"Critical race theory" and ... Immanuel Kant (?!?)

An eye-rolling editing FAIL at the Washington Post has begotten something rare: an interesting and substantial thread about Immanuel Kant.

The impetus for this was an op-ed by professional Republican hack Marc Thiessen on the Republicans' favorite bogeyman this season, The danger of critical race theory 11/11/2021. He writes:

Critical race theory, [Allen] Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.

Yes, folks, Immanuel Kant, author of What Is Enlightenment?, an essay often taken as a kind of general program for ; the Enlightenment, was an enemy of the Enlightenment.

Zack Beauchamp flagged how silly it was:

I just can't get over this. It's a thing the Washington Post actually published — a thing that is so completely and indefensibly wrong that anyone who has taken a single intro to philosophy course could explain why https://t.co/v5OteD8X5F pic.twitter.com/JBfX6Pb3PD

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) November 12, 2021

David Neiwert followed up with this comment:

I’m sure @marcthiessen won’t bother acquainting himself with the history of philosophy, but Kant was mostly critiquing the Rationalist school of epistemology. The Empiricists, a competing school, are usually credited (particularly Locke and Hume) with influencing the Founders. pic.twitter.com/zxGd0zw3O9

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) November 13, 2021

Philosophy professor John Holbo then stepped in to recount this bit of philosophical background:

The Pantheism controversy, in German ideas & letters, starts when the philosopher Jacobi tells the philosopher Mendelssohn the playwright Lessing confessed to him to having been a closet Spinozist. 3/ pic.twitter.com/bfNCJJfjXf

— John Holbo (@jholbo1) November 13, 2021

Check out Holbo's whole thread.

The anti-"Critical Race Theory" narrative is a conspiracy theory. An especially sleazy one if you take the time to dig into the "hghbrow" version of the backstory as articulated by unsavory characters like James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo.

Conspiracy theories present a common dilemma in political contests. The Republican media network has clearly educated its viewers and followers that "critical race theory" is a tribal slogan for Their Side. So a Republican politician just needs to say, "I will ban critical race theory from the schools," and its a clear signal to their side.

But if Democratic candidates try to answer it by going into some detail explaining what a sleazy and dishonest conspiracy theory it is, it risks adding credibility to it in a "where there's smoke there's fire" sense. But it shouldn't be the kind of challenge the Democrats too often assume it to be when confronting a hot Republicans "culture war" slogan.

Gene Lyons has an idea how they can go about it, i.e., by approaching it as the promotion of a moral panic (Trump's Mob: Gullible, Conspiracy-Minded, And Willfully Ignorant Of History National Memo 10/13/2021):

Because [Tucker Carlson's target audience is] gullible and prone to apocalyptic thinking — "the rapture" was all the rage in evangelical circles not long ago — one result has been a succession of what can ... only be described as "moral panics" over largely imaginary threats such as "Sharia Law," "Cancel Culture," and "Critical Race Theory." Since 2010, for example, several states have found it necessary to ban Islamic religious courts from exercising legal authority.

As if.

Susceptibility to conspiracy theories has to do with what is known as "anti-intellectualism." Historian Richard Hofstadter did a well-known book on the topic, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963). But the phenomenon has hardly gone away in the ensuring six decades since it was published.

But it's also the case that conservatives are also eager to give even crackpot theories some kind of intellectual heft. Hofstadter noted that there are "lowbrow" versions of far right conspiracy theories as well as "highbrow" ones. He also suggested that a "middlebrow" category could be helpful, but that term doesn't seem to have caught on generally. (Though I use it myself.) In his most famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Harper's Nov 1964)

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

A tremendous amount of additional research has been done on this topic since then, so Hofstadter's 1964 essay is scarcely the last word on the topic. But it's still a useful read.

There are many conservative think-tanks and assorted journals that crank out their own "middlebrow" and "highbrow" versions of these theories. The Claremont Institute and a faction associated with it called the West Coast Straussians is one such institution among many. Their perspective was very influential on the "1776 Project" which provides what passes for what the anti-CRT propagandists would like to see taught in American schools.

The Lost Cause narrative retrospectively justifying the Confederate revolt to preserve slavery that also became an ideology for the overthrown of Southern state democracies established during Reconstruction is a huge example of such a false, crackpot theory that not only served as a useful ideology for bad ends but screwed up the teaching of history in the US for generations.

So journalists, political analysts, and scholars do have to pay some attention to the backstories in such ideological theories, even if election campaigns are not the right place to attempt elaborate and nuanced discussions of them.

While we're on the topic of current paranoid conspiracy theories, I've noticed lately some tendency on the "highbrow" right to treat the term "narrative" as a pejorative. In that view, viewpoints of the Mean Libruls are "narratives," i.e., false and deceptive, while their own stories around something like the alleged Critical Race Theory conspiracy are simple statement of truth. There is an analogy here to some Christian fundamentalists - I've heard Pat Robertson do this - that their version of Christianity is not only the True Religion, but it's actually the only actual "religion" because all the other ways of thinking that call themselves religion are false, evil, Satanic, etc.

I recommend against putting a lot of effort into trying to uncover some chain of reasoning behind that. It's more the psychology of Us Againt Them.

Christian white lady from Blaze TV explains how Mean Libruls and their "critical race theory" are forcing polite white folks to form a "White Identitarian movement"

Allie Beth Stuckey is part of Glenn Beck's Blaze TV operation, which of course is highly ideological and very conservative, even radical rightwing. She has a podcast in which she presents conservative views from a Southern Baptist perspective. In the recurring schisms in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) she currently seems to be on the right wing of the SBC, which is by general American standards, already very rightwing.

I'll start out by giving her credit for criticizing the creepy idea that Tucker Carlson recently proposed on his FOX News White Power Hour that public school classes should all be recorded on camera. In order to make sure the innocent white en aren't being poluted by "critical race theory" (CRT), the Republicans' latest bogeyman conspiracy theory, of course. "Critical race theory" as it used by the Republicans actually is code for "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

The Republicans didn't go all in on the CRT conspiracy theory until this year. But now it's become the Republican "Tea Party" of 2021.

Stuckey had this to say, though (07/08/2021 YouTube post):

But she's with Blaze TV, and she's all in on pumping up the CRT scare, so I'm not going to take that as any sign of emerging liberalism on her part. Maybe she's just enough of an adult to recognize some of the ways that children could be hurt by this, including in ways that have nothing to do with what's being taught.

I'm linking to her recent video on CRT, not because it contains anything substantive, but because it shows a couple of things about the limitations of the CRT slogan that I found a bit surprising to see: Critical Race Theory: The Left Loves It ... But Doesn’t Understand It 07/09/2021.

The rightwing meme on CRT is a sleazy conspiracy theory, which not only incorporates another longtime conspiracy theory on the far right called "Cultural Marxism," but seems to be pretty much just a rebranding of it. I've posted numerous times about both on this blog. Here I'll just summarize the narrative. It claims that a group of Jewish Marxists in Germany in the 1930s came up with a theory about culture that later spawned something called "postmodernism" and Political Correctness and now CRT, and it's all about destroying capitalism and undermining White Pride.

As with any conspiracy theory, refuting it can have the unfortunate effect of spreading it. But when the US Republican Party makes a slogan like CRT central to their political identity as they are doing in the current moment, it's also not really possible for non-Republicans to completely ignore it.

The two things that most strike me about this presentation are (1) she seems to recognize that that some of the pushback from even mainstream liberals is likely to be effective for people who aren't besotted true believers in the Glenn Beck Republican Gospel, and (2) in trying to explain in more detail how terrible CRT is to give her listeners additional arguments to use, she winds up making the Republican CRT meme actually sound like the silly mush that it is.

Because once you get beyond CRT being scary anti-white-people stuff and start talking in the slightest detail about what the concept of "whiteness" means among the theorists she's condemning, you have to at least hint at the idea that race is a social construct that does is applied to defining and reinforcing social power relations. And that already starts to dilute the message of, "scary Jews! Scary black people!"

Once she starts actually laying out the arguments of the fairly narrow legal academic field whose advocates themselves call "critical race theory," she quotes arguments that involve more serious points than "white people are all evil," for instance in citing the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Third Edition, 2017) by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. She uses the term "liberal order" as something she defends, which is sure to befuddle most of her audience. She says, "CRT rejects the idea of judging people by their individual actions and rather judges people by group and by the systems they uphold either actively or just complicitly [sic]." (29.00 in the video)

Anyone who reads a few pages of the Delgado-Stefancic book is likel to see right away that the critical race theory that actually identifies with the name will see that it's an introduction to a specialized academic field. But Stuckey in that podcast spends a lot of energy into repeating that this is some kind of a comprehensive ideology that is Communism and Marxism in thin disguise. Maybe she didn't get to the page in the book that says, "Critical race theory has yet to develop a comprehensive theory of class." (Hint: Class is kind of a key concept in Communist theory. But, hey, class, race, oppression, colleges - it all sounds like icky Commie stuff, amirite?)

She repeats again and again with an arrogant smile that the CRT bugaboo is aimed at creating racial discrimination against white people, which FOX News viewers of course hear constantly, so most will just hear that and say, "Yeah, that's what I already knew." And if you're a self-righteous scold looking for ways to complain about black people in a respectable middle-class way, you might pick up a useful phrase or two.

But, apart from sporadically citing a couple of books published within the last 20 years, it's not really a whole lot different than what a Bircher or White Citizens Council fan would have been saying in 1960, or 1965, or any time since. In other words, the Mean Libruls are all Commies who are helping the Jews and black people take over. And, oh yeah, public schools are dangerous for nice white children, so better to send them to a Christian private school or homeschool them with fundamentalist Christian texts.

In other words, even a presentation that tries to expose CRT as a dangerous new menace in what would count on the right as an intellectual presentation - Stuckey does speak in complete sentences with understandable syntax - it winds up as mainly a list of all the white nationalist fears that segregationist-minded white people have been passing on from generation to generation. Stuckey's presentation is too sad and boring to be infuriating, although it does rise to the level of mildly annoying at points. Still, it's deeply dishonest rightwing propaganda.

She manages to stay on her dreary script most of the time. But near the end, just after 54:00 in the video, she warns her audience that CRT is meant to be "anti-White Power." She thinks that is a bad thing. She assures her listeners that CRT is "anti-white," but mealy-mouths around that point a bit, because that make it sound like she's being thoughtful, or nuanced, or something.

To make sure she summarizes the key points at the end, she explains that how CRT "manifests itself is in the explicit condemnation of white people as a whole." And then not-too-subtly suggests that it's time for a "White Identitarian movement" to counter CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!") - not that she's advocating it, you see, it's just that some white people will "inevitably" take that as a necessary response to CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!"). "White solidarity is going to come together as a reaction to [white] people being constantly maligned," she says.

This is nasty stuff. Seriously boring, but nasty.

Should the House of Representatives expel Marjorie Taylor Greene?

The thing with the current discussion about expelling Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House is that she has boosted a call for the Speaker of the House to be assassinated, supported (at least de facto and possibly actively) the January 6 invasion of the Capitol, and publicly pimped an outrageous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. This is one of those rare times where the idea that "the Constitution isn't a suicide pact" applies. The House does have the ability to expel a Member, and expelling one who has given them good reason to believe is a physical danger to them is an obvious move.

Nick Visser notes in this article that even Mitch McConnell is at least trying to pretend he disapproves of Greene's far-right radicalism (Nick Visser, A ‘Cancer’: Mitch McConnell Excoriates Marjorie Taylor Greene For Conspiracy Theories Huffpost 02/01/2021):

Greene has faced a firestorm of criticism after the media detailed her yearslong history of controversial social media posts. Before her election, she supported false claims that the Parkland, Florida, and Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings were staged, “liked” Facebook posts that called for the killing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and publicly mused that a space laser may have caused 2018’s deadly wildfires in California.

In what is probably the most famous case of a Member of Congress directly engaging in physical violence in the Capitol chambers, Slave Power South Carolina Congressman Preston's Brooke's notorious assault on anti-slavery Sen. Charles Sumner in 1858, Brooks was at least censured by the House. But he became a hero among defenders of slavery, and was re-elected to his House seat after the assault.

We can't say that the Civil War would have been somehow avoided if Brooks had been expelled by the House. But the fact that he wasn't must surely have been taken by the defenders of the Slave Power as a sign of weakness on the part of the free states.

Yes, expelling a Member of Congress is a power than can be abused, which means the Republicans will abuse it if they think they can get away with it. And with the Republican Party in its current Trumpified state, that's true whether or not the Democrats expel someone or not.

But even if Greene's voters may have sent her to Congress because they wanted her to physically threaten Pelosi and other Congresspeople, that doesn't mean the House has to accept that behavior from one of their Members.

I say, have an expulsion vote and let the Republican Members show us all where they stand on her threats and crass anti-Semitism.

An expulsion would require Republican votes, "The Constitution gives Congress the ability to impeach federal officials and judges, but not its own members. They can only be removed by expulsion, which requires a 2/3 vote." (Zachary Wolf, It's hard to expel a member of Congress. Here's what to know CNN 01/28/2021)

Wolf adds:

Only 20 federal lawmakers have been expelled in the history of the US (15 in the Senate and only 5 in the House). The vast majority of expulsions had to with the Civil War. There have been only two post-Civil War expulsions -- Rep. Michael Myers, a Pennsylvania Democrat, was kicked out after taking money from undercover FBI agents. The other was James Traficant, the Ohio Democrat, who was convicted of bribery charges.

TYT has been covering the MJT story, including: Marjorie Taylor Greene's INSANE Social Media Posts Exposed 06/28/2021:

The US left, the January 6 Capitol riot, and the threat from far-right terrorists (2 of 2)

This is second of two posts on the far right threat in the aftermath of the Capitol riot of January 6.

Daryl Johnson has been sounding the alarm about violent rightwing terrorism from within the government and in the public.

He talks about his own experience and how he view the current threat in this interview with Michael Moore, Ep. 154: How To Stop The Coup Klux Klan (feat. Daryl Johnson) | Rumble 01/14/2021

In this interview, Johnson also addresses the problem He Saw the Storm Coming Slate 01/14/2021 (Podcast) Transcript here.

The interviewer, Mary Harris, gives a quick roundup of Johnson's experience at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama-Biden Administration:

I wanted to talk to Daryl about what took place [on Wednesday, January 6], because in some ways he predicted this, not the details, but the coming wave of anti-government sentiment and where it could lead. Back in 2009, a report he wrote about the risks of right wing extremism got leaked to conservative media. It was the beginning of the end for his career at Homeland Security. But with each passing year, Darrell’s work seems more prescient. Since leaving the federal government. Darrell has tried to avoid the darker corners of the Internet. He knows what’s lurking in there. But this week he’s gone back just a little to see what the groups he used to monitor are saying. It turns out they are already creating their own narrative about what went down on Wednesday.

Jonathan Stevenson looks at Trump’s Lingering Menace New York Review of Books 01/09/2021, making this observation on Trump's position during the Capitol invasion:

Trump’s tactical forbearance does not absolve him. Quickly calling in the National Guard to aid the undermanned police and prevent the siege would have been a legitimate, non-political use of military force designed to preclude illegal interference with the political process. Instead, the administration appears to have ensured that the Pentagon was disposed to be non-responsive, leaving the pro-Trump protesters greater freedom of action.

In less that 24 hours from when I am writing this, Joe Biden will be inaugurated President, so these following two article about the danger that Trump as a lame-duck President has posed will (hopefully!) be out of date: Susan Matthews, It’s Almost Over. That’s the Problem. Slate 01/09/2021; Abigail Esman and Dahlia Lithwick, from three weeks before the January 6 invasion of the Capitol, America Is Attempting to Exit an Abusive Relationship Slate 12/15/2020

Dahlia Lithwick also has a good piece on Republican diversionary whining in connection with the Capitol attack,(Republicans Still Don’t Get It Slate 01/13/2021):

It is, quite frankly, beyond belief that the very same people who could have died in the United States Capitol just last week have somehow persuaded themselves that they’ve in fact experienced a more acute First Amendment injury than even insurrection itself—and that any effort to impose liability for the property destruction, terror, and death that resulted from the storming of the government is a monstrous encroachment on their right to talk. [emphasis in original]

The US left, the January 6 Capitol riot, and the threat from far-right terrorists (1 of 2)

I find myself often tempted to use the walking-and-talking-at-the-same-time metaphor a lot, especially when talking about quarrels of the moment between liberals and progressives and the ever-popular hair-splitting on the progressive side of the dial.

Not to pick on the left, though. Splits and arguments among groups that are closely aligned on policy preferences is part of politics. The slaveowner and classical liberal theorist James Madison discussed that very phenomenon in Federalist #10. Groups and parties with little or no effective political power are also very prone to factionalism, because they have limited resources or rewards to hand out, like actual political offices or paid staffing opportunities that are available to larger parties.

That's certainly true on the radical right, most of which at the moment seems to be enthusiastically pro-Trump. Tina Nguyen and Mark Scott's report, Right-wing extremist chatter spreads on new platforms as threat of political violence ramps up Politico 01/12/2021, gives a sense of the fractious nature of the multiple groups trying to organize protests in support of Trump's ludicrous but deadly clown coup.

David Neiwert also remarks:

One the factors ameliorating the ability of the radical right to gain traction in the USA is the reality that, as a movement, it is almost entirely comprised of paranoid, volatile, egotistical people who eventually all hate each others' guts.https://t.co/FevDtnayRO

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) January 15, 2021

One of the post-January 6 controversies on the progressive left is over the required response to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Part of what conscientious civil libertarians and people on the left do in the political conversation is try to step back from the moment to ask how different actors will exploit it.

Security agencies will always use a crisis to ask for more money. And they will always use a crisis to ask for greater leeway in how they go about their jobs. So, yes, it's part of the job of Members of Congress and responsible citizens to scrutinize such proposals carefully to the extent they can. That's basic to democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

So we have discussions going on right now like this one on the Left Reckoning podcast featuring Matt Lech, David Griscomb, and Daniel Bessner, The War On Division? 01/16/2021, in which they raise legitimate concerns about how the "security state" will exploit this. Justice in the US and in many other countries is far too often "blind int he right eye" in that police and security agencies attract people with an authoritarian bent of mind. In the US, police agencies are often less alert to threats from white protesters or activists than they are toward those of color.

So we need to listen to the people who are raising these concerns.

Where I have a different perspective than the three participants on that podcast and some others on the left is that I think they may not fully appreciate the very real problem represented by the violent radical right and how badly law-enforcement in the US has neglected (and sometimes encouraged) it. And part of the problem is that violent far right groups like the Oath Keepers have been actively recruiting among police agencies and infiltrating law enforcement.

So this is an issue where people on the left should be able to walk and talk at the same time. The democratic framework for responding to the January 6 insurrection is one that can be elaborated in a similar way from a liberal perspective or a Marxist one or as something in between. For that matter, a conservative argument could be made in much the same way, although as the political theorist Corey Robin has been reminding us for years, what American Republicans call "conservatism" is very often reactionary ideology which is more interested in wrecking major elements of democracy and the rule of law rather than actually conserving it.

That case is this. The US has a liberal-democratic government with regular free elections based on the principle of universal suffrage. (A bourgeois-democratic government, if one prefers a more classical term,) The courts operate with real independence. It's a system based on a monopoly capitalist economy, which includes extreme social inequality that itself drastically limits the formal equality of citizens as political actors and serious de facto (and de jure!) corruption in the political system due to the role of big money political donors. And the rule of law is severely mitigated by a drastic carceral orientation that gives the US more ordinary prisoners than any other country in the world. In absolute numbers, not just proportional. And there are some serious democratic deficits in the current Constitution, including: the manner of electing the President through an Electoral College; the strongly undemocratic current structure of the US Senate; the lack of a Constitutional provision for the equality of women. And there is real though un-Constitutional voter suppression in many states largely based on race and ethnicity.

But there are regular, competitive elections with broad access to the vote, illustrated in 2020 by the highest turnout of eligible voters in the US since 1908. And even taking 1860 into account, until 2021 we have always had a peaceful transfer of power at the Presidential level. And despite the lynch mob invading the Capitol building at Trump's immediate incitement, the transfer of power to Joe Biden is still happening day after tomorrow.

There is no remotely feasible way that a successful coup by Trump would lead to a desirable outcome from any kind of serious left or center-left perspective. The closest hopeful analogy in that scenario would be a political general strike like the one that successfully blocked the Kapp Putsch in Germany in 1920. But even that scenario - which would require a general strike in a country with a relatively weak organized labor movement on a scale not seen since the work stoppages by freed slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War - would wind up in the best case with a restoration of the 2020 election results with a Democratic Administration in the White House.

The Capitol riot and Trump's clown coup attempt more generally has plenty of relevant predecessors in US history: the Aaron Burr conspiracy; the pro-British secessionist movement among Northeastern Federalists during the War of 1812-15; the slaveowners' invasion of Kansas Territory; the Confederate treason that caused the Civil War; the overthrow of democratic governments in the South by force and violence that ended Reconstruction; mass lynching incidents like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921; and, the Liberty League plot against FDR's Administration.

In all those cases, the "left" position at the time, and endorsed by most left historical interpretations, was to side against the rightwing insurrectionists and for the Constitutional government. One might argue that Bleeding Kansas was an exception, because the national government then dominated by very proslavery administrations supported and encouraged the violent proslavery groups in Kansas. The antislavery movement sympathized with and some directly engaged in the guerrilla war between the pro- and antislavery forces, the most famous participant in the latter being Captain John Brown. But the goal of the antislavery side was to incorporate Kansas Territory as a state under the American Constitution but without slavery.

In the case of the Union rejecting the secession of the Southern slave states, there were a couple of German writers who were very pro-Union and wrote articles for the American press sympathetic to the Union, and later became important figures in the European left, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

In none of those cases did it mean that liberals and leftists were indifferent to the fact of repression against labor and the left, or because they thought the existing government agreed with them on all major issues of the day. It was that they were looking at who was fighting for what, and what realistic consequences could be expected from a rightwing victory.

So siding with the elected Biden-Harris Administration against Trump's malicious clown coup seems painfully obvious to me. It doesn't mean that we should ignore misuses of the threat, especially by people who want to undermine civil liberties. We definitely should be opposed to that. But in terms of the substance of the violent threat from the far right, the problem the last 15 years has been more that the left, the center, and law enforcement were underestimating that threat rather than overestimating it.

No liberals welcome in a Popular Front against ... a violent rightwing coup attempt against the US govt that featured a white supremacist lynch mob hunting down Members of Congress in the halls of the Capitol?!? https://t.co/P0Ykc1R9I4

— brucemillerca (@brucemillerca) January 18, 2021

The day after the Capitol riot, Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the incident in this podcast (the YouTube version is dated 01/17/2021), in which they discuss some of the broad political, Consitutional, and even class questions it raised: Why Is This Happening? - Ep 144.

Brunch Liberalism on collision course with the real existing Republican Party

The current moment and the early weeks of the Biden-Harris Administration are particular important. Not only because of the immediately urgent problems of the COVID pandemic, the economic depression, and repairing various instances of administrative dysfunction caused by the Trump-Pence Administration. But also because the Republicans are already testing the incoming Administration to see how effectively the Republicans can block them. If the Biden-Harris team responds to Republican bad faith in negotiation by pretending that it is not bad faith, that will further embolden their obstructionism.

The current fight over a new COVID-relief/stimulus bill is the first round. If the Republicans come out of this thinking they've punked the Democrats - which is where it's headed at this particular moment - they will take that as encouragement for what they intend to do anyway, to undermine the Biden-Harris Administration as much or more than they did with the Obama-Biden Administration.

Among the Democratic base, the Brunch Liberals will be ready to declare Normalcy on January 20. Eugene Robinson is already impatient to go back to brunch: Can you feel your blood pressure going down? Thank Joe Biden. Washington Post 12/17/2020. He gushes in his first paragraph. "You know what's truly remarkable and promising about the incoming Biden-Harris administration? It's so normal."

In case we might misunderstand the point, he continues directly: "Soothingly normal. Reassuringly normal. Lowering-everybody's-blood-pressure normal. And after Inauguration Day, we have reason to hope, even boringly normal for days or weeks at a time."

For weapons manufacturers and other corporate lobbyists, "normalcy" never went away. And business as usual will continue, though there will be more lobbying opportunities for former Democratic politicians and operatives. (Not that they were exactly scare anyway!) They will continue doing business as usual.

For devoted Trump fans, which apparently includes a very large part of the Republican Party at all levels, the Trump-Pence years were Normalcy, i.e., freaking out over imaginary QAnon conspiracies run by a mythical Deep State and imagining that scary black people and Latino immigrants were going to confiscate their cars and lawnmowers and shotguns, or whatever. They are already shifting from treating the Biden-Harris Administration as an ongoing crisis and will be howling endlessly about tan suits and Democratic politicians saying cuss words and an endless search for scandals and pseudoscandals of all time.

Then, of course, there are the Proud Boys and similar violence-oriented radical right groups who are already looking forward to "civil war". Their only "normalcy" is looking to promote violence and racial hatred and general sedition against democracy, but their activity and adrenaline levels are already notably increasing. (See Dave Neiwert's latest, Proud Boys torch their claims to nonviolence with hate crime attacks on Black churches in D.C. Daily Kos 12/17/2020):

One of the recurrent myths that far-right street brawlers such as the Proud Boys like to tell each other, in bullhorn speeches and social media posts, is that what differentiates them from “rioters” like antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) is that they don’t engage in arson and property damage: “That’s not who we are!” is a common refrain heard at right-wing events, including the recent pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” protests.

But it is, in fact, who they are, and worse. The Proud Boys who invaded Washington, D.C., last Saturday to protest Joe Biden’s election made that more than clear when they began attacking and vandalizing African American churches with Black Lives Matter signs and banners, tearing them down and burning them in the streets. Metro D.C. police are now investigating the acts as hate crimes. [my emphasis]

No, the radical right isn't taking the onset of Biden-Harris Normalcy as permission to Go To Brunch in piece peace. Proud Boys vandalize D.C. African American churches, destroy BLM signs Daily Kos 12/17/2020 (language may be inappropriate for workplaces):

Corey Robin, thought-provoking as ever - and Trump's hysteria against the Democratic Party

Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila in their Weekends podcast for Jacobin interviewed the historian Corey Robin in their weekend segment, Trumpism After Trump with Corey Robin 12/05/2020 (his interview begins just after 56:40:

Corey Robin is someone I have found to be consistently provocative in a constructive way.

I tweeted a dissent from one of Robin's points about Thomas Jefferson:

I don‘t how we can meaningfully project the fascism concept into the late 18th or early 19th century. TJ may not have possessed saintly (or even bourgeois) moral consistency. But how we can write him out of the history of democracy without indulging some Charles Beard fantasy?

— brucemillerca (@brucemillerca) December 5, 2020

Robin in the Weekends interview mentions that his entered left politics via the labor movement. I was also involved in labor issues and organizing in my early 20s and have always throught that a strong labor movement - including effective unions, just to be clear! - so it was interesting to hear Corey Robin mention that as part of the grounding of his political perspective.

Having spent decades on the left side of the political spectrum, I do periodically feel the need to define myself in relation to current left positions and controversies. Because, hey, it wouldn't be the left if we weren't fighting over what are the True Left positions.

The Weekends interview is one I found useful without necessarily being in total agreement with all the points he makes. I did a four-part review of his best-known book starting here, Corey Robin’s "The Reactionary Mind" (2011): (1 of 4): classical liberalism in the US 01/09/2012. That one goes into more detail on the topic of the tweet above, which is how to understand the Revolutionary generation in the US while not falling into the problems of Charles Beard's capital-p Progressive analysis of the American Revolution and the politics of the Constitution.

It starts off with his own story of a strange interaction he had with Neera Tanden, Biden's pick to head his Office and Management and Budget. He then gives a broad overview of the development of the present-day Republican Movement Conservatism. He talks about the relatively dominance of an increasingly conservative mainstream narrative after the re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972. "Their real achievement was to transform the Democratic Party," he says, referring to how the Democratic Party in response to the rising strength of Movement Conservatism embraced a neoliberal ideology that contributed heavily to the vast increase in wealth and income inequality over the last 40 years in the US. It also left them with a political message that blurred any distinct political branding for the Democratic Party.

It produced the current situation of chronic asymmetric political polarization that Andrew Hacker argues became particularly dominant beginning with the so-called Gingrich Revolution of 1994. In his book with Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005), they describe a situation that to a large extent still exists today, only hyper-charged with even more of the money-in-politics problem they identify here:

Although the two parties have both become more cohesive, there remains considerable truth to the old Will Rogers joke about the Democratic Party’s basic organizational deficiencies. (“I am not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”) In crucial areas, from fundraising to congressional leadership to the fervor of the base, the Democratic Party is both less centralized and less networked than the contemporary Republican Party. Individual Democrats, when they have enjoyed power at all, have much more jealously hoarded their autonomy than have the Republican rank and file—a reality on display repeatedly in Clinton’s two terms. Moreover, big money is a strong unifying force for Republicans, but it introduces considerable cross-pressures for Democrats. Important elements of the standard Democratic agenda, especially on economic issues, coexist awkwardly with the realities of contemporary political finance, which require that Democrats seek support from deep-pocketed business contributors. As we will see in the Conclusion, there are exceptions to these generalizations. But they are just that: exceptions. Democrats still have a hard time escaping the Tower of Babel. [my emphasis]

Fortunately, since there have been positive developments for the left along with setbacks, including some of the changes in public opinion and activism that Robin goes on to discuss (along with important historical reflection on the left and the courts in US history). Not least of those is the emergence a much stronger independent left media environment that was still metaphorically in the toddler stage in 2005. The Weekends show is a good example.

For anyone who panics at the thought of any association of Democrats with an avowedly "democratic socialist" media like Jacobin's print and online operations, I would suggest that it's time to get real about what the Republican Party of 2020 is. Their Dear Leader Trump - whose defeat in November's election most Republicans in Congress still refuse to publicly acknowledge - spoke Saturday in Georgia, telling his public COVID superspreader rally attendees that the Democratic Party led by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi is "the lunatic radical left." He said, "Very simply, you will decide whether your children grow up in a socialist country or whether they will grow up in a free country. And I will tell you this: socialist is just the beginning for these people. These people want to go further than socialism, they want to go into a Communistic form of government. And I have no doubt about it." (after 11:15 in the video of the entire speech, full of flatly false claims, from NBC News, Trump Holds Rally In Georgia Ahead Of Senate Runoff Election 12/05/2020.)

He proceeds to describe the two Democratic Senate candidates, centrist Jon Ossoff and center-left African-American minister Rafael Warnock this way: "radical John Ossoff and Rafael Warnock. Ossoff and Warnock are the two most extreme, far-left liberal Senate candidates in the history of our country."

In urging Georgia Republicans to participate in the dual Senate election in January, the Dear Leader said (after 46:15), "If you don't vote, the socialists and the communists win." (Evan Semones, 'Don’t listen to my friends': Trump encourages Georgia Republicans to vote Politico 12/05/2020)

So, no, Republicans are not going to stop calling Democrats socialists and communists. There are only two ways Democratic candidates can avoid that. They can decide not to run for office. Or they can become Republicans. Otherwise, they're going to call you a commie.

Conservatives have been attacking their opponents as "socialists" since, oh, 1865 or so, as Heather Cox Richardson explains in Marx is Not Around the Corner Moyers on Democracy 10/28/2020.

"Radical extremism" in US politics in 2020

Jay Bookman takes a look at Who is the true radical extremist in Georgia U.S. Senate race? Georgia Recorder 11/24/2020.

His answer is, the two Republican Senate candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

And he's right:

Who but radical extremists would attempt to overturn the clear results of a presidential election? Who but radical extremists would insist that millions of valid, legitimate votes – from Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — be tossed aside as if they don’t exist, as if the American citizens who cast those votes don’t exist?

I do have a reservation about the conventional framing he uses, "Our system of government is built upon compromise and moderation."

That's true in terms of the normal functioning of government. But practical compromises and moderation (in the sense of civility) in routine dealings among politicians and government officials are procedural concepts. Which is not the same as political-ideological moderation, which is defined by situation rather than by some kinf of timeless content.

I often mention how democracy in the US has evolved since the Revolutionary War in the 18th century. Having a government without a king that is run by representatives elected by the votes of property-owning white men was a revolutionary-democratic idea in the 1770s. And was for quite a while afterward. The left-right convention in talking about political positions came into usage a bit later with the French National Assembly after the 1789 revolution there. But a democracy of property-owning white men was a radical left idea at the time.

In 2020, of course, the concept would be downright reactionary. Because a great deal of American history has been over the expansion of or restrictions on democracy and who deserved to be included in it. I think it's fair to say that as recently as 20 years ago, the idea of same-sex marriage was generally considered a distinctly left, or far left, or radical extremist idea. But public understanding of that issue has now moved so much that prohibiting same-sex marriage is more a radical right idea.

So, yes, let's not have Preston Brooks clubbing Charles Sumner within an inch of his life on the Senate floor. Let's do have equal rule of law that includes Presidents and members of his administration.

But whether a political idea is "extreme" at a given moment in a particular political configuration is not a measure of whether it's a good or bad idea. That's especially important to remember that a main defining characteristic of American politics for the last 30 or even 40 years has been asymmetric partisan polarization.

Conversely, bad political ideas are still bad ideas. No matter whether they are "moderate" or otherwise in the political spectrum. It's worth remembering that in the US in early 2003, the "moderate" position was to support the invasion of Iraq. God save us from that kind of "moderation".

Is there hope for fewer alliances between mainstream conservatives and the Radical Right?

Jorge Alemán takes a (somewhat) hopeful lesson from recents setbacks of the far-right party VOX in Spain to suggest that the noeliberal project more generally is in a moment of crisis. (¿Qué pasa con el odio de las ultraderechas? Pagina/12 22.10.2020):

Hasta ahora las derechas clásicas habían sido ganadas por la extensión del rechazo de la política propio del discurso de las ultraderechas, pero ahora la dominación neoliberal duda sobre si ese es definitiva su camino.

Los teóricos afines al neoliberalismo saben la religión del Mercado no puede sostenerse en el odio, debe encontrar formas más seductoras para sus consumidores. No obstante, por ahora no pueden, temen como siempre el ascenso de fuerzas democráticas y progresistas que ya comienzan a retornar.

[So far, the classical right [center-right conservative] has been winning by continuing their rejection of the politics proper to the discourse of the far-right, but now neoliberal domination has doubts about whether that is definitely the direction they want to take.

Theorists aligned with neoliberalism know the religion of the market cannot be sustained by hatred, that they must find more seductive forms of politics for their consumers. Nevertheless, for now they cannot, fearing as always the rise of democratic and progressive forces that are already beginning to return.]

He is basing his larger observation also on the apparent rejection of Trump in this year's eletion in the US and on Angela Merkel's refusal to make common cause with the far right in Germany. The implication is that because the far right altervatives have an alternative form of politics that supports the established economic order but not the liberal political order. So allying with the far-right remains a chronic temptation for the conservatives parties.

Alemán argues that not only will Trump lose, but also "un estilo político primario con bases megalómanas y paranoicas que solo se afirman en el odio" [a primary political style with megalomaniacal and paranoid bases that are only affirmed in hatred.}

Americans opposed to Trump are at the moment in a don't-count-your-chickens-before-they-are-hatched mode about the Presidentioal election. It's not over until the election and the post-election challenges are finished and Joe Biden is sworn in as President.

But at least in the US political context, Alemán is more confident that I that the defeat of Trump will also mean the end of Trumpism. Not after the Republicans Party backed Trump so enthusiastically for four years, the NeverTrumpers at the Lincoln Project notwithstanding. The prospect of the Republican Party remaking itself in the mode of, say, the Eisenhower Administration is virtually unthinkable at this point. Radical right ideology will continue to drive the Republican Party. And thare is little pospect that "the fever will break," as establishment Democrats endlessly hope.

Democrats and the post-election fight(s)

Heather Cox Richardson discusses the Republicans' post-election planning in a Facebook post of 09/14/2020.  This is just one example among several:

Yesterday, Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has tried to dictate how the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on coronavirus, went on an unhinged rant in a video on Facebook, accusing the CDC of having a “resistance unit” of “seditious” scientists who were permitting Americans to die so they could harm Trump’s reelection campaign.

Caputo urged his listeners “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.” He said that Trump is on track to win in November, but that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will stoke violence rather than conceding. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. Caputo claimed that the Trump supporter killed in Portland, Oregon was “a drill” for what was to come. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing…. [T]here are hit squads being trained all over this country” to stop a second Trump term, and they were, he said, “going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going.” Caputo noted that the pressure of his job had harmed his physical health, and his “mental health has definitely failed.” After his video had been viewed more than 850 times, Caputo shut down his account.

The escalating language of violence indicates that the Trump team thinks it is going to lose the election. [my emphasis]

The legal fight

We won't know much about how the court fight will look until the results come in. Trump's crony Roger Stone, also quoted by Richardson, calls for seizing ballots and blocking voters through intimidation at the polls. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian give a rundown on Stone's suggestions in this segment, Roger Stone: Trump Should Seize Total Power If He Loses Election The Young Turks 09/15/2020:

The angles for legal challenges are things that Democratic attorneys can prepare for right now. And I hope the Party and the Biden campaign are making sure that adequate prepartions for that are in place.

The Messaging Fight

This Lincoln Project ad illustrates one reason I find to be optimistic about the post-election fight over the outcome of the voting, Parasite 09/09/2020:

It's an ad targeting Lindsey Graham. This is another sign that the Lincoln Project is willing to target at least some of Trump's worst enablers. It's also a disgusting ad. It uses visuals to compare Graham to gross parasites. This is honestly real Nazi-level propaganda stuff. This is over the top even for me.

But the Lincoln Project people are actual Republicans, so they don't care. I have no doubt that if they thought a blatantly homophobic ad against Graham would be useful, they would do that, too. Although they might run that through some separate front group. Establishment Democrats are willing to use dishonest homophobic trash smears - but only against progressive Democrats. (Ryan Cooper, This Massachusetts primary is everything wrong with the Democratic Party The Week 08/31/2020) The Democratic establishment gave up years ago on trying to match the Republicans' messaging even on basic effectiveness, much less aggressiveness.

But I assume the Lincoln Project types will still be on the anti-Trump/pro-democracy side when Bunker Boy's election-theft operation goes into its post-election phase at exactly 12:00:01am November 4. So the "united front" against Trump has an actual chance at matching the Trump camp's post-election-fight media messaging. Because unlike the Democrats, the Lincoln Project types won't be under any illusion that there is any honor or goodwill on the Trump side of the post-election fight - and they would ignore it if they thought there was.

As soon as Biden is inaugurated and Trump no longer has the nuclear football, they will go back to using their brand of propaganda against anything and everything decent the Democrats try to do. But, as Joe Stalin said when he was publicly hinting at making a pact with Hitler in 1939, "politics is politics". So maybe the Democrats will get half of Poland out of this deal. Or at least a small chunk of Latvia.

The protest element

Serious question, not meant to be snarky or provocative. How should the official Democratic Party prepare for street violence by Trump supporters in the immediate aftermath of the election?

Trump and his close supporters are now openly encouraging their followers to shoot people. He himself basically confessed to ordering what amounts to a death squad hit on the "antifa" activist, Michael Reinoehl, who had confessed publicly to having shot a follower of the violent far-right group Patriot Prayer, in self-defense, he said. And we've seen examples all across the country of police departments encouraging and actively cooperting with violent far-right "militia" groups. (Death squads? Aspiring death squads?)

Although the actual politcal violence/terrorism during the Trump years has overwhelmingly come from domestic white supremacist groups, I know that some of "black box" anarchist groups like to break windows and start fires during times where there are large demonstrations. They do counter-protests against far-right groups, and some of them would have happy for any excuse to "kick some nazi ass". But to the extent the "antifa" groups actually practice defense in public situations, I certainly wouldn't be one to object if, for instance, they saw some Boogalou Bois thugs kicking the crap out of somebody lying on the street and they interfened to stop it. It is legal for someone to physically intervene to stop a murder in progress, after all. And it takes some guts for them to do it, since they know the chances that the police and the feds will side with the far-right perpetrators even in that case are close extremely high.

So, what will the Democrats as an official political party do after the election? If Ron Brownstein's Atlantic piece the other day is accurate at all (Democrats Won't Cede the Streets This Time 09/10/2020), at least some establishment Democrats are very aware that the Republicans' post-election strategy will involve not only lawsuits and public propaganda, but organized demonstrations (the 2000 "Brooks Brothers" riot on a massive scale). And Trump and his goons are already inciting post-election violence on their side. The anti-Trump/pro-demoracy side may be able to hold its own on the media messaging front, mainly because there are actual Republicans on that side who are willing to use aggressive messaging against their political opponents.

So the Democrats have to promote some kind of public resistance, too, but the real thing this time that would look more like what's happening now in Belarus, and not just senior Democrats tweeting platitudes and writing sternly worded letters. But there is also a real risk that the police and pro-Trump militias will continue and escalate the kind of violence they are already using against Black Lives Matter demonstrators. A couple of measures seem obvious to me.

But first, I want to mention that the discussion about any kind of political violence in the US is still stuck in stale media clichés about The Sixties, i.e., Ghandi-style active nonviolent protest vs. active self-defense protest and preparations. But that framework isn't especially helpful in 2020. For one thing, the idea that the Democrats could put together some kind of effective partisan militia by November is delusional, and nobody is advocating that anyway. (Good Lord, the Biden campaign is jittery about advocating their own programs like a $15 minimum wage!)

But the Democrats certainly should actively encourage and organize peaceful protests nationwide. And one obvious preparation measure is not at all new: fund lots and lots legal obvservers to monitor the protests, whether or not they are official Party events. That's even more urgent because of the systematic police attacks on journalists. And they could have legal teams ready to go when protesters are arrested or illegally prohibited from demonstrating. There are already indepedent group that do some of that work. But the Democratic Party needs to make sure there's a surge supply of such legal services available on November 3 and even before.

And why shouldn't the Democrats hire legal bodyguards and private security to protect demonstrators, as well? They could actually save lives of protesters being attacked. There's certainly no shortage of such entirely legal security services available, although I can imagine they would be leery about entering situations where they could find themselves confronting police, as well as street-thug rightwing goons. On the other hand, there are lots of ex-cops in security services, so their ability to "speak cop" might also help in some cases. But shouldn't the Democratic Party make a serious effort to do that? The fact that the Democratic Party was funding or endorsing such an effort would be a substantial signal to the general public that criminal violence being used against peaceful protesters is a very real risk. It should also give people who don't go out to a demonstration once a month more confidence to participate. And the idea of attacking trained security personal trained and experienced in using legal firearms would itself make the brave patriots of the Bougaloo Bois and the like think a bit more carefully before they decide to assault protesting grandmas.

Fascism and authoritarianism, then and now

Because Donald Trump is such a clear and present danger to formal democracy and the rule of law, his time in office has produced even more scholarly and journalistic accounts of authoritarianism. Not that the theme was being ignored before that. A new German book on the contemporary far right and its narrative themes is titled Das Faschistische Jahrhundert: Neurechte Diskurse zu Abendland, Identität, Europa und Neoliberalismus (The Fascist Century: New Right Discourses on the West, Identity, Europe and Neoliberalism). The title is a reference to a statement of Mussolini, "We have every reason to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a fascist century." declaring the dawn of a "fascist century". He had founded his Fascist Movement in 1919.

The lead essay in that book is by Roger Griffin, author of A Fascist Century (2008). In that book, he argued that fascism "as a party-political force of any consequence, it effectively died in Hitler’s bunker, unable to operate as a ‘cultic’ or ‘ritual’ form of politics with a charismatic leader." But he also argued even in 2008 that there were discernable continuities between fascist nationalism and some prominent ideas in the European far right:

[There is a] strong element of continuity between interwar and post-war schemes of national regeneration, which sometimes nurtured a pan-European vision of rebirth. It also highlights the way an extreme right-wing form of ‘Europeanisation’ has become far more prominent since 1945 as a response to the Cold War, globalisation, and to the rise of a liberal-capitalist European Union fostering multi-culturalism.

Contemporary Eurofascism offers a motley group of ultra-nationalists, neo-Nazis, Third Positionists, New Rightists, and white-supremacists a way of dissociating themselves from the narrowly chauvinistic nationalisms of interwar Europe that were largely based on the nation-state – and hence from Nazi crimes against humanity – while smuggling nationalism into their policies in other guises, such as ‘ethno-regionalism’, or the war on ‘Americanisation’. [my emphasis]

As we know, far right politics can evolve fairly quickly. QAnon went within three years or so from being a demented fringe phenomenon on obscure online message boards to now being rapidly accepted by the Republican Party base in the US and even spreading to Europe. Just like the original fascism, even nationalistic ideologies can become an international trend. Yanis Varoufakis talks about the Nationalist International of far-right parties and movements in present-day Europe.

As always, defining fascism is a tricky business. Even people very familiar with the history wind up relying to some degree on a variation of Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: I don't know how to define fascism, but I know it when I see it!

Historically speaking, since Mussolini called his movement and party Fascist, it would be difficult to argue that his politics were anything but fascist. And since Hitler saw himself as following Mussolini's model in his drive to take power in Germany, it's fairly obvious to see German National Socialism as a form of fascism. (Although among academics that has been seriously disputed!) The Dollfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship of 1933-38 in Austria was even more explicitly modeled on Mussolini's regime.

Other far-right regimes of that period like those in Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Rumania, and Croatia were anti-democratic and authoritarian. But the definitional task is complicated by the fact that while explicitly ideological fascist parties may have supported or participated in those governments, the dominant leadership was not quite so explicitly aligned with a fascist ideology as were Mussolini, Hitler, and Dollfuss. Griffin notes that "Mussolini and Hitler recognised an affinity between their movements that they did not see, for example, in Salazar’s Portugal."

That's worth keeping in mind when looking at today's political situation. I'm inclined to an I-know-when-I-see-it approach when looking at Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, or Narendra Modi in India. But as concepts like "red fascism" or "Islamofascism" remind us, a promiscuous use of the term may wind up obscuring more than it clarifies.

I've previously suggested that Hungary is a good example of how Trumpism could develop - with or without the Orange Clown in the White House. (Hungary as a model for American authoritarians 04/11/2020) The main far-right authoritarian party in Hungary had been Jobbik. The current Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had been a liberal leader during the post-1989 transition, and his current party is Fidesz, which has been affiliated with the conservative European People's Party, though it is currently suspended (though not expelled). But since Orbán became Prime Minister in 2010, he has pushed Hungary in the direction of authoritarian "illiberal democracy." As Zoltan Simon reports (Orban Says He Seeks to End Liberal Democracy in Hungary Bloomberg 06/28/2014):

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.

Authoritarianism takes various forms. Despite his affinity for Putin's style of rule in Russia, Orbán is currently maintaining the outward forms of democratic institutions. We can and should expect authoritarian governments to become more so. But Orbán at this point is not arresting journalists or poisoning opposition leaders. He has established broad control over the press through oligarchs allied with him buying up media outlets, without resorting to formal censorship. Politicians and political parties can organize and campaign in regular elections, but through an extreme form of gerrymandering he has made it virtually impossible for opposition parties to gain a majority in Parliament to be able to form a new government.

All this is a way of saying what the famous apocryphal saying attributed to Mark Twain, that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And the historical background and contemporary similarities can help us understand the very specific events and developments in the US or any other given country.

Radical Right in Real Time

There is a lot of coverage currently that looks at current developments among radical rights sects and the Republican Party in light of the current danger to democracy.

Dave Neiwert gives a detailed update on the Republican/far-right political narrative about "antifa§ in The right’s eliminationist narrative about antifa was borne of conspiracism and lives in it now Daily Kos 08/03/2020.

Mark Bray discusses the antifa-conspiracy narrative in Antifa: Terrorist Group or Trump Scapegoat? Amanpour and Company 06/04/2020:

Bray also writes about antifa in Antifa isn’t the problem. Trump’s bluster is a distraction from police violence. Washington Post 06/01/2020.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has spent a lot of time this year on YouTube videos discussing her scholarly work and contemporary politics, and also posting political commentary on her Facebook page and at Bill Moyer's website. She has given particular history to American political parties in her professional work, including To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014). She takes what I would call a realistic view of US political history that engages directly with how the longterm development and expansion of democracy has simultaneously been intimately connected with inequality and brutality. One of her recent essays is Democracy Under Attack 09/07/2020:

Democracy depends on the rule of law. Today, we learned that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who rose to become a Cabinet official thanks to his prolific fundraising for the Republican Party, apparently managed to raise as much money as he did because he pressured employees at his business, New Breed Logistics, to make campaign contributions that he later reimbursed through bonuses. Such a scheme is illegal. ...

Democracy depends on equality before the law. But Black and brown people seem to receive summary justice at the hands of certain law enforcement officers, rather than being accorded the right to a trial before a jury of their peers. In a democracy, voters elect representatives who make laws that express the will of the community. “Law enforcement officers” stop people who are breaking those laws, and deliver them to our court system, where they can tell their side of the story and either be convicted of breaking the law, or acquitted. When police can kill people without that process, justice becomes arbitrary, depending on who holds power.

Democracy depends on reality-based policy. Increasingly it is clear that the Trump administration is more concerned about creating a narrative to hold power than it is in facts. [my emphasis]

Sarah Churchwell takes a look at the real existing American fascism during the days when Mussolini and Hitler were practicing their versions of it in American Fascism: It Has Happened Here NYB Blog 06/22/2020.

Fundamentalist Christianity and its institutions are still critical links in the US between the Republican Party and the most fanatical far-right attitudes and conspiracy theories. Here are a few recent pieces focusing on that aspect:

• Adam Gabbatt, 'Unparalleled privilege': why white evangelicals see Trump as their savior Guardian 01/11/2020
• Paul Rosenberg, The Power Worshippers: A look inside the American religious right Aljazeera 06/02/2020
• Eric Eykel, Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims 'Jesus Was White' Religion Dispatches 06/29/2020
• Eric Miller, Trump’s Unholy Alliances: An Interview with Sarah Posner Religion and Politics 07/29/2020
• John Stoehr, Sadism Is Still the Point for Most White Evangelicals Religion Dispatches 08/17/2020
• Michael Peppard, Mike Pence’s Idolatrous RNC Speech Commonweal 08/30/2020
• Michael Luo, American Christianity’s White-Supremacy Problem New Yorker 09/02/2020
• Bob Smietana, Video from priest says Catholics who vote for Democrats will go to hell. One bishop approves this message. Religion News Service 09/06/2020i>

Police agencies "blind in the right eye” to the violent far right

As the Trump Administration seems to be in full crash-and-burn mode, lots of insiders are trying to position themselves and/or their agencies in a better light. So that's always something to keep in mind as a background situation for stories like this: Betsy woodruff Swan, They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them. Politico 08/26/2020:

Just a few weeks into the new administration, DHS leaders noticed an alarming trend: a burst of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and University City, Mo.

“We were all scratching our heads saying, ‘What is this?’” Neumann said. “You could sense that something about the threat was changing and morphing, but we couldn’t quite put our fingers on it until Charlottesville.”

On Aug. 11, 2017, scores of young white men carrying tiki torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter,” in a public display of white supremacist mobilization that shocked and sickened the country. The next day, counterprotesters thronged the streets of Charlottesville to push back. And a white supremacist drove a car through that crowd, injuring 19 people and killing a woman named Heather Heyer.

Trump’s infamous response to the weekend: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

It could have been a moment of action from the federal government, Neumann said — a chance for a systematic White House review of the threat’s scope and causes. But it wasn’t

The deference of local police agencies to violent far-right groups has been growing - even though some of them like the Sovereign Citizens groups have been known to be particularly dangerous for police themselves.

It's also not new that there would be actual overlaps and clsse connections between police departments and far-right groups. In the South during the segregation period of roughly 1876-1970, such connections between official law enforcement and KKK-type groups were familiar enough.

Andy Campbell reports in (Portland Police Are Giving Up On Policing The Far-Right Huffpost 08/25/2020):

Allowing local far-right groups to wreak havoc on the city isn’t a big departure for the PPB. As the Proud Boys cheered, officers launched tear gas and other munitions at anti-fascist counterprotesters during a rally in 2017, which left one antifa protester with a gas canister lodged in his head. Police gave the Proud Boys an escort out of the city following a rally in 2018 that saw the far-right demonstrators outnumbered by anti-fascists. A key officer had a friendly and ongoing relationship with the leader of Proud Boys affiliate group Patriot Prayer, judging from texts obtained by Willamette Week.

But relinquishing the act of policing to the brawlers themselves is both new and concerning, especially given the context: Local extremists have escalated their violent tactics in recent weeks, brazenly introducing guns and a lot more weaponry to the melee.

This is another major problem with American policing, that they are two often "blind in the right eye" when it comes to violent political groups.

It would be a disaster if a new Democratic Administration in Washington failed to address the chronic problems of policing in a serious way. And it certainly needs to be serious enough to bring down the obscene number of police murders of unarmed black people who are posing no physical threat to them or anyone else.

How the far right is meddling in the BLM protests

Dave Neiwert has been reporting at Daily Kos on the sinister role that far-right extremists have been playing in relation to the Blck Lives Matter protest uprising that has been going on for weeks.

In 'White supremacists' arrested while trying to amplify protest violence, Richmond mayor says Daily Kos 07/27/2020, he writes:

We’ve had evidence for some time that right-wing extremists have been lurking at anti-police protests around the nation, amplifying the violence by engaging in vandalism, assaults, and attacks on police — often while pretending to be there to support Black Lives Matter and antifascists leading the protests.

This weekend in Richmond, Virginia, police arrested several such saboteurs during a Black Lives Matter protest, according to city Mayor Levar Stoney. “White supremacists” were carrying pro-BLM signs and breaking windows at downtown businesses, Stoney said, but were stopped when BLM protesters pointed them out to police.

"We've spoken on many occasions about those who've chosen a more violent route to express their discontent, and what that does for the overall movement towards social justice," Stoney told reporters Sunday. "Last night that reared its ugly head right here in the City of Richmond ... We saw some violent actions, violent protests, spearheaded by white supremacists. And frankly, it was disgusting. Disgusting. As they held plywood shields that read, BLM, these folks toured areas of damage downtown, The Fan, breaking windows, tagging private property with hateful language." [my emphasis]

See also his pieces:

• Militiamen's reactionary presence at protests threatens democracy, and police appear on their side Daily Kos 07/31/2020
• Don't be fooled: 'Boogaloo' may attract all kinds of fans, but it's a violent far-right movement Daily Kos 07/14/2020

When we're dealing with anything so complex as the current uprising set off by the sadistic murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis cops, we need to be able to walk and talk at the same time. A small demonstration, like a picket line in front of a store, is relatively easy for the organizers to keep orderly and focused. The same is true for most union protests, even larger ones, not least because unions have practice in organizing protests.

It's always possible for passions to run high and for individuals to get rowdy even at those kinds of protests. And there can be genuine bad actors like the Bougaloo Bois at work whose goal is specifically to discredit the protests.

Large protests like the big antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s, the marches against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the civil-rights March on Washington in 1963, the Women's March after Bunker Boy's inauguration in 2017, or today's Black Lives Matter marches, are more complicated phenomena. Even a large march or protest can be well-organized. But they inevitably attract people with a wide range of ages and motivations, including people who are mainly attracted by the excitement. And some of them may cause trouble against the wishes of the organizers.

Jerry Brown has some relevant remarks in this Facebook video, Trump is so bizarre and so deviant in so many ways ... 07/27/2020. Referring to his years as Mayor of Oakland (1999-2007), he says, "Look, Oakland, I was there, they've got several hundred anarchists that like to break windows, light fires, and protest. But local people can handle it." He's referring to a local group of "black box" anarchists there. But Jerry is capable of making practical judgments about real situations, and he could hardly be more critical of Trump's use of paramilitary goon squads against local protesters:

See also, Former CA Gov. Jerry Brown on COVID-19 and Protests Amanpour and Company 07/29/2020:

But the weeks of the nationwide BLM protests have been for the most part peaceful. Republicans and white supremacists are quick to condemn any protests that disturbs their own comfort even momentarily as "violent." But that's not a definition the rest of us should accept. I'm not inclined to split theoretical hairs over whether breaking a window during a demonstration qualifies as "violence". But anyone with a brain or a conscience should be able to distinguish between violence against property and violence against people. And when it comes to toppled statues, I'm not going to cry over them or spend a lot of energy moralizing about an unauthorized toppling versus a procedurally correct one. Especially since American culture makes a fetish about the nobility of toppling statues related to regimes of which the American government disapproves.

Here's a tenth-anniversary reposting of the famous toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad in 2003, April 9, 2003: Saddam Hussein's statue falls 04/09/2013:

Commentator Lara Logan was giving it an enthusiastic propaganda commentary. The footage was frequently used in introducing news reports on the war and in retrospective accounts. Often the footage was shown edited to make it appear that the statue toppled immediately off the pedestal, which we see in that footage actually happened in two stages, which doesn't have exactly the same theatrical affect. Shots from a longer distance showed that the crowd attending the event was only a couple of hundred people at most, although that clip shows people walking by the scene as though it was no big deal. It was also the very next day that massive looting broke out in Baghdad - and I mean massive, not just a few broken windows - which most accounts of the Iraq War identify as an extremely important moment that discredited the occupation in an important way at an early moment.

But that statue-toppling became an iconic moment, especially for Iraq War fans. It's worth remembering that the Confederate armies commanded by Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson killed far more soldiers of the United States armed forces than the Iraqi army of the guerrilla fighters during the long disaster that followed the statue-topping ever did.

The US today and political polarization in Weimar Germany

Corey Pein did a report last year for The New Republic on a development that at this point is a small curiosity in American politics, , Antifa Is Arming Itself Against a Trump Crackdown 07/02/2019.

Armed far-right groups are hard to overlook in the US. Dave Neiwert recently wrote about a recent development in the Trump Administration's encouragement of such groups. Bureau of Land Management director's deference to 'constitutionalists' creates chaos in the West Daily Kos 02/12/2020:

The nexus of the law enforcement problem is the Constitutionalist Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a far-right group that has been steadily recruiting sheriffs, deputies, and other police officers into their “constitutionalist” belief system. The CSPOA contends, like all such “radical localism” ideologues, that the county sheriff, and not any federal agency, is the highest law-enforcement authority in the land.

These beliefs, as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s disturbing investigation of the CSPOA’s reach explained, originated with the Posse Comitatus, a profoundly racist and anti-Semitic organization of the 1970s and ‘80s whose ideas had a kind of underground currency in rural America for awhile. The Posse’s leaders preached that the Constitution limited the federal government’s powers to raising a military and conducting foreign policy. The intent, as always, was to restrict if not nullify the government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws, as well as gun control laws, land use, and a host of other policies. In the end, the Posse was urging its followers to ready themselves for acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. [my emphasis]

The police and courts in the United States have generally always been less aggressive and less harsh toward violent far-right groups than toward left-wing ones. It's understandable, since the far-right seeks to preserve the established order of money, power, and privilege. Even when the groups' rhetoric is populist. Their version of the elite they claim to be fighting is likely to be some variation of The Jews, Hollywood, The Media, colleges, and Mean Libruls.

Understandable, but often dangerous even for law enforcement themselves. Because violent crackpot groups attract more than their share of fools and unstable characters. And groups like the "sovereign citizens" often target police who they see as representing illegitimate authority.

The main terrorism problem in the US recently has come from the white-supremacist far right, even more so than from Islamic fundamentalists, whose politics are also a different brand of far right. The extreme fundamentalist Christian Reconstruction ideology often plays a role in the thinking of violent far-right sects.

There is an occasional case of political terrorism in the US that more-or-less fits the profile of leftwing. But they are very rare.

The small groups on which Pein reported were antifa (antifascist) activists who organize and counter-protest against far-right groups who advocate and practice violence based on their ideologies. So they have good reason to be prepared to defend themselves, a right the NRA invokes incessantly to promote endlessly growing gun sales. (With no apparent regard to the ugly practical consequences.)

I don't foresee anything resembling the partisan militia groups of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and early 1930s becoming a significant factor in US politics in the immediately foreseeable future. In Germany, not only the Nazis but other rightwing parties had their militias, or at least goon squads, e.g., the NSDAP Brownshirts (SA). The Social Democrats and the Communists had their own militant groups who could put up a physical fight when it was called for.

In Austria, the conservative Christian-Social Party had an allied armed militia called the Heimwehr. The Social Democrats had their own militia-type group, the Republikanischer Schutzbund. And the Austrian Nazis had their own goon squad, too. The clashes between the Heimwehr and the Schutzbund resulted in what is known as the Austrian civil war of 1934, although that particularly intense phase of the clashes lasted only a few days. But it was a very significant event in Austrian history, which became a huge barrier to Austria having the possibility of a united resistance against the German invasion in 1938. The Austrian Nazis directed by Berlin also made an unsuccessful coup attempt in Austria in 1934 that included the (successful) assassination of the conservative dictator Engelbert Dollfuß.

In both Germany and Austria, the partisan militia phenomenon had a lot to do with the conditions in the two countries after the First World War. For one thing, there were millions of men who had served in the respective Imperial Armies who had training and experience with firearms. Another was the chaotic conditions following the war in both countries, Austria itself being created as a separate country for the first time. Both nations had new democracies, and both were under restrictions from the victories Allies on their official military armaments.

Military conflict actually continued for both Germany and Austria after the surrender. From the Wikipedia entry on the German Freikorps, the paramilitary groups supported by the German government:

Freikorps also fought against the communists in the Baltics, Silesia, Poland and East Prussia after the end of World War I, including aviation combat, often with significant success. Anti-Slavic racism was sometimes present, although the ethnic cleansing ideology and anti-Semitism expressed in later years had not yet developed. In the Baltics they fought against communists as well as against the newborn independent democratic countries Estonia and Latvia. In Latvia, Freikorps murdered 300 civilians in Mitau who were suspected of having "Bolshevik sympathies". After the capture of Riga, another 3000 alleged communists were killed, including summary executions of 50–60 prisoners daily. Though officially disbanded in 1920, some of them continued to exist for several years and many Freikorps' attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the government in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Their attack was halted when German citizens loyal to the government went on strike, cutting off many services and making daily life so problematic that the coup was called off. [my emphasis]

In Germany, the bloody suppression of the mass demonstrations in 1919 that came to be known as the Spartacus Revolt and then the violent overturning of the leftwing Bavarian Soviet government that same year generated massive distrust between the Social Democrats and the Communists. The failed Kapp Putsch was a violent attempt at overthrowing the constitutional democracy that was thwarted by the massive general strike supported by the left. And the conservative parties never particularly trusted the whole idea of Weimar democracy anyway. So, the democracy's lack of political legitimacy in the eyes of many on the left and the right prevented the establishment of what these days we somewhat vaguely call a "monopoly of violence" for the government.

This is one aspect of the "lessons of Weimar" that is difficult to apply to the United States in 2020. Others, like the fatal austerity policies of 1930-32, have more obvious direct relevance.