TOTALITARIANISM ON THE RISE AGAIN
Totalitarianism is on the rise again everywhere, not just here.
The radical right – call them fascists because that’s what they are – are taking control. Our old ally, Great Britain, is a hot mess. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador….half of Africa….all turning further and further right of center. And Asia, well, Asia is under China’s thumb.
We have Russia at war with Ukraine while a half dozen separatist movements are beginning to erode Russia. China is verging on bankruptcy. We have Israel at war with a tiny enclave that they could have pulverized in a couple of days, but didn’t because they were trying to have mercy on the civilian population, while elements within Israel are turning it into yet another totalitarian state. And there’s Iran over there, watching, waiting for its chance.
Why?
The very strange answer is, “Why not?”
Fascist governments thrive during times of economic, political and social unrest because they all promise to deliver a glorious future through the simple expedient of returning to a previous status quo.
Right now, in the midst of rising economic uncertainties, increasing breakdowns in public services, catastrophic natural disasters, amid predictions for more of the same and worse, the people are terrified.
They are being frightened into the arms of totalitarian dictatorships for the same reason that totalitarian dictatorships always win power: they promise to protect their people from the bad policies of their predecessors.
Here, in the United States, there a significant percentage of the population that wants same sex marriages taken off the books, an absolute ban on abortions, CHRISTIAN school prayer, deep tax cuts that will only benefit the wealthy, elimination of progressive education, the re- re-writing of history itself, the denial and rejection of scientific facts, beginning with irreversible climate change, and regressing back to the biblical creation story, cutbacks or elimination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and a hundred other social programs that benefit minorities, immigrants, the poor, the mentally challenged, and the ill.
You can tell which way the wind is blowing by the extent of the antisemitism in the environment. The more antisemitism you see and hear, the more you are seeing and hearing Adolf Hitler being reincarnated right in front of us.
Our new would-be leaders are elitists, racists, misogynists, pederasts, rapists, war-mongers, antisemites, self-aggrandizing, thieving, blood-thirsty….fill in the ones I’ve missed.
Democracy is failing because democracy is, well, ridiculous. Democracy claims to be for majority rule with minority rights. Check your history books, because, from their inception, every so-called democracy has always been about minority rule WITHOUT majority rights.
The United States is not and never has been a democracy, the correct term for which is actually “direct democracy.” Instead, we have always been a “representative republic” in which we elect a small percentage of ourselves to rule over everyone else.
So, what happens next, then?
First, you destroy the newspapers that try to print the truth. (If it’s not in print, it’s just hot air.)
Next, you build a social media monster (we’re in it right now) that overwhelms us with false, misleading, mind-numbing and fact-twisting disinformation that makes it impossible for us to understand what’s really going on.
Then, you expand and diversify the social media monster so that like-minded individuals can’t even find each other any more, friends lose touch, con artists posing as friends sell us bullshit cures for non-existent diseases while telling us not to worry about the poisons in our water, the poisons in our food, the poisons in our air, and the poisons in our medicines while at the same time trying to convince us not to to take the vaccines that do work for the very real diseases that do exist.
The United States has always been a reactionary country. The exceptions to this rule were from 1860 (the beginning of the Civil War) to 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) and again from 1933 (the beginning of the Roosevelt Era) to 1968 (when Lyndon Johnson, the last New Dealer, retired from public life, or maybe it was 1955, when we blundered in to Vietnam.) At all other times, the United States was a repressive racist regime under the thumb of the Southern Autocracy.
Today, that racist reactionary United States is trying to make a comeback, a return to the days when we took California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado and Nevada from Mexico…and we are not alone in this ambition.
There are ancient empires looking to make a comeback. Turkey, once the Ottoman Empire that ruled Central Europe and the Middle East for 638 years. Iran, once the Persian Empire that ruled the same region for 228 years before succumbing to the Greeks in 331 BC, which is almost equal to the 235 years of our existence as a nation.
France has not forgotten when she ruled Europe. Germany has not forgotten the humiliation it suffered through two disasters world wars and forty-four years of occupation by Russian and American armies waiting for the final showdown at the Fulda Gap.
Russia, of course, has not forgotten the 73 years during which they ruled half of Europe. And there are still assholes in the Vatican who long for the return of the Holy Roman Empire.
And China? China remembers when their Mongol hordes made it all the way to Austria, but let’s not forget when the Moors ruled Andalusia.
In fact, England seems to be the only European nation that has forgotten its Empiric age.
Democracy was a blip in the history of this planet. No empire was ever a DEMOCRATIC empire. The term is an oxymoron, something that cannot be.
The very idea that the people – any people – can rule themselves is an anathema to the ruling classes. It’s an anathema to the Catholic Church (except for this current pope, who is on the way out.) It’s an anathema to the billionaire classes, to Elon Musk, who is now trying to destroy Wikipedia because he can neither buy it nor control it, to Mark Zuckerberg who wants to own our thoughts and the mechanisms we use to formulate them.
I would like to think that the people will rise up and vote right next November…but it doesn’t matter.
If he runs at all, and I hope he does, Joe Biden – win or lose – will be the last democratically elected president of the United States. If he wins, his win will trigger a civil war that we will lose because the police, much of the armed forces, and millions of veterans, are on their side, not ours, along with the judges, 27 state legislatures, and the majority of the news media themselves.
And this is why I keep telling Jews to arm up, because we will be the first to be swept up after the immigrants.
12/01/2023 @ 9:16 pm
That is a very disturbing testimony. I do agree that authoritarianism is on the march…practically everywhere. I do not believe that it will take hold in the U.S. Do I think we are close? Yes. We are uncomfortably close. However, I think most people are not tuned in to this question or choice yet. For those of us who stew about such things, it seems impossible to comprehend how this might not be everyone’s preoccupation. I just don’t think it is…yet. Strict, focused attention to the choice before American voters won’t really occur until after Labor Day, next September. Trump may be the GOP nominee at that point, and he may not. That is not entirely clear yet. And once the whole voting electorate is focused, I doubt Trump, or GOP authoritarianism under someone else, will be their choice.
Admittedly, it is a little bit like trying to imagine a giant meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere and turning the atmosphere into a giant fireball. All of the elements to make that happen exist, but their coming together in just the manner to bring that about…I still find doubtful. Too many, I believe, still value freedom and democracy. (Yeah, I said it).
12/02/2023 @ 3:30 pm
Let’s get really real. Most people do not understand the basic premise of a representative republic which is that your privileges, prerogatives, and preferences can be voted out of existence by a small minority of your friends and neighbors…and, once they have taken over the courts – you are left with no recourse, which is exactly where we are right now. Most people do not understand that “direct” democracy, operating under consensus, operates by excluding those who do not agree with the majority. In no place and at no time have the people ever been given the right to rule themselves, nor would I want to live in that world because the first thing they would do would be to kill all the Jews. The utopian ideal that we can all come to an agreement about how to run our country presupposes that we are all in agreement about what we want that country to be like. Without that consensus, which does not and has never existed, direct democracy is just another type of dictatorship. There is in fact, no humancentric system of government for any political unit larger than the tribe, a group where everyone knows everyone else by name.
12/02/2023 @ 9:06 pm
Well, Alan, you’re actually using the talking points of the right when you say we are a “representative republic.” Democracy and republic are not complementary opposites. They actually refer to different aspects of what our nation is. We are a republic because we are not owned by and subject to a king. We are a representative democracy because of scale, and to some degree, as a buffer from an uninformed mob. Republic means we don’t have a king, not the manner in which we come to decisions. Res publica means “the people’s thing.” The right wing likes to counter the concept of democracy with the claim that we are a republic instead of a democracy. No one ever claimed that the US is a direct democracy, and the fact that we are not one does not mean that we are not a democracy.
Incidentally, North Korea is also a republic.
12/02/2023 @ 10:24 pm
Since I never read or listen to rightwing nonsense if I can avoid it, I have never before heard that differentiating between democracy and republic was a rightwing trigger. I was making a distinction between direct democracy and a representative form of government.
There are many extrapolative interpretations of Res Publica. Publica refers to people. Res means “thing” or “matter” so I suppose we can accept that Res Publica means “a people thing” or “public matter” or “public affair.”
“Republic” is commonly defined as a form of government in which “the people and their representatives hold power.”
I hold to my definition that the term “republic” should therefore be expanded to “representative republic” to remind people that, in a republic, the people AND THEIR REPRESENTATIVES hold power. The crucial element then is that power is held by the people THROUGH their representatives, in which case, the representatives actually become their rulers, which is exactly what has happened to us.
I don’t believe that any form of representative government will survive in the communications environment we have created. The next step in the decentralization of government will be the abolition of formal meetings of the houses of congress which, I predict, will soon be conducted online rather than in person. That’s another nail in democracy’s offin.
12/03/2023 @ 8:11 am
Power is an interesting thing. It exists in many forms, and the various forms apply different amounts of leverage, like a transmission selects gears for an engine. From infancy we pursue power in various ways. Whether it is the power to cry for attention, or the power to crawl and propel ourselves across space, or the power to compel others to do what we want with our cries, we seek and require power. Power attaches to all things that we do, and all other living things do.
All forms of power are like this, though the equation gains complexity as our intellects, responsibilities, and abilities grow in complexity. The various forms are too many to list, but money and politics are the most germane to this conversation. (Political power also has many subdivisions). But, generally, money and political power come with them the need to consider ethical principles because they involve overcoming the volition of other free individuals. That is the corrupt essence of power. Power is essentially 100% corrupt when it involves overcoming another free individual’s choices or principles. Power gives the powerful the ability to supplant the other’s principles, desires, or needs with his/her own. That is corruption. Pure corruption.
With politics, the work around within a democratic, free society is to have broad, fair inclusion in the process, and representatives who act as delegates and trustees, depending on the situation, for the benefit of those who have selected them. So, this is not direct democracy, and the trustees/delegates do have power, but when functioning properly, there are checks on the power, and the power is not used to subdue the will of the constituency, but rather to serve them.
I heard it said once that American citizenship is advanced level citizenship. It requires involvement and knowledge to operate properly. I agree with that. The power is there to be abused, but the mechanisms are also there to keep it in check and see that it is utilized properly. Lightning once was known as a purely destructive power, so much so that people thought of it is God’s immediate judgement. Lightning rods were seen as interfering with God’s corrections as recently as early America. Benjamin Franklin ran into such objections to his invention. Now, electricity is seen as a powerful, but useful means of accomplishing many tasks. Among those is us being able to communicate over distances once thought impossible. My point here is that we can evolve within society to harness power for our purposes. We always have so far. If past is prologue, we will harness the power of the internet, and money and politics to serve our needs rather than be consumed by them. Sure, it won’t be easy, but neither was arranging satellites in geosynchronous orbit to carry our messages to one another.
I AM USING MY EDITORIAL PREROGATIVE TO CIRCUMVENT THE LIMITATIONS OF THE FORMAT WHICH WOULD NOT ALLOW ME TO DIRECTLY COMMENT ON YOUR COMMNENT TO SAY THAT i ADMIRE YOUR OPTIIMISM BUT I FAIL TO SEE WHERE IT IS SOURCED FROM BECAUSE THE REPRESENTATIVES WE ARE ELECTING TO GOVERN US, FROM THE COUNTY LEVEL ON UP ARE ALMOST UNIVERSALLY CORRUPT. IF THEY DON’T ALREADY COME FROM MONEY, IN WHICH CASE THEY ARE THERE TO PROTECT MONEY’S INTERESTS, THEY ARE MONIED BY THE TIME THEY HAVE WORMED THEIR WAYS INTO LEADERSHIP ROLES, AND ARE EVEN MORE MONIED BY THE TIME THEY LEAVE. IN FACT, HARRY TRUMAN HAS THE UNIQUE DISTINCTION OF HAVING BEEN A POOR MAN WHEN HE ENTERED OFFICE AND WAS STILL (RELATIVELY) A POOR MAN WHEN HE LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE. (GRANT MANAGED TO BANKRUPT HIMSELF AFTER LEAVING OFFICE BY BACKING ONE OF HIS SON’S SCHEMES BUT HE MADE IT BACK ON HIS MEMOIORS JUST BEFORE HIS DEATH.) i HAVE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO HAD MORE LEVELS TO THE THE CONVERSATION.
12/02/2023 @ 10:46 am
That is a horrid fantasy Alan, but it is not deranged. I understand how you get there but have to hold on to the analysis provided by Bitey to be able to place one foot in front of the other each day.
I try not to be alarmed but often fail.
12/02/2023 @ 3:31 pm
It’s horrid, but it is not a fantasy if it is happening right now, in real time, all around us.
12/05/2023 @ 12:21 am
Why is authoritarianism on the march?
In Europe it’s mainly because of immigration. Successful immigration involves integration, and here we have the twin problems of European governments not being skilled at it and immigrant populations having no aspirations to really belong to the societies they’re ostensibly joining. Maybe they’ll be successful over time. Britain’s done a better job than most in Europe I think. France has done a lousy job, starting with Algerians and continuing with other primarily Muslim immigrant groups. For Sweden, immigration hasn’t worked.
There’s no excuse for us here, though. Here it is, as Alan said, that media are set up not to be trusted. The inability to verify facts to the satisfaction of large swaths of the population is dangerous as Hell and I don’t know how to get around that.
Concentration of wealth also results in this, and in this area the US has been an utter failure for half a century, though Biden is trying to do something about that. What do I mean by an utter failure? For that you need to know three things:
1. The middle class standard of living hasn’t risen since Nixon.
2. Since Nixon, the population has risen by about 50%, so if distribution of wealth looked now like it did under Nixon, when it wasn’t exactly communist, we’d expect a GDP growth since then of about 50%.
3. Since Nixon, GDP has grown by about 1,200%.
With money comes influence, and that influence results in wealth being more concentrated. It all works like the tiny video with the three guys and the cookies. The rich guy gets the guy in the middle angry by accusing the poor guy of stealing from him when the poor guy isn’t stealing at all. That’s the Right in a nutshell.
12/05/2023 @ 9:42 am
I agree with your analysis, Kosh. And my guess is that the road to pulling these divergent forces together to form a stable, harmonious society would be through tax code. As it would be consistent with your analysis, entrenched wealth/power creates fiefdoms, and not free societies. So, cap the wealth and invest long term in your free, inclusive society. Counter the top down, ‘trickle’ argument with bottom up development. Give immigrants the opportunity to buy into a society with a progressive tax structure that promotes the commonwealth rather than arriving into a society that takes its organization from various princes and principalities.
12/05/2023 @ 11:08 am
Money trickles up, not down. The model was built upside-down. I figured this out years ago, then found out that Will Rogers said this 80 years before I did. I reinvent the wheel a lot.
A lot of Republican economic policy happens because Democrats are so busy focusing on social policy that they don’t notice the economic and business advantages inherent in their own policies. This drives me nuts. Even the guys who almost get there like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich stop short. They don’t say outright that what they suggest is actually good for business. Why, I don’t know.
What also bothers me is the widespread failure to notice the obvious, things that are really easy to figure out if you bother to spend the time. One is trickle down vs. trickle up. If poor people spend money, who owns the businesses they spend it in? The mechanism for trickle up is right there in that thirteen word question.
Another is the idea that tax breaks for the wealthy jump start the economy. It can under very specific circumstances, circumstances we haven’t seen in years, but in order to figure that out, there’s a step missing. Please forgive me if I’ve said this already. I probably have.
The problem on the table is that investors (the wealthy) don’t invest sufficiently in companies that hire Americans. Before we arrive at a solution, we have to address the cause, and we haven’t. The big question is:
Why aren’t they making those investments? The solution depends on the answer.
If the answer is that they don’t have enough cash and capital is expensive and/or scarce, giving them a tax break will address the problem by increasing the available capital supply for investment. How do we know if this is the answer? Look at interest rates. If they’re low, then capital is cheap and available, and giving the wealthy a tax break will increase a surplus, something guaranteed not to affect investor behavior. They’ll pocket the money instead of investing it and we’ll get a Jobless Recovery because we haven’t addressed why they aren’t investing.
Another possibility is that they don’t think such investments are sufficiently profitable. If you look at investing and ignore ROI (Return On Investment), you’re not really looking at investing. Why aren’t they profitable enough? In all probability, because not enough money is trickling up. When the poorest 40% of Americans collectively have less than a third of one percent of America’s wealth and the poorest 60% have less than 5% of America’s wealth, millions and millions of Americans don’t exactly have discretionary income. So you don’t inject money into the top of the economy, you inject it into the bottom. Democrats do that for social reasons, then the deficit drops. Republicans don’t, then the deficit rises. This has been happening repeatedly since about Nixon – deficits tend to fall during Democratic administrations, exactly the opposite of what most people would expect. Too many people are looking for partisan explanations to get around this and not enough are looking at why this happens.
I’m not an economist. In college I took one course for which I could have gotten Government (Political Science elsewhere) or Economics credit, though that was taught by a guy who helped write the Marshall Plan. That’s it, no other Economics courses. I’m not an investor. I’m not particularly well read on economics at all – I don’t read economists. I don’t have any qualifications on paper. Why am I noticing this and not seeing anyone else noticing it? These are not difficult dots to connect, nor are these difficult concepts to understand.
12/05/2023 @ 12:07 pm
You are blaming the wrong cahoots: the investors are passive participants. They buy stocks and pocket the dividends but they don’t control the operation of the corporation unless they own a controlling interest in the corporation, like Zuckerman Bezos and Musk.
In corporate America, the boards of directors represent the investors, and select the managers who run the companies. Corporations are under a legal mandate to maximize the return on investment to their investors, the shareholders. That’s why public interest corporations have been created because they are not obligated to return profits to the shareholders, which raises questions about why shareholders would invest in them and in most cases, they do so because they are invested in the social objectives of the public interest corporation.
Outside of that one ray of hope, America is failing specifically and precisely because we exported almost all of the manufacturing jobs that once enriched the middle class to China and other places where labor costs are low enough to offset increased transportation costs and risk supply line breakdowns. Today, the American middle class consists of a disappearing class of small merchants, the mechanical workers who build, install, and fix those things that cannot be imported from elsewhere, and a dwindling middle management class that will soon be automated out of existence
So we have two culprits, the exportation of manual labor jobs, and increased reliance on robotics. Both of these false solutions to nonexistent problems have the same consequence: foreign workers do not buy American manufactures, and robots don’t buy anything at all.
American is failing because Corporate America has been at war with the American consumer without realizing it. Every worker who removed from the work force is one more consumer removed from the economy. No economic system can survive without consumers, as China is about to discover.
12/05/2023 @ 2:01 pm
I’m not blaming investors. What I’m saying about investors is that you get what you incentivize and that tax breaks often don’t incentivize investment, the prospect of profit does.
As to what you say about labor, I have made the same point for years. Workers and customers are the same people. Henry Ford understood that and hardly anyone has since.
12/05/2023 @ 1:53 pm
Interesting question, Alan. You asked me about my optimism. I confess that my viewpoint is not generally based upon optimism. I searched through your preceding comment to find where I pulled toward the optimistic side. The following portion of your comment is where I think we do have room to be optimistic. You wrote:
“I don’t believe that any form of representative government will survive in the communications environment we have created…”
And I do get that the speed and power of our communications presents huge problems, but so did Gutenberg’s invention. Until now, the dissemination of information has always led to more freedom rather than less. It isn’t always easy, and I don’t expect that fact to change anytime soon. I do expect our trend toward pin-balling our way through our challenges will continue. Yes, the speed and intensity of our technologies present ever increasing obstacles, but we have survived nuclear technology, so far. I’m betting that we will reason our way through AI, quantum computers, and satellite communications.
12/05/2023 @ 2:00 pm
I’m not blaming investors. What I’m saying about investors is that you get what you incentivize and that tax breaks often don’t incentivize investment, the prospect of profit does.
As to what you say about labor, I have made the same point for years. Workers and customers are the same people. Henry Ford understood that and hardly anyone has since.
12/05/2023 @ 2:01 pm
Sorry, that comment was a reply to Alan.
12/05/2023 @ 11:54 pm
Gutenberg produced less than 180 copies of the Vulgate bible, a couple of treatises that no one read, two indulgences in press runs of 7,000 copies each, so, essentially, one book….and that one book was the trigger for the Protestant Reformation, which resulted in several hundred years of warfare. That’s the damage that one book can do. The amount of data in circulation is now estimated to double every 24 hours by IBM. Other (more reliable) sources claim that we are doubling the amount of data every one to two years. Both numbers are misleading because data isn’t knowledge and much of that data is duplicated over and over again. Buckminster Fuller estimated that knowledge was doubling every 25 years from 1945 onward, a claim he made in 1982. Nevertheless, the presence of all that garbage makes it increasingly difficult to find facts and determine the truth in the midst of the opinions. I think that we are beyond our depth because of the amount of time that we have available versus the amount of data we have to sift through to know what’s going on. I know that I am totally overwhelmed.
12/06/2023 @ 6:28 am
Alan, the Gutenberg bible’s effect is not limited to, nor can it be measured by the mere number of bibles produced. The main effect created by the dissemination of this document was the notion that an individual could think for himself. That was a new development at that time, and the viral spread of thinking about such ideas was not something that humanity was prepared for. Your comment shows that you’re failing to see the scope of change from the previous condition because you take the current one for granted.