When people sit by idly and allow those in power to replace the rule of law with the rule of men, when the objective fact-based truth is replaced by subjective narrative, this is the result. I realize that Russia was never a perfect democracy, but people there have tasted freedom and obviously desire more of it than what Putin is willing to dole out. The example of Russia should be a warning to the rest of us who still enjoy life in a democratic society.
Anyone who ever says “it can’t happen here”, anywhere, is ignorant of history. Everywhere and everywhen in history that it has happened, it’s been preceded by people saying that, and they’ve all been wrong. We are the same species as the Romans who replaced the Republic with Empire, the same species as Genghis, Tamerlane, and Vlad Dracul, the same species as the Fascists and the Nazis and the Communists and those who put Putin in power. If it can happen to them, it can happen to us, because they are us.
“It can happen here, but not without a fight.”
Also, fight ignorance. Timothy Snyder:
[INDENT]8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. [/INDENT]
Today, Gary Kasparov said something a little darker on twitter:
[INDENT]Bingo. One of the reasons propaganda and lies work despite a free & aggressive press. They still feel obliged to treat everyone in good faith every time, giving time for the lies and doubts to spread.
[/INDENT]x.com
All very good sources to read and follow, with Garry Kasparov being one of the best sources. He’s not just a chess player; he’s an exiled Russian dissident and he actually, IIRC, tried to run as an opposition figure against Putin (forgot when). His observations are astute.
And he’s spot on about the press – it’s most infuriating to me how the major networks are still giving press time to sources of information who serve no purpose other than to represent a particular worldview. There’s nothing of value in having a GOP pundit or representative present an argument or counter-argument – we already know what they’re going to say. If reporters would actually and ferociously challenge the lies, I would be all for having these mouthpieces appear on these “news” programs – because they wouldn’t be able to stand up to a real journalist. Although I frequently criticize and tend to have a low opinion of CNN, Jake Tapper (from time to time) is actually a good example who does his fucking job. He makes people uncomfortable - not because he’s there to make people uncomfortable, but because he insists on real answers to his very real questions. He doesn’t back down. That’s how you handle these clowns. Reporters need to stop giving equal time, and instead give equal opportunity to have equal time.
One of the reasons - maybe the chief reason - that our Constitution has freedom of the press is that people like Thomas Jefferson saw value in having a court of public opinion. The press is fucntioning at its highest when it behaves like a good police detective. Imagine if police detectives simply accepted the versions of truth or narratives that their persons of interest gave them and said “Well, he gave is his side of the story, what more can we do?” No, no, no - you confront people with inconsistencies and contradictions and make them explain it. Make them uncomfortable until they explain it ways that are logical.
Good grief. Why isn’t this thread actually ABOUT Putin and what he and his administration has done? Why does it have to be about the US?? This is the kind of shit that really drives me nuts about this board. We have tons of threads either veiled or not about Trump and how ignorant and evil Republicans are. Couldn’t we just, you know, discuss something happening in Russia without silly snipes about the US? Just once?
There isn’t enough bandwidth on this message board to cover the daily shitshow that is the Trump admin. GWB gave us a pointless war, but not the same parade of absurdities. Just yesterday they appointed someone to advise on dietary guidelines: an ethics waver was necessary. You see Kailee Tkacz was a lobbyist for the corn syrup industry: before that she represented the Snack Food Association.
Ha, ha comedy gold. In any other administration this would be a scandal; today this warrants an article in the International Business Times and that is all. Hell, Stormy Daniels doesn’t even receive wall to wall coverage.
In fact, the OP is on point. In Jan 2017, 538 discussed 14 versions of the Trump administration, including the Frum scenario, where the US slides into authoritarianism. Thanks to successful resistance, the nightmare scenario quickly receded in probability. Good.
But the long run baseline has shifted: present and future wannabe tyrants should consider the Trump era to be a proof of concept. The authoritarian playbook turns out to work fairly well. Kevin Drum discusses its components:
Step one is to secure control of the security forces. We’re not there yet, far from it. To do that you need to smear the existing leadership as corrupt, cultivate a simultaneous tolerance for corruption in your ranks, and purge the armed forces, replacing them with loyalists. But to do that, what’s necessary? Kevin Drum: [ul]
[li]You need your own party to go along with it. Your party has to carry water for unconstitutional acts.[/li][li]You need a core of devoted followers.[/li][li]You need the press to report everything at least neutrally, even if your charges are obviously phony.[/li][li]You need a weak opposition.[/li][li]You need to put a show on for the masses, like Mussolini did.[/li][/ul] We got all the bullet points (click the link). But Trump isn’t much of a strategist nor, crucially, does he care all that much about his party. So they don’t care too much about him, provided his GOP approval ratings are north of 70% and his aggregate approval above 30%.
TL;DR: No, we’re not sliding into authoritarianism, though it’s a small risk. But Trump has provide a proof of concept: many of the prerequisites have been demonstrated.
Conservatives faced a challenge of judgment and character in Nov 2016. They failed. Today liberals face a challenge of intelligence, character, and stamina. That means responding rapidly if Mueller is fired and working the swing districts this year. The GOP will neither collapse nor renew itself without an electoral shellacking.
Our fascist is an incompetent fascist because he’s not truly a fascist; he’s a blank slate upon which the billionaire class can write their ‘remedies’ for the country. Putin rose to power, and he knew exactly what he intended to do with that power with every step. He also had the technical expertise to effectuate crippling a fledgling democracy.
Trump has had to overcome a number of obstacles that Putin did not face. For one thing, while Trump has authoritarian impulses, his skill set doesn’t translate to the political arena - he needs assistance in that regard. But what’s troubling is, he has received that assistance, and he has forged an increasingly effective partnership with his comrades in congress, and more so, the billionaire plutocratic class that supports him. Trump also inherited much stronger public institutions and a 240-year democratic tradition. But if you look at what’s happened in just the past year, the damage he has inflicted in terms of the public trust surrounding our political system and the institutions that support it, it’s truly breathtaking what he has managed to achieve - and I obviously don’t mean that in a good way.
If we are to draw analogies between America and Russia, Yeltsin is to Trump as Putin is to ???.
Yeltsin was instrumental in Putin’s rise to power. If parallels can be drawn, I can’t help but wonder what real American monster lurks in the shadows just waiting to be released by Trump’s doddering incompetence.
It’s the possibility that it might be Pence that keeps me awake at night. He’s the seemingly obsequious, ever reliable, shameless flatterer that is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing that is America’s Putin analogue.
I’m not sure there are exact parallels between America and Russia, or with any other regime in history. There are some parallels, but American authoritarianism will take on a character all its own. Putin was a corrupt bureaucrat who came of age in a culture of the administrative state. Had the Soviet state managed to somehow survive relatively imperfect but in one piece, we might never have known of Putin. His door opened when the Soviet regime collapsed and found itself in the hands of an incompetent reformer who was long on ideology but short on technical competence. It also helped that Russians themselves were probably predisposed to be more receptive to authoritarianism, which is not to say that they can’t have a democracy there, but that they long ago accepted that if it takes a strongman to keep food on the table and the lights on, then so be it.
America has a long tradition of democracy in some form (which is why I think that democracy will continue to exist in some less perfect form, but a form that might be unrecognizable today). We’ve always been a democracy, but we’ve not always been an egalitarian form of democracy; ours is a culture that is far more tolerant of inequality and imperfection in the distribution of wealth and even in terms of the distribution of basic human rights. It’s only in the last 50-100 years that we as a society evolved to some degree to embrace a more egalitarian and inclusive form of democracy, but that has always competed with the forces that existed in much of America’s earlier history. I suspect we’re going back to a period in which we experience more of this imperfect and unequal version of democracy and economy. And unfortunately, that probably means unrest and human rights abuses.
Which is why Pence fits my analogy. He won’t destroy ‘democracy’, he’ll just bend it to fit the version of America that he and his cronies consider to be the good old days. Like Putin is doing with Russia.
Gosh, Measure for Measure - those were FUCKING EXCELLENT links!
Talk about an emergency preparedness kit! (especially the second link) I’m surprised they haven’t been brought, like, waaaaaayyy more to the forefront - get this shit out there!
Thank-you.