Tag Archives: Authoritarianism

I Wish Everyone Realized How Serious This Is

Posted on by

Dan Rather, the former face of CBS News, is mad as hell (the page has an audio link if you’d rather listen to him read this):

. . . Where I find myself today: Usher out the children. Cover sensitive ears. Because this old reporter is full of a little fire. 

The topic at hand is the truth, and not some esoteric notion to be debated in a college philosophy seminar. This is a truth so urgent, so important, so obvious, that attempts to undermine it would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. So here it is. 

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. It wasn’t particularly close. He won the total national vote overwhelmingly and won decisively in the Electoral College. There is no credible suggestion to the contrary. Election officials confirmed it. The courts confirmed it. It is apparent to everyone who doesn’t live in an alternate reality, who doesn’t harbor seditionist impulses, who isn’t a craven opportunist, or who doesn’t marinate in the cesspool of these forces, otherwise known as Fox News. For those who suggest otherwise (who say that Biden is not the legitimately elected President of the United States), many have been deceived and others are willfully deceiving them for their own cynical, and dangerous, ends. 

And yet that’s where a majority of Republicans find themselves today, if you believe the polls. And it is certainly where a majority of elected officials are if you just listen to what they say, or more importantly don’t say. The origin of this lie-laden authoritarianism is the former president, who couldn’t fall back on his usual playbook of suing, sulking, and skedaddling to get himself out of the loser spotlight. So he decided to do what he does best, the tool he used to propel himself to the presidency. He lied. Not a small half-truth. Not a wee fib. Not even a bald-faced lie. A lie so big it deserves to be written as a proper noun — the Big Lie. 

This Big Lie led to violent insurrectionists storming the United States Capitol, attempting to stop final certification of election results. It has led to Republican state representatives falling over themselves to try to cut back on voting rights. And how do they try to justify it? They say their supporters have lost faith in the voting system. But that is because their supporters have been lied to by the same politicians who are now using that as an excuse to stifle democracy. Propaganda and authoritarianism play on in a destructive feedback loop. . . . 

Now to be fair, not EVERY Republican has fallen in line. Take the high-profile case of Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president, Dick Cheney. She’s certainly no liberal . . . but she has had the temerity to say what her colleagues won’t, that the would-be emperor has no clothes . . . [So] her fellow House Republicans are coming for her like a political version of Murder on the Orient Express . . . 

Who thrives in such an environment? Craven opportunists like Elise Stefanik. You would think this Harvard-educated congresswoman from upstate New York would know better about the Constitution and the ridiculousness of the Big Lie, but she long ago pegged her future to prostrating at the altar of [the former president]. And now she is poised to replace Cheney in Republican leadership. Some conservative groups are grumbling that Stefanik’s voting record is far more “liberal” than they would like, but . . . whatever tenuous links the Republican Party had to a consistent ideology [are now broken]. It’s now a cult of personality, not a political party. And fealty is prized over all else. . . .

It brings me no joy in saying that one of the factors that is exacerbating this dangerous era in our national history is a Washington press corps that is struggling to make sense of a disorienting landscape. The bedrock of American democracy, for better and worse, has been a stable two party system — with some notable moments of exception. The press is used to two opposing forces waging battle over policy. At least nominally. Now the no man’s land between Republicans and Democrats is over a belief in democracy itself and not things like taxes or foreign policy.

Once again, this is not a theoretical musing. Is it too much to say that giving oxygen to the Big Lie, let alone actively espousing it, is a form of sedition? Full stop. Think about it. Is lying about the truth of last November making a mockery of any pledge of patriotism? No matter how many flag lapel pins you wear or how often you quote the “Founding Fathers,” to deny a fair and honest election and the orderly transfer of power risks placing you squarely in the camp of dictators and autocrats, and helping with the demise of democracy.

The press needs to start taking this even more seriously than it does now. Every elected Republican who has played footsie with the Big Lie should have to defend that record before they can speak on any other topic. They can’t be allowed to dodge. The questions aren’t difficult. Did Joe Biden win the election? Where is your evidence to the contrary? And because there is no such evidence, if they try to quote something, they should be pressed on the truth. Live interviews are particularly problematic because politicians can stretch out a string of lies so long that they can spin their way to a commercial break. Those with a history of such actions should not be given prominent platforms for their performance art. 

The Big Lie must be the context for everything that is taking place in Washington, and political stories across the country. It is not old news. January 6 is not old news. This denial of reality is the animating principle driving the Republican Party. We can’t talk about legislation in Washington, immigration, climate change, fiscal policy, foreign policy, civil rights, education, or any other issue politicians are “debating” without talking about the Big Lie. . . . 

Republicans desperately want the mainstream press to cover the daily news cycle through the lens of traditional party politics. At the same time, they go on their propaganda channels and stir up their base against the mechanics of fair and open elections. They spread the poison of illegitimacy to attack the Biden Administration. On Fox News you get a concerted and coordinated attack. Outside of that echo chamber you get what was once the normal news diet of a spectrum of different stories. But this is not a normal news environment. This is an attack on American values, and our ability to continue to function as a government that represents the will of the majority of Americans. The Big Lie is everything right now and the press and the American people must not provide safe harbor for it to continue to metastasize. 

I want to end with a note of some optimism. I believe the Big Lie is so ludicrous and outrageous that it can be made to collapse under the weight of its own perfidy. If it is put into the proper spotlight, if it becomes so radioactive that big business, the press, and the public at large refuse to bestow any legitimacy to those who traffic in it, then it can and will be defeated. . . .

Unquote.

Some in the press are finally referring to a Republican lie as a lie, which is progress. But it’s hard to believe anything but the passage of time (a lot of time) will weaken the Big Lie’s hold on what is now a reactionary cult.

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post, who is much less optimistic than Dan Rather, explains why:

Let’s not beat around the bush: The Republican Party has pretty much lost its mind. In the time since the 2020 election, rather than trying to make a new start after the disaster of the [previous four] years, it has become more radical and more extreme. Most important of all, it has emphatically and comprehensively rejected democracy itself.

Now here’s the scariest part: There’s almost no reason to believe that this will hurt the ability of Republicans to win elections and take back the power they’ve lost. . . . 

Outside of a few truly deranged members, almost all elected Republicans in Congress know that [their candidate] lost. But they’re making a calculation that because of polarization, it doesn’t matter how extreme they get, what kind of lies they encourage people to believe, or what kind of damage they do to our system. If they can keep their base angry, it will give them the path back to power . . . despite the fact that the Republican Party is still in thrall to the most disastrous president of any of our lifetimes, one whose incompetence helped result in hundreds of thousands of American deaths and the implosion of our economy.

Yes, [he] lost. But not by the 23-point margins of the 1964 and 1972 elections. By just 4œ percentage points.

In today’s Republican Party, polarization doesn’t just mean there’s almost nothing the party could do that would cause its support to collapse. It means there is literally nothing it could do.

. . . [The Republican] base remains sizable enough that they’re always in a position to win, even with those defections. And at the state level, they not only hold the bulk of the power, they’ve gerrymandered state legislative seats so ruthlessly that in some places it’s essentially impossible for Democrats to take control no matter how resoundingly they win the support of the electorate.

So show me the Republicans in Washington who will lose their seats for being too supportive of [their leader] and the “big lie” of the stolen election. . . . The combination of gerrymandering, geographical sorting and polarization means there are almost none. The party can get steadily more unhinged and more implacably opposed to democracy, with consequences for its electoral fortunes that are temporary at most.

All it would take to return them to complete power in Washington is an ordinary midterm election [when the president’s party usually loses seats] followed by an economic downturn in 2024, whereupon whichever cynical extremist they nominate for president could sneak into the White House.

We keep waiting for the moment when the country says, “Now you’ve gone too far, Republicans,” and sends them into oblivion. But the truth is, they see no reason to change the path they’re on. . . .

Once You Accept a Big Lie, All Bets Are Off

Posted on by

A scary article from David Atkins of The Washington Monthly:

. . . The entire left-leaning political world has spent the months after the 2020 election obsessed over the fairness of elections, and conservative attempts to rig the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression. This is for good reason, of course: Republicans know they lack the support to win majority support in a fair contest, but believe they have the right to rule nonetheless for reasons that ultimately boil down to white supremacy, religious dominionism and antiquated patriarchal beliefs. So Republicans have been busy passing bills to restrict voting among young people and non-whites, while doing their best to ensure that exurban conservative whites continue to be dramatically and unfairly overrepresented in the House, Senate and Electoral College.

But there’s another even more sinister trend among conservative politicians that deserves greater attention: an unwillingness to concede any electoral victory by a Democrat as legitimate, and an eagerness to punish any Republican elected official who concedes the will of the voters. The Big Lie that [their candidate] really won the election is now canon among a majority of Republican voters. Any Republicans who refuses to toe the line is branded a heretic, and elections officials who dared to certify Biden’s win are being censured or stripped of their power. Arizona Republicans have sponsored a bogus “audit” of the election full of crackpot conspiracy theories, and Republican legislatures have been busy taking control of both running and certifying elections out of the hands of county official in Democratic-run cities and counties.

The context of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt by Congressional Republicans to refuse to certify the Electoral College tally, in the hopes of sending the election back to gerrymandered Republican state legislatures and handing [themselves] a win as part of a anti-democratic coup. It was a physical coup attempt designed to intimidate Congress into enforcing a legislative coup. Republicans who refused to back the latter are facing steep primary challenges.

It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this is, and what its consequences might entail in the very near future. As Greg Sargent notes, the “GOP appears to be plunging headlong into a level of full-blown hostility to democracy that has deeply unsettling future ramifications.”

Biden’s electoral college win was only certified because enough Republican secretaries of state and county election board officials did their duty to democracy and resisted pressure to thwart the will of the voters. Every lever of Republican power has since been wielded to punish them. Minor county board officials have been receiving organized harassment and death threats. Secretary of state Raffensperger in Georgia is not only facing a major primary challenge, he was also stripped of his power to certify the election in the future. Every Republican not already committed to preserving their power by any means necessary has been put on notice that if they do not cooperate they will be physically threatened and politically replaced.

So what happens in 2024 if President Biden or Vice President Harris win the Electoral College, but local Republicans on county boards with majority Democratic votes refuse to certify the election; when state legislatures who have seized control of certification refuse to certify their state tallies; when a potential Republican majority in the House of Representatives refuses to certify the Electoral College tally? What happens when they refuse to certify Democratic wins in purple state Senate races, throwing control of the Upper Chamber into limbo and chaos? What happens if Biden/Harris wins the popular vote by 8 million votes and 30 electoral college votes, only to see Republicans in states like Georgia and Wisconsin decide that their GOP legislatures will send electors for . . . Tucker Carlson or Josh Hawley instead? What happens if Democrats legitimately add to their lead in the Senate, only to see Republicans refuse to certify those tallies as well, keeping GOP Senators in place for the next session?

The short answer is that the matter would go to the courts. The clear rule of law says that state legislatures cannot overrule the will of the voters. But if the vote isn’t officially certified, there is no official will of the voters. There are laws stating that elections must be certified by certain dates, but there a dearth of precedent around what happens if they don’t. And given the [previous] administration’s stacking of the lower courts and the wildly conservative imbalance on the Supreme Court, it’s not clear that the outcome would favor the preservation of democracy. Nor is it clear that the matter would be resolved in time to prevent civil conflict–or, in fact, that Republicans in the state or federal legislative branches would honor the Court’s authority should it side against them.

A Republican Party hostile to democracy can use America’s creaky Constitutional system to create a series of unprecedented roadblocks to majority rule. Not just by suppressing the vote or drawing unfair districts, but by refusing to accept the vote itself. The result could throw the nation into political violence unseen since the days of Ku Klux Klan terrorism if not the Civil War itself.

There are ways of addressing these problems. The role of certifying elections can be taken out of the hands of either local or state partisan officials and given to independent judicial boards, electoral courts and elections commissions as in many other developed democracies. The electoral college can be bypassed by the National Popular Vote. We can strengthen laws around the requirement to certify elections per the tabulated results, and increase the transparency and security of those results by requiring paper trails and open source software on voting machines. We can end the gerrymandering that allows anti-democracy conservatives to control legislatures and House delegations in states where the majority of the population votes against them. We can stop the end-run tactics used to take elections administration out of the hands of local officials secretaries of state and put them under the thumb of partisan legislatures, and make it harder for legislatures to send separate slates of electors.

But to do almost any of those things would require at a minimum ending the filibuster. If Republican attempts at voter suppression and gerrymandering are not enough to spur Senators Sinema and Manchin to take appropriate action, then perhaps the threat of ending democracy itself might. The Senate won’t be a very collegial place if the country is melting down in violence from an anti-majoritarian coup. . . .

Unquote. 

It’s comforting to think “they’ll never go that far”, but given what we’ve seen in recent years, and since January 6th, it’s probably too optimistic.

What Would You Tell a Group of Germans about American Politics?

Posted on by

If you could talk for eight minutes.

Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University. A foundation asked him to give an analysis of our politics to forty Germans. It’s an interesting, depressing eight minutes.

What Could Happen Next If We’re Not Careful

Posted on by

A scholar who’s studied authoritarians around the world discusses this week’s insurrection and how it might be the beginning, not the end. An interview from Huff Post:

HP:  Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a history professor at New York University and author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”  She [thinks we] could be headed for even more violence and political unrest. 

This historic insurrection was the culmination of five years of fascist rhetoric from the president. You’ve been at the forefront of identifying and documenting how Txxxx and the “Make America Great Again” movement represent a real authoritarian or fascist insurgency. Were you still surprised to see what you saw Wednesday?

RBG:  No, I wasn’t surprised. I was extremely calm when it happened because I just kind of expected it. Of course, it was shocking to then see the lawmakers cowering, and then I became very angry at the arrogance and lawlessness, and the fact that the police didn’t do anything and that these guys went out for drinks later, these insurgents. But no, this has been set up since Txxxx’s presidential campaign, when he actively cultivated all of these various militias and far-right forces, so it’s that cultivation entwined with this victim cult.

Because this doesn’t work if you don’t have the cult leader. And the leader is the victim. So the leader is the protector, he’s going to save the nation, blah, blah, blah, but once they bonded to him, it’s very fascistic. It’s very fascist. If he’s in trouble, their duty is to save him. And so Txxxx has played them like a violin all these years, doing exactly what he needs to do to string them along and keep them loyal. Give them just enough crumbs of affirmation.

And then he called on them because the other things that he was trying to do didn’t work.

HP:  You’ve described this kind of leader-follower relationship like a fascistic relationship. Typically how is that spell broken? How do people get out of that?

RBG:  Unfortunately, they don’t get out of that. What I mean is — the other cases are, in some ways, not analogous, because when you have a real dictatorship, there’s no opposing voices. In fact, in a way, it makes our case all the more scary and remarkable because he didn’t have time to ruin democracy.

You know, we had a very robust opposition press. But yet he still managed to have this huge mass of fanatically loyal people. And so once they bond with a leader, historically the only thing that gets people out of it is direct experience with disaster. So it’s very Interesting that the coronavirus didn’t cause more people to turn away from Txxxx. And again, he’s very skillful at propaganda, so he knew how to present it all so that . . . he wasn’t touched — the mismanagement wasn’t blamed on him. 

But some people did, some people woke up and made videos, saying, “I used to believe Txxxx and my wife died,” so that’s the kind of thing that needs to happen at a mass level. And it’s been horrifying that it hasn’t happened. Indeed he got more votes. 

And in Italy and in Germany — and again, you had many, many years of total dictatorship — but the only thing that ruined or started to dissipate the personality cult was when the Allies bombed Italy and Germany and regular people had immense hardship. And in that sense, what’s parallel is the shock of people seeing the Capitol breached, and lawmakers having to run for cover. That shocked some Txxxxians into resigning, like it woke some people up.

HP:  I think what I’m seeing some people express concern about is that, although it made certain people decide to leave MAGA world or whatever, or at least some people in the White House, the storming of the Capitol could also end up being a kind of a recruiting event.

RBG:  Yep. I think . . . you could easily see January 6 as the start of something. It’s the start of a new phase…. It’s the start of a new phase of subversive extremist activity. It could be.

HP:  Yeah, because it kind of feels like — like they breached the Capitol, they got in, the Capitol’s vulnerable. 

RBG:  Then they got to go out for beer. They didn’t end up in prison. [although more are now being arrested]

HP:  They just went out for beer.

RBG:  So that’s what actually made me not sleep last night. I’m so angry about that
. It’s just everything wrong for our future. 

HP:  We are entering these last couple of weeks of the Txxxx presidency . . . but it feels like Jan. 6 was a significant point of a new, subversive extremism movement in this country. Is there an analogous situation in history of authoritarian figures not being in power but still holding so much power? 

RBG:  Again, it’s not an exact analogy, but [Chilean dictator] Augusto Pinochet was voted out and he’d been in for 17 years and had a real dictatorship . . .  normally these guys, they either go into exile or they die or they’re killed. So one of the only ones was Pinochet, who was voted out. It’s maybe the only one I know about. 

HP:  We’re seeing some people finally starting to distance themselves from Txxxx and his efforts to throw out the results of the election. So we have [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell give this speech on the floor of the Senate, and now his wife, the secretary of transportation, has submitted her resignation. What’s your reaction to that?

RBG:  Partly “OK, great. Better now than never,” but partly I’m rather cynical about it, because this fits the history of such things where these people, once they make their crony deals with the leader, they back them no matter what they do, and the only thing that makes them act is if they feel their personal safety is threatened. Literally them. It’s so interesting to me that only when the Capitol was breached and they actually had to go into lockdown against an armed insurgency did they decide that there was some danger enough to merit distancing from Txxxx. . . .  It’s just their self-interest. 

However, they could have not [distanced themselves] . . . .

HP:  What do you see as the best path forward, for both the immediate future dealing with Txxxx over the next couple of weeks and looking forward at the MAGAverse and how to deal with that over the next few years? 

RBG:  I think every day he stays there it’s like increasing danger. And it can get more dangerous . . . because he’s going to be more inclined to do desperate things, to sell intelligence, to sell out people, to take revenge ― just [ramping] up everything he’s already been doing. And so he shouldn’t be allowed to stay there. . . .

He’s the far-right wacko in chief, and he should be de-platformed for sure. He’s the biggest danger to society we have. So going forward, I mean, unfortunately, I foresee a lot of turbulence, an attempt to make America as dangerous as possible and blame it on “antifa” and other groups; and a lot of extremism and domestic terrorism, all to create the need for “law and order” government so that Republicans can get back into power. I mean, I hope that doesn’t happen, but I could see that happening.

HP:  And that essentially is what you think is the motivation behind this campaign to blame everything on antifa? 

RBG:  A day before this happened, [the Txxxx administration] issued that weird proclamation about antifa being terrorists. And it’s like, what? Interesting timing. But luckily, the attempt to blame antifa hasn’t really stuck. I mean, I know it’s being circulated on right-wing sites, but the visuals are so compelling it’s hard to blame it on the left. [Note: More on this in a future post]

HP:  What do you think happens on Inauguration Day?

RB:  He’ll have some kind of rally. It will be like the victimhood rally, depending on what happens to him, but if he’s just allowed to stay there, he’ll have some kind of rally, and that will help to kick off this next phase that we’re talking about. And it’ll be like super-dangerous grievance stuff, because now that he’s out of power, he’s going to be more unleashed and unhinged than ever. I hope people are realizing that. You know, I feel bad because people want to relax, because Biden’s coming in and we didn’t even get to enjoy the victories in Georgia, and instead they have to prepare themselves, to be ever more vigilant.

HP:  That feels like an argument for arresting him.

RBG:  Yeah. He has to be removed. For the good of everyone.

Unquote.

I don’t know if she’s being pessimistic or realistic. The history of other countries suggests “realistic”. Twitter, Facebook and Google are finally demonstrating some responsibility. Arrests are slowly being made. What happens depends on how the rest of us, including people in the government and media, deal with this right-wing cancer that’s been unleashed. 

More Confirmation of Something We Already Knew

Posted on by

From The Guardian:

The Republican party has become dramatically more [authoritarian] in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.

In a significant shift since 2000, the [Grim Old Party] has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.

The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Dxxxx Txxxx.

By contrast, the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.

The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.

Anna LĂŒhrmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.

V-Dem’s “illiberalism index” gauges the extent of commitment to democratic norms a party exhibits before an election. The institute calls it “the first comparative measure of the ‘litmus test’ for the loyalty to democracy”.

The study, published on Monday, shows the [Republican Party] has followed a similar trajectory to Fidesz, which under Viktor OrbĂĄn has evolved from a liberal youth movement into an authoritarian party that has made Hungary the first non-democracy in the European Union.

India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been transformed in similar ways under Narendra Modi, as has the Justice and Development party (AKP) in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Law and Justice party in Poland. Txxxx and his administration have sought to cultivate close ties to the leadership of those countries.

The Republican party has remained relatively committed to pluralism, but it has gone a long way towards abandoning other democratic norms, becoming much more prone to disrespecting opponents and encouraging violence.

“We’ve seen similar shifts in parties in other countries where the quality of democracy has declined in recent years, where democracy has been eroding,” LĂŒhrmann said. “It fits very well into the pattern of parties that erode democracy once they’re in power.”

“The demonisation of opponents – that’s clearly a factor that has shifted a lot when it comes to the Republican party, as well as the encouragement of political violence,” she said, adding that the change has been driven in large part from the top. . . .

In western Europe, centre-right parties like Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Spain’s People’s party have stuck to their commitment to democratic norms. By the same measure, Britain’s Conservative party has moved some way along the liberal-illiberal spectrum, but not to the Republicans’ extremes.

“The data shows that the Republican party in 2018 was far more illiberal than almost all other governing parties in democracies,” the V-Dem study found. “Only very few governing parties in democracies in this millennium (15%) were considered more illiberal than the Republican party in the US.”

The institute has found the decline in democratic traits has accelerated around the world and that for the first time this century, autocracies are in the majority – holding power in 92 countries, home to 54% of the global population.

According to V-Dem’s benchmark, almost 35% of the world’s population, 2.6 billion people, live in nations that are becoming more autocratic.

Unquote.

The Republican Party is also an outlier among major political parties by virtue of its repellent denial of global warming.

Eight days.