Many of us have been stunned into silence the first part of this year, as Trump’s new administration rolls toward implementing the authoritarian U.S. government that had been predicted. We’re warned almost daily not to be complacent, not to be the frog in the pot of boiling water. Yet the majority of us continue to go about our daily lives, trying to suppress the great unease we now feel.
Nor is America the only place witnessing the ascendancy of the far right. It is a worldwide phenomenon now, and it frequently seems there is no stopping it from growing even more pronounced.
Why is this happening?
The best explanation to date for Trump’s rise and the appeal of “strong men” around the world.
The Northern Irish writer Richard Seymour provides the best set of answers we’ve yet seen in his book Disaster Nationalism.
And what is disaster nationalism? According to our search engine’s AI assistant, “Disaster nationalism refers to a political phenomenon where far-right movements exploit crises, such as environmental disasters or economic turmoil, to promote nationalist agendas and rally support. This concept highlights how these movements thrive on societal fears and insecurities, often offering a sense of identity and belonging in times of chaos.”
That is a high-level view, and also something of an understatement. Disaster Nationalism is an adroit manipulation of the resentment and anger that everyone feels from time to time—it can harness the latent fascist tendencies lurking within many citizens, and it is doing so at an alarming rate today.
Seymour is a strong writer and his exegesis is compelling. If you’re concerned about what’s happening today, in America and around the world, you should read this book.
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Recently, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock. It is now 89 seconds until midnight. We are, in the opinion of these scientists, closer than ever to the end of human civilization.
It’s not just nuclear weapons that determine this estimate—climate change, bioterrorism and artificial intelligence play major roles as well. Suffice it to say the future does not look bright.
The Doomsday Clock. Source: the bulletin.org.
Science and scientists are not in vogue in today’s dumbed-down and duplicitous America, but that hardly matters. Nothing lasts forever, and the United States certainly won’t.
America’s unwinding has been visible for a long time now. George Packer’s The Unwinding was published in 2013, and there were many warning signs prior to that. Over the last 12 years, the country’s disintegration has accelerated rapidly. Donald Trump has been elected twice.
Today’s U.S. citizens are more widely divergent in their beliefs and their acuity than ever. Half of all households, maybe somewhat more, own no books. The American educational system has been in serious decline for years, as have students’ reading abilities.
Red states are growing much faster than blue states, and they are rich in resentment and vindictiveness toward the blue elites (i.e., ordinary people who have a college education and a conscience). Now the far right has assumed power.
“Assumed” is the right word, because Trump & Co. are not limiting themselves to constitutionally authorized authority. Elon Musk, the adolescent genius elected by no one, has assembled a callow wrecking crew to dismantle entire U.S. government agencies, and as of now no one is stopping him.
The Democratic Party, as has been widely noted, doesn’t have a clue. Their attempts to protect the crumbling, fumbling Biden were disastrous, and their attempts to organize and communicate have failed as well. Even if, against the odds, they managed to retake the White House in four years, it wouldn’t matter. The country’s divide is not going away and the far right has seized, and will retain, the upper hand.
If you want to keep the best of America, and American Democracy, then try to do so. Do whatever you can. But keep your eyes wide open, and watch your back. Things are not likely to get better.
The dreaded 2024 U.S. Presidential Election is nearly upon us, and many Americans report heightened anxiety. U.S. voters are right to be anxious, but perhaps not for the reasons they think.
There is a widespread narrative that casts this election as a battle between authoritarianism on the one hand, and democracy on the other. That is a superficial, black-and-white fairy tale that bears little resemblance to the truth. It would have you believe that, if the Democrats can manage to win, America will be saved and reason will prevail.
Harris vs. Trump. Source: cnn.com.
But consider: the country is intractably divided, almost 50-50. The election will not change that. Voters are divided largely on the basis of educational attainment, and the U.S. educational system has performed poorly in recent decades (hence the divide). The election will not change that, either.
Consider, too, that the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place. Vicious, genocidal campaigns are occurring in the Mideast and Africa, and they are simply background noise in the West. Climate change is accelerating more rapidly than anticipated, and the powers that be ignore that, too. Will the 2024 election change either of those realities? Will it result in a more equitable and peaceful human society, even in the United States?
Of course not.
In this context, why should one even bother to vote?
The answer to that question summons the old hope vs. despair argument—i.e., you can either give up, or you can try to make things better in some small way.
One could argue that, over the course of millennia, humanity has made gradual advances and improvements.
One could also argue the opposite.
If you believe in incremental progress, then you should vote for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Such a vote is less likely to result in immediate chaos or increase human rights violations and/or climate disasters. (Although all of these certainly remain possible.)
Just realize that your vote, and the election, will improve nothing by themselves. Change for the better will remain up to those willing to undertake it, after the votes have been cast.
As the United States prepares to celebrate Independence Day, the picture it presents to the world at large is not a good one. For that matter, the rest of the world isn’t looking so hot, either. The turn to the right, here and globally, seems inexorable.
The recent presidential “debate” is a stark example of how far this country has fallen. We’re offered two elderly white male candidates, one a convicted felon and congenital liar, the other an 81-year-old who could not complete his thoughts or sentences.
The catastrophic debate. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times.
“I am worried about the image projected to the outside world,” Sergey Radchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was quoted as saying in the New York Times. “It is not an image of leadership. It is an image of terminal decline.”
France, Germany and the Netherlands, along with Italy, have also swung to the right, and thus have begun the process of dismantling societal safeguards that right-wing governments generally undertake. (The UK, thankfully, appears to be proceeding in the opposite direction.)
It’s well-known that the U.S. has been declining in terms of its citizens’ well-being relative to other nations. U.S. News & World Report, famous for its controversial college rankings, puts the United States at #23 in the world overall. The OECD* Better Life Index has us at #10 overall, but #33 (of 35) for social inequality, #28 (of 41) for voter turnout and #29 of 41 for life expectancy. Factor in our increasingly lax laws on the country’s 300 million+ guns and the Supreme Court’s determination that President Trump has absolute immunity for “official acts,” and our national situation is even worse than it looks.
As of this writing, President Biden is reportedly considering whether he should continue trying to persuade his party and the general public that he is an effective candidate, one who could handle the presidency for the next four years. The Times reports that if he concludes he cannot recover from his debate debacle, he could drop out of the race as soon as next week. That would raise new risks as a group of alternative candidates would grapple for the nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Nonetheless, it is probably the best course of action.
Even so, Trump seems likely to win in November. If he does, America’s outlook will be bleaker still.
* Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Today, November 7, 2020, is a day for celebration. Donald J. Trump, easily the worst president of the modern era and a contender for worst president ever, has been vanquished. Joe Biden will become America’s 46th President.
What’s more, Kamala Harris will become America’s first woman and woman of color to serve as America’s Vice President. In light of the country’s long record of racial and gender inequality, this is icing on the cake.
President-elect Joe Biden. Photo: Wikipedia.
Biden’s ascension to the presidency will not automatically solve America’s myriad problems, which are severe. But there will be ample time to focus on these problems, and their possible solutions, after the new president and his team take office. For now, every thinking American owes Mr. Biden their gratitude for his defeat of the malignant Donald Trump.
President Trump is already responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Americans due to his inept and belated response to the onset of COVID–19 in the United States this past February. He will soon be responsible for the deaths of many thousands more, thanks to his criminally irresponsible support for “Reopen America” protests and disobeying state shelter-in-place guidelines. He should be removed from office immediately.
Does Mike Pence have the guts to save American lives? Photo: pbs.org.
Vice President Pence actually has the authority to do this, acting in conjunction with other high-ranking officials in the executive branch, thanks to the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The fourth section of that amendment explicitly states this. The first paragraph of that section reads as follows:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
We’ve had “acting” officials in almost every major government position during this administration, so we may as well have an Acting President. When Trump behaves in a manner that results in massive and needless loss of life, he is obviously “unable” to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Whether Pence, who has raised obsequiousness to an art form during Trump’s reign, has the courage to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment is debatable. One hopes he will find the courage, through naked self-interest if for no other reason.
Trump’s willingness to callously sacrifice American lives for his own political self-interest is both murderous and treasonous, and he should face legal consequences for his actions as soon as he returns to civilian life. That day should be, must be, soon.
If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump’s misbegotten elevation to the presidency in 2016 was a flashing alarm for American democracy, the Covid-19 pandemic has eliminated it. This country’s institutions, infrastructure and governance were seriously ailing before Trump took office. Once he entered the White House, he and his supporters and enablers quickly made America sicker still—even before the first coronavirus case on our shores was diagnosed. Now he serves as a malignant pathogen enabling the spread of the disease.
A sick president. Photo: Al Drago for The New York Times.
The country’s tardy and inadequate response to the pandemic has been widely reported, even as Fox News and Trump’s right-wing followers tend to downplay its significance. Trump’s outrageous malfeasance with regard to the disease has been less widely covered.
Let’s look at one flagrant example, from Trump’s Friday news conference. Like his address to the nation on Wednesday evening, the news conference was meant to reassure Americans that everything was under control. Trump uttered the magic words “national emergency,” which was enough to generate a temporary stock market rebound. The markets assumed this meant competency would finally come to the fore and the coronavirus pandemic would now be dealt with appropriately. This was a faulty assumption.
Earlier, Trump had claimed that everyone who wanted a test could get one, which was an enormous and obvious lie. Rather than reassuring the country, he increased Americans’ fear and anxiety.
President Pathogen uttered more damaging falsehoods on Friday, chief among them this one: Google was designing a website—1700 engineers were working feverishly to complete it by Sunday evening—which would enable anyone to see whether they needed a test and, if they did, would direct them to a “convenient” drive-through testing center.
This was complete and utter bullshit. While there have been reports outlining some of the individual lies involved in that claim, none of them adequately condemned the brazen degree of Trump’s mendacity. It boggles comprehension, simply because it is so glaringly obvious. Why would the President of the United States voice such easily disproved lies in public? What did he think would happen when Sunday evening rolled around and there was no such website to be seen, let alone any “convenient” drive-through testing centers?
I’ve often wondered, along with countless others, what accounts for Trump’s sick behavior. It’s easier to explain away his supporters (ignorance, desperately misplaced hope and/or personal gain) and enablers (sycophancy and/or personal gain). But what about Trump himself? Is he evil? Stupid? Incompetent? A complete sociopath? So incredibly self-involved as to believe any statement he makes must perforce be true?
I would surmise all of the above. What’s certain is that Trump is a malignant virus in America’s bloodstream and a greater threat to the country’s future than Covid-19 is. Like that disease, he and his cohort must be eradicated.
The Conservative party’s decisive win last Thursday in Britain, and the consequent path forward to a massively misguided Brexit, is only the latest in a series of increasingly ominous events circulating through the 24-hour news cycle.
Nationalism wins again. Ignorance wins again. And so the West (and indeed the world at large, cf. India) continues to march backward, steadfastly ignoring science, history and common sense.
Boris Johnson photo: ibtimes.co.uk.
The similarity of what’s happening in the US and the UK cannot be ignored. In both cases, discord, ignorance and resentment—and sometimes downright hatred—are ascendant. In both cases, the less educated, less affluent rural districts manage to dictate results to their more informed “betters” in urban areas. In the UK, a plurality of voters would prefer not to leave the European Union. In the US, a plurality of voters would like to impeach and remove Donald Trump from office. Neither electoral system will permit the plurality to have its way, and yet the right-wing victors on each side of the Atlantic continue to trumpet the virtues of “democracy.”
This devolution of the “special relationship” contributes nothing to progress in the world at large—see, for example, the latest failure to adequately respond to the global climate change emergency.
At the end of this year and decade, here are three wishes for a smarter, healthier decade to come:
That the European Union, arguably the twentieth century’s greatest political achievement, remains intact despite Brexit and other pressures;
That the American people, despite a skewed electoral system, manage to elect a Democratic President and Senate; and
That a new American administration will act quickly to tackle climate change in a meaningful way.
Two recent opinion pieces in the New York Times sum up the miserable state of the country as another July 4 has come and gone. The first, published on July 3, is headed “America Started Over Once. Can We Do It Again?” It describes the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution, with particular emphasis on the 14th Amendment, which includes these lines:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Simple, straightforward, but of course still unfulfilled. Yet the promise is there, clearly evident in the words “any person.” Unfortunately, as the Times notes, the promise is receding even further as the Supreme Court continues to tilt right.
Langston Hughes, photographed by Carl Van Vechten. Source: Wikipedia.
The second piece, published by columnist Roger Cohen today, is headed “America Never Was, Yet Will Be.” The line is from the Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again,” and it too deals with a promise that remains unfulfilled. A deep, magnificent promise that was once resonantly symbolized by our Statue of Liberty. A promise still alive for many around the world, even in our current dark times, even if it can never be realized under Trump’s appalling administration.
In his poem, Hughes addresses America’s downtrodden, still plentiful today. Such people are the spiritual ancestors (I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart) of many of Trump’s current supporters, and those supporters remain fooled, too distracted by “fake news” to see the truth and act accordingly.
Here is “Let America Be America Again” in its entirety:
Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean— Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That’s made America the land it has become. O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home— For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore, And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we’ve dreamed And all the songs we’ve sung And all the hopes we’ve held And all the flags we’ve hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay— Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME— Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose— The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives, We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again!
So I wake up this morning to the cheery retro sound of the Beach Boys on my clock radio: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Hmm—it usually plays Handel. But the Golden Oldie turns out to be a harbinger of better things to come as I drift downstairs for my first cup of coffee and fire up Firefox to check the Times site for the morning news.
A worldwide change of heart. Photo: Wikipedia.
I can’t believe what I’m reading—it seems as though the whole world has had some sort of spiritual awakening overnight while I slept. I give my coffee cup a suspicious glance—is this my usual blend?—take a cautious sip, and try to assimilate what I see and hear in numerous video clips and read in various breathless reports.
Still dazed, I try jotting down some essential points from all this incredible news. Here, in no particular order, are my notes:
Donald Trump announces that he now sees a new way forward to Making America Great Again, and will appoint Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as his closest advisers. He implies that, while he will retain the title of President for the remainder of his term, Sanders and Warren will be running the country on a day-to-day basis.
Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan both decide to resign from their respective leadership positions in the Senate and the House, and call upon their Republican colleagues to do the same. “It’s time to make room for more progressive thinking in Congress,” they say in a joint press release.
Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un announce that both Russia and North Korea will abandon their nuclear arsenals at the conclusion of the upcoming summit with President Trump in May. “Nuclear weapons have cast a shadow of terror over the world for far too long,” the two leaders say in a coordinated announcement. Other nuclear powers suggest they will follow suit.
Benjamin Netanyahu announces his resignation as Prime Minister of Israel, and also presents a comprehensive peace proposal that includes restoring all appropriate Palestinian lands and making generous reparation payments for all who died at the hands of Israeli forces since the nation’s founding. The proposal is widely applauded in the West and the Muslim world alike.
Finally, I see that Wayne LaPierre, spokesman for the National Rifle Association, has decided to step down as well. He cites a profound change of heart as the reason, and urges people in general to turn in their guns and hunters to give up their sport. In a press release, P. J. Muddbottom of Barksplit, WI, a hunter, is quoted as saying he agrees with LaPierre and will henceforth stop hunting. “I never did like the way squirrel tasted anyway,” Muddbottom says.
Then I feel a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Wake up,” my wife says. “Here’s some coffee.” Puzzled, I try to point to the cup I already have but it’s not there. My laptop screen is dark. Have I really dreamt all of this?
I thank my wife and start up my computer for what seems the second time. I open the Times home page and see the world is conducting business as usual after all. I rub my eyes. My notepad with all its fantastic good news is nowhere to be seen. My coffee tastes bitter.
