What has happened here?
We were worried about Donald Trump’s anti-democratic actions in his first term.
We did big report on those concerns — See our 2020 article Trump’s Threat to Democracy (The sections are titled: Working to undermine the democratic election process, Prepping us for more than two terms, Demanding the incarceration of political rivals, stoking rather than refusing to condemn racism and white nationalism, A war on truth and accuracy, undermining checks and consolidating power, and corruption).
We were relieved and grateful when Joe Biden won.
Then we get January 6, and then it comes out that Trump actually spent a good month trying to steal the 2020 election, a month in which he tried to get his own DOJ and his own Vice President to help him ram through a false electors scheme (replacing Biden’s electors with electors who would cast their vote for Trump in select states that Biden had won), tried to pressure Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” enough votes to swing Georgia to Trump, and attempted other acts of fraud that would’ve had Richard Nixon impeached impeached and impeached some more. [Section 1 of our January 2024 What We Know has excerpts from and links to the January 6 Commission report.]
But of course something has changed here in the United States of America. Republicans are protected from fair contests by overrepresentation in the Senate and by gerrymandered House districts, and their base is living in a Fox News and Breitbart alternate reality — so Republican politicians mostly just fear getting their base mad at them. Also: Mitt Romney made an interesting point that in the first impeachment trial, many Republican Senators were politically afraid to vote against Trump; but by the time of the second impeachment trial, people were also starting to talk about looking out for the safety of one’s family*. And of course we had Mike Johnson first latching onto one crazy conspiracy theory after another before finally settling on his “constitutional” argument for why the constitution requires us to disenfranchise a few select swing states’ worth of voters** — which hocus pocus many other Republicans latched onto, giving them the story they needed to conflate Trump’s obvious attempts to cheat his way into a forever-presidency with some “serious” constitutional question that would of course excite any honest American’s sense of fair play.
*[See What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate by McKay Coppins for the Atlantic Monthly on September 13, 2023]
**[Section 4 of our January 2024 What We Know examines Mike Johnson’s method for legitimizing Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election via a constitutional-law white wash.]
Anyway, however it all happened, the Republican Party embraced Trump even after he attempted to undermine our democratic process in obvious and well-documented ways, and this Trumpian GOP has also found ways to act like his raving and consistently dishonest (We should update our 2020 comparison of fact checking Trump vs other US politicians [at that time, Trump’s score was 71% mostly false, false, or pants on fire false; compared to 23% for Obama, 27% for Hillary Clinton, 37% for Biden, and 45% for Mitch O’Connell) and anti-democratic rhetoric (punish the media if they disagree with him, use the Department of Justice to go after political rivals, immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation, just be dictator on day one, he’ll “fix” things so you don’t have to vote ever again, et cetera) all spring from perfectly reasonable concerns.
And then we have this:
The Jan 6 investigations consisted mostly of hours and hours of Republican members of Donald Trump’s 2020 administration explaining how they resisted Trump’s efforts to use the power of the US government to steal the 2020 election presidential race. But now conservative think-tanks have drawn up both plans and rosters to not just avoid the kind of political appointees who had stood up to Trump in 2020, but to also replace a large chunk of the the Federal bureaucracy with people whose primary and fundamental qualification is not how well they can perform their job, but how willing they are to follow any order Trump gives; while simultaneously removing safeguards (put in place after the Watergate hearings) to distance the Department of Justice (and other Executive branch bodies) from direct control of the president.
[Those safeguards have been adopted by the Executive branch itself, so they don’t need congress’s help to undo them. We can better appreciate the speciousness of the Heritage Foundation’s invocation of the “Unitary Executive” theory when we consider that their underlying argument is that the Federal bureaucracy has become bloated and out of control because the executive branch created all these departments to do tasks that congress is supposed to be directly controlling. In such a scenario — with the executive branch must smaller and with the congress actively checking its power — having the president directly in control of the executive branch seems reasonable enough. But if the underlying concern is that the executive branch has aggregated too much power to itself and has gotten fat on its own power, then the solution would require measures that would both shrink the federal bureaucracy and get congress to be more directly involved in the kind of work that we are currently accomplishing through the executive branch’s expansion of the federal bureaucracy*. But instead, the Heritage Foundation is suggesting we leave the giant Federal Bureaucracy in place — including the Department of Justice –, and that we make no immediate changes to congressional oversight; and that in fact the only change we should make right now is to give a man who has already tried to use his DOJ to steal one election absolute control over the federal bureaucracy (including, of course, the DOJ).
*The Heritage Foundation and other like-minded groups would argue that much of what the executive branch agencies currently do is not the purview of the federal government, and can thus be eliminated. The old conservative argument was that a lot of what the executive branch does should be done by no one, and a lot of what remains should be handled by congress. But what they are now doing is using an old argument, based on a traditionally conservative interpretation of the constitution, as a cover to slip through a program that would not bring about their stated goals (smaller executive branch, smaller government, congress more involved in nuts and bolts of what government oversight would remain) and would greatly increases the risk that the next president of the US will become our first autocratic ruler, thus ushering in the end of our democratic republic.]
[See Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for Institutionalizing Trumpism — a January 2024 interview of Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts by Lulu Garcia-Navarro for The NY Times.
Also interesting/disconcerting is What I learned when I read 887 pages of Project 2025 by Carlos Lozada for The NY Times in February 2024.
We have meant for months to complete a section on conservative think tanks in What We Know (an essay cited and linked to above), but as of August 2024, that task remains incomplete.]
So what we have today in August 2024 is a Republican presidential candidate who has learned how to better become a dictator (mostly remove the kind of people who got in the way last time) and a Republican Party that has systematically weeded out those who are most likely to disagree with that president’s decision to make himself a dictator, and that has also laid the intellectual and organizational groundwork to help make it easier for him to make himself a dictator, if he so chooses — and everything he says makes it seem that he very much does chose to be a dictator rather than one of those old-fashioned wimpy US presidents who were such losers that they could be voted out of office by puny little citizens (you know, losers like Washington, Lincoln — well, everybody up to Trump!).
That’s how things appear to me.
And this all seems to me so obviously evil and terrifyingly possible that I wake up at 4AM or 5AM every day with my gut in knots.
But enough people act like Donald Trump and his GOP’s recent behavior are not clear and present threats to all that is wisest and best in our world and in our lives that I wonder: Am I crazy?
And what would my madness be?
Believing that Donald Trump and his GOP represent a clear and present danger to US American democracy — so that if they win, the best we can hope for is that we spend the next four years fighting for the survival of our representative democracy; and the worst case scenario is that we just straight up turn into a Putin’s Russia type country where part of the government’s fundamental strategy is to oppress dissent, spread misinformation, and fix election results — ??
Or would those who dismiss my concerns as fatuous grant that perhaps we’ll end up with a Russia-style autocracy, but that’s fine, because I am silly to believe that representative democracy is a spiritual good and a great blessing and that undermining our shared democracy is a great and wholly unjustifiable evil?
Am I crazy?
Someone is crazy here.
Something crazy is waking me up at 4AM every morning.
There’s a little over two months until this election.
What would actually help?
What should we do?
Authors: The Usual Suspects
Editors: Extra people with extra time
Production: B. Willard Pure Love Productions
Coffee, Donuts, and Back-and-Forth: A. Whistletown Catering and Kibitzing
Copyright: Andy Mac Watson
Ideas to explore (in no particular order):
1.
Corruption: How it spread within Trump and through the GOP, and how to stop it from infecting the whole nation.
2.
Corruption: Where it is easier to get and maintain power, prestige, and wealth doing bad things (stealing, cheating, lying, hurting others) than doing good things (helping, telling the truth, defending other people’s rights).
3.
Campaigning on joy — on the joy of democracy, on the joy of not fearing your government, the joy of together sharing both the conversation and the government, the joy of not having to choose between material success (including basics like getting good food and safe drinking water for your children) and telling the truth and standing up for what is right.
4.
How to make it clear to everyone that Trump and the GOP supporting him is a radical departure from US American politics, which had not been perfect but whose leadership had agreed upon us all maintaining a working democratic republic, rather than an autocratic form of government?
5.
The case for liberal democracy: Why is it preferable to autocracy? In particular, we need to examine the spiritual case for liberal democracy as contrasted with the kind of autocratic theocracy that many members of the Heritage Foundation would like to use Trump to help force upon the citizens of the USA.
6.
How could a Kamala Harris presidency shore up the foundations of our shared democracy? The approach would need to both be generic and specific: Take generic steps that would help protect democracy in general and take specific steps to put the genie back in the bottle — the evil genie of a post-democracy GOP.
7.
A look at Russia and the reality of a top-down corruption. It’s not pretty. How to catch it and feel it and show that it is not uniquely Russian, but it is just what you get when the government is committed to stealing power from the people.
Give people an idea of what it is like to live in Russia these days. For example, the New York Review of Books article showing the corruption of the police and how people of authority sometimes try to bend the rules a little to do the right thing, and how they often flow along with the corruption.
8.
In the US today, the divide between rich and poor is as high as it was before the Civil War and before the Great Depression. What are the policies that have created this situation? What is the impact of the wealth gap on democracy?
We read with interest an article in the Atlantic Monthly written by two scholars who had examined political collapses across millennia. The common factors they found were (1) extreme disparity in wealth and (2) overproduction of elites. They made the case that both those factors are in play now. They argue for policies that would redistribute the wealth (i.e. policies in opposition to the last 40 years of bipartisan neoliberal financial policies).
This article reminded us of Tony Judt’s comments about the radical politics and fears of violent revolutions that were shaking Western democracies between the two world wars: Judt had noted that it didn’t occur to revolutionary political theorists (like Marx, who thought that concentrating all the capital at the top would have to lead to a violent revolution by the lower classes) that democracies might vote themselves to a more equal distribution of wealth, but to some degree that is what they did.
We also read an interesting article in the NYT about how starting with Reagan and Clinton, both Republicans and Democrats embraced economic policies that increased the disparity between the very rich and the rest of us (the afore-mentioned 40 years of bipartisan neoliberal financial policies); and that the Biden administration took some meaningful steps towards correcting these policies, but that the Biden administration did a terrible job of communicating how their economic policy decisions fit into the larger picture of correcting an economic game that has gotten tilted too far to the advantage of the richest players.
But of course that brings up the awkward elephant in the room:
Maybe Biden didn’t want to talk too much about how what we need to do now is to reduce the wealth of the super-wealthy and spread the wealth around. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment has made meaningful campaign finance reform impossible-ish; so the ultra-rich currently have and will most likely continue to enjoy the ability to greatly impact our politics. How to use politics to redistribute wealth when those with all the wealth can flood our airwaves with the propaganda of whatever candidates will let them continue to keep all the money to themselves?
You see: we’ve gotten ourselves into a bind.
9.
The nuts and bolts of how Trump 2025 could push US American democracy beyond the breaking point.
10.
We live in a liberal democratic republic. What is this form of government? Why is it worth preserving?
11.
What would help? Here and now: How do we elect Kamala Harris and use the next four years to make our liberal democratic republic sturdy again? What would actually help right here at this critical election, and would also help send us in the right direction for these next four critical years?
12.
Abortion, Gaza, & billionaires: We believe everyone is best served by voting for Kamala Harris in this election. Because we believe everyone is best served by protecting our shared democracy. But how to make the case to everyone?
13.
False problems used to create real autocracy:
Voting “security” measures that are thinly-veiled attempts to keep democratic voters from voting or having their votes counted.
GOP congressman visiting El Salvador and coming back gushing about prisons and police presence while conveniently overlooking (1) the crime problem El Salvador had to address was much much greater than the US’s and (2) the jailing of innocent people without either fair trial or transparency, the increasingly autocratic hold of the president on the nation, and other trade-offs that are painful (especially for those unjustly imprisoned without meaningful recourse) in the short-term and probably oppressive and dysfunctional in the long-term.
[The High Price of Safety in El Salvador by Megan K. Stack for The NY Times on 8/29/24]
The uncanny similarity between MAGA’s inaccurate portrayal of the US as cess pool of corruption and crime and China and Russia’s smear campaigns — there’s this terrible situation that only a man above the law can tame and/or we’re all already living in corrupt tyrannies, so why would anyone act like there’s some big problem with China and Russia?
[The New Propaganda War by Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic Monthly in May 6, 2024]
14.
Same old same old disguised as an exciting new idea.
There’s no mystery where Trump and his GOP will be taking us. We know what happens when country’s are run by autocratic regimes: China, Russia, Iran: People are afraid to speak openly about their government; people who speak out disappear; the corrupt leaders routinely and intentionally make decisions that harm the nation (since the goal is first of all staying in power, with pleasing the population a distant second, and actually governing in a way that is best for all who knows how far down?) and there’s nothing anyone can do about it; the state itself terrorizes, manipulates, and silences its citizens: evil calls itself “justice” and gets away with it.
And Trump walks, talks, and acts like would-be dictator, while his GOP writes big reports and gathers personnel rosters with the stated goals of expanding the power of the presidency and replacing checks on Trump’s will with people who will do whatever he asks of them.
Maybe Trump wouldn’t fully succeed in this evil endeavor, but why on earth would any free people freely hand the keys to the kingdom to an arson and his team of flame fanners? Only if you think burning down representative democracy is going to help things.
Move to Russia, then. See how great that is. Eventually someone that you love will ever be unacceptably “different” or simply feel that one should speak out against injustice, even when one’s own government is perpetuating the injustice. And then what?
In the US, you are allowed to be yourself and tell the truth as you seee it. People may roll their eyes or shake their head or be a jerk to you; but the state is not going to imprison you for it. And that is what is new in human history; and that is something exciting and wonderful; and that is what is at stake in this election.
15.
The christian nationalists writing Project 2025 misunderstand Christianity: Jesus did not say build me an empire that codifies your ideas about my ideas into laws brutally enforced and about which the people have no say; Jesus said the most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, and your neighbor as yourself.
Destroying the ability of the people to keep their government from becoming a tyranny is a crime against humanity, a crime against the soul of things, a crime against your neighbor, as well as a crime against yourself (all crimes are crimes both against the soul of things within you and everyone, and against you and everyone).
16.
But what to do? What is going on? How to actually help here and now? Stop Trump here; reinvigorate US American democracy now and in the future. How?
17.
Supporting Donald Trump is supporting political evil. Why? How to show that? Why does it matter? What do mean with “political evil”? We mean using the state as a weapon against the people.
It is evil to make the government a place that encourages lying, stealing, cheating, and harming other people — that demands acts of great bravery to here and there resist a general and generally victorious corruption. It is evil to push government in that direction. More corruption is when bad behavior is more rewarded and good behavior is more punished. It is evil to make a system select for cruelty, for dishonesty, for crime.
It is a high-level evil. And this high-level evil is what the GOP is trying for, whether the individual member of the GOP admit it to themselves or not. Watch Donald Trump. Watch what he says and remember what he has done. And then watch them sketch a plan for giving him more power than any other US president has ever had over the workings of our government. Feel what that is. It is nothing more nor less than an attempted coup: the replacing of our shared democratic republic with an autocracy run by a man who is unfit to lead even within the constraints of democracy. It is a crime against humanity.
What is confusing is the relationship between individual imperfections and collective evil. What the GOP and those voting for anyone except Kamala Harris in this election are doing is making it more likely that political evil will win the day and that this particular government of the people by the people and for the people will indeed vanish from the earth. How can it be that people who are not themselves evil participate in this greatly evil?
And then there will be the people in the government — hand-selected to be predisposed to going along with whatever Donald Trump would have them do (sensible or not, legal or not, moral or not). How evil are they today? How evil will they end up being in the service of this regime?
It doesn’t work to accuse people of being evil. They think you’re being ridiculous and/or evil. And it is hard to believe that, for example, Mike Johnson is evil. And yet he is working so hard to bring about an obvious and world-historic evil. What does this mean? What does God think?
I keep thinking of my grandfather’s boyhood observation that Hitler wasn’t wrong because he or his parents or his pastor said Hitler was wrong: Hitler was wrong because God says Hitler is wrong.
Doesn’t God say Mike Johnson is wrong to help Donald Trump gain power of this nation? Or does God not mind political oppression, the control of the media, destroying dissenters’ wealth and sometimes taking their freedom or even their life? Does God not consider it evil to work towards entrenching a government that is committed to remaining in power at all costs, and that intimidates and harms its own citizens as a fundamental governing strategy?
Was God only saying Hitler was wrong because of the gas chambers? Maybe God said Hitler was wrong starting with rounding up huge swaths of the population? Maybe God doesn’t say Putin is wrong, since relatively few Russians end up as political prisoners — although most everyone gets the hint and it is understood that you don’t speak out too seriously against Putin, and you don’t agitate seriously for free elections, and you keep your head down while Putin uses the power of your government to oppress your fellow citizens and also the citizens of other nations — anyone who has the audacity to think they could be free of a Putin dictatorship?
Where does God draw the line? We can all agree that Hitler did was evil and that God says it is. But how is it that sincere pastors pray that God help Donald Trump defeat the evil members of our current government who have stolen the 2020 election and who now use the power of government to attempt to chain the rightful leader of God’s people?????
There’s an interesting New York Review of Books article about right-wing Catholicism’s anti-liberalism. A fringe group, except now it is part of the mindset animating a lot of the right-wing ideas that are standing ready to drift into power on Trump’s chaotically whiplashing coattails. The kind of thinking breathing life into, for example, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
[The Tower & the Sewer by Mark Lilla for the New York Review of Books on June 20, 2024]
The writers cited in this article argue that liberalism needs to be replaced by an autocratic government imposing catholic moral norms on society. One author suggests using “‘Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends’ in the political sphere”.
Likewise, Project 2025 combines a willingness to expand the power of the presidency at the expense of traditional checks and balances in the name of forcing fundamentalist Christian moral positions into law (even though in this particular democracy at this particular time, the voters wouldn’t support their agenda) with a plan to fill the next Trump administration with people inclined to confuse loyalty with Donald Trump with loyalty to the United States of America (not that one shouldn’t be loyal to one’s commander and chief — just that the last administration prevented Trump from stealing the 2020 election largely because it was full of people who took it for granted that preserving democracy and the rule of law was more important than collaborating with a president who is trying to undermine a fair election to remain in office).
These ideas are as old as human societies: The ends justify the means: My truth is the TRUTH; if you don’t get that, I shouldn’t have to bother convincing you — it is my God-given right and duty to force you into submission. This is the logic of Putin’s Orthodox Church which vehemently supports his invasion of Ukraine. It is the logic of Iran’s theocratic regime. It is nothing new. It is boring. It is lonely. It is a lie. But what does God think of it?
What is the spiritual impact of attempting to use the government to impose one’s own spiritual beliefs on everyone else? One thing to keep in mind: Whatever you imagine your justifications, your goals, and your qualifications: Once you start working towards a dictatorship, you cannot guarantee that you will get your way as far as xyz policy decisions are concerned (especially not in the long run), but you can guarantee that if you succeed, you and everyone else will be stuck with the results.
Mike Johnson goes to church. He prays. He is certain that God chooses leaders (at least when he or people who agree with him win). What does this mean?
I am certain that Mike Johnson’s attempts to elect Donald Trump in 2025 are morally wrong. What argument could I have except, “Because God / The Light / The Soul of Things / The Wheel within the Clay says so”? What other authority counts when we’re speaking of moral rights and wrongs?
How could Mike and I be so at odds here? I don’t think this is a case where well-intentioned decent people can diagree: I think democracy is a spiritual good and anyone can perceive that what the GOP is offering us in 2025 will at least severely damage if not outright undermine our democracy. And not just me (a fiction floating on other fictions): many real people of whom one could sincerely say “goes to church” and “prays” also feel this way.
So what is going on? Where is God in all this? How is it that God always agrees with everyone? Maybe it’s that God is not looking at the nuts and bolts of what we’re doing? Not paying attention to how our gears are fitting into the driving wheels and where those wheels are taking the train? Obviously, God would know all that — right? But maybe God doesn’t take it into account?
Unless God is more like the Holy Spirit than the Father or the Son, and so doesn’t “know” anything, but is simply Love?
Something spiritually confusing is at play here. I, at any rate, am demoralized, and within a proper demoralization there is always a large element of bewilderment. Mike Johnson, you bewilder me.
18.
Real versus fake news. And the philosophy beneath both. And the way that Something Deeperism flows into responsible journalism. So what flows into irresponsible journalism?
