“The Donald” Trump is now, to the chagrin of much of that party, the
virtual Republican (GOP) candidate for president of the United States of
America. Many people on both sides of the political aisle in the US and, to an
even greater extent, around the world, are scratching their heads and asking
themselves how on earth someone like Trump could end up even being an
independent presidential candidate, let alone the GOP pick.
Perhaps the most often used term to describe “The Donald” to date is
“loose cannon”. Being the virtual GOP nominee has done nothing to change that.
And loose cannon is a graphic and accurate term. In the days of sailing ships,
cannon were carefully placed and meticulously fastened in position to ensure
maximum firepower and safety. But in rough seas or in battle, one of these
heavy iron or bronze guns could break loose from its moorings and wreak havoc,
acting as a free-wheeling and unpredictable battering ram capable of crushing
crewmen and bashing holes in the hull and bulkheads before it could be gotten under
control. In short, a loose cannon might well be responsible for sinking a ship
and killing its crew.
And this is precisely what Donald Trump is doing, not only within the US
Republican Party, but also to the American reputation on a worldwide scale. A
few examples:
Over the course of the past few months, White House insiders have noted
that wherever President Barack Obama goes in the world and no matter what the
purpose of his trip might be, he ends up having to explain the “Trump
phenomenon” to foreign leaders who are scared to death that someone such as
Trump—a billionaire power broker with fundamentalist and isolationist ideals,
zero experience in or knowledge of foreign affairs and who plays by ear his
would-be policies on such vital issues as war, immigration, trade, international
relations and the role of the United States on the world stage—might actually
have a shot at the presidency of the most formidable nation and nuclear power
on earth. So true has this been that Obama has apparently had to craft a patent
response to try and put foreign leaders’ minds at ease. But up to now, that
answer has been based on the previously widely held theory that a Trump
presidency could only happen when pigs flew, that “The Donald” would never get
the delegates he needed to win the GOP nomination and that the Republican
leadership would head him off at the pass when they all met at the national
convention in Cleveland next July.
But in light of Trump’s stunning wins in the primaries—which even rendered
a vastly moot point the announcement that rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich would
pool their own support in order to beat the real estate mogul—the president
will have to take another tack, since Trump has proven his detractors as wrong
as Obama did his when they said that the United States wasn’t ready for an
African American president, and especially not a liberal one.
Another example is the emerging reaction of true conservatives in the
GOP sphere of influence. For instance, highly respected conservative Washington Post columnist George Will
wrote this past week that the only way the GOP could redeem itself was for
non-Trump supporters to break with the party line in the November presidential
elections and vote for the probable Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and
then to ensure that hers ends up only being a single-term presidency. Indeed,
Clinton is much more in line with the GOP mainstream—judging from her voting
record in Congress—than Trump is, despite her affiliation with the rival party.
But despite Trump’s seeking to write George Will off as “a loser”, it would be
hard to overemphasize the momentous importance of a statement such as this
having come from such a highly respected and authoritative conservative
opinion-former as the Washington Post
columnist is.
And George Will doesn’t seem to be the only dyed-in-the-wool
conservative who is thinking along these lines. No sooner had it become obvious
that Trump would be the stand-alone candidate (Ohio’s Governor Kasich can
hardly be taken as a serious threat) than Republican Senator John McCain, who
ran against Barack Obama for president in 2008, immediately intimated publicly
that he would be breaking ranks with the GOP to support Hillary Clinton in
November (anyone but Trump, obviously). How could he back, he wondered aloud,
someone who quoted the National Enquirer
as if its stories were on the level—a reference to Trump’s picking up on an
item in the scandal sheet that suggested involvement of Ted Cruz’s father in
the Kennedy assassination. Son and brother of two former presidents and himself the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, who dropped out of the GOP race after getting trounced by Trump also refused to kiss and make up, saying, Trump "has not demonstrated (the right) temperament or strength of character. He has not displayed respect for the Constitution. And he is not a consistent conservative. These are all reasons why I cannot support his candidacy."
Among numerous others who favored the “Will Solution”: Republican
campaign strategist Steve Schmidt tweeted: “Republicans need to ask whether they love
their country more than their party.” Conservative blogger Ben Howe typed “#ImWithHer”.
Howe would later add, “I am a fiscal conservative and I am a social
conservative. That will not change. But I will not vote for an egomaniacal
authoritarian.” Philip Klein, managing editor of the conservative Washington Examiner, publicly announced
that he had just “de-registered” as a Republican Party member. His announcement
came just after the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, a
Clinton-hater, waffled, surrendered and said he was okay with Trump and that it
was time for the GOP to pull together and start thinking about beating Hillary.
Clearly, then, there is mounting unrest in the party, which has been hijacked
by an outsider, and a dangerous, divisive, authoritarian one at that.
However, the problem isn’t nearly so much what Trump has done to
domestic politics as it is what he is doing to the US reputation worldwide—and,
indeed, what he is doing to Western democracy, which was already weathering the
storms of the George W. Bush era in which authoritarianism managed to get its jack-booted
foot in the door in a serious and pernicious way, in the wake of the
nine-eleven attacks of 2001—a dangerously erosive trend for democracy that
President Obama has been partially unable, but also partially unwilling to
change significantly during his seven years in office. While Trump’s
authoritarian style, which has reminded more than a few observers of the rise
of fascism in the 1920s and ’30s in Europe, may seem like an astonishing “American
phenomenon”, seen in a broader context, it plays to a rising trend on the
European continent— déjà vu for anyone old enough to have first-hand knowledge of,
or second-hand learning from their parents’ lips, in the years before and after
World War II, about the radical authoritarian populism that fostered that
devastating global conflict.
Carlo Bastasin, a Senior Fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institution,
writes: “Migration, inequality, middle class decline, the euro crisis, mistrust
of the establishment—there is no shortage of explanations for the angry message
voters in European countries are delivering with their ballots. However, most
of the time, we dismiss the message as a temporary burst of irascibility that
will eventually self-modulate. For at least 20 years, we have deemed public
irritation as a negligible price for democracy.”
But Bastasin goes on to warn that this is a misconception, that, in fact,
“support for radical parties has only grown. Traditional parties favoring
European integration—Christian democrat and social democrat—are threatened all
across the Continent. New radical parties, particularly on the far right, are
popping up everywhere... Every four years, the Christian Democratic Union of
Germany (CDU) loses one million voters for purely demographic reasons. The same
applies to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Victims of the area’s
high youth unemployment, young voters in Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, and
elsewhere often vote differently and unpredictably.”
This should sound familiar to all of those—liberals and conservatives
alike—who Trump’s extraordinary success across the United States has taken by
surprise. In reality, it should come as no surprise at all. There has simply
been an utter failure to read the signs. In the post-nine-eleven Bush era,
people, by and large, willingly and naïvely handed their human and civil rights
over to the care of the Executive, in the name of the War on Terror.
Authoritarianism always feeds on fear, and authoritarians manipulate fears and
feelings of insecurity to gain the support of a critical mass. Fear is what
has, in the last decade and a half, led Americans to relinquish more and more
of their rights—both civil and human—and to tolerate the introduction of institutionalized
torture and “extraordinary rendition”, blanket legal exceptions to the Bill of
Rights, domestic spying without legitimate authority or recourse, arrests
without charges or trial, presidential “kill lists”, massive “collateral
damage” in overseas operations, the waging of military actions that violate
international law, and so on.
But the devastating financial and economic crisis that capped the Bush
years and ushered in Obama’s presidency, and the exponential rise of
international terrorism that has followed, has fostered new and still deeper
fears and left radicalized rightwing segments of the US population (like their
European brethren) with a deep distrust of mainstream politicians, and hence, of
the system as such. They are, then, as ripe for fundamentalist authoritarian
populism as similarly profiled segments of the European population are. And
Donald Trump fills that bill.
The similarities between what’s happening in Europe and the Trump
phenomenon in the US are truly striking. Quoth Bastasin: “This trend is taking
hold of Europe in much the same manner as what happened in the first half of
the previous century. This may sound alarmist if not for the fact that European
societies are on a slippery slope that provides momentum for authoritarian
politics—a slope formed by the combined effects of the economic and migrant
crises, which makes the prospect of closing national borders compelling for
voters. We have already assented to barbed wire fences going up in Eastern
Europe to keep refugees out. Now, Austria is erecting ‘walls’ on the Slovenian
and Italian borders.”
Even as this is taking place in Europe, Trump is promising his radicalized
anti-everything supporters that he will bar Muslims’ entry to the United States
and build a wall so strong on the southern border that no “raping, murdering,
drug-smuggling” Mexican will get through it, and doubling down on that vow by
saying that he will, furthermore, “make Mexico pay for that wall.”
Like populist authoritarians before him, Trump plays to the most fundamentalist
segments of society, serially insulting women and minorities ranging from
immigrants to Hispanics, Muslims and Jews. He invents “facts” and lies whenever
convenient, covering for his encyclopedic ignorance by making up his discourse
as he goes along. Moreover, he is underscoring support for populist dictators
throughout the Third World, where he is pointed to as a sign of the times, a
trend by which minority and individual rights are made to give way to the will
of the majority and where the majority signs over its rights and the entire
power of the nation to an autocratic elite.
And he is a boon to systems like those in place in Russia and Turkey
where authoritarians like Putin and Erdogan increasingly scoff at Washington’s
do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do democratic moralizing and have become ever-less
apologetic for their autocratic designs.
It was Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels who famously said: “If
you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to
believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can
shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of
the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its
powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and
thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
The Donald is an accomplished student of this authoritarian lesson and
one can only expect that he would, as president, also master the repression of
truth by authority of the State. As a Washington
Post editorial recently warned, Trump has demonstrated “contempt for the
separation of powers by threatening the Speaker of the House (Trump said the
Speaker would ‘pay a big price’ for opposing him). Where his policy agenda is not thin, it is
scary...In short, (it) should inspire fear that someone so lacking in judgment
and restraint could acquire the powers of the presidency.”
To date, Trump’s share of the GOP pie, no matter how successful he may
appear, has only been a little less than half. Between Republicans and
Democrats who do not support him it would seem to follow that between 50 and 75
percent of Americans are anti-Trump. For the sake of world democracy and
security, it can only be hoped that a huge proportion of non-Trump supporters
will turn out to vote in November and help stem the tide of populist
authoritarianism both in the US and abroad.
Comments
Post a Comment