Decisive Action.

2020 Was Just A Rehearsal:  From a purely strategic standpoint, Trump’s, and the new, post-November 2022, Republican dominated Congress’s, best move would be to take Biden and the Democrats completely by surprise. If the attention of Trump’s enemies is focused almost entirely on what he might do in 2024, then the obvious strategy is to move against them as soon as the new Congress convenes. Depose Biden, and install Trump as President, in January 2023.

THE FALL OF AMERICA would unleash hell: economically, diplomatically, militarily, culturally; the whole world would be rocked to its foundations. Like the fall of Rome, the nearest historical equivalent, the collapse of the United States would mark the end of an era.

The musings of a history buff? Not really. The odds of the American Republic collapsing into chaos and civil strife – even civil war – are already better than even.

In the latest issue of the Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Barton Gellman, puts it bluntly: “Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.”

The Washington Post is no less pessimistic. It has just published an opinion piece by three retired Generals urging the military to begin preparing now for the “insurrection of 2024”. As befits senior military officers, their words are not minced:

[T]he Defence Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military […..] The military and lawmakers have been gifted hindsight to prevent another insurrection from happening in 2024 – but they will succeed only if they take decisive action now.

These words should quell immediately any impulse to scoff at the idea that the United States could fall. The Generals’ opinion piece is not so much a straw, as a whole haystack, in the wind. The key question it provokes is daunting. Either, they are writing to warn Trump and his followers that the United States Armed Forces are prepared to stop them. Or, it is an act of desperation from military men who already sense that the armed forces can no longer be considered reliable defenders of the US Constitution.

Alarmingly, at least some of the Generals’ advice suggests that it may be the latter:

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove all potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

The picture painted here could not be clearer. If American democracy falls beneath the blows of Trump and his followers, then the American armed forces will not escape the breakdown of legitimate authority, nor the open recourse to violence, that will sweep across the rest of American society. The Army, itself, will split between Trumpists and Constitutionalists. Civil war will be inevitable.

The most astonishing feature of this looming threat to American society and its democratic institutions is how few members of the Constitutionalist political class can see it. From the President on down, there is not the slightest evidence that anything is being done to hasten the “decisive action” the Generals are demanding. The Democratic Party, in particular, is a rudderless hulk, riven by faction, and incapable of self-discipline. Trump and his followers, with scant regard for the Constitution or even the Rule of Law, are clearly preparing to re-write the political rules of engagement, and the Democrats just look at them, blinking helplessly in the headlights of the Republican Party’s onrushing Mack Truck.

One can only speculate what the Generals are saying to themselves – and any other Constitutionalists still willing to fight for the republic – behind closed doors. The strategic position can only be described as dire.

The mid-term elections are less than twelve months away and, right now, all the smart money says that the Republicans will re-capture both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The key question then, of course, is what will they do with the full powers of Congress at their disposal?

Some will no doubt be clamouring to impeach Joe Biden. But, unless the Republican Party emerges from the mid-term elections with two-thirds of the Senate under its control, Biden’s conviction on the Senate floor is most unlikely. Impeachment also runs the risk of finally concentrating the minds of the Democrats. As Trump, himself, demonstrated, an incumbent president has a lot of resources – military resources in particular – upon which he can call in extremis. In Biden’s case, those resources might even agree to come to the President’s rescue.

From a purely strategic standpoint, Trump’s and the Republican Congress’s best move would be to take Biden and the Democrats completely by surprise. If the attention of Trump’s enemies is focused almost entirely on what he might do in 2024, then the obvious strategy is to move against them as soon as the new Congress convenes. Depose Biden and install Trump as President in January 2023.

But, surely, there is no legal way President Biden can be deposed? If the Republicans lack the numbers to impeach him, then he cannot be removed from office until the General Election of 2024. Obviously, that is correct. But the Republicans may decide that the “legal way” is not their best option. If they can depose Biden quickly and cleanly, without warning, then they can, almost certainly, rely upon their mates in the Supreme Court to bestow an ex post facto blessing on Trump’s fait accompli. (They would no doubt plead that the maintenance of peace and national unity demanded nothing less of them!)

The Republican blitzkrieg would be swift and brutally effective. By a Joint Declaration of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the 2020 Presidential Election would be declared fraudulent and Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory voided. The Joint Resolution would, further, confirm that the Office of President of the United States had again been bestowed upon Donald Trump by a clear majority of the American people on 3 November 2020. This would be acknowledged by correcting the Electoral College vote, and by the Chief Justice administering the Oath of Office to the President-Elect. The proper constitutional order would, thereby, be restored.

Congress would then decree the immediate arrest of the “November 2020 Traitors”, leaving the House and the Senate devoid of Democrats. Trump loyalists in the armed forces would attempt to arrest all senior military officers deemed sympathetic to Biden and the Constitution. Public protest would be met by a declaration of martial law.

American democracy would thus be extinguished in less than a week – and all hell would break loose. The more numerous and much wealthier “Blue States” ( i.e. Democratic Party-controlled) would secede from the Union. A second American civil war would tear the United States apart. The savagery of the conflict would intensify. Ultimately, as Margaret Atwood anticipated in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, an uneasy truce would follow the use of tactical nuclear weapons by the armies of both sides.

With America in ruins, and the global economy in free-fall, ethno-nationalism and autarky would be the order of the day. To complete this grim apocalyptic picture, successive global pandemics and runaway climate change would bury what remained of humanity’s hopes. A new Dark Age would descend.

A grim prognosis. Which is why we must all hope that a great many more Americans than “three retired Generals” are, at this very moment, readying themselves for “decisive action”.

A version of this essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 December 2021.

Milley-tary Intervention.

Face Off: Informed that President Donald Trump and his allies were planning to claim victory in the 2020 presidential election and use their control of the federal apparatus to stage what amounted to a coup d’état, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, is said to have responded: “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”

THE SANE HALF of the United States must be breathing a huge sigh of relief. Excerpts from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, published today (15/7/21) in The Washington Post, reveal just how important the character of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has become to the fate of the American republic. Confronted with the demands of an out-of-control Donald Trump, a Chairman lacking in General Mark Milley’s determination to defend his country’s constitution may well have buckled. Fortunately, this general was not the buckling kind.

Informed that Trump and his allies were planning to claim victory in the 2020 presidential election and use their control of the federal apparatus to stage what amounted to a coup d’état, Milley is said to have responded:

They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.

Very true, but in describing the reality of the situation with such uncompromising, gun-metal clarity, Milley was opening up a very large can of worms. The guiding constitutional principle in relation to the armed forces of the United States is that they must, at all times, remain under civilian control. The “Founding Fathers”, most of whom had received a classical education, were only too aware of the role Julius Caesar played in the downfall of the Roman Republic. Generals, they insisted, must be kept on tight civilian leash.

All well and good, but what happens when the civilians in charge (like the Secretary of Defence) are all the carefully selected political creatures of a man intent on making himself President-for-Life – and to hell with the Constitution! – what then?

Well, then it comes down to an unelected military officer deciding, on his own recognisance, that the orders of his Commander-in-Chief (i.e. the President) are unlawful and therefore unconstitutional, and consequently ought not to be obeyed by him, or anybody under his command. Paraphrasing the notorious formula of the US officer in Vietnam: “It would become necessary to destroy the Constitution in order to save it.”

A grim decision. But, the alternative decision: to obey the orders of a Commander-in-Chief who has just invoked the Insurrection Act, or declared a State of National Emergency, in order to steal the election from his opponent and feed the Constitution of the United States into the shredder; would have been even grimmer.

Perhaps word of Milley’s refusal to go along with Trump’s intended autogolpé (the Spanish term for a self-administered coup-d’état) tested the courage of Trump and his supporters to its breaking-point. After all, and as the failure of the attack on the US Capitol Building revealed, any insurrection attempted without the active co-operation of “the guys with guns” is doomed to fail.

Milley’s love of history stood the American people in very good stead during the final, harrowing weeks of 2020 and the first 20 days of 2021. Trump he insisted, was preaching the “Gospel of the Führer” and the USA was facing what he called “a Reichstag moment”. [The destruction of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, by a young Communist arsonist, was seized upon by Hitler and his Nazis as proof of an impending Communist uprising requiring the suspension of the German constitution and the authorisation of rule by decree.] A week after the storming of the Capitol Building on 6 January, Milley raged: “These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II”. How Trump must regret his failure to appoint someone other than Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs!

Though America made it through the perilous weeks of Trump’s incipient treachery and celebrated joyously President Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House, the United States military may soon be called upon to rescue the republic a second time.

So wedded has the Republican Party become to Trump’s “Gospel of the Führer” that they have launched an all-out assault on the democratic process in the states it controls. Supposedly convinced by Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”, the Republicans are now showing every sign of being willing to steal the 2022 mid-term elections.

If the comprehensive voter suppression laws they have passed allow them to reclaim both the House and the Senate, there are those within the Republican Party’s ranks who would not hesitate to have Congress declare the 2020 presidential election result null-and-void and seek to re-instate Trump in the White House. Were this scenario to unfold, President Biden would have two choices: acquiescence; or, to declare martial law, proscribe the Republican Party, and arrest its leaders, congresspeople and senators. Pending the calling together of a new Constitutional Convention, the drawing up of a new and unequivocally democratic (small ‘d’) constitution, and the holding of new elections, Biden would be required to rule by decree – and the US Military, the FBI and the CIA – the “guys with guns” – would have to let him do it.

In order to save the American republic, they would have to destroy it. Off the wall scenario? Let’s hope so. It would be unwise, however, to ignore President Biden’s impassioned speech, delivered earlier this week to constitutional scholars in Philadelphia, the key sentences of which were heavy with foreboding:

So hear me clearly. There’s an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are, who we are as Americans. But make no mistake, bullies and merchants of fear, peddlers of lies, are threatening the very foundation of our country ….. We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the civil war, That’s not hyperbole. Since the civil war. The Confederates, back then, never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on 6 January. I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.

And who prevented the army of the racist, slave-owning, and profoundly undemocratic Confederate States of America from marching into the US Capitol? The United States armed forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant and their Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln – that’s who.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 16 July 2021.

Be Woke - Or Go Politically Broke.

Conventional Wisdom? The Republican Right is convinced that to “go woke” is to “go broke”. It simply does not believe sufficient Americans feel strongly enough about social justice to make any kind of boycott remotely effective. Clearly, the Boards of Directors of more and more American corporations disagree. 

RECENT MOVES by large American corporations to distance themselves from Republican Party voter suppression initiatives signal a profound historical shift. For the past 100 years, most political scientists have worked on the assumption that no political party cares more for the welfare of American capitalism than the Republican Party – and vice-versa. To hear Republican presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio come out swinging against Delta Airlines for its criticism of Georgia’s new voting law is, therefore, both confusing and disconcerting. If “woke” capitalist corporations have joined the ranks of the Republican Party’s enemies, then who the hell are its friends?

Before answering that question, however, let’s sample just a little of Rubio’s invective. According to the left-wing American periodical, Mother Jones:

“In a strange line of logic, the Florida senator seemed to argue that the law, which among other restrictions bans non-poll-workers from distributing water to waiting voters, was not as bad as genocide against Uighur Muslims in China, where Delta also does business, and therefore should not be subject to the company’s reproach. ‘They make billions of dollars in a country that doesn’t even have elections…and they don’t say a word about it,’ Rubio argued, ‘but in America they’re prepared to boycott a state and condemn them publicly…They’re hypocrites.’”

Not that they would stoop so low, but Delta Airlines could have responded that Georgia’s Republicans and the Chinese Communist Party have all the appearance of political brothers, given that in both jurisdictions only one party is allowed to win.

The airline might also have pointed out that, while a boycott of China by Delta would have not the slightest impact on the fate of the Uighurs, a boycott of Georgia would greatly assist the efforts of black voters in that state to defend their hard-won civil rights. Certainly, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 had that effect!

The Republican Right is, however, absolutely convinced that to “go woke” is to “go broke”. It simply does not believe sufficient Americans feel strongly enough about voter suppression to make any kind of boycott remotely effective. Clearly, the Board of Directors of Delta Airlines disagree.

And, they’re right. The demographic structure of the United States population is undergoing a profound transformation. It is becoming younger and browner and, worse still, from the Republicans’ perspective, it is becoming “woker”. If this were not the case: if the ‘natural home’ of a clear majority of American voters was the Republican Party; then what possible interest would GOP-controlled state legislatures have in making it harder for young, brown and black Americans to cast their ballots?

Capitalists, both in the United States – and here in New Zealand – are rightly focusing their attention on the workforces and consumers needed to generate profits in the future. Far-Right political strategists refuse to acknowledge this. Unfortunately, for them, the terrified and angry whites upon whose slumping shoulders Donald Trump built his 2016 victory, are growing older and sicker and deader. Their political dominance can only be maintained by keeping voters who do not look and think like themselves away from the polling booths. But, that way lies the suppression of democracy and civil war – neither of which is particularly good for business. The last thing intelligent capitalists ever want to see is blood in their own streets.

Donald Trump’s Republicans must be getting ever-so-slightly panicky about how many of the party’s friends and allies are abandoning them. They are right to be worried. By alienating corporate capitalism and making bitter enemies of the mainstream media and universities, the Trumpists are, if they only knew it, corralling their followers into a socio-economic and cultural dead-end.

When all is said and done, it is corporate capitalism that manufactures the future, the mainstream media which decorates it, and the universities that pass out the credentials entitling their holders to live in the nicest parts of it. By shutting themselves out of liberal capitalism’s Emerald City, Trump’s poorly educated munchkins are slamming the door on their own and their children’s best chance for a happy and prosperous future.

“Go woke, go broke!”, the Far-Right gurus bray. They should pay more attention to history. For more than 250 years, Capitalism has avoided going broke by consistently putting its prodigious energies behind those widest awake to the future’s most profitable possibilities.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 April 2021.

Revolution Postponed.

Crisis Averted - Again: In a funny/sad sort of way it’s a pity that Joe Biden won. Once again, Americans will convince themselves that the system, the Constitution, has worked exactly as it should. Yes, that same Constitution did allow a man like Donald Trump to wield full executive power for four years. But, it also gave the American people the opportunity to correct their mistake – which they have just done. So, crisis averted. Time for everyone to stand back and stand down. Sleepy Joe and Kamala have got this. (Are you listening Bernie? Do you hear what we’re saying, AOC?)

THE THIRD AMERICAN REVOLUTION has been postponed, but it has not been cancelled. With the American news media (Fox News included!) calling the Presidential Election for Joe Biden, that part of America which still believes in American democracy is allowing itself “a brief period of rejoicing”.

The followers of Donald Trump, sullen and watchful, have yet to accept the judgement of those powerful social forces for whom the news media speaks. With every day that passes without a clear call-to-arms against the fast-consolidating Biden ascendancy, however, the Red Hats’ stomach for a full-scale uprising will diminish. In the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly”. For Trump, and Trumpism, delay means death.

That a crushing coup d’état was not unleashed the moment the trend toward a Biden victory became clear bears testimony to Trump’s signature lack of organisational talent. While indisputably the master of improvisational political theatre, the President has never demonstrated the slightest ability to stick to a script – let alone write one! The slow and careful accumulation of the human and material resources necessary to seize the American state has proved, thankfully, well beyond Trump’s capacity. Hence his personal tragedy’s rapid descent into farce – as illustrated to perfection in the Veep-like absurdity of the “Four Seasons” press conference!

Were Trump and his rapidly shrinking band of courtiers to issue orders to the United States Military, demanding the forcible impoundment of the ballots in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, it is now highly unlikely that they would be followed. Nor can Trump rely upon the Supreme Court to pull his electoral irons out of the fire. The nine justices may not see eye-to-eye on many things, but it’s a safe bet that any request to nullify the largest tally of presidential votes in American history would be met with a polite – and unanimous – refusal.

Possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law; and right now Biden has what Trump most wants: public acceptance of the “facts on the ground”. Confirmation that he will be the next President of the United States.

Where does this leave the Third American Revolution? The answer, sadly, is stalled. What should have happened in the 1970s; what could have happened in 2009 as Capitalism threatened to expire in the death-grip of the Global Financial Crisis; looks certain to be put off again. Why? Because, once again, just as the American system seemed on the very brink of political catastrophe, it rescued itself.

Think about the last time a malignant, mentally-ill President was holed-up in the White House, asking himself if he dared to strike down American democracy. Richard Nixon, in 1974, was considered so unstable that his Secretary of Defence, James R. Schlesinger, distributed a secret memo to the commanders of the military bases around Washington DC, advising them not to respond to any Presidential order to deploy troops onto the streets of the capital unless it was counter-signed by himself. It turned out to be unnecessary. The US system, the US Constitution, ended up working in precisely the way it was supposed to work. The crisis was averted. The overwhelming majority of Americans stood back and stood down.

But, not all Americans. The effective deposition of a sitting President, by putting the rights contained in the First Amendment to the US constitution to effective use, was the last straw for the most reactionary elements of the American ruling-class. Democracy was out of control. The rapid post-war expansion of the “Middle Class” had raised expectations beyond the capitalist system’s capacity to satisfy them. Organised labour was out of control. Blacks, women, minorities of all descriptions, were demanding their place in the sun. The Third American Revolution: the revolution in which the republican institutions arising out of the First American Revolution (1776-1783) and the efforts of the Second American Revolution, usually referred to as the Civil War (1861-1865), to infuse those institutions with genuine liberty, equality and democracy will finally be vindicated and transformed in a radical re-imagining of American freedom – it simply had to be stopped.

In their essence, this is what the four decades since Watergate have been about: delaying the Third American Revolution. Using this insight as a key, it is relatively easy to unlock the recent history of the Republican Party. It’s increasingly strident efforts to drive back the gains of African-Americans in the 1960s; its cynical alliance with the open misogyny and homophobia of fundamentalist Christianity; its packing of the US judiciary with reactionary judges; its deliberate debasement of US political culture and discourse: all of it has been about putting off the evil day when the full revolutionary potential of American democracy manifests itself.

And the Democratic Party? It’s history, over the past four decades, has been all about convincing both itself, and the American people, that it is not the political vehicle for bringing the Third American Revolution into being – even though anyone who pays the slightest attention to the sort of Americans who are voting for the Democratic Party knows that it must be.

Which is why, in a funny/sad sort of way it’s a pity that Biden won. Once again, Americans will convince themselves that the system, the Constitution, has worked exactly as it should. Yes, that same Constitution did allow a man like Donald Trump to wield full executive power for four years. But, it also gave the American people the opportunity to correct their mistake – which they have just done. So, crisis averted. Time for everyone to stand back and stand down. Sleepy Joe and Kamala have got this. (Are you listening Bernie? Do you hear what we’re saying, AOC?)

Except that the most reactionary elements of the American ruling-class can no more afford to stand back and stand down in 2020 than they could in 1974. Forty years on, they have so much more to lose. In 1972, when Richard Nixon won his second term in a landslide of historic proportions, the top 1 percent of Americans controlled roughly 10 percent of their country’s wealth. After 40 years of more-or-less constant counter-revolutionary success that share has grown to nearly 30 percent!

Their shield and their sword, the Republican Party, is not about to help Biden “heal America’s soul”. On the contrary, it’s going to do everything it can to exacerbate the differences within the Democratic Party and, by doing so, break-up the fragile social unity created by Trump’s anarchic improv theatre.

Deep down, the forces of reaction will be glad to see him go. The Republican president they will need to keep the Third American Revolution at bay for another 40 years must be made of much sterner stuff.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 November 2020.

Giving Trump Enough Rope.

Not Drowning, Waving: What the political scientists and mainstream media pundits, the Hollywood celebrities and TV comedy show hosts, all fail to understand is that they are the people who keep the Right’s rope tight. The more they disparage and deride Trump and his “deplorable” followers, the tighter they wind it around themselves: the harder they try to pull the Right down, the more closely the separate fibres of Trump’s eclectic coalition are drawn together.

THE SPEED at which the Right is mutating is nowhere more evident than in Donald Trump’s America. One has only to examine the tensions within the American Republican Party to get some measure of its disarray. In spite of controlling all three branches of the federal government, the Republicans have never looked more fractious. Fewer and fewer on the right are convinced that politics-as-usual is any longer capable of delivering the changes they seek.

The American experience is far from unique. Across the world, rightists are rejecting the argument that political power is accessible only from the centre. Increasingly, right-wing leaders and activists are turning to ideas and traditions long considered moribund, disreputable – or both. The era of monolithic parties, held together by monolithic ideologies, has ended. By twisting a campaign rope out of many ideological strands, Trump was able to lasso the White House and hog-tie the institutions of American democracy.

It was not always so. For many decades, American political scientists fondly assumed that the average conservative voter in the United States was an essentially benign creature. Conservatives affirmed the verities of the Christian religion and the traditional values which flowed from them. They believed fervently in individual liberty, the sanctity of private property and the virtues of untrammelled capitalist enterprise. If asked to sum up their political philosophy in a single sentence, they would, likely as not, repeat some version of Thomas Jefferson’s claim: “The best government is that which governs least.”

What conservatives were most emphatically not assumed to be, were malignant enemies of freedom and progress. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower cleaved proudly to the founding principles of the American republic. On occasion, Republicans had even been known to fight for them.

This “progressive” conservatism was, however, always more apparent than real. It required the constant effort of newspaper editors, party grandees and intelligent presidential aspirants to robe the naked prejudices of conservative Americans in the togas of small-r republican virtue. So long as the means of political communication remained in the hands of these political elites, the vicious ideas and aspirations of small-town America could be filtered out of their betters’ lofty political discourses. No one gave much thought to what might happen to right-wing politics if technology advanced to the point where every citizen could become their own publisher.

Even in the Internet Age, the idea that the President of the United States might dispense altogether with the services of the elite media and communicate directly with his electoral base via social media remained unthinkable – until Trump started tweeting.

Political scientists are aghast at the intellectual chaos manifested every day in Trump’s utterances and tweets. They, along with the political journalists they taught, are utterly unable to make sense of the President’s communications. It’s as though the myriad crazy notions of the American Right have been gathered together in a huge basket (let’s call in Fox News!) into which Trump reaches every day for inspiration. The results are as incoherent and self-contradictory as they are illustrative of the astonishing ignorance and credulity of the “ordinary” American citizen. To the educated, the credentialed, the experts, it simply makes no sense.

But it does. It makes perfect sense. The only way to prevent the Right’s “rope” from unravelling is to ensure that every strand receives equal care and attention. It doesn’t matter that Trump’s electoral base is composed of racists, homophobes, misogynists, fundamentalist Christians, Islamophobes and out-and-out fascists; as well as hard-line neoliberals, climate-change sceptics, union-busters, flat-taxers, economic nationalists and Ayn Rand libertarians; so long the dearest hopes and darkest fears of each component of this bizarre coalition continue to be encouraged by their President.

The other thing that the political scientists and mainstream media pundits, the Hollywood celebrities and TV comedy show hosts, don’t understand is that they are the people who keep the Right’s rope tight. The more they disparage and deride Trump and his “deplorable” followers, the tighter they wind it around themselves: the harder they try to pull the Right down, the more closely the separate fibres of Trump’s eclectic coalition are drawn together.

The Republican Party is no longer an ideological and organisational monolith and it lacks anything remotely resembling a coherent plan for “making America great again”. The billionaires who back it have almost nothing in common with the marginalised men and women of the rustbelt states who secured Trump’s victory. Except this: their hatred for the Democratic Party and their media allies.

While the Democrats and the mainstream media keep the Right’s rope tight, the Republican Party’s disdain for politics-as-usual will grow – and so will the President’s.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 4 May 2018.

Death In The Arena.

Making America Grate Again: For the past week the world has watched with growing horror the fevered phantasmagoria of far-Right lunacy that the Republican Party is attempting to pass off as a political convention. Does the rise of Trump mark the fall of the American Republic?

 

WATCHING THE OPENING HOURS of the Republican National Convention was like encountering Bob Dylan’s prophetic visions made flesh. There were the ghosts of Belle Starr – resplendent in their blinding white Stetsons – all lustily cheering-on a procession of Trumped-up heroes, while the heads of chambers of commerce from across America looked on in ill-disguised embarrassment.

 

Even so, for sheer implausibility the opening day’s speakers would have taxed even Dylan’s surreal imagination.

 

Scott Baio – all grown up from his stint as “Chachi” on the television sit-com “Happy Days” – warmed-up the crowd. Speaking movingly to the teleprompter, he soaked up the startled audience’s applause like a parched field in the rain.

 

Bizarre enough for you? Well, you just wait, there’s more.

 

David A. Clarke is the Sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Marching up to the podium, the gaudily decorated sheriff snapped out a brittle salute and almost immediately brought the Convention to its feet by declaring that “Blue Lives Matter!”

 

He was black.

 

The opening day’s theme was “Making America Safe Again” – making it just possible to discern the faintest outline of a rationale behind the Trump team’s extraordinary choices. If your slogan features a word as loaded as “again” where better to begin than with the Eisenhower-era certainties of “Happy Days”. And who better than a second-rate actor to sing their praises?

 

The same applies to the Convention’s response to the groundswell of anger and bigotry that has been whipped up by the recent attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Who better than a sheriff to make the pitch for law and order?

 

Not as good as Sheriff Andy Taylor from Mayberry, North Carolina, would have been, but Uncle Tom Clarke from Wisconsin was a more than adequate substitute. Better, perhaps, since having a white police officer poor scorn on the Black Lives Matter movement could very easily have been misinterpreted by the “liberal media”.

 

Not that was ever any fear of that.

 

The air of surrealism pervading the Convention’s agenda may have been disconcerting, but it was no more unsettling than the mainstream news media’s live coverage of the event. Veteran CNN broadcasters like Wolf Blitzer never batted an eyelid as the procession of freaks and fakes that had been billed as Republican movers-and-shakers made their way across the stage.

 

What’s been unfolding this presidential election year has been called “Post-Truth Politics”, and watching CNN’s coverage it’s easy to see why. The most mendacious misrepresentations of events; glaring sins of omission; outright lies: all are weighed carefully and analysed with the same ponderous gravitas of the seasoned news anchor. So determined are the big networks to escape the dreaded accusation of bias (in favour of what – the truth?) that all of them have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the blow-waved emperor’s nudity.

 

They justify this refusal to speak truth to power by citing their journalistic duty to remain “fair and balanced”. As if their failure to acknowledge the fevered phantasmagoria that the Republican Party is passing off as a political convention is somehow a noble gesture. That they will have to “balance” this week’s moral capitulation by presenting the Democratic Party’s Convention as a collection of equally freakish flakes and fakes only highlights the extraordinary damage “Post-Truth Politics” is inflicting upon the American electorate.

 

The Convention venue, Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, is billed as the home of the “Cavaliers, Monsters and Gladiators”. That these are all the names of Ohio sports teams in no way detracts from the thoroughly Dylanesque symbolism. Cavalier in his treatment of Republican Party tradition, and the fabricator of the most monstrous political expectations, Donald Trump has, predictably, turned his party’s convention into a four-day television mini-series for gladiatorial poseurs.

 

The noted American blogger, Richard Escrow, describes the man who would be crowned America’s king as “a bloated bleached-blond Narcissus transfixed by his own silhouette” – and it is hard to disagree. Who else would subject his party to night after night of saccharine tributes to his own greatness from his own family?

 

No stranger to Post-Truth Politics himself, Britain’s new foreign secretary will have little difficulty in making sense of the Cleveland spectacle. Boris Johnson has made a special study of Rome’s imperial dynasties. His classical historian’s eye will recognise the apotheosis of Donald Trump for what it is: the death of the American Republic.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 July 2016.

Yes, He Can! Why So Many Americans Are Voting For Donald Trump.

Striking A Pose: Those narrowed eyes, that tilted head, the jutting jaw: so reminiscent of Benito Mussolini. Donald Trump has never held elected office and has no record of public service upon which to build his candidacy. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this outsider status that draws so many Americans to him. They are not looking for someone who understands the system. They hate the system. The President they're looking for must be a wrecking ball!

 

WHAT LEADS THE MAN who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 to come out for Donald Trump in 2016? What prompts a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat to re-register himself as a Republican – just so he can vote for “The Donald” in the Florida Primary? Obviously it’s about disappointment. About “change we can believe in” turning into the same old Wall Street shuffle. About “yes we can” somehow acquiring the rider “but not quite yet”. Equally obviously, however, it’s about hope. If the eloquent graduate from Harvard Law School couldn’t, then maybe – just maybe – the ebullient, trash-talking property billionaire can.

 

Can what, though? That’s what’s got New Zealanders puzzled. Trump offers very little in the way of carefully considered and thoroughly costed policy. Indeed, a rational case for electing Donald Trump president is difficult to make. The man has never held elected office and has no record of public service upon which to build his candidacy. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this outsider status that draws so many Americans to him. They are not looking for someone who understands the system. They hate the system. They’re not in the market for a constructive candidate, they want a President who’s ready to go after the system with a wrecking ball!

 

The Republican and Democratic parties have only themselves to blame for Trump’s extraordinary run of primary victories. For three decades they have either crudely inflamed, or, loftily dismissed, the people they call “Trailer-Trash” and “Rednecks”: the very same people who are now turning out in their tens-of-thousands for the man who openly proclaims that he “loves” the “poorly educated”.

 

Are you going bald? Does your beer-gut spill over your belt-buckle? Do you work at a dead-end job for the minimum wage? Yeah? Well, guess what? The Donald loves you guys – and he wants your votes. Why? Because your votes, and the votes of those assholes up at the Country Club carry exactly the same weight. That’s right: exactly the same. And you know something else, fellas? There are way more of us than there are of them!

 

It’s taken these folk a while to work out that all the promises the Republicans made about abortion and gay marriage were only ever intended to keep them away from the Democrats. Not that they needed much persuading – not when the Democrats had already written them off as Bible-bashing misogynists, unreconstructed racists and gay-bashing homophobes. But now they have woken up. Now they know that the politicians in Washington have about as much interest in their welfare as their old employers did when they laid them all off, shut down the factories, and opened up new ones in Mexico or China.

 

That’s why they have no interest in Senators, or Governors, or any other representatives of the established order. That’s why they’re flocking to the man who’s so rich he doesn’t need to go cap-in-hand to the Koch brothers (like “Little Marco” Rubio). The man who “gets” what’s happened to people like them. The man who knows that the TPP is nothing more than a thieves’ charter, something cooked-up by and for the big corporations. The man who, like them, knows what it means to be ridiculed, excluded and hated – and isn’t afraid to say so out loud. The man who wears the scorn of the Establishment as a badge of honour, and who revels in its all-too-obvious fear.

 

When asked by journalists (“disgusting people”) what his reaction would be if the Republican Party grandees attempted to deny him the nomination, he didn’t answer them directly. What he would do was not something he was prepared to discuss. What he did tell the news media, however, along with the rest of the political class, was what his followers would do: “There’ll be riots in the streets.”

 

Moderate America – Hillary Clinton’s America – recoiled in horror. This was without precedent in the nation’s recent history. A presidential candidate had just warned the nation that his followers would not shrink from unleashing civil disorder – if that is what it took to secure their objectives.

 

Nothing less than the future of the American Republic is now at stake. Its fate in the hands of a social formation filled to the brim with the same reckless disdain for established order that drove the bluff burgesses, sturdy artisans, and unruly apprentice boys of Boston in the 1770s. The revolutionaries who concluded that if the Royal Government in London could offer them nothing more than the constant abrogation of their rights, then they would devise a way of governing themselves.

 

Two-and-half centuries later, the role of King George is being played by the Federal Government in Washington. Not for nothing did these latter-day rebels style themselves “The Tea Party”. They may not be historians, or political science graduates, but the imagery of the armed citizen stepping forward to confront tyranny is burned ineradicably into their political imaginations. Nor are they strangers to the grim business of securing their nation’s objectives by force. A great many of Trump’s followers are veterans of America’s most recent wars: the men and women who were “rotated” in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq far too many times. Not only are these good ole boys and gals ready to fight for their version of the United States of America – they know how.

 

Donald Trump, with a political empathy bordering on the fascistic, has made himself the leader of these disregarded Americans. He “gets” them in ways that Hillary Clinton (and even Bernie Sanders) cannot hope to emulate. Like every successful purveyor of nationalistic populism, he first stokes and then validates his followers’ anger. Because they have been cheated by those who claimed to be their friends.

 

But that’s all over now, because he, the Donald, will never cheat them. He will be their wrecking-ball. And, together, they will “make America great again”.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 21 March 2016.

Black Brothers And Good Ole Boys: Bernie Sanders' Winning Margin?

Rooting For The Wrong Team: Dumb, racist, Bible-thumping, gun-loving, working-class white males living in the American South began voting for the Republican Party when the Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Bill into law in 1965. The Republican Right has been playing them like a fiddle ever since. If he's to become President, Bernie Sanders is going to have to persuade these good ole boys to vote the same way as their black brothers.

 

IF BERNIE SANDERS is to win the US Presidential Election he’ll have to win the support of two crucial demographics. The first group to win over are working-class blacks. The second, and arguably the more important, are working-class whites. Because, right now, the Sanders campaign is a paradox: it offers America a left-wing programme, but the voters who have , so far, responded most enthusiastically are not the black, white and Latino working-class Americans who would benefit most from its content, but the young, well-educated children of America’s white professional middle-class – and some of their parents.

 

As the primaries head South and South-West into South Carolina and Nevada the Sanders campaign must find a way to counter Hillary Clinton’s popularity among African-American voters and Latinos. If he does not find some way of detaching a significant number of black support from the Clinton juggernaut in South Carolina, he risks getting what Barack Obama calls a “shellacking”. Being beaten by 40-50 percentage points in the Palmetto State would damage the Sander’s campaign very seriously. A narrow loss (10-15 points) on the other hand, would indicate that he just might come out the other side of “Super Tuesday” with enough delegates to keep on fighting.

 

[The phrase “Super Tuesday” refers to the Tuesday in February or March of a presidential election year when the greatest number of states hold primary elections to select delegates to national conventions at which each party’s presidential candidates are officially nominated. More delegates can be won on Super Tuesday than on any other single day of the primary calendar; accordingly, candidates seeking the presidency traditionally must do well on this day to secure their party’s nomination. States participating in this year’s “Super Tuesday” (1 March 2016) are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming. – Wikipedia]

 

Sander’s position in Nevada is of less concern than his situation in South Carolina. The Nevada polls put him within striking distance of Clinton, which suggests that, whoever wins there, the margin will be relatively narrow. If it’s not, and Clinton racks up a big Nevada win, then the Sanders campaign will find itself holed below the waterline.

 

In Sander’s favour, however, is the endorsement he has received from the “Black Lives Matter” movement. This mostly young activist group has broken ranks with the ageing veterans of the 1950s and 60s civil rights leadership – nearly all of whom have come out strongly for Clinton. Black youth, who have grown up in the post-civil rights activism era, are drawn to Sander’s unequivocal condemnation of Police racism, and are as enthusiastic as white youth about his promises of free tertiary education and universal, publicly funded and provided health care.  If Sanders attracts the support of young black working-class voters across the South (where most of the Super Tuesday primaries will be taking place) then Clinton campaign’s progress will be severely impeded.

 

But, even if he heads off Hillary to claim the Democratic Party’s nomination, Sanders cannot become President of the United States without re-claiming for the Democratic Party a significant chunk of the white working-class’s current support for the Republicans.

 

In the states of the old Confederacy, and especially among voters with only a high-school education, the formerly rock-solid grip of the Democratic Party was broken as long ago as the late 1960s. The poor, ill-educated, deeply religious working-class white males of the Old South never forgave President Johnson (a Texan goddammit!) for passing the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It made them easy meat for the Alabama Governor, George Wallace, in 1968; Richard Nixon, in 1972; and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

 

By skilfully practising the dark art of “wedge politics” the Republicans have by-and-large held on to these angry and alienated “good ole boys”. Culturally impoverished, Fox News watching, minimum wage workers comprise the core of evangelical Christianity in America; hold deeply conservative views on most social issues; love their guns, their families and their flag; and have precious little that’s good to say about Blacks (welfare scroungers!) Latinos (illegal immigrants!) Muslims (terrorists!) or “Big Government”.

 

Can Sanders – a socialist Jewish-American – win back these good ole boys? That depends upon how forthright and uncompromising he is willing to be in sheeting home the blame for working-class America’s woes to where it properly belongs. Deep down these voters know that they’ve been suckered by the country-club set, and that, as Sanders declares over and over again, the game in America is rigged against the ordinary working stiff – no matter what colour or creed he may be.

 

Only if he is able to convince both the black and the white working-class that a vote for the Democratic candidate is a vote to break through to the surface and once again breathe free American air, can Bernie Sanders hope to become the 45^th President of the United States.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road  of Saturday, 20 February 2016.