Tag: authoritarian

What Does Putin Have on Trump? Probably Nothing, Trump’s Just Being Trump

Michael Matheron1 Comment

On tonight’s Jenn Psaki’s show, I just heard Nancy Pelosi speak about Trump’s recent Putin-related comments:

  • Seemingly inviting Russia to invade NATO countries, i.e., those who “don’t pay their dues,” and saying he’d let Russia do “anything they wanted to them,” and
  • His lack of quick response to Russian activist Alexei Navalny’s death due to “unspecified reasons” which Pelosi reckons was an assassination. Then his belated comments, three days after his collapse in a Russian prison, was his usual self-serving attempt to equate Navalny’s death with his own legal problems:

    “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. The former US president and presumptive Republican White House nominee added: “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”

Pelosi, as is true of most everyone, stipulates that “Putin has something on Trump.” After reciting that mantra since 2016, I think there’s another explanation: Trump is simply being Trump. It’s no secret about his “bromances” with nearly all world authoritarian leaders. For example, why don’t we wonder “what does Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have on Trump?” Or, “what does Kim Jong Un have on Trump?” All this is not completely irrelevant, but, I believe, only partially true, if at all.

Trump doesn’t need any authoritarian to have something on him. He’s simply an unapologetic authoritarian personality, dyed in the wool at his monstrous father’s directions and via Roy Cohn, a verifiable monster. It’s baked in; Trump is dictator simpatico. He has, as well, survived and thrived despite serious legal, media, and political attacks for decades, emboldening him beyond all concern about his omnipotence. He’s likely always admired those who exercised unquestioned dominance over individuals, industries, and countries. So, of course, he admires Putin. He has no control over himself, in everything that makes a person human, he’s so close to his authoritarian dream and life force, presently leading the GOP, not like a dictator but as a dictator. Next in his sights is our country in full, so mammoth is his evil.

Being humans, we try en masse, I think, to bring some gestalt to the chaos Trump has caused and will continue to accelerate as the election cycle grinds on. We still, after nearly eight years of Trump’s historically rapacious performance as the first truly psychopathic American president, are shocked. At times I startle at the thought that, yes, Donald Trump, was president, and, shockingly, appears at least in light of his apparent omnipotence, to have a path to another four years of destruction. But this is no standard nightmare from which I, or we, can hope to awaken, relieved that it was just a dream. Wondering and wasting time wailing at the wailing wall will not cause Trump and his crowd to magically disappear. We must snap out of it, and very soon begin to fight without apology, if not without fear.

Is This Election “Crucial”? You Bet It Is

Michael Matheron3 Comments

Crucial Elections Are a Moveable Feast

Once again we enter the one-year countdown until our next presidential election, and, as always, this is a crucial one. Trite as that observation may be, trite is not always wrong. At 74, I’m old enough to recall the 1959 election and every one since. Each of those was labeled crucial by many. Yet, “crucial” is a moveable feast: what were the perceived stakes then, in each presidential election? In hindsight, FDR’s election in 1932 was crucial for the nation. Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, became crucial for the Union of the States. George Washington, elected to serve in 1789 was a crucial election, perhaps most importantly because he refused to accept the mantle of king, and calmly retired to Mount Vernon.

Mostly and realistically, the crucialness of an election is a post facto consensus. For one example among many, especially during the conservative resurgence since 1980, people still argue, for instance, that Herbert Hoover’s laissez faire policies would have brought us out of the depression more swiftly and satisfactorily. Liberals see Ronald Reagan’s two terms as a wrecking ball to all we believe in; conservatives sanctify him, calling his elections crucial to the birthing of the Tea Party and the MAGA movement. We need not talk about Nixon, he was always obvious.

The point is that we ought to belay the crucialness game. It’s hindsight alone that generally makes the case whether the previous election was crucial. On the whole, most presidential elections have had but a modicum of cruciality. In hindsight, few presidencies threatened to utterly unhinge our governmental and constitutional foundations, although admittedly, FDR gave many a Republican a scare during that worldwide period of enthusiasm for socialism, ever more an honest threat then to many in the gilded class than now. Nixon frightened the Democratic party into an uncharacteristically fighting stance. The Bush-Cheney alliance accelerated the decimation of even the concept of truth.

Belay Waiting for Hindsight

And then there was Trump. Among the despicable and degenerate presidencies, his was the worst we’ve faced as a nation, and we barely survived him. Pardon me if I don’t waste time demonstrating that he swung a wrecking ball to all we hold dear. And far from just retiring to Mar-A-Lago, like Washington did to Mount Vernon, he is now more than ever before front and center, bringing fear and trembling to the majority of Americans, from old-fashioned conservatives to card-carrying socialists. Despite his very real legal jeopardy in courtrooms throughout the land, he confidently speaks openly about his policies for his next attack on his own country: martial law using armed services troops on our soil; presidentially ordered selective prosecutions; destruction of the civil service system; frightening cabinet picks; wildly disturbing pardons; historical revision. What else? Do we need mention the whole that would likely be worse than its parts?

As a looming dictatorship of the Kleptocrats, i.e., government by thieves, Trump’s enabler’s plan to steal not only wealth in all its material forms, but moral, intellectual, and cultural wealth. Moreover, they plan – are already planning – to use our legal, electoral, and constitutional systems to do so, and in so doing, to destroy those systems and install authoritarian rule, in a way they will maintain was “lawful.” And by and large, the opposition, particularly the moribund and reticent Democratic party, treats this election surprisingly lightly, as if an historically unprecedented malevolent threat were simply another presidential election. This despite Trump’s first term presidential record of abuse at every turn.

We don’t need to wonder if this election is crucial. No waiting for hindsight is required. Drop the debate about it. Use time, especially air time, more productively. We’ve already witnessed Trump and company at work; they openly showed their cards to the entire nation. He earned two impeachments, 90 some odd criminal charges for actions he feels entitled to, and near universal disdain here and abroad for using the nuclear option against our electoral college, and his own Vice President. If this was the warm-up act, imagine the main event. Despite my admission that hindsight plays an important role in labeling presidential elections crucial, we don’t need hindsight to label this election crucial.

We’ve been to the circus and we saw the elephants.

Tribal Partisanship, Authoritarianism, And Violent Rhetoric

Michael MatheronLeave a comment


January 26, 2011

Tribe Trumps All.   At Slate.com on Monday, Shankar Vedantam’s interesting article, Partisanship Is the New Racism, revealed how recent psycho-sociological scholarship is changing the way partisanship is understood. Primarily, he explains, academics have begun to believe that partisanship is not the result of matching our thinking about the issues of the day to the party that supports them. It’s quite the opposite, Vedantam writes. Evidence is emerging that “our party loyalties drive our views about issues, not the other way around.” And this effect is the result of social identity: “I’m a Democrat because people like me are Democrats, or I’m a Republican because people like me are Republicans.” This helps explain why partisanship of a group’s slow-to-change social identity remains intact “even though each group’s rational interests might be better served by the other party.”

Social identity as a member of a tribe is the trump card, not the issues of the day: “race, gender, religious affiliation, geographical location—play an outsize (and largely hidden) role in determining our partisan affiliations.” And like racism, partisanship implies discrimination against “those who do not belong to our group.”  Moreover, given the moral taint that accompanies open bipartisanship, like racism, we try to appear non-partisan as much as we possibly can; Vedantam calls it that old familiar plausible deniability.

He concludes: “If partisanship and racism are both tied to social identity, then a post-partisan America is about as likely as a post-racial America. Our views on issues may change, but our identities remain stable over decades. Democrats and Republicans sitting together in Congress will no sooner put an end to partisanship than gay men, black women, and Alabama hunters will give up their tribes.”

The Emboldening Effect of Violent Rhetoric.  One commenter on Vedantam’s article, Martin Kobren, offered a different analysis, one we’ve heard over the years, the authoritarian personality. And, if the academic research is accurate, the highly ingrained partisanship through social identity will get worse, not better, despite the recent cooling off period in response to the Tucson shootings. Kobren wrote:

“The thing is that authoritarians who feel that group integrity is being threatened tend to react most strongly against outgroups . . . If you crank the threat up enough, the literature shows that people with lower authoritarian tendencies begin to behave like people with higher authoritarian predispositions. You can see immediately why our politics is as nasty as it is. Politicians who stoke up fear and loathing of the other party are actually preparing their parties for battle. It mobilizes the hard core and gets the lower authoritarians in the party to begin thinking like their higher authoritarian comrades. [All emphasis added]

Quo Vadis?  And if, as Vedantam writes in Partisanship, The New Racism, social identity trumps national issues on a person’s route to partisanship, one can imagine that the violent GOP rhetoric will grow (and especially among the Tea Party). This follows from the commenter’s observation that with more “cranking up” of the threat by “alpha” authoritarians, the more emboldened the lesser authoritarians become. To be sure, there are authoritarians in all political movements, but if, for example, the Tea Party’s success in the midterm elections emboldens those more timid TPs, their rhetoric of violence and destruction is likely to reassert itself after the Tucson effect wears off. Vedantam closes with an excellent diagnosis:

“Poor Barack Obama. From the standpoint of authoritarianism, he’s doing everything wrong! He keeps talking about there not being a red American or a blue America, but only a United States of America. It’s unilateral disarmament. On the other hand, the Republicans keep doing everything right. Authoritarians respond when they think that existing leadership is weak, ineffective or illegitimate (that’s where the birthers and all the people who insist that Obama is a socialist or a muslim come in). They mobilize when they see that there is an ‘us’ (the real Americans) who need to protect themselves against ‘them’ (everyone else).“

If the Democrats – and President Obama, in particular – decide to ramp up their anemic political rhetoric, and finally stand up as a group to fight the good fight for more progressive policies, then the emboldening effect among Democrats will energize the party, and provide some pushback against the GOP and the Tea Party. Democratic leaders and back benchers, one and all, must engage the GOP and, especially, their red-headed stepchild, the TP.  Engage them with tough speech, if not hate speech. But engage them!

So, despite the recent increase in violent imagery in political “discourse,” it appears that the pot of violent and destructive oratory is nowhere near the boiling point. Many timid Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers still remain sidelined waiting to be “emboldened.”

And what is the next step when all the timid are alpha dogs?