Donald Trump: Democracy’s mirror image? By Philip Manow / David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?

By Dilip -

The way that Trump plays with uncertainty, tests out what is thinkable and conceivable, seems to be precisely what makes him so fascinating. Like with a car accident, one cannot look away. His game is ‘to keep the country in suspense’, as he put it before the 2016 elections, when asked whether he would accept the results. By forcing us to continually speculate about whether he will break the rules, he forces us to play his game. This creates suspicion. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, in his testimony before the House of Representatives in February 2019, expressed his fear that if Trump loses the election in 2020, ‘there will never be a peaceful transition of power’. Conspiracy theory is the logic of populism – and it is a logic that affects everyone.

But perhaps we should stop looking spellbound at the coming election and its outcome? After all, the current wisdom is that democracies die not with a bang, but with a whimper. Perhaps the United States made the transition to a soft dictatorship long ago and people simply failed to notice. Will the decisive moment prove retrospectively to have been a small, inconspicuous piece of news, a note in the margins?

Since 2015, the Federal Election Commission, whose job is to ensure compliance with electoral law, and whose six members are confirmed by the Senate, has repeatedly been unable to work due to lack of a quorum. In May 2020, having been inoperative for 37 weeks, it was finally able to return to work, only for another member to resign in July. Since then, the Commission has again lacked a quorum. In other words, weeks before the USA goes to vote, properly monitored elections are not possible…

https://www.eurozine.com/donald-trump-democracys-mirror-image/

David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?

Warnings about resurgent fascism are not entirely unjustified. And yet they can still blind us to the political dangers we are now facing. It is Napoleon, not Hitler, who exemplifies an enduring threat to modern democracies, argues historian of modern France David A. Bell.

Is fascism making a comeback?

As a historian, my first reaction has been to answer the question with a resounding ‘no’. My professional training has led me to think of fascism as a specific historical phenomenon, largely limited to the period from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, and built around highly regimented mass movements. These movements struggled to bring about the revolutionary transformation of society, worshipped omnipotent leaders, had a mystical belief in the power of violence, and were committed to a racialized cult of the nation grounded in fantasies about a mythical past. Fascist movements also included powerful paramilitary auxiliaries such as the Nazi SA and Mussolini’s Black Shirts. In the fascist states, the movements took control of the government and transformed it into an instrument for achieving their repressive, and even genocidal, aims.

By this specific historical definition, it is hard to see fascism at work in the world today, and certainly not in the United States. The Republican Party, whatever its flaws, is not a regimented mass movement, with dedicated cadres under party discipline. America’s fringe right-wing militias are not latter-day Black Shirts. Neither are the few hundred border control agents whom the administration sent into Portland and other U.S. cities this summer...

https://www.eurozine.com/fascism-or-caesarism/

HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home

Jill Lepore  A History of America’s military spending
Jonathan Freedland: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight // Chauncey DeVega: Vigilantes are preparing ‘to launch a coup’

George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths

Tom McTague: The Decline of the American World

America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick

Black and Unarmed and Killed by the Police…an incomplete list…This is America….

Houston Police chief to Trump: Please, keep your mouth shut if you can't be constructive

Donald Trump and American carnage // Will Urban Uprisings Help Trump?

May 1968 - June 1989. It's been five decades since 1968, and things are somehow worse

Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves

Protests in USA over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of police - 25 cities have imposed curfews

Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness

Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Speech on the American Military Industrial Complex, January 17, 1961

Simi Mehta - Martin Luther King: Changing The World With Love

Adam Lusher - Story of the last survivor of the last slave ship to travel from Africa to US is published after 87 years

Michael Roberts: The top 1% own 45% of all global personal wealth; the bottom 50% own less than 1% // Global Economic Volatility and Socio Political Reactions

SUBMARINE STATE

Dismantling democracy? Virus used as excuse to quell dissent...

Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality

Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)

Book review: Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

George Monbiot: ‘Try to stop me’ – the mantra of our leaders who are now ruling with impunity

Is Donald Trump the Second 9/11? Or Is He the Third? By Tom Engelhardt

Chauncey DeVega: Trump is mentally ill but our real sickness runs much deeper

Trump, Troll-in-Chief, wags the Impeachment Dog by Going to War with Iran

Donald Trump has blundered into a crisis of his own making with Iran. By Mohamad Bazzi

Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death

Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century

Lucian Truscott: Trump wants to end the forever wars - except the one about oil and money

William Astore: The U.S. Military’s Lost Wars // Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at Most

Tom Dispatch - William Astore, From Deterrence to Doomsday? // C. Wright Mills on The Structure of Power in American Society (1958) // The Week the World Almost Ended by Nate Jones and J. Peter Scoblic

Angela Mitropoulos - Fascism, from Fordism to Trumpism // The hucksters of discontent


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