It’s important who is running the show

The Resistance YouTube channel is competing with the Marsh Family in England in producing some of the best protest songs of the last couple of years. Like this one: (1)

The Resistance YouTube channel is competing with the Marsh Family in England in producing some of the best protest songs of the last couple of years. Like this one: (1)

The bizarre show the Trump White House has staged since the beginning of the Trump 2.0 Administration is distracting and scary. To the Trump cult followers, it’s interesting because he’s “owning the libs.” They enjoy the sadistic shows that masked ICE goons are putting on attacking and kidnapping Latinos. His narcissistic self-indulgence and bizarre, norm-breaking behavior is entertaining to people who admire his willingness to ignore dignity and decency because they wish they cut loose all the time like that. The lawless thugs who are signing up to be ICE agents actually do get to directly indulge some of their criminal sadism themselves.

Various actual experts on authoritarianism have been explaining that this type of dishonesty – telling obvious lies and making grossly absurd claims which your cult followers are expected to pretend they believe – is a common feature of dictatorial and wannabe-dictatorial regimes.

The ugly show provokes different and even conflicting reactions among those not devoted to the cult. Some look at the incompetence and absurdity and hope earnestly that most people will see that rejecting it as unacceptable. Something like that assumption is behind the corporate Democrats’ approach to opposing Trump, because it seems so obvious that Trump will lose the next election – with the optimistic assumptions that the President who told the assembled generals of the armed forces he intended to use them militarily against “the enemy within” will not really be able to nullify elections.

Something like that assumption was behind Joe Biden’s assurances that “the fever will break” and that Republicans in Congress would be ready to go back to Biden’s imagined Golden Age when Republicans and Democrats cheerfully cooperated to do constructive things. It didn’t happen.

The Democratic establishment embodied by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries is making a similar assumption for the 2026 elections: Democrats should keep their heads low and wait confidently for Trump’s failures and past voting patterns will deliver big wins for the Democrats in 2026. This assumption is also compatible with their desire not to irritate billionaire donors to the party, of course.

But politics and government matter, even though a certain cynicism about politics and politicians is understandable enough. Especially in the era of neoliberal economics which we are unfortunately still living through.

There’s a new film which just went up on Netflix called A House of Dynamite, which is about nuclear war, or at least the possible beginning of it.

The film is a real cliffhanger and very well done. I found myself thinking all the way through it, that this is a real reminder that we need competent and committed professional running government. Most dramatically in national security but in every other aspect as well, including emergency management and health. The idea that such a thing is possible if we let TechBro billionaires high or ketamine or on their own dictatorial fantasies run things is as delusional as the idea that Donald Trump stops one war per week, or whatever that crackpot claim has become today.

Longtime arms control advocate Joe Cirincione recently discussed the film, picking up on its treatment of interceptor missiles to counter nuclear missiles. Trump’s occasional reference to an Iron Dome to protect the US against nuclear attack is a reference to the concept of a “Star Wars” anti-missile system, a project that dates back to the Reagan Administration which has been run as one of the biggest boondoggle projects in history:

At best, in highly scripted tests, the interceptors have only hit their targets in half the tests (11 out of 20 attempts). When worried Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (played masterfully by Jared Harris of Chernobyl and Foundation fame) is told of those odds (slight exaggerated in the film to a 61 percent chance of success), he exclaims, “So, it’s a fucking coin toss?! That’s what 50 billion dollars buys us?”

We have actually sunk $63 billion into the Ft. Greeley system, [known] as the Ground-based Missile Defense system (GMD). It is part of the $453 billion that the Congress has spent on failed national missile defense systems since Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983. The best contractors, the best scientists, a fire house of money and…nothing has worked. [my emphasis] (2)

The basic problem with the concept of the nuclear anti-missile shield in the case of nuclear exchanges between the US and Russia or the US and China is that in order to prevent damage several orders of magnitude worse then conventional bombing campaigns could ever achieve is that the effectiveness of the missile shields would need to be very close to 100% effective. And measures that could be used to reduce the ability to knock missiles out of the air are far cheaper than the ABM missiles themselves would be.

It’s important not to get distracted by the bizarreness of the Trump clown show. It’s also important for people not to panic at every thread issued by Trump or Stephen Miller or Gestapo Barbie Kristi Noem. But it’s also important to take seriously that the most powerful country in the world is now:

... led by a man who can’t distinguish his imagination from the Treasury ledger, and a press corps too numbed or career-minded to pull him back to Earth. The cognitive decline, the narcissism, the financial grift: all of it merges into one sustained act of national gaslighting. And the longer journalists treat it as normal, the more that alternate universe consumes the real one. (3)

Democracy and the rule of law are dead yet in the United States. But they are more endangered than they’ve been at any time since the Civil War.

It has become common to the refer the US and its Constitutional government as the American Experiment, a phrase that implies something hopeful, forward-looking, and open-ended but whose success has to continually be established in the face of developing challenges. But like any phrase that becomes a popular patriotic trope, it can also function as an excuse. We could also describe making an arsonist the head of the city fire department as an “experiment.”

But calling it a Hail Mary Gamble would be more descriptive.

So we really do need to pay attention to what government officials with big responsibilities are actually doing.

Notes:

(1) It’s Not Your House – A Country Gospel Roast of Donald Trump. The Resistance YouTube channel 10/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/pzeoN98S4Wo?si=wb8VV8fkX4lCXWOu> (Accessed: 2025-26-10).

(2) A House of Dynamite: Go see Kathryn Bigelow's new political thriller. Strategy & History 10/18/2025. <https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/a-house-of-dynamite> (Accessed: 2025-26-10).

(3) Geddry, Mary (2025): The Trump Whisperer. Geddry Substack 10/23/2025. <https://marygeddry.com/p/the-trump-whisperer> (Accessed: 2025-26-10).

The need for sobriety about prospects for Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan

Joe Cirincione stresses that Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics essentially embrace the concept that Israel should be a pariah indefinitely. Writing in mid-September, Cirincione observes:

Hours before unleashing a ground offensive against Gaza City on Monday, journalist Julian Borger reported for The Guardian that “Netanyahu braced his country for a future of mounting economic isolation, urging it to become a ‘super Sparta’ of the Middle East.”

“We will increasingly have to adapt to an economy with autarkic features,” Netanyahu said at a conference in Jerusalem, because “we may find ourselves in a situation where our defense industries are blocked. We will have to develop indigenous defense industries. We will have to become Athens and super-Sparta. We have no choice. At least in the coming years, we will have to deal with these attempts at isolation. What worked until now will not work from now on.” [my emphasis] (1)

He argues, based on an off-the-record presentation in 2024 from a former Israeli official, that Netanyahu’s “Sparta” strategy is based on three ugly realities:

Israel is no longer a democracy.

Israel is in an historically terrible situation, domestically and globally.

The growing narrative in Israel is “We can decisively win against all our enemies.”

There is a long-standing convention in reporting on Israel-Palestine diplomacy that applauds breakthroughs and speculates hopefully about the possibilities of developments. This is not good or bad in itself. Complicated diplomatic arrangements can go well or poorly. And when it comes to long-standing issues like the horror-filled history of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians, there are good subjective reasons to hope for progress, no matter how unlikely it may be.

But realistic expectations are also important. Haaretz editorializes about the hope for American restraint on Netanyahu’s government:

Israel's prime minister fears peace more than he fears war. Instead of seizing the historic moment that Trump created, he once again chose the inertia of refusal, fearing a confrontation with his messianic coalition partners.

In the Knesset, Trump said that Netanyahu is "not the easiest guy to deal with," but praised him for understanding "better than anybody" that it was time. He didn't say how he made him understand that. The truth is that Netanyahu gave in to American pressure. Trump must continue to exert this pressure on Netanyahu and on Israel. If he insists and doesn't give up, the skies he spoke of might truly be the limit. [my emphasis] (2)

What the editorial is describing there is that the US government, under heavy pressure from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where in both countries Trump and his family have lucrative business deals, and from European countries that started recognizing Palestine as a state (an important diplomatic and political gesture), insisted that Netanyahu accept some kind of hostage deal and ceasefire agreement.

Despite the optimism of the moment, it’s important to keep in mind that what Israel has firmly, officially, publicly committed itself to is actually very limited: essentially, only the hostage swap itself and a ceasefire. And even that very short-term stability is unstable: (3)

The ill-fated “Oslo process” is a major cautionary example. It began with a high-profile agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PA) brokered by the Clinton Administration that was meant to lead to a two-state solution. In reality, its concessions to Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank eventually eliminated that possibility.

Surprises can happen, of course. But the two-state solution has effectively become a diplomatic zombie. Despite a wide range of ideological shades, from militant socialist to flaming reactionary, the Zionist project in practice has always been about displacing the Palestinians, not creating a parallel Palestinian state. In the rarefied language of high diplomacy, the recent round of recognition of a “Palestinian state” is a significant sign of disapproval of Israel’s current policies.

As Ilan Pappe has explained:

The [Oslo] peace process was a busted flush from the outset. To understand the failure of Oslo, one has to widen the analysis and relate the events to two principles that remained unanswered tl1roughout the Accord. The first was the primacy of geographical or territorial partition as tl1e exclusive foundation of peace; the second the denial of the Palestinian refugees' right of return and its exclusion from the negotiating table. (4)

As long as Israel maintains its insistence on continuing to rule both Israel and the occupied territories as an apartheid state and to carry forward the goal of dispossessing ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, there will be no genuine peace solution in the foreseeable future. Add to that Netanyahu’s ambition to destabilize the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, and the prospects for a stable regional peace will continue to be dim.

And Netanyahu himself currently faces a criminal trial on corruption charges as soon as he leaves office, as Donald Trump ham-handedly reminded the world in his recent address to the Knesset. Aside from his territorial and geopolitical ambitions, Netanyahu’s desire to stay out of prison – Israel still has a functioning judicial system at least for Israeli citizens – gives him an open-ended incentive to foment continual crises and military conflicts. In particular, dragging the US into a regime-change war against Iran is a decades-long goal of his.

Zvi Bar’el gives a sober evaluation of the actual prospects for peace emerging from the Trump-Netanyahu reality-TV show. He notes that at Trump’s Gaza Peace Summit meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt:

Wanting to thank the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Donald Trump ordered him to stand up to receive his allotted measure of praise only to discover, to his surprise, that Sheikh Mohammed was not present.

The fact that Trump had failed to notice that the man who pledged to invest about $1.4 trillion in the United States did not show up for the historic gathering should have offended the absent leader, perhaps; more importantly, however, it raises questions about the feasibility of the next stages of the president's 20-point plan for Gaza. …

That is because Sheikh Mohammed was just one of three heads of state from the region, along with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the ruler of Oman [Sultan Haitham bin Tariq], who failed to honor Trump and the host, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi, with their presence. (5)

Bar’el notes that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) both have the heebie-jeebies about the Islamist Hamas group being still in power and operating in Gaza. Then there’s the crackpot arrangement of a Peace Board for Gaza run directly by Donald Trump and Tony Blair to function essentially as a colonial vice-regency, which will almost certainly turn out to be one of history’s worst jokes of this period.

Add to all of this the fact that the Israeli publicly may be highly critical of Netanyahu but nevertheless has been widely supportive of his genocidal war on Gaza, as Amira Hass notes:

At some point, the optimists believe, the Israeli media's obscuring of reality will cease to brainwash and numb hearts. The phrase, "the context," will not be considered a profanity and the public will connect the dots: Oppression. Expulsion. Humiliation. Deportation. Occupation. And all the suffering between them. They are not parts of slogans that self-hating Jews coined, but describe the life of an entire people, for years, under our orders and our guns.

People are not born cruel; they become such. The cruelty of Palestinians towards Israelis is covered extensively in our media, articles and close-ups. It developed in response and resistance to our foreign and hostile rule. Our cruelty, that of Israeli society, is getting ever more sophisticated with the aim of protecting our spoils: the land and the water and the freedoms from which we expelled the Palestinians. [my emphasis] (6)

Despite the pause in the fighting and the genocidal violence against Gaza Palestinians, peace and stability for Israel is a long way off.

Notes:

(1) Cirincione, Joe (2025): Netanyahu Wants Israel to Become a Pariah State. Strategy & History Substack 09/17/2025. <https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/netanyahu-wants-israel-to-become> (Accessed: 2025-15-10).

(2) Netanyahu Fears Peace More Than He Fears War. Trump Must Keep Up the Pressure. Haaretz 10/15/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-10-15/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-fears-peace-more-than-he-fears-war-trump-must-keep-up-the-pressure/00000199-e6b9-d705-a5bb-fff9f6670000> (Accessed: 2025-16-10).

(3) Ceasefire Is OVER: Israel Killing, Bombing And Starving Gaza. Owen Jones YouTube channel 10/15/2025. <https://youtu.be/qJZYiTN81Ho?si=eEa8SfnIxAG9rYpF> (Accessed: 2025-16-10).

(4) Pappe, Ilan (2024): Ten Myths About Israel, 99. London: Verso.

(5) Bar’el, Zvi (2025): Trump's Middle East Visions Face a Long Road to Reality. Haaretz 10/15/2025. Full link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-10-15/ty-article/.premium/trumps-gaza-plans-face-a-long-road-to-implementation/00000199-e55b-dde4-a7bd-fd7fa08b0000> (Accessed: 2025-15-10).

(6) Hass, Amira (2025): Will Israelis One Day Say of Their Country's Atrocities in Gaza, 'I Was Always Against It'? Haaretz 10/15/2025. Full link: <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-10-15/ty-article-opinion/.premium/will-israelis-one-day-say-of-their-countrys-gaza-atrocities-i-was-always-against-it/00000199-e7c4-d705-a5bb-ffcc7c810000> (Accessed: 2025-15-10).

How is Netanyahu doing on ending the Everlasting Peace Plan?

Gideon Levy discusses developments with the, shall we say, shaky ceasefire in Gaza, the first event on the ground in Peace President Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan that went in to effect October 10. (1)



Yair Golan of the small centrist Israeli party, The Democrats, is the formal Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset. In an editorial, he asserts that Bengamin Netanyahu is currently working to keep Hamas as the primary Palestinian force in Gaza, which he has done in the past, as well. (2)

Mouin Rabbani gives his take in this October 19 report, suggesting that Peace President Trump may be threatening Hamas with civil war in Gaza. (3)



He doesn’t provide a lot of details here. But such a conflict would presumably involve Hamas fighting against non-Hamas gangs in Gaza – some of which Israel had also been subsidizing to stage attacks on foods supplies coming into Gaza.

Everlasting Peace certainly seems to be off to a rocky start!

Majed Abbusalama at Middle East Eye reminds us what has happened in previous episodes of Eternal Peace there:

It is a rare joy to witness the happiness of my family, friends and neighbours in Gaza - many of whom have lost more than 10kg of body weight and aged prematurely over the past two years of genocide. I pray that the drones and warplanes will finally leave our skies, and that this ceasefire will hold, even in these times of deep mistrust.

It is a joy to see the smiles of relief. But I must remind you - and the world - that Israel has a habit of breaking ceasefires. Once global attention shifts, it resumes its slow genocide. Its political strategy is to exploit the passage of time to expand its colonial project, approving fake ceasefires to distract international solidarity, calm global uprisings, depoliticise trade unions and weaken political organising. [my emphasis] (4)

But former British Prime Minister Tony Blair just got a word of support from Egypt in his nomination to be the new colonial viceroy of Gaza. So there’s that! “Blair’s record in the Middle East is controversial, to say the least, and the suggestion floated by Washington that he help run a post-war Gaza has been met with suspicion and even disgust in much of the Arab world.” (5)

Notes:

(1) US won’t allow Netanyahu 'to sabotage’ Gaza truce agreement: Gideon Levy. Al Jazeera English YouTube channel 10/21/2025. (Accessed: 2025-21-10).

(2) Golan, Yair (2025): Once Again, Netanyahu Chooses Hamas Over Israel's Security. Haaretz 10/19/2025. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-10-19/ty-article-opinion/.premium/once-again-netanyahu-chooses-hamas-over-israels-security/00000199-f886-d72d-addd-f997e8610000 (Accessed: 2025-21-10).

(3) US may be indirectly threatening Palestinians with civil war: Analysis. Al Jazeera English YouTube channel 10/19/2025. (Accessed: 2025-21-10).

(4) Abusalama, Majed (2025): Gaza ceasefire: The world must ensure Israel does not resume a slow genocide. Middle East Eye 10/18/2025. (Accessed: 2025-21-10).

(5) Egypt backs Tony Blair to oversee Gaza as ‘modern-day high commissioner’. Middle East Eye 10/21/2025. (Accessed: 2025-21-10).

How is the Everlasting Peace Plan for Israel-Palestine going?

Peace President Trump earlier this month was saying of his famous 20-point peace plan, ““I think it’s going to be a lasting peace, hopefully an everlasting peace.” (1)

This calls to mind the line in Jazmine Sullivan’s breakup song: “Forever doesn’t last too long.” (2)

Democracy Now! interviews Haaretz columnist Amira Hass on the shaky nature of the current ceasefire. (3)

It includes a discussion of a grim recent report finding that 83% of the Israeli public supports expelling the Palestinians from Gaza. Hass calls particular attention to the growing aggression of Israeli settlers against West Bank Palestinians.

How any of what we know and have experienced so far adds up to “an everlasting peace” is beyond my meager understanding.

Moulin Rabbani discusses the fragility of the current agreement: (4)

It took the “Oslo Process” from 1995 to 2000 to break down. Trump’s Everlasting Peace plan might sputter along until the end of this year or so. That is, to the extent that any substantive agreement s beyond the immediate ceasefire (which Israel has already been violating) and the hostage returns. The prospects for the Everlasting Peace Plan (5) do not look good at the moment.

Meanwhile, another Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy, also doesn’t seem to be very positive on the Everlasting Peace Plan. (6)

Levy also discusses the basically symbolic nature of countries simply formally recognizing a Palestinian state. Jonathan Shamir on October 6, just before the formal date of the Everlasting Peace Plan, also cautions about taking such formal diplomatic maneuvers as being more substantive than they actually are:

State recognition … has never been the core demand of the movement for Palestinian liberation. In fact, in response to the consensus that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Palestinians and those amplifying their message have made a uniform call for an immediate ceasefire, a halt in weapons aid and sales to Israel, and the imposition of sanctions. Absent these concrete measures, critics have argued that recognition is little more than a trick—a sleight-of-hand meant to placate restive Western publics while perpetuating the same conditions that enabled a genocide against the Palestinian people in the first place. Macron, who co-convened the recent UN summit with Saudi Arabia, exemplified this deceptive approach. From the dais in the assembly hall in New York, he recognized Palestine while omitting any mention of cutting off French arms sales to Israel, which have continued unchecked since October 7th. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, similarly, recognized a Palestinian state while leading a government that continues to use workarounds to evade its own partial ban on sending weapons to Israel. Starmer has also met senior Israeli officials on British soil as recently as September 10th, and has led a massive crackdown on solidarity activism by designating the direct action group Palestine Action as a terror organization and arresting hundreds of peaceful protesters. Three of the other countries that recently recognized Palestine—Australia, Canada, and Luxembourg—likewise continue to sell weapons to Israel and refuse to sanction it. [my emphasis in bold] (7)

Notes:

(1) Tait, Robert (2025): Trump dreams of ‘everlasting peace’ as acolytes drop heavy hints to Nobel committee. Guardian 10/09/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/09/trump-nobel-peace-prize-gaza> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(2) Sullivan, Jazmine (2015 [?]): Forever Don’t Last. Spotify n/d. <https://open.spotify.com/track/5ILoNug82Z8g4qUfpr5GXE> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(3) “Israeli Sadism in a Nutshell”: Amira Hass on Israeli Prisons, Settler Violence & Gaza Ceasefire. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 10/17/2025. <https://youtu.be/9-Y2qEow5zo?si=28EsnLwIGXXkvAiD> Also with full text at: <https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/17/amira_hass> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(4) Will Gaza Cease Fire Hold? The Majority Report YouTube channel 10/18/2025. <https://youtu.be/XSSA57YFz-g?si=7Dk3I6kHqf9JxQZv> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(5) Magdy, Samy et al (2025): Israel and Hamas agree to part of Trump's Gaza peace plan, will free hostages and prisoners. AP/Britannica 10/09/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/news/616563/ac80d3ed50ff2a9b4106ab5e13156651> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(6) Gideon Levy: an Israeli journalist standing up for Gaza. Frontline YouTube channel 10/17/2025. <https://youtu.be/hha6eL5-pbU?si=UvPUxoU6K_QFqoEu> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(7) Shamit, Jonathan (2025): The Recognition Trick. Jewish Currents 10/06/2025. <https://jewishcurrents.org/the-recognition-trick> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

The American democracy protests on October 18

The nationwide and international No Kings protests yesterday were impressivc, bringing literally millions of people out to protest against the Trump 2.0 regime’s creeping fascism.

The parallel No Tyrants event in Vienna sponsored by Democrats Abroad was also impressive. Even a few Portland Frogs showed up!

The labor movement was a key partner in mobilizing demonstrators for the No Kings events, which was sponsored nationally by the activist group Indivisible. Indivisible’s website estimated the turnout at seven million protesters.

BBC News reports:

Huge crowds took part in "No Kings" protests against President Donald Trump's policies in cities across the US on Saturday, including New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles.

Thousands packed New York City's iconic Times Square and streets all around, with people holding signs with slogans like "Democracy not Monarchy" and "The Constitution is not optional".

Ahead of the demonstrations, Trump allies accused the protesters of being linked with the far-left Antifa movement, and condemned what they called "the hate America rally".

Several US states had mobilised the National Guard. But organisers said the events, which drew nearly seven million people, were peaceful. (1)

I heard a couple commentators on a Daily Beast podcast grumbling that multiple protests are less interesting than one big protest in Washington. But I’m inclined to think that the multiple nationwide protests that we’ve had this year on the two No Kings days if more politically effective at mobilizing voters to the pro-democracy cause than a single march in the national capital.

Also, organizing One Big Protest in the capital city is easier in a smaller country like Serbia or Hungary than it is in larger ones for the obvious reason that it’s much more of a challenge to go to Washington D.C. from California or Texas or Oklahoma City that it is from Richmond or Baltimore. Also, the larger the crowd, the more of a challenge that traffic and lodging become.

It's also important that protests generate interest in “red” (Republican-dominated) areas and give people there an opportunity to get together and get to know each other and – very importantly – to see that that many of their neighbors even in rural areas and small towns are as concerned as they are about crackpot policies and about brutal attacks on their immigrant neighbors by ICE goons and having a President how can’t even maintain the decorum of a five-year-old.

The Republicans have a distinct advantage in organizing and messaging in more rural states, not least because they have a network of conservative evangelical churches that do effective get-out-the-vote drives. Labor unions are still the backbone of the local get-out-the-vote drives for Democrats. But union membership has decreased drastically over the last 50 years. And the national Democratic Party has been just shamefully lazy about developing and maintaining state party organizations in more conservative parts of the country.

Laura Rozen has a good summary of views on the value of grassroots mobilization of the No Kings sort. She quotes the president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict from a recent podcast:

In a stable democracy, you would expect that public opinion would be a guardrail on this kind of overreach; that if the public didn’t approve that, that would stop it. And again, that was a fairly stable assumption for recent decades, at least on some issues.

In a backsliding democracy, though, it’s really public mobilization. That’s the guardrail. And mobilization shows intensity, right? And it also has the capacity to impose costs. And the costs don’t just need to be imposed on the administration. They can be imposed on enablers of the administration…

So you start looking comprehensively, not just at the government, but the enablers. Those who are contracting with the government, those who are serving into it. What is the ecosystem that is supporting a tax on democracy?

There’s no one tactic that’s necessarily going turn things around. It’s going to be a lot of different people getting involved. It’s a huge country. Every state has their own political scene. So there might be heavily like very-localized responses in some cases. And then there might be cases like with [comedian Jimmy] Kimmel, where you actually can get a national scale response. [my emphasis] (2)

Notes:

(1) Goodwin, Grace Eliza & Wilson, Caitlin (2025): Millions turned out for anti-Trump 'No Kings' protests across US. BBC News 10/19/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93xgyp1zv4o> (Accessed: 2025-19-10).

(2) Rozen, Laura (2025): In backsliding democracy, ‘public mobilization is the guardrail’. Diplomatic 10/17/2025. <https://diplomatic.substack.com/p/in-backsliding-democracy-public-mobilization> (Accessed: 2025-19-10).

Trumpism and antifa/anti-fascism: “Conservatism” as fan fiction

The Independent recently characterized the Trump 2.0 Administration‘s designation of a concept, “antifa” (anti-fascism), to be a terrorist movement as follows.

Research shows that genuine political violence remains overwhelmingly driven by far-right actors, not nebulous “Antifa” networks. But this, truly, is where MAGA has arrived: a place so far removed from observable reality that it now holds official government functions with imaginary enemies. Once, conservatism prided itself on being “the party of realism.” Today’s version treats politics as fan fiction, complete with invented villains and lore.

Such productive unreality takes the energy that could be spent on governing or solving problems and redirects it into myth-making. Instead of talking about wages, housing or climate disasters, we’ll talk about black-clad anarchists who can’t be fact-checked because they’re mostly imaginary. And then we’ll use their apparent existence to justify masked men with rifles into cities that, it just so happens, didn’t vote for us. You could almost admire the absurdity if it weren’t attached to actual state power. [my emphasis] (1)

Sam Seder and the Majority Report crew recently discussed the Trump 2.0 regime’s scam about “antifa”: (2)

Miles Kenny defines the general concept of “antifa” for the consistently sober Britannica this way:

The roots of antifa are generally traced to the interwar period and specifically to resistance movements provoked by the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany. In the interwar period, fascist movements emerged throughout Europe and were usually met in each country by a corresponding antifascist movement. Fascism eventually succeeded, through politics or military conquest, in seizing power over most of western Europe before and during World War II, and partisan resistance movements fought throughout the continent with varied levels of success. Following the war and the defeat of overt fascism, the memory of these partisans inspired a new generation of activists wary of a resurgence of fascism through the activities of right-wing parties and movements (see fascism: Neofascism). [my emphasis] (3)

In the US, especially over the last decade, there was a rise in prominence of locally-based groups identifying themselves as “antifa” who came to be identified by a particular style:

Antifascism as a distinct political strategy (rather than as a generalized opposition to fascism) is based on several key assumptions. These include the observations that fascist groups typically attempt to utilize the freedoms of liberal democracy—such as freedom of speech and association—to gain enough power to eventually deny the same freedoms to others and that those struggling against fascism should not wait until this denial is realized to militantly resist it. Antifa tactics therefore include “deplatforming” fascists—that is, using both public pressure and physical disruption to prevent fascist opponents from organizing or promoting their own beliefs. In recent times, antifa members have also engaged in doxing, or the sharing of private information about opponents online. This tactic is often used to publicly shame opponents who engage in anonymous online political activity and to pressure workplaces to fire alleged fascists. Antifa has garnered much more attention for its property damage at protests, its disruption of right-wing events, and its targeting of specific right-wing figures, including the American white nationalist Richard Spencer, who was punched in the face in a videotaped assault in 2017. [my emphasis]

But the groups that are part of this political trend are not part of some central nationwide organization or some Jewish conspiracy funded by George Soros, as the Trumpistas like to pretend. And they certainly don’t have armed gangs on anything like the scope that we see on the Trumpista right with armed groups like the Proud Boys, who Trump famously embraced with his message to them: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!” [my emphasis] (4)

Of course, that was a few years ago. Now the Proud Boy types have an opportunity to become ICE agents and get paid by the federal government to indulge in violence and lawless mayhem.

Notes:

(1) Trump just hosted an ‘Antifa roundtable’ at the White House ... it was so much worse than you’re imagining. The Independent 10/08/2025. <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-antifa-portland-pam-bondi-posobiec-b2842048.html> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(2) Trump Panel Admits Antifa Fought Actual Nazis. The Majority Report YouTube channel 10/11/2025. <https://youtu.be/si5GQmSCpFY?si=O0vgDlziaKbl7KJb> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(3) Kenny, Miles (2025): antifa. Encyclopedia Britannica 10/09/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Antifa> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

(4) Pilkington, Ed (2021): 'Stand back and stand by': how Trumpism led to the Capitol siege. Guardian 01/07/2021. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/06/donald-trump-armed-protest-capitol> (Accessed: 2025-09-10).

Music for democracy: Warning: "antifa" (anti-fascist) content

I came across this just recently. It’s pretty good!

There are other songs like this. For instance, this Woody Guthrie classic as interpreted by Nina Hagen:

I used to think this song melody was a bit corny. Somehow it doesn’t sound so dorky any more.

That was “woke” long before conservatives decided that being asleep was the only way people should be. It uses American symbolism for aspirational democracy at the same time acknowledging the gritty ugliness that has also be part of “America.”

Notes:

(1) The F-Word | Folk Protest Song Against Trump, MAGA, and Fascism. The Resistance YouTube channel 09/20/2025. <https://youtu.be/yJnvKkFcCzU?si=z7KjVH9pQTGjn3tz> (Accessed: 2025-13-10).

(2) All You Fascists Bound to Lose. Nina Hagen YouTube channel 07/19/2023. <https://youtu.be/FMDgqMdpBMs?si=MzUbIJrN9XUir0UB> (Accessed: 2025-13-10).

(3) John Kay & Steppenwolf-Monster/Suicide/America. Beto de Leon/Corazon Concerrts YouTube channel 04/08/2020. <https://youtu.be/F61y8J0U0n4?si=fq4FkZk2WwKUq7Vq> (Accessed: 2025-13-10).

A brief but welcome break in the Gaza genocide

The current pause in most active combat in Gaza along with the hostage-and-prisoner exchanges just agreed upon are a welcome break in the violence. There seems to be little reason to imagine it will last long.

One reason is that the Netanyahu government is committed to continuing the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and moving to absorb the occupied territories into what supporters of that project call “Eretz Israel,” aka, “from the river to the sea.” That goal is officially endorsed by Netanyahu’s Likud party and his governmental program. But in places like the US and Germany, the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is often called an endorsement of genocide against Jews.

The hope for a “two-state solution” still has diplomatic currency. But it’s hard to see it at this point as anything but a zombie concept. Israel controls the occupied territories and there is very little domestic constituency for allowing a Palestinian state. Israel rules over its own official territory and the occupied territories with a strong apartheid system. That can continue indefinitely. Or it can be replaced by a democratic state including both those who are currently Israelis and Palestinians.

Despite the triumphalism of Donald Trump’s bizarre reality-TV speech speech to the Israeli Knesset this week, the grand vision of a peaceful Middle East is still a long way off. (1)

Kyle Kulinski gives an irreverent and scathing description of Trump’s Knesset speech: (2)

Netanyahu’s commitment to continuing war also means that the neighborhood isn’t a friendly one, as Zvi Bar’el recently described in Haaretz: (3)

Bar’el writes:

[H]ope is not yet lost. On May 15, 2008, on Israel's 60th Independence Day, U.S. President George W. Bush gave a rousing, optimistic address to the Knesset in which he fantasized about the "new" Middle East.

"Israel will be celebrating its 120th anniversary [2068] as one of the world's great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people. The Palestinian people will have the homeland they have long dreamed of and deserved – a democratic state that is governed by law, and respects human rights, and rejects terror. From Cairo to Riyadh to Baghdad and Beirut, people will live in free and independent societies... Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations... Al Qaida and Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognize the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause."

A wonderful vision; we just have to pass the time until 2068. [my emphasis]

Visions are necessary. Concrete arrangements for peace are infinitely better.

Notes:

(1) Scott Lucas analyses President Trump's peace deal as 'nothing more than a cynical move'. Times Radio YouTube channel 10/13/2025. <https://youtu.be/cxHtM9cttgE?si=e9iJ0ssLyJwd5N6T> (Accessed: 2025-14-10).

(2) Breaking: Trump Protested in Israel: Begs for Bibi Pardon; Brags About War Crimes. Secular Talk YouTube channel 10/13/2025. <https://youtu.be/aUyJHn2akkM?si=5EAdF-2E56FdKNTx> (Accessed: 2025-14-10).

(3) Bar’el, Zvi (2025): How Netanyahu's Mideast 'Map of Opportunities' Is Turning Into Israel's Map of Threats Two Years After October 7. Haaretz 10/06/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-10-06/ty-article-magazine/.premium/how-netanyahus-mideast-map-of-opportunities-is-turning-into-israels-map-of-threats/00000199-b91a-d9d3-ab9b-fbdb05bc0000?gift=4942310067fd43d0b130ab794cd880e5> (Accessed: 2025-14-10).

Two takes on the state of the development of authoritarianism in the US – one of them clear and urgent, the other from Barack Obama

Philosopher Jason Stanley, an authority on fascism and a critic of current authoritarian trends in democracies, gives a succinct and clear diagnosis of the current state of the fascist process the Trump 2.0 Administration is currently pursuing. (1)

Stanley is pointing to real threats to democracy and calling clearly for serious efforts to counter them.

Here is a longer discussion that former President Barack Obama held for his Obama Foundation. It’s three times as long as Stanley’s 10-minute interview and has only a fraction of the substance of Stanley’s. (2)

The focus of their discussion there is Hungary and Poland, with activists affiliated with the foundation discussing the situation in those countries in broad language. Just after 11:00, Obama himself has this to say:

Well, see if I'm hearing some of the themes that you're talking about correctly,

The way I describe it is that the liberal democratic market-based order that was dominant post World War II in what was then called the West, and then, subsequently, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, then spread throughout Europe.

A big challenge is that the governments themselves, whether center right or center left, we're losing touch with people and we're delivering on some of the basic hopes and dreams of people. And so you get frustrated with government, period. That obviously then opens the door for right-wing populism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anger, grievances

And so what I'm hearing is that - and you see this a little bit [sic!] in the United States, this promise to go back to the way things were. But you might win an election, but you're not going to win a majority to really move forward, unless you're able to address some of the failures of the old system. Right?

During his first term in office, Obama pushed for a Grand Bargain in which Democrats would make permanent cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republicans agreeing to increases in tax on the wealthiest – increases that Obama knew very well Republicans would reverse at their first opportunity.

He continues:

So that's one big piece of business. 

And the second thing is that how we engage people in this new era with social media and with huge gaps in wealth and the complexities of the modern economy, people feel as if they don't have control and they feel as if their politicians often don't have control over all the different forces there. And we haven't figured out, alright, what are the new forms of participation that can engage people and make them feel empowered so that when they act, it's going to make a difference for them and their families.

And then the last thing, which is the point you made about working local. It's a broader principle, which is how do we rebuild social trust? Because the thing we've learned is social media is very good at making people fearful of or angry about those who don't agree with them. What we haven't figured out is how do we get people to be able to work together despite not agreeing on everything?

Actually, Obama’s remarkably successful 2008 Presidential campaign’s Obama for America organization was based on a community-organizing model directed by Marshall Ganz, a former senior organizer for the United Farm Workers. (He discussed the UFW experience in a 2009 book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Strategy, Leadership, and the California Agricultural Movement.)

His 2008 campaign actually did bring a diverse coalition together to elect the first African-American President. But after being elected, he folded the Obama for America group into the Democratic Party apparatus and abandoned the successful community-organizing mode. He also replaced Howard Dean as Democratic National Committee chair and abandoned Dean’s “t0-state-model” to reinvigorate the state Democratic Party organizations nationwide.

Obama continues:

But when you think of, alright, what would be the vision that you think could excite and engage people? When you think of, here are one or two things that make it difficult for people to have faith and confidence in government and the results of democracy.

And so as a consequence, if we fix one or two of these things, it wouldn't solve all the problems, but it would be a good step forward.

And he talks after 19:20 about his ideas on pushing back on authoritarianism:

You build good habits and you raise people's expectations about what's possible.

And that's the beginning of, then, that contrast creates the possibility at some point of transformation at the national level as well.

Yes, Mr. President, I think we can all agree that it would be a good thing to create “the possibility at some point [sic!] of transformation at the national level.” It was in 2008 that the Democratic Presidential nominee repeatedly invoked "the fierce urgency of now."

He continues, “But you have to break the initial cynicism that ‘everything's the way it is, and there's nothing that we can do about it’.” Kind of like the fierce urgency of now – without the fierceness or the urgency.

One of the panelists, Sándor Léderer, inserts:

And if I may add one, learning, I think from this 15 years of anti-democratic rule [referring presumably to Poland and Hungary], and also I think it applies a bit to what's going on in the US currently, is that politics has much more power than we thought.

So these guys actually exploit politics unfortunately for the worst, but they show that there is much more energy and potential into what a government can achieve if they want to do something. It's unfortunate.

Obama picks up on the point to make what sounds like a vague plug for the milktoast “abundance” agenda that Ezra Klein has been pushing lately, which comes down to bold reformist ideas like, uh, loosening local building codes.

It's an interesting question that I'm grappling with obviously because I'm watching what's happening now. And it goes to the point about not returning to exactly what was being done before, where things were stuck.

Here he’s referring to the political frustration that “things are stuck” under democratic government that contributes to the rise of authoritarianism. In the US, Donald Trump’s coming to power in the election of 2016 came after, well, eight years of Barack Obama’s timidly moderate Presidency.

The challenge we have, right, is that authoritarians can get things done just by breaking things. They hadn't shown themselves to be particularly good at building things. But they can tear things down, remove constraints on their actions, and empower themselves in a small group.

Now, in terms of being able to solve some of the big problems around healthcare or education, there, not so much, because that does require creating new structures. It is not just a matter of getting a cut and taking a piece of whatever is being done and making sure your friends are rewarded and your enemies are punished.

But I do think the insight it speaks to - if we are renewing, reforming, recreating a democracy for the 21st century, that some of the old impediments have to be cleared away. So, in the United States, for example, there will need to be laws that are changed so that action can be taken more effectively, more quickly to respond to problems in a lawful way.

But I think what we've seen is that when people are frustrated, they're willing to take any kind of action, even if it's unlawful, because at least there's a sense of, well, something's happening. And that's something that I think everybody has to internalize at this point.

It’s worth recalling here that Obama’s handpicked successor, Joe Biden, promised wealthy donors that under a Biden Presidency, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.” (3)

To be fair to Biden, despite that stone-conservative instinct, he actually got more substantive progressive economic legislation passed than Obama did as President.

Obama is justly famous for his eloquence, although it’s only mildly apparent here. And all politicians try to frame their proposals in a way that different constituencies can understand them as being in line with their preferences. Like here; who’s in favor of preserving “old impediments”? Who’s against changing laws ”so that action can be taken more effectively, more quickly to respond to problems in a lawful way”?

But does that mean that the Democrats should flush the Senate filibuster rule the next time they have a majority instead of allowing a Republican minority to block important programs that will benefit large number of working people and not just billionaire donors?

But does that mean that the Democrats should flush the Senate filibuster rule the next time they have a majority instead of allowing a Republican minority to block important programs that will benefit large number of working people and not just billionaire donors?

Also, what the hell does Obama mean when he says “authoritarians can get things done just by breaking things”? Like what? What have the Trump/Stephen Miller/Gestapo Barbie crowd gotten done by “breaking things” other than, you know, hurting people unnecessarily, ignoring their duty to uphold the rule of law, laying the groundwork for suppressing votes, and staging S&M theater to give cheap thrills to Trump cult members following it all on social media?

The list of sad and/or bitter ironies in Obama’s history of appealing to voters with soaring rhetoric while delivering little of substance is a long one. Obama’s response to the Supreme Court’s reactionary Citizens United decision in 2010 that opened US election campaigns to practically unlimited floods of billionaire cash into election campaigns came during Obama’s first term. And as President, he immediately and rightfully criticized it.

But his only substantive response was to make a half-hearted attempt to pass a legislative fix. Democrats had a clear majority in both the House and the Senate in 2010 when the Court made its Citizens United decision. The effort failed, and the Democratic Party ever since has relegated the issue to a stock item on the e-mail fundraiser lists.

Joe Biden’s and the Democrats’ bill that would have remedied the Supreme Court obliteration of the Voting Rights Act also included remedies against the Citizens United decision. It won a majority in both Houses, but two of the most worthless Democratic Senators ever elected blocked it by upholding the Republican Senate filibuster against it:

The Freedom to Vote: John Lewis Act would address some of this, by ending dark money in elections and requiring full disclosure of campaign spending. It passed the House and had a Senate majority — as did an earlier bill just focused on campaign finance — but was killed by a Republican filibuster, this time aided, as we know all too well, by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). (4)

The filibuster is a Senate rule. It can be abolished completely, or suspended for a single vote, by a majority vote of the Senate. I’ve never believed for a second that Manchin would have voted to kill the Voting Right Bill if Biden had applied any serious pressure on him over it. And Sinema was such a flake that she would never have been the sole vote to block the restoration of the voting rights act if that other nominal Democrats Manchin hadn’t voted to kill it, too.

Obama himself always manages to sound eloquent and concerned. And, like in that Obama Foundation presentation, he tries to ruffle as few feathers as possible. That is, unless he’s scolding Democratic voters and activists for not embracing the most accommodating stance toward the Republicans on a given political issue.

I’m not at all sure that a vague message like the one Obama delivers there, calling for removing “old impediments ,,, so that action can be taken more effectively, more quickly to respond to problems in a lawful way,” is received by almost anyone, certainly not by serious Democratic reform activists, as anything other than a call for passivity and resignation, one that will not generate confidence in the Democrats’ ability to meet the moment.

I would much rather see him warning people that the Republicans want to suppress voting in Democratic precincts in 2026 by using soldiers and masked ICE agents to intimidate voters in old-fashioned Southern-segregation style. And reminding cops and soldiers that they are obligated to disobey illegal orders. Calling for useful reforms like Medicare for All would be a good idea, too. But it’s hard to even imagine Obama the Stalwart Moderate ever endorsing such a thing.

Notes:

(1) ‘A coup is happening’: A new warning against Trump’s authoritarian slide. MSNBC YouTube channel 10/12/2025. <https://youtu.be/mk3Dzq7AptI?si=02HpAoge0fR_BVgu> (Accessed: 2025-12-10).

(2) How to stop authoritarianism across the globe: a conversation with President Obama. Obama Foundation YouTube channel 10/11/2025. <https://youtu.be/gRNaIMR00Fc?si=K1e8Cd--3KZ8PXIG> (Accessed: 2025-12-10).

(3) Joe Biden 2020: 'Nothing Will Fundamentally Change'. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert YouTube channel 06/21/2019. <https://youtu.be/w_q2LBA38NI?si=fzYrsOUUFPuhiP3c> (Accessed: 2025-13-10).

(4) Waldman, Michael (2022): Obama Was Right About Citizens United. Brennan Center 04/12/2022. <https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/obama-was-right-about-citizens-united> (Accessed: 2025-13-10).

Nobel Peace Prize winner and … golpista?

I don’t recall the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize being a prelude to a regime-change war, aka, an illegal invasion of a sovereign country.

But the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado, the nominal leader of the Venezuelan opposition may be an innovation of sorts.

I won’t try here to rethread all the needles in the history of Venezuela from the last three decades or so. But it’s important to keep in mind the framework with which American policymakers view Venezuela. The most significant part of that framework is the fact that Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of crude oil. And the Trump 2.0 regime, which idolizes climate-wrecking fossil fuels, is no exception.

Venezuela is one of the best examples of how oil resources are both a blessing and a curse. Oil-related activities are such a big part of its economy that it stunts and otherwise distorts other parts of the economy. Oil-related activities draw so many jobseekers that it has severely restricted Venezuela’s agricultural economy for instance.

Deutsche Welle gives this softball English-language report on report on Machado. Including an in-depth analysis of the situation by, uh, her daughter. (1)

The DW report soft-pedals the strong indications that Peace President Trump is preparing to invade Venezuela to overthrow its current government under Nicolas Máduro, who is rightly described as an authoritarian ruler.

The widely-used V-Dem Democracy Report of 2025 rated Venezuela in 2024 as an “electoral autocracy,” along with Hungary, Russia, and, yes, Ukraine, among others. V-Dem uses four categories, ranging from more democratic to less: liberal democracies, electoral democracies, electoral autocracies, and closed autocracies. (The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave made the liberal-democracy list for 2024; where it will stand at the end of 2025 is an open question.)

As the leader of the opposition, Machado would be a likely choice to head a government to be installed by force by the Trump regime. She seems for the moment to be the Ahmed Chalabi of Venezuela for the neocons and Peace President Trump.

I always think it’s helpful to keep in mind that Venezuela has the world’s largest supply of crude oil. It’s possible that has little or nothing to do with the policy of the US or other countries toward Venezuela. (It’s also possible that I will soon see a flock of winged pigs flying by my window.)

Machado dedicated the Nobel Prize to Peace President Trump, saying she was accepting it in Trump’s honor. Whose government is giving strong indications that it is getting ready to do an actual regime change war against Venezuela, for which Machado seems to be the “Ahmed Chalabi” of the moment. (See link in comments.) The left-of-center Argentine paper “Página/12” just profiled Machado as the “Nobel golpista” (Nobel coup supporter) because of her role in supporting the attempted 2002 coup against the elected government of then-President Hugo Chávez. (2)

The Shrub Bush/Dick Cheney Administration supported that coup. (I’m sure oil had nothing to do with that, either!) It failed. Kind of like the plan to have Ahmed Chalabi set up a model liberal democracy in Iraq. Or the 20-year war in Afghanistan that ousted the Taliban government and ended up with, uh, the Taliban back in power.

But at least there’s the oil. And the Trump 2.0 Administration is very enthusiastic about those fossil fuels because, you know, windmills kill whales. Or, whatever this month’s favorite fantasy claim is.

Democracy Now! provides a more sober look at Machado and her politics: (3)

Notes:

(1) Could winning the Nobel Peace Prize save her life? DW News YouTube channel 10/11/2025. <https://youtu.be/vzx6nwMOv6U?si=YUTgz2uQxlIKcUR7> (Accessed: 2025-11-10).

(2) Majfud, Jorge (2025): Nobel golpista. Página/12 11.10.2025. < https://www.pagina12.com.ar/864760-nobel-golpista > (Accessed: 2025-11-10).

(3) 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for Anti-Maduro Leader María Corina Machado "Opposite of Peace": Greg Grandin. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 10/10/2025. <https://youtu.be/VYASIbq0EG0?si=vC-uUguzNbITRyld> (Accessed: 2025-11-10).

It Can Happen Here. And it is. (Warning: May include pro-democracy/antifa content)

Back in 2007, in the days before Stephen Miller as deputy President and Gestapo Barbie (Kristi Noem) as Homeland Security chief, pro-democracy “antifa” types were worried about some obvious tendencies that could lead to having a full-blown authoritarian (aka, “profa”) government.

One of them was Joe Conason. I’m re-upping here a slightly modified version of a review I did at the time of his 2007 book, It Can Happen Here:

Conason's book focuses on the governmental and partisan manifestations of the Republican Party's deep-seated authoritarianism. Though Conason is an investigative reporter in the tradition of I.F. Stone, his focus in this book is pulling together a coherent narrative describing the Cheney-Bush Administration's drive to undermine the substance of American democratic and Constitutional government while leaving the forms in place. He relies on the wealth of material already in the public record, much of which he has reported in some form in his regular columns. He makes full use of his knowledge and skill in describing the roles of key players without reducing complex processes to personality quirks or individual ambitions.

As a close observer of the major press dysfunction during the Clinton administration and subsequently, it's not surprising that his descriptions of the press' role in the Cheney-Bush style of rule are particularly vivid. He gives the following memorable picture of Fox News, which could almost serve as a definition:

Never in the history of American politics or American broadcasting has any media outlet been so closely identified with a president or a party as Fox News is with George W. Bush and the Republicans. Overseen by Fox News boss Roger Ailes [formerly a Republican media consultant], it is an inappropriate and journalistically illicit relationship that long ago crossed whatever normal boundary separates politicians and press organizations. ...

Fox News represents an innovation in the authoritarian mode: a fully dedicated mouthpiece for the state that is nevertheless unofficial and in the private sector. Such is the ingenuity of American capitalism, in the hands of naturalized citizen Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation mogul who abandoned his Australian citizenship in order to qualify as an owner of American TV stations. Aside from profit, which only began to flow after almost eight years and roughly $800 million in estimated losses, the separation of ownership from the state affords much greater credibility to the propaganda message. (my emphasis)

The problem with American media reporting, though, is not restricted to the blatant partisans of Fox News and of what I called in 2007 “Oxycontin radio,” i.e., Rush Limbaugh and his imitators.

Conason skillfully describes how the toxic combination of lazy and compliant reporters, the extreme governmental secrecy that is a hallmark of Dick Cheney's style of rule, corporate media dominance, and actual government-sponsored propaganda have combined to cripple the functioning of an independent press that is a critical element of democracy. He calls attention to a trend in the Republican Party toward advocating overt censorship, still alarmed as were in 2007 about the amount of genuine journalism still being practiced in the US. He calls special attention to an article by Gabriel Schoenfeld, Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? Commentary March 2006, which lays out much of the ideological justification for this next level of authoritarian media regulation.

Conason creates a useful framework in which to view the authoritarian tilt of the Republican Party under the Cheney-Bush Administration, from ideological organizations like the Federalist Society (which promotes corporatist legal doctrine) to the effect of having an atmosphere of permanent war. The latter is essential for Dick Cheney's program of authoritarian rule, because only with such a climate of fear and threat can the Cheney policies of preventive war, torture, massive spying and an Executive not bound by any laws completely supplant the legal and Constitutional practices of the old Republic.

The Cold War provided such a framework, too. And in his concluding chapter, Conason fills in the dots leading from the Nixon administration's police-state measures known collectively as "Watergate" and the Reagan administration's secret war program (which is best known through the Iran-Contra scandal) to the Cheney methods of authoritarian governance which permeated the Cheney-Bush Administration.

Conason argued that understanding the roots of the Cheney-Bush situation in the darkest side of the Nixon administration is important because "[m]ost Americans, even those who lived through the Nixon era, have forgotten the context - let alone the details - of the Watergate scandal." He also observes, "The parallels are striking, but the difference is that Bush, Cheney, and Rove, and the forces they represent, are far more developed and powerful than the Nixon gang ever was." (my emphasis)

Fascism is a process. There is a strong continuity from the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and earlier to the Liberty League of the 1930s to McCarthyism to Nixon’s government to Iran-Contra skullduggery to the odious Kenneth Starr to the Cheney-Bush War on Terror policies to the January 6 insurrection to our Trump 2.0 regime of today with its cruel and bizarre cast of characters. That’s why so many of us found it thoroughly cringe-worthy when Kamala Harris made Liz Cheney – who loyally defended her father’s war and torture policies – a major prop in her failed 2024 campaign.

I wrote in 2007 that though Conason doesn't mention it in the book, his analysis illustrated the need for something like a Truth Commission process after Cheney and Bush are out of power. Not only did we need prosecution of crimes committed - and there have been many - but we also needed a process by which the abuses of the Cheney-Bush Administration can be publicly aired and understood. We needed to make it far harder for people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who learned their governing principles and style from the worst aspects of the Nixon administration, to come to power 10, 20, 30 years down the line determined to succeed where Cheney, Rummy [Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld], Karl Rove and the rest had prior to the first Trump Presidency failed. The criminal and antidemocratic practices of the Cheney-Bush administration needed to be thoroughly discredited.

Sadly, the Obama Presidency that began with clear majorities in the House and Senate and an implicit mandate for progressive reforms was more focused on sacred Bipartisanship and wanted to “look forward, not backward” when it came to criminal acts of war, torture, and rapidly developing authoritarianism.

Sadly, the Obama Presidency that began with clear majorities in the House and Senate and an implicit mandate for progressive reforms was more focused on sacred Bipartisanship and wanted to “look forward, not backward” when it came to criminal acts of war, torture, and rapidly developing authoritarianism.

You can always quibble about what is not said in even the most thorough book. Conason only gives attention to the phoniness of the "moderate Republican" scam late in the book, while his earlier mentions of that bold Maverick John McCain could leave an excessively favorable impression on those not familiar with the Maverick's rightwing and downright militaristic record. The book also only alludes to the role that segregationist practices from the Jim Crow era in the South play in the Republican Party's current authoritarian cast. But those really are quibbles about a book that provides a valuable understanding of the larger problem. (In any case, Conason himself examined those issue more closely in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003).

One thing Conason did in the 2007 book that I hadn't seen done so clearly elsewhere is to describe how the Wall Street wing of the Party and the Christian nationalists managed to combine what on the surface may seem conflicting agendas. In the chapter he devotes to this subject, "The Corporate State of Grace", he writes, "The creative destruction of modern capitalism disrupts traditions and disregards family values." In theory, this creates a tension between the goals of Wall Street free-marketeers and Christian theocrats.

But he does a great job of explaining that, in practice, these seemingly conflicting interests don't create the Party split that Establishment pundits were constantly predicting back then. In fact, the corporate interests and the Christian dominionists have "an informal but clear division of labor". What not so long ago was commonly called Big Business provides the money, the theocrats turn out votes of Republicans. This division of labor also allowed some politicians to pass themselves off as "moderate Republicans" while actually supporting the theocratic agenda.

In the grim age of the Trump-Musk-Miller Administration, anyone who would still be considered a "moderate Republicans” counts as an “antifa terrorist” in the Trump 2.0 regime’s eyes. Note to those under 30: yes, there was once a small but identifiable group called "moderate Republicans.”

Many of the key Christian Right leaders are wealthy men themselves - few of them are women - and thus see their own economic interests as the same as those of corporate executives or investment bankers. "Whatever their differences, however, the religious right and the corporate right have much more in common", Conason writes.

Factional divisions can always cause problems. But the alliance of the stock market and the pulpit in the Republican Party was already in 2007 a long-term and stable one. In particular, Conason noted pointedly, "The Chamber of Commerce types and the Baptist preachers both hate unions with a special passion."

The title of Conasons's book is derived from Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here, which describes a fictional fascist takeover of the United States. Like all of Lewis' novels I've read - full disclosure: I'm a big fan of his - the decades-old historical context doesn't prevent It Can't Happen Here from being both entertaining and instructive. Elmer Gantry (1927) remains one of the best looks at American Protestant fundamentalism you can find. Lewis includes a fictional rightwing character in his novel Gideon Planish (1943), the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery, who gradually became known to a national audience:

And during all this time, the Reverend Ezekiel himself will, as publicly as possible, to as many persons as he can persuade to attend his meetings, have admitted, insisted, bellowed, that he has always been a Ku Kluxer and a Fascist, that he has always hated Jews, colleges and good manners, and that the only thing he has ever disliked about Hitler is that he once tried to paint barns instead of leaving the barns the way God made them.

A revival of interest in Sinclair Lewis' work would be a welcome development.

Conason himself has stayed on the authoritarianism beat. He published The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism in 2024. He is also the editor-in-chief of The National Memo and an editor-at-large for Type Investigations.