Archive for category: TRUTHOUT

Donald Trump lost the presidential election more than eight months ago, yet for many of his followers, it is a matter of faith that at some point later this summer, he will somehow be “reinstated” as president.

Trump himself has been fanning the flames of this fantasy, appearing either in person or from his Mar-a-Lago perch via satellite link at political rallies in which speakers have, at various times, called for martial law, spouted QAnon conspiracy theories and urged military intervention against Joe Biden’s administration. On Telegram and other encrypted social media sites, there are increasingly strident calls for violent actions aimed at reinstating Trump. And die-hard supporters such as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon have been touring the country claiming that vote count “audits” in Arizona and elsewhere will trigger Supreme Court rulings that negate Biden’s victory.

The drip-drip of conspiracist rhetoric by Trump and his acolytes, as well as the congressional GOP’s craven refusal to throw its weight behind a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol breach, has had a measurable impact in this era of disinformation and social media panics.

Last month, a Hill/HarrisX poll found that about 30 percent of Republicans thought it likely Trump would be declared president again this year. Other polling has found that a significant percentage of all respondents think Trump could well return to the presidency in 2021; this includes up to 1 in 5 Democrats and 3 in 10 Independents — who, presumably, largely view this prospect not with glee but with horror.

In less fraught times, such a gaping lack of understanding of how basic political processes in this country work would be dismissed as the rantings of a fringe cult. But in the wake of January 6, when thousands of hard rightists, with Trump’s tacit blessing, stormed the Capitol and went on a hunt for political figures they viewed as enemies, it’s hard to over-emphasize the dangers that this movement poses to the future of U.S. democracy.

Earlier this summer, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed Congress specifically on the danger that this movement could turn to violence again. As the supposed August “Trump reinstatement” date neared, the DHS worried the individuals and groups could shed blood as a way to somehow trigger a broader conflict. Far from easing his foot off the accelerator in this moment, Trump has, once more, poured gasoline on a fire, this time through valorizing insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt — who was shot dead by a police officer as she and others surged into the Capitol — and claiming, without evidence, that she was actually assassinated by a Democratic security official.

Last week, reports circulated about how the top military brass was convinced, in the run-up to the January 6 congressional certification of the Electoral College vote, and in the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration, that Trump was about to order a military coup.

The more we learn about Trump’s last months in office, the clearer it becomes that talk of coups and martial law was far more than just idle chatter.

A new book, I Alone Can Fix It, by two Washington Post reporters, has detailed how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and other top generals believed such an order was a real possibility and discussed mass resignations as a way to stymie Trump’s democracy-busting plans.

That such discussions were taking place at the very highest levels of the military is surreal in and of itself, indicative of just how far off the rails the Trumpites were heading in their final days in office, and just how far removed from democratic norms that entire rotten regime had gotten.

Milley’s willingness, along with that of his top military colleagues, to resign rather than carry out illegal orders was honorable, but of itself it would not have been adequate. If they were so concerned, why didn’t they go public with those grave worries in late 2020, warning the public that coup-plotters were gaining traction inside the White House, instead of waiting months after the fact to belatedly air their sense of unease to reporters? Silence in such a desperate situation, even if mandated by a desire to remain politically neutral, seems sorely insufficient.

Had those hunkered down with Trump in his final redoubt ended up declaring a form of martial law and ordering new elections in key swing states, Trump’s team could simply have appointed other, more pliable generals to replace those unwilling to be complicit in his dictatorial ambitions — men and women whom he would undoubtedly have tried to portray as “enemies of the people” and against whom his fierce propaganda apparatus would instantly have been turned.

Moreover, while the top generals grew increasingly wary of Trump’s methods and his values as his presidency wore on, among military veterans, a majority continued to support the real estate mogul into the 2020 election and beyond. Veterans and other weapons-trained personnel (especially in law enforcement) formed the backbone of extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers, who were central to both the Capitol breach and other pro-Trump protests around the country. There’s no guarantee they would have followed the generals over Trump in such a battle of the wills.

There is, in fact, a long — and largely ignored — history of extremism within the military, one that Trump tapped into ruthlessly. Acknowledging this, earlier this year Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a service-wide review designed to tackle extremism among rank-and-file personnel; reports still abound of current and ex-military personnel involved in far right groups, such as Atomwaffen Division and other racist and extreme-nationalist organizations, although the scale of this is hard to estimate since the military has been notoriously lax in compiling relevant data.

The more we learn about Trump’s last months in office, and his willingness to lean on the muscle provided by paramilitary groups such as the Oath Keepers, the clearer it becomes that talk of coups and martial law was far more than just idle chatter. Trump couldn’t fathom losing his reelection bid and bowing out gracefully; he had no interest in a peaceful transfer of power and a preservation of basic democratic principles, and he felt no moral limits on his exercise of power to beget more power. The recent revelations about how worried the military’s top brass were about being ordered into action against U.S. civilians give further evidence of just how close the American democratic experiment came to a catastrophic collapse.

Alas, that danger was not neatly and finally put to rest on the evening of January 6, when Trump’s insurrection collapsed; nor was it eradicated on January 20, when Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president. More than a half year later, it is still percolating, fanned by a graceless ex-president and his preening, egotistical fantasies about a summertime Second Coming.

In state after Republican state around the country, a push is underway to create legal pathways to subvert election results. This effort is buoyed by the fact that well over half of Republican voters believe that Donald Trump is the “true president.” And it will be further bolstered by Trump’s summer-of-hate tour, during which he plans to traverse the country to give stump speeches aimed at keeping himself in the political spotlight, putting pressure on any and all GOP officials and political leaders to continue to hew to his lies. Trump appears ready to actively campaign against any GOP political figure who supported his impeachment and opposes his ongoing claims to having won the election.

From the beginning of his presidency, Trump and Trumpism both appeared to be a cult and a deeply authoritarian political movement, one that tapped into some of the most violent impulses in U.S. political history. It was a combination of the demagoguery of McCarthyism and the conspiracism of the John Birch Society. It valued absolute loyalty tests — not to country or to the Constitution, but to the person of Donald J. Trump. And in demanding loyalty, it brooked no dissent, insisting that individuals and institutions bend repeatedly to its will.

In the weeks after the November election, when it was clear that Trump had massively lost the popular vote and had also lost the Electoral College vote, it was increasingly clear that Trump would attempt to hold onto power by any means necessary. Sure enough, there he was on January 6, goading on an enraged mob of Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, neo-Nazis, and other violent extremists whom he had invited to D.C. with the express purpose of making it impossible for Congress to certify the election result. The resulting bloodshed, as horrific as it was, ought to have surprised no one. Trump had, after all, been encouraging armed assaults against institutions of power for the better part of a year, calling on militias to “liberate” Michigan and other states from COVID-related public health restrictions and for his supporters to monitor the November 2020 polls. And GOP leaders, instead of distancing themselves from him, had essentially given him a free pass.

That the January 6 insurrection did not lead to greater bloodshed than it did was due more to luck than to lack of will. In the months since then, it’s become clear that the Capitol Police and National Guard were essentially, for many hours, ordered to stand down in the face of the far right attack. It has also become clear just how far Trump’s team was willing to go to basically order Department of Justice personnel into the fray to further their election fraud claims and attempt to overturn a democratic election result. And, in the ongoing seditionist language of Michael Flynn and other acolytes, it’s become clear just how comfortable these right-wing extremists were in utilizing military force to cling to power, and how, nearly half a year into the Biden presidency, they cling to the hope that an armed uprising, involving elements of the military and others, will somehow return their Great Leader to the White House.

The failed mob attack of January 6 ought to have been the event that lanced this toxic, poison-filled boil. In its wake, the GOP leadership, at a congressional and a state level, has had ample opportunity to cauterize the wound and sever their never-particularly-stable alliance with Trump.

At the federal level, had a handful more GOP senators found the courage to vote to convict the disgraced ex-president following his second impeachment, he would have been destroyed as a viable political figure and possible future candidate. More recently, had Sen. Mitch McConnell not rallied his senators to vote against the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate January 6, Congress could have thrown its full investigative muscle into unraveling the extent of Trump’s anti-democratic plans.

State lawmakers in one state after the next have moved to embrace Trump’s fantasies about rigged elections and massive fraudulent voting.

At the state level, state GOPs could have supported the congressmembers, including Liz Cheney, who had the moral courage to vote to impeach Trump for his actions (though not the courage to oppose his agenda while in office). Instead, those state parties have taken vote after vote to censor the pro-impeachment figures; activists have heckled and booed senators who voted to convict; and state lawmakers in one state after the next have moved to embrace Trump’s fantasies about rigged elections and massive fraudulent voting.

In Arizona, they have set in motion an utterly disreputable “audit” of election results that is being carried out with no transparency by a cohort of avowedly pro-Trump, and conspiracist individuals and organizations.

In Georgia, they have voted to constrict the franchise and to undermine the role of elections officials, from the Secretary of State on down, by allowing GOP elected officials to replace officials they deem a threat to the electoral process. Recall that, in 2020, the secretary of state stood firm in the face of extraordinary intimidation tactics from Trump, from his lawyers, and from his trolls who unleashed volleys of death threats and other threatening behavior against him. Come 2022 or 2024, that official, and county-level officials, might not have the ability to both withstand such pressure and to continue to hold their jobs.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection and needs to keep Trump on board, has called a special legislative session this summer that most commentators assume comes with the specific intent of dramatically tightening voting requirements, and constricting both absentee voting and early voting.

Around the country, state officials are buying into Trump’s rhetoric about a stolen election, and are putting in place rules designed to make it easier for the governing party and election officials to reject votes that don’t go their way. And around the country, too, as the media continues to give Trump a vast amount of free publicity by covering his each and every utterance, it is fast becoming a litmus test for GOP primary voters as to whether or not candidates support the most outlandish and far right of conspiracy claims and worldviews. As a result, the last vestiges of moderation and of rationalist politics are now being driven from the GOP. The GOP is now, the better part of a year after Trump’s thumping election defeat, on the verge of becoming more like a full-fledged far right party as seen in Europe than a mainstream conservative party.

Never before in U.S. history has a defeated president spent the year after he left office trying to undermine the election result, attempting to seize control over all the state levers of power within his party.

Addressing a QAnon event, Trump’s disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn argued that the U.S. military should intervene in domestic politics in much the same way as did the Myanmar military earlier this year. The most shocking thing about Flynn’s speech wasn’t his words — after all, Flynn by now has a long history of saying entirely despicable, fascistic things in public settings; it all was in the crowd’s reaction: he was wildly cheered rather than booed off the stage.

Trump was an entirely malignant, destructive president. Now, from his post-presidential gilded exile in Mar-a-Lago he is setting the stage for future waves of extremism and violence, and his henchmen are, increasingly, flirting with the language of paramilitarism and coups. Trump is demanding that state parties and federal political figures toe his line, and he is using his popularity among the GOP base to take down establishment Republican figures and to replace them with unbending loyalists and sycophants. His reactionary followers, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, are pushing a “domino theory,” arguing that a series of state audits of elections results will ultimately lead to Biden’s demise and to Trump rising, phoenix-like from the political ashes.

Goaded on by this tsunami of disinformation, 30 percent of Republicans now believe that Trump will magically be “reinstated” as president by August, or shortly thereafter — a stunning number and one that should cause grave concern. Never before in U.S. history has a defeated president spent the year after he left office trying to undermine the election result, attempting to seize control over all the state levers of power within his party so as to further his personal political ambitions, and using his proxies to gin up the notion of violence against his successor.

Trump was in the gutter as a president, and there he remains. As Trumpists take over political apparatuses around the country, he is becoming even more of a threat and a havoc-maker. I do not doubt that Trump would, if he ran for president again, be thoroughly defeated in any even remotely free-and-fair election. But, as Trump loyalists seize control in more GOP-led states, and as election law changes are implemented that make it easier for governing Republicans to undermine unfavorable election results in their states, I have every doubt that upcoming elections and the vote counts that follow can be guaranteed as free-and-fair in the first place.

The evolution — or devolution, if you will — of the right’s January 6 narrative continues apace, but is steering toward strange waters. When it happened, it was deemed an appalling attack against the very fabric of democracy … but Donald Trump didn’t like that, because the attackers were his people, and so the story began to change. It was antifa! Black Lives Matter protesters! No, that didn’t stick. Wait, they were peaceful tourists! See how they stay within the ropes as they carry their Confederate battle flags and lengths of pipe! Ten minutes with the footage from the front stairs and hallways batted that one down.

“There was a nationwide dragnet to find [the Capitol attackers]. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight,” intoned Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night. “But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged. Look at the documents; the government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”

Thus, by way of Carlson’s fake-clever loaded questions technique does the newest poisoned information pill splash down into the national bloodstream. The FBI did it, why not? This answer, unlike the others, is sure to please Trump, who despises the FBI and all within it. Blame it on them? What a hoot! Why didn’t I think of that?

It’s important to note that the FBI is certainly not blameless in the broader sense, having caused ongoing and brutal harm to many marginalized communities. However, there is absolutely no evidence that it had anything to do with the Capitol attack.

The FBI-did-it theory is the brainchild of Darren Beattie, whom you may recall was a Trump speechwriter for about 213 seconds before his deep ties to white supremacists were revealed. After being relieved of his position, Trump put Beattie “on a commission tasked with preserving sites related to the Holocaust,” according to the Independent UK. Beattie’s FBI argument, published earlier this week on his far right website Revolver News, has since been picked up and spread via social media by Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.

Some fine company Tucker is keeping these days.

“Even if we set aside these reasons to disbelieve Carlson’s theory and the fact that the government isn’t supposed to cite government agents as unindicted co-conspirators, it’s still a massive leap to assume that these people were government agents,” counter-argues Aaron Blake for The Washington Post. “Carlson initially raises this as a supposedly likely possibility, but then essentially treats it as fact. Is it possible it’s right? Virtually anything is possible. There’s just no genuine reason to believe it, despite Carlson’s presentation.”

A day later, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone arrived at the Capitol to speak with the 21 Republican House members who voted “no” on giving the officers who defended the Capitol the Congressional Gold Medal. When Fanone met one of them — Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia — Clyde pointedly refused to shake Fanone’s hand. Clyde, you may recall, was the Congress member who recently said the riot looked like “a normal tourist visit.”

If you believe this rash of dangerous conspiracy theories is going to wind down of its own volition soon, I invite you to think again. Carlson is merely a mouthpiece for the Republican-dominating Trump faction, which believes it is in total control of the party because it is. Floating this “FBI did it” theory is perfect Trump: Bleat some aggravated nonsense to scramble the minds of your foes, deny you actually said anything because you couched it as a question and let the battery acid of your malevolent intentions do its corrosive work on the body politic.

These are the people who very nearly turned the Department of Justice into Trump’s own personal hand puppet.

“[Trump and his allies] wanted the Justice Department to explore false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been manipulated to alter votes in one county in Michigan,” reports the Post. “They asked officials about the U.S. government filing a Supreme Court challenge to the results in six states that Joe Biden won. The president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, even shared with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a link to a YouTube video that described an outlandish plot in which the election had been stolen from Trump through the use of military satellites controlled in Italy.”

Trump loyalists want us to believe the election was stolen by Italian satellites, the Capitol was sacked by FBI agents dressed in their finest MAGA gear, and all of it is controlled by a cabal of cannibal pedophiles who run Hollywood and the Democratic Party. These theories are bizarre, wild and baseless, to be sure, but they are also dangerous, grounded in white supremacy and a deep disdain for democracy.

I would like to believe this is all going to be healthy for the republic in the long run, the lancing of a boil left to swell with pus and rot for too long … but the sheer number of people who will buy into all this is staggering. Maybe they don’t believe it, but they say they do, and they vote for the ones peddling these fictions.

Soon enough, and to the great thrill of Trump, the arc of this argument will leave Republicans with little alternative but to openly embrace the Capitol attackers as brothers and patriots. It really doesn’t matter if they believe it or not. On a long enough timeline, the platform of “owning the libs” becomes potentially lethal for all involved, and for the country itself.

Today’s Republican Party is an extremist force that no longer qualifies as a mainstream political party and is surely not interested in participating in “normal” politics. In fact, today’s GOP is so wrapped around extreme and irrational beliefs that even Europe’s far-right parties and movements, including Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, seem conventional in comparison.

The GOP’s political identity has been dramatically shaped by former President Donald Trump, but these recent shifts would not have been possible if there weren’t already an array of groups across U.S. society and culture (including white supremacists, right-wing Evangelical Christians and Second Amendment activists, to name just a few) that have long embraced extremist and “proto-fascist” views about the way the country should be governed and the values that it should hold. For them, Trump was and remains America’s “great white hope.” In this context, Trump’s voting base — which continues to believe in the idea of a stolen election and to support Trump-led GOP efforts to stamp critical race theory out of schools and restrict voting rights — speaks volumes about the anti-democratic and threatening nature of today’s GOP.

In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky explains what has happened to the Republican Party and why even more than democracy is at stake if the “proto-fascist” forces inspired by Trump return to power.

C.J. Polychroniou: Over the course of the past few decades, the Republican Party has gone through a series of ideological transformations — from traditional conservatism to reactionism and finally to what we may define as “proto-fascism” where the irrational has become the driving force. How do we explain what has happened to the GOP?

Noam Chomsky: Your term “neoliberal proto-fascism” seems to me quite an accurate characterization of the current Republican organization — I’m hesitant to call them a “Party” because that might suggest that they have some interest in participating honestly in normal parliamentary politics. More fitting, I think, is the judgment of American Enterprise Institute political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the modern Republican Party has transformed to a “radical insurgency” with disdain for democratic participation. That was before the Trump-McConnell hammer blows of the past few years, which drove the conclusion home more forcefully.

The term “neoliberal proto-fascism” captures well both the features of the current party and the distinction from the fascism of the past. The commitment to the most brutal form of neoliberalism is apparent in the legislative record, crucially the subordination of the party to private capital, the inverse of classic fascism. But the fascist symptoms are there, including extreme racism, violence, worship of the leader (sent by God, according to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo), immersion in a world of “alternative facts” and a frenzy of irrationality. Also in other ways, such as the extraordinary efforts in Republican-run states to suppress teaching in schools that doesn’t conform to their white supremacist doctrines. Legislation is being enacted to ban instruction in “critical race theory,” the new demon, replacing Communism and Islamic terror as the plague of the modern age. “Critical race theory” is the scare-phrase used for the study of the systematic structural and cultural factors in the hideous 400-year history of slavery and enduring racist repression. Proper indoctrination in schools and universities must ban this heresy. What actually happened for 400 years and is very much alive today must be presented to students as a deviation from the real America, pure and innocent, much as in well-run totalitarian states.

The Democrats have [failed] to provide a constructive alternative that answers to the needs and just aspirations of many of those who have flocked to the Trump banner.

What’s missing from “proto-fascism” is the ideology: state control of the social order, including the business classes, and party control of the state with the maximal leader in charge. That could change. German industry and finance at first thought they could use the Nazis as their instrument in beating down labor and the left while remaining in charge. They learned otherwise. The current split between the more traditional corporate leadership and the Trump-led party is suggestive of something similar, but only remotely. We are far from the conditions that led to Mussolini, Hitler, and their cohorts.

On the driving force of irrationality, the facts are inescapable and should be of deep concern. Though we can’t credit Trump entirely with the achievement, he certainly has shown great skill in carrying out a challenging assignment: implementing policies for the benefit of his primary constituency of great wealth and corporate power while conning the victims into worshipping him as their savior. That’s no mean achievement, and inducing an atmosphere of utter irrationality has been a primary instrument, a virtual prerequisite.

We should distinguish the voting base, now pretty much owned by Trump, from the political echelon (Congress) — and distinguish both from a more shadowy elite that really runs the Party, McConnell and associates.

Attitudes among the voting base are truly ominous. Put aside the fact that a large majority of Trump voters believe that the elections were stolen. A majority also believe that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it” and 40 percent take a stronger stand: “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Not surprising, perhaps, when a quarter of Republicans are reported to believe that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”

It’s hard to garner votes with the slogan “I want to rob you. Vote for me.” That leaves only a few options. One is to prevent the “wrong people” from voting.

In the background are more realistic concerns about the disappearance of “the traditional American way of life”: a Christian and white supremacist world where Black people “know their place” and there are no infections from “deviants” who call for gay rights and other such obscenities. That traditional way of life indeed is disappearing.

There are also elements of realism in the various “great replacement” theories that seem to consume much of the Trump base. Putting aside absurdities about immigration and elite plotting, a simple look at distribution of births suffices to show that white domination is declining.

It’s also worth remembering the deep roots of these concerns. Among the founders, there were two distinguished figures of the Enlightenment, one of whom hoped that the new country would be free of “blot or mixture,” red or black (Jefferson), while the other felt that Germans and Swedes should perhaps be barred entry because they are too “swarthy” (Franklin). Myths of Anglo-Saxon origin were prevalent through the 19th century. All of this is apart from the virulent racism and its horrifying manifestations.

Concerns about satanic cults are dangerous enough, but other deeply irrational beliefs are far more consequential. One of the most threatening revelations of recent days was a scarcely noticed observation in the latest report of a Yale University group that monitors attitudes on climate change — the euphemism for the heating of the planet that will end organized human life on earth unless soon brought under control. The report found that “Over the past year, there has been a sharp decline in the percentages of both liberal/moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans who think developing sources of clean energy should be a priority for the president and Congress. The current numbers are all-time lows since we first asked the question in 2010.”

Meanwhile every day’s news provides information about new potential disasters — for example, the June 11 release of studies reporting the accelerated collapse of a huge Antarctic glacier that might raise sea levels by a foot and a half — along with reminders by the scientists reporting the warning that “The future is still open to change — if people do what is needed to change it.”

They won’t, as long as the reported attitudes prevail. Unless overcome, they might be a kiss of death if the current strategy of the Republican Party succeeds in putting the wreckers back in power. The strategy is plain enough: no matter what the harm to the country, and to their own voting base, ensure that the Biden administration can do nothing to remedy severe domestic problems, and ram through Jim Crow-style legislation to block voting of people of color and the poor, counting on the acquiescence of the reactionary judiciary that McConnell-Trump have succeeded in installing.

The party is not a lost cause. The Democrats have helped by failing to provide a constructive alternative that answers to the needs and just aspirations of many of those who have flocked to the Trump banner. That can change. Furthermore, attitudes are shifting among younger Republicans, even among younger Evangelicals, a core part of the Republican base since the ‘70s.

Nothing is irremediable.

With regard to the political echelon, there is little to say. With fringe exceptions, they have abandoned any semblance of integrity. Current votes are a clear indication: Total Republican opposition to measures that they know are favored by their constituents in order to ensure that the Biden administration can achieve nothing.

Trump has exhibited a certain genius in tapping poisons that run not far below the surface of American society and culture.

The most abject capitulation of the political echelon was on global warming. In 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had a limited climate plank in his program, and congressional Republicans were considering related legislation. The Koch energy conglomerate responded in force, and any spark of independence was extinguished. That much was evident in the last Republican primaries in 2016, pre-Trump: 100 percent denial that what is happening is happening, or worse, saying maybe it is but we’re going to race toward disaster without apologizing (as said John Kasich, who was honored for his integrity by being invited to speak at the 2020 Democratic convention).

I can’t raise any objections whatsoever to what you say, but I am a bit baffled by Biden’s insistence in trying to reach out to Republicans on some of the major issues confronting the country. Isn’t bipartisanship a pipe dream?

Not entirely. Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer did manage a triumph of bipartisanship. Abandoning a prior commitment to legislation on global warming, Schumer teamed up with Republican Todd Young to conceal a limited industrial policy program within a “hate China” bill that appealed to shared jingoist sentiments. Republicans ensured that such significant components as funding for the National Science Foundation would be whittled down. Young celebrated the triumph by declaring that “when future generations of Americans cast their gaze towards new frontiers,” they won’t see “a red flag planted” there, but our own red, white, and blue. What better reason could there be to try to revive domestic manufacturing while trying to undermine the Chinese economy — at a moment when cooperation is a prerequisite for survival.

Meanwhile Biden’s Department of Defense is reorienting resources and planning to war with China, a form of madness barely receiving attention, analyzed in detail in Issue #1 of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy, June 11, 2021.

Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a cult of personality. Is this why Republican leaders blocked the creation of a commission to investigate the January 6 attack on Capitol?

Trump has captured the voting base, but the political echelon faces a quandary. For a long time, the party elite has been a rich man’s club, pandering to business power even more than the Democrats, even after the Democrats abandoned the working class in the ‘70s, becoming a party of Wall St. and affluent professionals. The business world was willing to tolerate Trump’s antics as long as he was loyally serving them — with some distaste, since he tarnished the image they project of “soulful corporations.” But for major sectors, January 6 was too much.

The McConnell types who run the party are caught between a raging voting base in thrall to Trump and the masters of the economy whom they serve. A commission of inquiry, if at all honest, would have deepened this rift, which they have to find a way to paper over if the party, such as it is, is to survive. Best then to cancel it.

Lies, propaganda, and restricting voting rights have become the governing principles of today’s GOP. To what extent will the new voting restrictions work to the advantage of the Republican Party, and how will they impact on the current political climate in general and the future of whatever is left of democracy in the United States in particular?

Trump’s highly effective strategy of legitimizing “alternative facts” was based on an endless flood of lies, but a few true statements floated in the debris. One was his comment that Republicans can never win a fair election. That’s a real problem for the rich man’s club. It’s hard to garner votes with the slogan “I want to rob you. Vote for me.” That leaves only a few options. One is to prevent the “wrong people” from voting. Another is to shape the party program so that policy is concealed by appeals to “cultural issues.” Both have been actively pursued. Trump gave the practices a particularly vulgar twist in his usual style, but he didn’t invent them.

The party leadership is dedicated to the obstructionist strategy of sacrificing the interests of the country in order to regain power.

The current wave of Republican Jim Crow-style legislation is understandable: Trump’s observation is accurate, and is likely to be more so in the future with demographic changes and the tendency of younger voters to favor social justice and human rights, among Republicans as well. The efforts have become more feasible after the Roberts Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby decision in 2013, which “set the stage for a new era of white hegemony,” as Vann Newkirk rightly observed.

Displacement of policy by “cultural issues” traces back to Nixon’s southern strategy. With Democrats beginning to support mild civil rights legislation, Nixon and his advisers recognized that they could switch the southern vote to Republican by racist appeals, barely disguised.

Under Reagan there was little disguise; racist rhetoric and practices came naturally to him. Meanwhile the Republican Christian nationalist strategist Paul Weyrich easily convinced the political leadership that by abandoning their former “pro-choice” stands and pretending to oppose abortion, they could pick up the northern Catholic and newly politicized Evangelical vote. Gun-loving was soon added to the mix, by now reaching such weird absurdities as the recent Benitez decision overturning California’s ban on assault rifles, which are, after all, hardly different from Swiss army knives [according to Benitez]. Trump added more to the mix. Like his fellow demagogues in Europe, he understood well that refugees can be used to whip up xenophobic passions and fears. His racist appeals also went beyond the norm.

Trump has exhibited a certain genius in tapping poisons that run not far below the surface of American society and culture. By such means, he managed to capture the Republican voting base. The party leadership is dedicated to the obstructionist strategy of sacrificing the interests of the country in order to regain power. That leaves the country with one functioning political party, itself torn between the neoliberal leadership and a younger social democratic voting base.

Your phrase “whatever is left of American democracy” is to the point. However progressive it might have been in the 18th century — and there is much to say about that — by today’s standards American democracy is deeply flawed in ways that were already becoming clear to the leading Framer, James Madison by 1791, when he wrote to Jefferson deploring “the daring depravity of the times,” as the “stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the government — at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations.”

That could well be a description of recent years, particularly as the neoliberal assault achieved its entirely predictable consequence of placing government even more at the command of concentrations of private power than before. The “largesses” are too familiar to review. Ample research in mainstream political science has shown that the “clamors and combinations” have left the majority of voters unrepresented, as their own representatives heed the voices of the super-rich, wealthy donors and corporate lobbyists.

The most recent study, using sophisticated AI techniques, dispels “notions that anyone’s opinion about public policy outside of the top 10 percent of affluent Americans independently helps to explain policy.” Thomas Ferguson, the leading academic scholar of the power of the “tools and tyrants” of government, concludes: “Knowing the policy area, the preferences of the top 10 percent, and the views of a handful of interest groups suffice to explain policy changes with impressive accuracy.”

But some vestiges of democracy remain, even after the neoliberal assault. Probably not for long if neoliberal “proto-fascism” extends its sway.

But the fate of democracy won’t actually matter much if the “proto-fascists” regain power. The environment that sustains life cannot long endure the wreckers of the Trump era of decline. Little else will matter if irreversible tipping points are passed.