free people, and how it should operate. Last year, at least 50 different right-wing groups pushed campaigns to ban certain books in schools, according to a report released by PEN America on September 19^th. PEN said that across the country, restrictions occurred in 138 school districts, which included 5,000 individual schools and enrolled nearly 4 million students.

Only if progressives get far more involved in the curriculum of public education, by securing their place on local school boards, can we hope to have a school system that honestly and fully produces adults who understand what good government is, who understand the changing nature of America, who understand today’s problems have nothing to do with the race, nationality or religious beliefs of their brother and sister Americans. For as Amartya Sen has argued, good primary schools contribute as much to democracy as strong political parties do.

Other measures should be promoted and fought for as well, such as getting more and more states to adopt ranked-choice-voting and non-partisan primary elections. In the few places where this has been instituted, the results have produced far fewer extreme winners of elections. And city and county and state elections should be taken more seriously than they are currently, since so much of what is decided by such governing entities impact us greatly. Yes, the fight for abortion rights, against racism, for fair union organizing laws, for economic justice, and an end to America’s imperial militarism, must be understood as a fight to save our democracy at all levels of government. In these battles this new coalition must be as dogged and determined as are our neo-fascist foes. (Of course, in many cases the only way to win these rights will require the election of non-capitalist third parties, or by leaving the Democratic Party no choice but to vote the enlightened way. How to build such a party, such an electoral coalition, I must leave for another day.)

It is for these and other reasons, that I am urging the creation of a popular, broad-based coalition to undertake the kinds of actions I’ve suggested in this talk, and a hell-of-a-lot more. A pro-democracy movement coalition that is broad enough and powerful enough to regularly take to the streets in protest with our demands. A movement coalition so powerful that it cannot, if we stick to it until our demands are met, be defeated. A movement coalition like that of the labor, civil rights, anti-war and women’s rights movement coalitions of the past. It must be prepared to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets on behalf of the coalition’s demands, or whenever an unfair and undemocratic effort is underway to further disenfranchise millions of our sisters and brothers. Happily, the majority of America’s youth and millions of adults are with us, and in many separate ways are already leading the fight back effort.

Well, am I right? Is America already far, far down the road that ends in authoritarianism, or worse? And am I right about what I believe is the only way to prevent this journey into the abyss? I’m now old enough to freely admit that I have been wrong many times before in my life and might be wrong again. So, I would like to know what you, the readers think. Perhaps you agree with me about the danger of losing our already shrunken, skeletal, democracy, but disagree on how best to prevent such a loss. To let me know what you think, send your comments to the LA Progressive.

What is absolutely essential, as we undertake this historic imperative, is to remember this: that we’ve overcome great historic evils and divisions in our country in the past. The evil of slavery. The evil that tore apart America during the Civil War. The evil of children sent to work in factories. The rights of women. The anti-communist “witch hunts.” Earlier Jim Crow laws. The Vietnam War. All of our past victories over such evils demonstrate that history itself has been on our side when we’ve fought our battles with a strong people-powered movement.

And so, remembering that so much of history is on our side, let us vow today to start now to build a united, mass-movement coalition of pro-democratic forces in America. If we do not do this, then we will have failed to answer this new call of history; a call of history facing our country and the entire world today; a call to fight like hell to stop America’s ever accelerating devolution into authoritarianism. For I truly believe that if we acknowledge just how dangerous this moment is, remember how we won great victories over long odds in the past, and get about the necessary business of organizing the only kind of movement that can bring us victory, our day will come!

Hitler studied and learned from the United States. From Indian Reservations to Anti-Miscegenation laws, the U.S. provided a roadmap to Concentration Camps.

Hitler’s American Model by Yale Law School professor James Whitman is a 220-page bombshell. It should be required reading in every high school. It tells the story of how German attorneys studied U.S. law, culture and history to develop the legal underpinnings of German fascism.

There is only one hero in this book, Louis B. Brodsky, a Jewish Manhattan magistrate. On September 6, 1935, he ordered the release of five anti-fascist rioters who had been among a U.S. crowd of a thousand who tore down a swastika flag on the German liner SS Bremen. A lowly judge who usually dealt with bail hearings and night court, Brodsky wrote a fiery opinion calling Nazism “a revolt against civilization” and the swastika flag a “black flag of piracy.”

A diplomatic crisis ensued. The U.S. State Department sent a note of regret to Berlin that “the German national emblem” had not been respected.” Hitler, seizing on the incident, announced that the swastika flag and Blood and Citizenship Laws would be adopted at the “Party Rally of Freedom” nine days later.

Known as the Nuremburg Laws, these statutes focused on citizenship, and sex and reproduction. The attorneys drafting them were determined to establish a regime founded on definitive racial categories and to prevent mixed marriages between Jews and “Aryans.”

Hitler’s American Model

In the 1930’s, they found plenty of legal precedents in the U.S. Thirty states had anti-miscegenation laws. In fact, the U.S. stood at the forefront in the creation of de jure and de facto second-class citizenship for Black people, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Ricans and other people of color and ethnic groups. And it was admired in Germany as an innovative world leader in “Nordic,” white supremacy and conquest.

Reading Whitman’s book one learns that Hitler was sitting in prison and dictating Mein Kampf to Rudolph Hess when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924. The act laid out preferences for Northern Europeans, restrictions on people from Southern and Eastern Europe, and bans on everyone else. Hitler praised this development: “The racially pure and still unmixed German has risen to become the master of the American continent and will remain so as long as he does not fall victim to racial pollution,” he wrote.

Harry Laughlin, an influential American eugenicist who served as an expert advisor to Congress on immigration, praised the 1924 law as a political breakthrough in the adoption of “scientific” racism. He was not alone. During the 1930s, U.S. lawyer Madison Grant promoted the sterilization of people with mental and physical disabilities while engaging in a friendly back and forth with German eugenicists dedicated to creating the “master race.” A grotesque German law which authorized killing “useless eaters” — the incurably ill, elderly people and people with various physical and mental conditions — was the handiwork of these despicable eugenicists.

Whitman writes that the Jim Crow South and segregation drew Nazi legal experts’ interest, but after debating the pros and cons, they concluded that merely separating Jews and Gentiles would not work because of the extraordinary economic power of the Jewish community (which they were eager to get their hands on).

Instead they zeroed in on western expansion and the genocide of Native Americans as a model for their own ambition to conquer Eastern Europe, subjugate its citizens and force all Jews onto “reservations” (which in practice became concentration camps).

As early as 1928, Hitler was making speeches glorifying the way Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

Surprisingly, German attorneys believed that the U.S. went too far in making “one-drop of blood” (or one Black ancestor) the legal standard for defining who is African American. Under Nuremburg law, it took three Jewish grandparents to qualify as a Jew. And ultimately, they decided against criminalizing miscegenation.

But if you still think fascism is “un-American,” read this book. It’s as American as apple pie and now, forced motherhood.

Crossposted from Freedom Socialist Party

In 1982, Meryl Streep stared in the film Sophie’s Choice, playing a survivor of Auschwitz.

In 1982, Meryl Streep stared in the film Sophie’s Choice, playing a survivor of Auschwitz. Sophie, the mother of two small children, boy and girl, unfortunately lives in Poland when Hitler decides to invade the country. Lebensraum. “‘I want to be a prophet once more today,’” Hitler tells the German parliament in 1939 (Bloodlands), so those sufferers of his fascist pogrom, be damned! The Jews must be annihilated! And since some 98% of the Jewish race lived beyond Germany’s borders, “most of them in Poland and the western Soviet Union,” Hitler considers the presence of Jews a good excuse to march and collect land on the way to the east.

Sophie and her children are along the way toward a fascist victory. She and her children aren’t Jewish, but she is swept up along with her children and taken on a train to Auschwitz. There, standing before the entrance, she encounters an SS doctor. He notes, no doubt, her blood hair.

The doctor’s grin fills the screen. He looks closely in her eyes. Is she sufficiently terrified?

The viewer knows. Sophie suspects. She clutches the little girl in her arm and with the other hand, holds on tighter to the boy. The children know too. There in the dead of night, standing in one of the lines among so many others, is Sophie and her children. All alone.

Sophie tries to smile. The doctor seems to move in closer to Sophie’s face. He speaks to her, and she speaks back in German. She’s nervous, but it’s perfect German. But what does this matter to the smirk-face that fills the screen.

The SS doctor has an agenda!

The smirk-face speaks. She has to pick one. Not one apple on a cart, not one question on a test, not one street to walk down. Pick one child! Pick one child—to turn over to him! Now!

The screen fills with Sophie terrified face. She seems confused and not so confused. She’s shaking her head in disbelief. Maybe he thinks she’s Jewish. She’s not Jewish. She speaks German.

Choice one. “‘Bitte?’” I can’t!

She can’t! She can’t! She can’t! And the girl we see in her arms, the little girl sharing the screen with her mother is lifted away from her mother. Screaming mother and screaming, the victims of those bound to fascism.

Fascism was a real thing in the United States long before Hitler’s rise to power. Not semi-fascism! Not just participants at fascist rallies, carrying Nazi flags, and saluting still photos of Hitler. Fascists had a long history of targeting their “enemies” in the United States from the beginning. Democracy didn’t sit well in the US ever since Indigenous people stood to impede the way of “progress.” Kidnapped and shipped to the New World, Africans and their descendants would ensure “progress” for the “superior” race.

Americans were “well aware of the actual ‘anti-Negro’ activities taking place’” in 1922, writes historian Sarah Churchwell. The poet T. S. Eliot wished the Southern Agrarians good luck in returning the South to the good old days when Negroes were in the fields and not walking free on American streets. Lynching, in the meantime, would just have to do!

While many in the press, including President Harding, condemned the practice of lynching to force Blacks to submit to a state of invisibility, the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill “still had a hard time in Congress,” writes Churchwell. The anti-lynching bill offended Southern Democrats. Not a single legislation will be enacted if the bill passes the senate! Two hundred anti-lynching bills followed. All were defeated.

The US senate imagined an America in which Blacks, accepting the ideology of white supremacy, would just march themselves back to the plantations!

Instead, on June 14, 1922, Black Americans marched in Washington DC. A Silent March on Washington is what it’s called. A march to protest, as the Boston Globe points out in an editorial, “the right to lynch” Black people in America! The pushback continues. Eight years later, three years before Hitler takes control of the German government, some 7,000 American Fascists stage a parade in Atlanta, writes Churchwell. The American fascist carry banners reading, “‘Back to the cotton patch, N—–.’” “‘It needs you; we don’t!’”

A year into Hitler’s reign, in 1934, American fascists, some 20,000 strong, calling themselves “Friends of New Germany,” rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Many cheer Hitler.

That year, the Daily Eagle’s headlines, “‘Americans, Awake! Your indifference to this Nazi menace might result in almost anything,’” called attention to the lovers of fascism in America. Nonetheless, lynching continued.

A Black man is given a choice, help load the mutilated body of the child onto a truck so the murderers, grown men, can take it to the Tallahatchie River for disposal. Or else… And the child? Emmett Till. Fourteen years old. Tortured in a Mississippi barn.

Despite bombings of homes and places of business, the Civil Rights Movement refuses to choose between fascism and democracy. Terrorism picks up steam. Majority Black towns become white over night once Black residents, driven to run out of town, leave what they own behind. Others are murdered trying to escape torched homes.

By May, 1963, democracy takes to the streets. Black children, singing and clapping as they march though Kelly Ingram Park near the 16^th Baptist Church, encounter the iron fist of police commissioner, Bull Connor, and his foot soldiers. Law enforcers and vigilantes are armed with dogs and fire hoses. Imagine the grin on Connor’s face as he watches grown men tearing the skin of children who are simply demanding the right to make democracy more than a slogan.

On September 15, 1963, at the 16^th Street Baptist Church, Black children are in the basement, preparing for Sunday school. It’s not long after the federal government orders the desegregation of Alabama’s schools.

Right-winged politicians, Evangelical leaders, educators, judges, and a good many Americans would prefer the complete disappearance of an American history that suggest the country’s likeness to that SS doctor in Sophie’s Choice and his ideological principles. Even before the chanting and saluting at Madison Square Garden, keeping the ideology of white supremacy alive was very much a goal for the “patriotic”! And “patriots” such as Robert Chambliss, Thomas E. Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry carried out their role in the plan to keep white supremacy alive.

Fifteen sticks of dynamite! Not just to inflict injury or death but to terrify a whole people! To terrify enemies! Grown men, so childlike with their strange ideas! One of them calls, warning parishioners: Fifteen minutes. Ten minutes. But how are the adults at the church to know?

At 10:19 am, the parishioners heard the blast. Some twenty are injured. Some experience life-changing injuries. In the basement, near where the bomb was set, the rescuers locate the bodies of four children. One had a concrete slab embedded in her head. Innocent and playful. Children.

Addie May Collins, 14, Carole Robertson, 14, Cynthia Wesley, 14, and Carol Denise McNair, 11.

It’s not only in the movies.

According to the New York Times, Chambliss wasn’t convicted until 1977, 14 years after that September day in 1963. He’s sentenced to life but dies in prison in 1985. In 2000, thirty-seven years later after the bombing of the 16^th Baptist Church, long-time suspects, Blanton and Cherry are finally held accountable for the devastation to lives. Black lives.

Doug Jones, former US Attorney for Alabama’s Northern District, recalls watching Blanton as the man showed no remorse, “no acceptance of responsibility.” He never bothered to reach out to the families of the girls killed.

No, it’s not only in the movies.

If Democrats can pull it off again, four or five generations after FDR did, it may well signal a second repudiation of Republican trickle-down style economics.

It’s easy to get lost in despair and outrage over the state of affairs in America. Women and queer people are being forced back into the kitchen and closet, climate change is killing scores of Americans every week, our schools and public areas are under constant assault by armed Republican gangs and GOP-sanctioned mass shooters. Over the past decade more than a million American lives have been lost to “deaths of despair” as a result of our 40-year experiment with Reagan’s neoliberalism.

And it’s not just domestic bad news coming out of the GOP’s open opposition to democracy. After Trump betrayed Ukraine, Russia attacked them; China is openly threatening a similar sort of war against Taiwan. There’s lots to be concerned about.

Nonetheless, I’m hopeful right now. I believe we’re on the cusp of a new “great turning” of American history, a replay of the crisis into which President Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped four generations ago, while revisiting many of the same solutions. And, ironically, it’s all coming about for for many of the same reasons.

In 1933, the United States was in the worst moments of its second greatest crisis of all time, eclipsed, in danger to the nation, only by the Civil War which had ended four generations previously:

Climate change caused by human activity — particularly deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices — was driving farmers off their land while throwing up hundred-mile-long dust clouds from the Midwest to New York City. (My old friend Dennis Weaver wrote heartbreakingly in his autobiography All The World’s A Stage [I wrote the foreword] about his family’s escape in their broken-down 1930s car from Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl to Oregon so they could pick strawberries, he as a migrant farm-worker child.)
Food prices were skyrocketing relative to income; homelessness was epidemic; entire regions of the nation were being depopulated as crime, fear, and despair stalked our nation.
The three previous Republican presidents had cut taxes on the morbidly rich from 91 percent down to 25 percent and deregulated Wall Street, throwing the nation into a depression so severe that fully a third of the country was unemployed and people were literally starving. The stock market had crashed to lows with a speed not seen in living memory; every bank in America had collapsed, the final few hundred just in the week before the new president was sworn in.
The nation was still reeling from a world war and a flu pandemic that had killed millions. Parents despaired that their children would never reach the standard of living they’d enjoyed; well over half the country was living in poverty.
The morbidly rich had literally never done so well; the preceding decade was called the “Roaring 20s” because wealthy people were lighting their cigars with $1000 bills and speculators and industrialists were in a wild competition over who could throw the most gaudy, expensive, and wasteful parties.
Meanwhile, when working people tried to organize unions, local police, rightwing “militia” gangs, and private security people would attack with dogs, chains, and live ammunition. Because there were no laws protecting the right to unionize, working people across the nation were routinely murdered for the crime of demanding a living wage.
Minorities — from racial minorities to gays to Jews — fared even worse than working white people. Lynching had made a comeback, the Klan and hundreds of “white citizen” organizations and “citizens militias” affiliated with it were on the rise, and few prosecutors in the nation would try to hold anybody to account. Local and state ordinances only protected wealthy white men, and, as there were no federal laws against murder or depriving people of their civil rights, even federal courts turned a blind eye to the spreading violence.
Fascists were rallying in American cities and rural areas, wearing swastika armbands and sporting Confederate flags, preaching a new form of government that had already taken over Italy and was on the verge of seizing complete control of Germany and Spain. So many Republican politicians had taken to the floor of the US House and Senate to praise Adolf Hitler and his new German fascism that the nation’s best-selling author, Rex Stout, compiled their speeches into a book titled “The Illustrious Dunderheads.” (My father gave me a first edition copy for my birthday five decades ago.)
Across the Atlantic and Pacific the world was rattled by talk of war. Japan was undergoing a massive rearmament and talking loudly about war with China; Mussolini and Hitler were publicly imagining a world without democracies where, in an echo of Tacitus, unitary fascist world leadership would bring about “a thousand years of peace.”

Into this maelstrom a new president stepped up to the microphone on the balcony of the Capitol and spoke:

“This is preeminently the time to speak the truth,” he told the nation, “the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself: nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

This was no happy-talk speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at his inauguration. In the next sentence he acknowledged the multiple crises facing America:

“[Stock] Values have shrunk to fantastic levels: taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

“More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.

“Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

And, yet, in that moment FDR galvanized the nation.

Cagle Cartoons: Rivers

On March 19, 1933, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Anne McCormick wrote a full-page article for the New York Times Magazine titled: The Nation Renews Its Faith: Out of the Swift Succession of Events That Has Marked Two Weeks of the New Deal, This Fact Stands Out: That the Confidence of the People in Government Has Been Re-established.

“One reason for the present meekness of both Houses,” McCormick wrote, “is that every member is practically buried under avalanches of telegrams and letters from constituents. These messages come to Democrats and Republicans alike. Sometimes profane, always imperative, they are mostly variations of a single order: Support the President: give him anything he wants.”

The people had seen the disastrous consequences of Republican rule, and rose, united, to reject it and support the new Democratic president.

The result was the creation of the first more-than-50-percent-of-the-people middle class in world history and a major leap forward for American — and worldwide — democracy.

If my analysis of today’s conditions is correct, we’re at a similar hinge-point of history:

Like in 1933, the morbidly rich are riding high.

Almost exactly like 1933, in fact: this is only the second time in American history when three men owned more wealth than the bottom half of the nation, when giant corporations fought unionization tooth-and-nail, and about half of all new income created every year goes straight to the top 1% and is typically taxed at less than 3%.

Like in 1933, Republicans crashed the economy and presented a united front to sabotage Democratic efforts to rebuild it.

Republicans have fully revealed their true economic agenda, and twice in the past two decades we’ve watched them give multi-trillion-dollar tax-cut and deregulation gifts from the public purse to their billionaire owners while driving our economy straight into the ditch. The Bush Crash of 2008 and the Trump Crash of 2020 are analogous to the Republican Great Depression of 1929.

Like in 1933, women are at the forefront of progressive change.

While women got the vote in 1920, they first participated in a measurably big way in the election of 1932 that kicked the GOP out of federal office and set the stage for the New Deal. Women then were outraged that Republicans had thrown their families into poverty, hunger, and homelessness. Women today are outraged that Republicans want to seize control of their bodies and their lives.

Like in 1933, climate change is changing the face of America and influencing our politics.

Deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices during the decades of the Industrial Revolution led to the Dust Bowl, which wiped out family farms and produced dust storms that shut down or nearly shut down entire cities (including New York). Americans demanded action, and FDR delivered with the Civilian Conservation Corps, putting Americans to work planting millions of trees across the country and ending the Dust Bowl.

Today, fifty years of lies from the criminal fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it created have stalled initiatives that could have prevented or softened the impact of global warming.

The result is drought, floods, and forest fires like never before seen in the memory of modern humans. Americans want action and the GOP continues to claim there’s no such thing as global warming or, if there is, we shouldn’t do anything to stop it.

Even as the fossil fuel industry continues to fund lies about climate change, fully 66 to 80 percent of Americans now want “major climate mitigation strategies.” And Democrats — without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate — just delivered the largest climate bill in the history of America.

Like in 1933, working people are rising up against employers who deny them the right to unionize.

Firing, beating, and even killing strikers and union organizers was widespread during the Republican Roaring 20s; today most of the anti-union activities are done by giant law firms with the blessing of dozens of 5-4 anti-union Supreme Court decisions between 1970 and today, nearly every one objected to by Democratic nominees to the Court.

While workers aren’t being killed in the streets like in the ‘20s, giant profitable corporate employers shutting down stores and firing union organizers while giving their CEOs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation are driving a similar working-class rage across the country. Gallup notes:

“The National Labor Relations Board reported a 57% increase in union election petitions filed during the first six months of fiscal year 2021.”

Labor unions today are enjoying a resurgence in popularity not seen since the 1950s. Gallup reports that 71 percent of Americans approve of unions, and 40 percent of unionized workers describe their unions as “very important” to them.

Like in 1933, religious hustlers and televangelists are preying on low-income Americans while making themselves rich and grasping for political power.

Radio came into its own in a big way in the 1920s, and by 1933 was dominated by hard-right religious figures supporting Republican politicians. Billy Sunday, Sister Aimee McPherson, and Father Charles Coughlin (who briefly supported and then turned on FDR) dominated the American airwaves, preaching fascism, racism, and worker exploitation to every part of America, just like rightwing hate radio hosts and televangelists do today on over 1500 radio stations from coast-to-coast.

In 1925, right-wingers successfully prosecuted Tennessee high school biology teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution. Today, right-wingers — again citing “values” and religion — are threatening to prosecute high school teachers for informing schoolchildren about America’s true racial history, climate change, and the simple reality that some people are gay or trans and have been throughout human history.

Like in 1933, right-wing rhetoric is driving an explosion of attacks on people of color.

That year, which saw the inauguration of FDR and the beginning of the end of the Republican dominance of American politics (for the next two generations), also saw a 350 percent increase in lynching in America over just the previous year. Roosevelt took the victims’ side, calling for civil rights legislation. As History.com notes:

“The Great Depression impacted African Americans for decades to come. It spurred the rise of African-American activism, which laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The popularity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal program also saw African Americans switch their political allegiances to become a core part of the Democratic Party’s voting bloc.”

Today we’re seeing a newly revived and broadened Civil Rights movement, as killer cops, discriminating employers, and brutal, racist, white supremacist gangs are being held to account in ways unimaginable just twenty years ago. While Republicans and right-wing media continue to demonize minorities and call for everything from giant walls to Muslim bans, groups representing race, religion, and gender identity interests are collaborating under the banner of the Democratic Party.

Like in 1933, a Democratic President is calling out fat-cats and fascists in the GOP while uniting Americans in a great project to rebuild our nation.

FDR railed against the men he called the “Economic Royalists,” saying:

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. …

“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.

“And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

President Biden is calling out the same people, those who use their great wealth to oppress workers while promoting what Biden calls “semi-fascism.”

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. …

“And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.

“They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

“They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

Between the obscene excesses of the GOP — from gifting billionaires with trillions of tax dollars; to using hate as a political weapon; to fighting forward progress on climate, voting rights, and rebuilding the middle class — and the united front Democrats are now offering, change is in the air.

Inflation is down, gas prices are normalizing, and even former Republicans are disgusted by Trump’s treasonous behavior and his followers’ support and rationalization of it.

Women and young people, in particular, are registering to vote in record numbers and on my talk radio show I’m sensing electricity in the air.

We just saw four special elections for seats in the House of Representatives, and in every one Democratic candidates outperformed President Biden’s 2020 vote in those same districts. A ballot initiative in Kansas to outlaw abortion was soundly defeated in that Red state, as Democratic candidates are integrating criticism of Republican support for the Dobbs decision into their campaigns.

Republicans are running scared, frantically scrubbing their websites of any mention of their extremist anti-abortion positions and deleting references to their climate denial and embrace of billionaires.

While we can never discount the impact of billions of rightwing dollars authorized by the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision, or the ability of Republican-controlled swing states to suppress or even refuse to count or acknowledge the vote, this all still points to a positive, 1933-like political trend this fall.

And if Democrats can pull it off again, four or five generations after FDR did, it may well signal a second repudiation of Republican trickle-down style economics and a second major renewal of the American middle class.

This election may well be the turning point, when Reaganomics and neoliberalism are finally rejected and America gets back on track to work for it’s people rather than just its billionaires.

Bottom line: double-check your voter registration and get active. Tag, you’re it!

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A complaint filed by Los Angeles attorney Walter Mosley outlines a scorching trail of fiduciary misdeeds by the Bowers Consulting Firm and Shalomyah Bowers.

The leadership from Black Lives Matter Grassroots announced that it has filed a lawsuit against its namesake (Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation).

Where and who has control of the multi-millions of donated dollars that poured into the coffers of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and the administrative stewardship of the money — continues to raise questions of ethics and self-dealing.

“Black Lives Matter Grassroots is Black Lives Matter. We were founded in 2013 by dedicated activists and many of the same people are still doing the work.” said Dr. Melina Abdullah “Today, we are demanding the return of the resources that rightfully belong to the people and the movement.”

The complaint filed by Los Angeles attorney Walter Mosley outlines a scorching trail of fiduciary misdeeds by the Bowers Consulting Firm and Shalomyah Bowers.

The lawsuit says that Shalomyah Bowers, the board secretary of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the non-profit organization that acts as the movement’s administrative arm, used Black Lives Matter, or BLM, as his “personal piggy bank,” and accuses Bowers of “betray[ing] the public trust by self-dealing and breaching his fiduciary duties.” The complaint alleges that Bowers has taken control of Black Lives Matter’s financial accounts and social media accounts, shutting out its founders and most prominent organizers, like Melina Abdullah. It has been reported that Abdullah, a founder of BLM’s Los Angeles Chapter who also heads its grassroots wing, estimates that the Global Network Foundation’s financial accounts hold over $100 million.

The Global Network Foundation’s board of directors, Abdullah said, “are engaging in self-dealing, enriching themselves off of the backs of people who put their blood, sweat, and tears into this movement.” Reported CourtHouse News Service.

BLM Grassroots alleges BLM Global Network Foundation and Bowers engaged in unfair business practices, intentional misrepresentation, fraud, conversion, and unjust enrichment all violations of the California Business & Professional Code Section 17200.

In May, we reported the differences between the now three separate and autonomous organizations that share the same acronym “BLM” and the words, “Black Lives Matter” — but to be clear, BLM Global Network Foundation, BLM Political Action Committee, and BLM Grassroots are separate organizations.

After exhausting efforts to work with and resolve differences between the organizations, a new fight is ahead of the nine year old social justice movement.

The BLM Grassroots Lawsuit

The case filed in Los Angeles County Superior – Central District alleges “this is a case of a rogue administrator, a middleman, turned usurper, who was hired to collect donations and account for expenditures of Black Lives Matter movement, formally operating as Black Lives Matter Grassroots, Inc. (“BLM”).

The court filing goes further into the alleged misdealings of Bower and the BLM Global Network Foundation – attorney Walter Mosley alleges –

These donations were given based on the well-documented work of BLM and with the intent to further support the work of BLM.

BLM organized the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (“GNF”) as a matter of convenience to collect donations and fulfill certain administrative duties for BLM, However, after siphoning off more than $10,000,000 in “fees” from BLM donors. Mr. Bowers decided he could not let go of his personal piggy bank, when more than 300 movement leaders, as well as BLM Founders, insisted that he resign from GNF. Instead, he continued to betray the public trust by self-dealing and breaching his fiduciary duties. His actions have led GNF into multiple investigations by the Internal Revenue Service and various state attorney generals, blazing a path of irreparable harm to BLM in less than eighteen months.

While BLM leaders and movement workers were on the street risking their lives, Mr. Bowers was in his cushy offices devising a scheme of fraud and misrepresentation to break the implied-in-fact contract between donors and BLM. Instead of using the donations for its intended purpose, Mr. Bowers diverted these donations to his own coffers and intentionally took calculated steps to prevent those same resources from being used by BLM for on-the-ground movement work during the Buffalo Massacre and the Jayland Walker protests in Akron, Ohio. Additionally, when BLM confronted this interloper, Mr. Bowers arrogantly changed the passwords of the shared social media accounts, emails groups, website portals and other groups, website portals, and other organizing tools that BLM had built in its nearly ten-year existence. He then hired expensive high-powered lawyers and media consultants to bully the organizers and founders of BLM. As of the date of this lawsuit, Mr. Bowers continues to fraudulently raise money from unsuspecting donors passing himself off as the organization that is doing the work of BLM, padding his own pockets at that of his associates at the cost of BLM’s reputation.

According to the Bower’s Consulting Firm’s website, Bowers lists BLM and others as clients under the work section. The firm’s mission is to support progressive causes and campaigns that are tackling some of the biggest political challenges––domestic and international––facing society today.

An online request to speak with a representative of the Bowers Consulting Firm was not answered at the time of publishing.

Listen to Exclusive Audio from BLM Grassroots Press Conference

This story is developing and will update in the coming days.

Photos By @JamesFarrLive

The US sheriffs are trying to hijack the Presidential election of 2020. The law enforcement agency is here to serve the people, not lost politicians.

If American democracy fades away, it won’t be due to a single event like the January 6 Capitol riot, or a single individual like Donald Trump. The history of democratic declines, whether in Weimar Germany or modern-day Hungary, Philippines, Turkey, Poland and Russia, shows that the onset of authoritarian post-democracy will not necessarily come from one thing, like a military coup. It can occur in stages of decay, with different actors advancing each stage.

In the US, it would likely include some secretaries of state and attorneys general willing to bend the election rules, and legislators sending alternative slates of presidential electors to the Electoral College, and the complicity of the increasingly right-wing US Supreme Court, all of them flouting the unwritten yet crucial democratic norms and traditions that undergird the institutions of representative governance. It would also likely involve a rabidly motivated plurality of the US population who are the most dissatisfied, polarized and the best organized, and willing to advance their goals through militant actions.

So that’s why in recent months I have been tracking a kind of kooky yet hair-raising plot by a shadowy national sheriffs organization, whose sheriff-supporters have illegally confiscated voting machines and other election equipment in different parts of the country. Moreover, these law enforcement officials have asserted a chilling legal authority — that they are empowered to ignore any law they deem unconstitutional, and that within their county jurisdiction their authority to do what is necessary to “protect” the people is greater than that of even the president of the United States.

Along with the increasingly visible “independent state legislature” theory and previous patriot movement nullification and interposition fanaticisms, these should all be recognized as branches of the sovereign citizen movement which manifested in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the rancher Bundy standoff in 2014, and other episodes of armed revolt. Taken along their logical trajectory and scaled to the grandiose proportions to which they aspire, this would mean the end of the rule of common law and the democratic institutions that make “E Pluribus Unum” governance possible.

Media outlets like Reuters, Washington Post, Detroit News and a few others have intrepidly uncovered these sheriffs’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election and prepare the shock troops of law enforcement officers for the next election. This scheme is both dangerous to our democracy and also takes the far right nuttiness that has infected our times into yet another Twilight Zone. There is evidence of its tentacles spreading across the country, even as we get closer to the next national elections in November.

Michigan’s new battleground

In Michigan, following the 2020 election in which Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by nearly three percentage points and 155,000 votes statewide, a clerk at a small town in rural western Michigan received an odd visit from a deputy sheriff and an “investigator.” What did they want to investigate? They asked for the township’s three central tabulator’s that had been used to tabulate all of that town’s votes. They suggested that the tabulators had been programmed in advance with a microchip to shift votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. They asked her to hand over one of her central tabulators for inspection.

She refused. Clerks and election administrators are trained never to give up their voting machines, to always retain that essential chain of custody. Not only is it considered “best practices” for secure elections, but allowing access to them is illegal. Federal and state laws limit who can access election hardware and software. Undeterred, these “election inspectors” visited other townships in Michigan. Three clerks in two other Michigan counties turned over their voting machines, flash drives and other equipment, public records show. According to a legal filing, the confiscated tabulators were taken to hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals, where a group of four men “broke into” the tabulators and performed “tests” on them.

Also present in one hotel room during some of the testing was presumptive Republican nominee for attorney general in Michigan, Matthew DePerno. DePerno allegedly was hunting for evidence to support Trump’s false election fraud claims. That’s awfully alarming, that a major candidate for attorney general either didn’t know or did not care that gaining unauthorized access to voting machines is a felony in Michigan.

One clerk from Barry County expressed bafflement and dismay over the theories presented to her by the Sheriffs. Trump won Barry County by 65 percent of the vote, “so I don’t know where they’re thinking that any kind of chips were in any of our machines or thinking that something had happened to them. The whole thing is nutty. It is nutty, totally nutty.”

Law enforcement is supposed to protect and serve. That is, serve the general public, not a failed presidential loser who continues to preposterously claim that the election was stolen. Officials eventually got the tabulators back many weeks and in some cases months later, when they were returned in the same odd manner, during shadowy meetings at a shopping center and carpool parking lot.

A national movement of right wing sheriffs mobilizes

Unfortunately Michigan is not an isolated incident. In a number of states across the country, including battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Colorado, attempts by sheriffs and their associates to break into and breach voting machines have raised alarms. Unofficial and unauthorized “investigators” have appeared, claiming they were seeking evidence of fraud, and gained access to voting equipment.

As reported in the Washington Post, in Colorado, the Mesa County clerk, Tina Peters, was indicted last March on charges for allowing unauthorized people to copy the hard drives of voting machines in her county. In Coffee County, Georgia, a cybersecurity executive said in court filings that he gained access to the county’s voting system information. In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state decertified voting machines in Fulton County after she claimed they had been improperly accessed by individuals seeking to “investigate” the 2020 election.

No one knows for sure how widespread these efforts have been. But this new flavor of Trumpy lawlessness goes much deeper.

Many of these crusading sheriffs belong to a “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which asserts that sheriffs, typically elected in counties, possess supreme law enforcement power within their jurisdictions. They claim superpowers within their counties that exceed those of state police, federal agencies and even the president of the United States. The movement’s most prominent group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, takes the extreme position that sheriffs can and should ignore any law they deem unconstitutional.

The sheriffs association, which has attracted supporters in recent years because of its opposition to COVID-related mandates and regulations, claims sheriffs derive extraordinary powers from the oath they take to defend the constitution and its principle of separation of powers between local, state and federal agencies. Indeed, the CSPOA website says “The law enforcement powers held by the sheriff supersede those of any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county. The vertical separation of powers in the Constitution makes it clear that the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the President…it is this responsibility that grants a Sheriff the Constitutional authority to check and balance all levels of government within the jurisdiction of the County.”

Retired sheriff Richard Mack, the founder of CSPOA, has called federal and state bureaucracies “the Gestapo of America.” Mack has been inducted into the NRA Hall of Fame and is a former board member of the Oath Keepers, an extremist, far-right paramilitary group that played a key role in the January 6 Capitol riot, with nearly a dozen of its members facing seditious conspiracy charges. The Oath Keepers recruit many of its members from among law enforcement.

At a recent CSPOA conference in Las Vegas, attended by county sheriffs from Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere, there was a panel about how to investigate election fraud. The session was called “2000 Mules: ‘Law Enforcement Has to Step in at This Point.’ Will Sheriffs Investigate?” The group has been actively encouraging sheriffs to mount their own investigations into Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims. The association says more than 300 of the nation’s 3,000 elected sheriffs have gone through its training programs. Its participants included Michigan sheriff Dar Leaf, who has petitioned courts to seize election equipment, assigned investigators to grill local clerks about balloting processes, and made sweeping requests for their records. Sheriff Leaf has appeared at a right-wing militia group’s rally, and suggested that a plot by some militia members to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer may have been a lawful attempt to make a citizen’s arrest.

These sheriffs are testing a legal theory with revolutionary implications for American democracy. They envision a sheriff-ocracy, in which a sheriff rules his jurisdictional fiefdom like an authoritarian ruler. It’s harkening back to the old days of the Wild Wild West, when the sheriff was often the only government in town. Indeed, Sheriff Leaf has stated that a sheriff “has no superiors in his county.”

“Now we have the far right building up an insurrectionary force inside law enforcement,” says Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. “They want to make sure that next time, if they want to stop counting, or if they don’t like the way things are going, they can just get their county sheriff to roll up and grab the voting machines or grab the lock boxes, or anything else. That’s the insidious nature of this thing. It’s terrifying.”

Sheriffs are part of a broader pro-Trump movement

Richard Mack and his fellow constitutional sheriffs are part of a much broader effort within the pro-Trump camp to gain control over the U.S. election system. Reuters conducted dozens of interviews, reviewed video from public meetings and examined scores of public records and found evidence in Michigan of coordination between the people spearheading Trump’s rigged-election claims and the sheriffs’ efforts. There is also evidence of national coordination, not only through the CSPOA but also through attorneys who have been part of a legal team led by looney Trump lawyer and Rudy Giuliani legal associate, Sidney Powell, who spearheaded the hiring of a team of experts from a forensic data firm to access election systems and data in at least three states, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada. Powell also filed a federal suit seeking to overturn Michigan’s presidential election results for “massive voter fraud,” but the judge found the suit’s claims so baseless that she sanctioned Powell and other lawyers on the case for misconduct.

In at least 15 states, candidates who embrace the false stolen election narrative are campaigning for governor and/or secretary of state in November’s elections. In Florida, Republican governor Ron DeSantis has set up an election police squad supposedly to ensure voting “integrity” but critics fear this new power could easily be misused against opponents. Trump activists have spread so much distrust and paranoia that election officials are receiving harassment and even death threats from Trump supporters who maniacally believe they are running corrupt elections.

In Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and other states, officials have pushed back against the so-called “constitutional sheriffs,” accusing them of undermining public faith in the integrity of elections and the election officials who administer them. I have long criticized election management in the United States, because it amounts to a decentralized hodgepodge of over three thousand counties and nine thousand townships with few national standards to guide them. Most established democracies in the world have a national elections commission that provides professional oversight and establishes minimum standards and best practices. The federal Election Assistance Commission, which was launched in the wake of the Florida presidential debacle in 2000, is supposed to play an oversight role but it is too weak and underfunded to do much. The real dirty secret here is that the United States provides more effective oversight for slot machines and the gaming industry than it does for our nation’s election administration or voting equipment.

Into this breach, Trump’s authoritarian sheriffs are stepping in, along with militant secretaries of state, legislators and right-wing activists, to try and establish their own rules. The steady drumbeats of partisan war are building in anticipation of the November election, which will decide congressional majorities. Two years after that comes the presidential election. Depending on which candidates are nominated, democracy itself may be up for reelection.

Crossposted from DemocracySOS

Think of it as a civil war between anti-democratic forces, where good deeds may have bad ends.

Liz Cheney’s electoral defeat is not the fall of an American hero. The good she has done on the January 6th Committee is almost certainly being done for less than admirable purposes. To ignore that fact is to overlook another front in the war on democracy.

Cheney is one face of the creeping totalitarianism that has been eroding American democracy for decades (and it wasn’t in great shape to start). Her bitter feud with Donald Trump is best understood as part of an internal battle currently raging within this country’s anti-democratic forces.

Any doubt on that score should be allayed by the television commercial her father made on her behalf, where the draft-dodging elder Cheney called Trump a “coward” and said his daughter was “standing up for the truth.” Being lectured on bravery and truth by Dick Cheney is like getting sailing lessons from the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

Besides, what exactly did Liz Cheney sacrifice with this latest turn? Her congressional career was over the moment Trump turned against her – which was well before the committee’s work began.

The Authoritarian

As a senior staffer in the Bush/Cheney administration, Liz Cheney served a president who did what Donald Trump could not: steal an election, albeit using the more genteel technique of judicial corruption. That administration’s body count and list of war crimes far exceeds Trump’s (although that could certainly change should Trump return to power.)

The sins of the father should not be visited upon the daughter. But Cheney the younger actively helped that administration lie its way into war, an act of deception that undermines one of democracy’s most essential building blocks: truth. (She was still pushing lies nine years later.) She was part of a national security team that secretly and illegally spied on millions of American citizens and others around the world. Throughout her career, Liz Cheney has been a tireless advocate for war and has staunchly opposed reductions in military aggression (often at the expense of the truth).

As an added affront to the MSNBC crowd, which seems newly infatuated with the intelligence services, Cheney worked closely with her father as he overruled and intimidated career intelligence analysts. And she attacked the FBI’s agents at a time when entrepreneurs were selling votive candles featuring its former director, Robert Mueller.

Democracy? Until recently, Cheney helped lead a political party that systematically undermined American democracy through voter suppression, gerrymandering, caging, and other illegal schemes. She actively participated in this war on democracy by, for example, opposing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and defending GOP laws that would obstruct poor and minority voting.

Cheney also called upon Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, to have the Justice Department investigate environmental groups like the NRDC, Sea Change, and the Sierra Club for lawful speech, claiming that “their interests align with those of our adversaries” like Russia and China.

America Gone Mad by Christopher Weyant, The Boston Globe, MA

News Analyst by Randall Enos, Easton, CT

The Liz Nobody Knows

The media’s memory-holing of the anti-democracy, pro-Trump Liz Cheney is an erasure of Stalin-era efficiency. It wasn’t that long ago that Cheney was one of Trump’s fiercest defenders. She didn’t hesitate to attack one of democracy’s basic principles, equality before the law, on Trump’s behalf, telling ABC News: “We had people that are at the highest levels of our law enforcement … saying that they were going to stop a duly elected president of the United States. That sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason.”

Coup? Treason? Sounds familiar. When she was on the other side during Trump’s first impeachment, Cheney lashed out at the Democrats in language that has since become familiar:

“I think the Democrats have got to understand the danger that they’re creating here and the damage they’re doing to the Constitution and to the republic.” – Rep. Liz Cheney, Fox News, December 2019

“… in the case of both the impeachment and their embrace of socialism, it’s just a complete fraud … they ignore their constitutional duty …”

“I think the American people are going to hold the Democrats accountable for what they’ve done over the course of the last several months in terms of the real circus and their failure to uphold their oath to the Constitution.” – Rep. Liz Cheney, Fox News Radio, February 2020′

Once she turned on Trump, Cheney wrote that Republicans “must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

Liz Cheney’s go-to move has always been to accuse her opponents of undermining the Constitution. The fact that it happens to be true in Trump’s case is probably immaterial to her. Then, as now, it’s a means to an end.

The Canonization

“My dear,” Maya Angelou reportedly once said, “when people show you who they are, why don’t you believe them?” That question should be posed to the liberal commentators who whitewash Cheney’s record. Most of this commentary is witless hagiography. But the more self-aware liberal praise singers, like writer Rebecca Solnit, try to wrestle with the paradoxical nature of their enthusiasm.

Solnit wrote a Facebook post which begins,

“Apparently a lot of adults have trouble with the concept–and reality–that just as good people can do bad things, so bad people can do good things, and I give you Liz Cheney, who after what appears to be a lifetime of doing or at least supporting very bad things, including her war-crimes-profiteer father, is doing a good thing and paying for it.”

Solnit, often a fine writer, chooses to adopt the all-too-common Democratic posture of lofty condescension toward those who disagree with her. Failure to share her opinion is presented as a kind of learning disability (without the sympathy and solidarity such a condition should inspire). After offering a list of bad people from history who did good things – I assume most Cheney detractors know such people exist – Solnit concludes that Cheney’s critics lack “the ability to cope with complexity.” That lack, she writes,

“helps people become manipulable, become cult followers who having once made the decision that the leader is right keep following into all sorts of dank places, become unable to perceive what’s going on around them ….”

In Solnit’s mind, and presumably those of like-minded Democratic liberals, people who critically analyze Cheney’s behavior are “cult followers,” while those who praise her unquestioningly are able to “cope with complexity.” Such is the intellectual rabbit hole that is modern center-left liberalism.

The Question

Instead of condescension in return, here’s a question: What is the likeliest explanation for this sudden shift in behavior from a politician who has shown a lifelong antipathy, not only to the public interest, but specifically to democracy and civil liberties? Here are four possibilities:

She suddenly realized the war on democracy that she, her party, and her family had waged for decades was wrong and decided to do the right thing, if only this once.

Cheney is, understandably, very angry that Trump told the January 6 rioters to ‘get Liz Cheney’ and wants to get even. (Trump’s exact words as he urged the crowd on were, “We got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world.”) Hey, I’d be pissed too, but it’s not exactly a high-minded motive.

Once Trump turned on her, she realized she would never win another primary and decided to go out in a blaze of self-serving and vindictive glory.

She, her father, and the many others who have labored behind the scenes to undermine democracy and civil liberties see Trump – both the man, and the cult of personality – as a threat to their own long-term plans.

I’m almost certain that the explanation for Cheney’s behavior lies in some combination of the second, third, and fourth explanations — and probably involves all of them. Option number 1, which Cheney’s liberal admirers have embraced, seems to be the least plausible of the four – by far. Maybe that’s the product of a cognitive defect or an inclination to cultism, but to me it seems more like a good application of Occam’s Razor.

The Endgame

The January 6th Committee is doing important work. It has made some critical discoveries, ones that should harden anyone’s conviction that Trump – and an alarmingly large number of other people – are determined to overthrow democracy and replace it with a form of fascism. (It has failed to communicate many of those discoveries as well as it should have, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Cheney has proven effective in a prosecutorial role. The Josh Hawley clip alone was a well-executed political takedown. It takes nothing from her skill, however, to suggest that she may have goals that stand against everything her new fan base says it believes in.

The problem, from the point of view of Cheney et al., isn’t that the actions of Trump and his followers are unconstitutional. The problem is that they’re conspicuous. The Trump crowd is moving too fast, being too unsubtle. A midnight lock picker doesn’t want another thief showing up with a blowtorch.

Trump’s brand of fascism is hasty, unruly, and impulsive, a cult of personality built around an unstable and unpredictable figure. Cheney represents another branch of American totalitarianism, one built on institutions, elites, and stability. Hers is the slow totalitarianism of internal spying, voter suppression, dark money elections, and dynastic politics.

Cheney’s branch of American totalitarianism helped the military-national security establishment grow in power, forging ever-deepening ties with corporations, educational institutions, religious establishments, and political centers of power at all levels – a hybrid form of government, lest we forget, that political scientists call ‘fascism.’

She and her peers kept this multi-faceted complex humming for many years. Then Trump and his minions triggered the hasty and unruly violence of ‘the wrong people,’ who came in breaking glass and shouting ugly names. This intrusion of the hoi polloi was led by people who don’t care about establishment figures like the Cheneys. Their leader humiliated generals and intelligence officers while acting outside the otherwise-predictable range of bipartisan military behavior in Washington.

But this threat to Cheney and her crowd also offers them an opportunity. As Republicans fall in line behind Trump’s lowbrow totalitarianism, Democrats and liberal voters are increasingly embracing the high-tech, lexically sophisticated authoritarianism of the intelligence and military establishments. They idealize the FBI and CIA, hang onto the televised words of generals, and elevate war criminals like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at the slightest prompting. (In Bush’s case, apparently all it took was a piece of candy.)

Cheney and her colleagues are smart. If they have an endgame, and they almost certainly do, it is to build on this growing liberal support for elites – the same elites that have been eroding American democracy for decades. My suspicion is that Cheney’s new organization, “the Great Task,” will raise a great deal of money from Democrats in the name of opposing Trump and will use it to reinforce elite perceptions, institutions, and power.

As is so often the case in history, there are no heroes in the Cheney/Trump conflict. One side has been steadily and successfully eroding freedom at home while pursuing mass death abroad. The other side offers a future of chaos and primal rage, in an atavistic America forged from perpetual war against the strangers in the forest. Both roads would bring suffering, and both could lead to nuclear annihilation.

Reposted from DemocracySOS