From Reagan to Trump

Another day in the crisis of American democracy. Where are we in this drama so far? Robert Reich posted this video today and does a good job summarizing at least part of the problem. How many hoops do we have to jump through to finally nail the trump/Russia treason down? Will it ever happen? Will it be sudden and unexpected or long and drawn out? Will the con man simply resign after pardoning everyone he can or will he have to be arrested and dragged out? At this point no one knows for sure but real damage is done every day. Let's be honest, despite some bright shining moments, mainstream corporate media has been absolutely atrocious in dealing with republican sedition for a long time. And today they seem to feel as though they cannot comment on each new day's atrocities without lamenting how pure and patriotic past republican presidents were. It is expected on cable or broadcast news to always try to balance and treat liars as though they have something worth our time to say. At every step the constitutionally-enshrined protectors of our republic pull punches, treat lightly, fail to challenge the lies, reach for something, anything that the Democrats have done to claim a false equivalence, and give an undeserved deference to some of the greatest villains our society has produced.

Democrats then bring butter knives to fight against the mechanized armor division that the republicans have spent so many years building. One of their worst offenses is appealing to the center and for unity, George Lakoff has spent years trying to convince Democrats and Progressives to stop playing into authoritarian hands in this fruitless endeavor. There is no "Center" where the left and the right meet and people could agree to rational solutions to real problems. There isn't even a spectrum or sliding scale of left to right according to Lakoff, but that one is kind of tough to get our heads around after so many years of hearing about that spectrum. So the piece I want to look at today is Vice President Joe Biden's call for the rest of us to reject doughfacedonny's crap and be the good nation we aspire to be. It is good, he hits all the right notes of keeping and building on the moral conscience that elected he and President Obama, and rejecting the hate and racism that donny has dredged up. The only problem is that he doesn't call out donny by name, a small one for sure as I can't even use his name nor put the title of "president" in front of it. Brother Charlie Pierce put it well, "say his name when you denounce his bigotry", though he was addressing the crocodile tear-shedding republicans who mouthed words to the effect of "this will not do donny." But it is the same product.

As evidenced by the naming of neo-nazi marchers in Charlottesville and their subsequent firing, it is effective. It is personal, the so-called alt right and their fellow republican base voters WANT US DEAD, so shaming and shining a spotlight on individuals is the right thing to do. It has to be made so toxic to even be associated with nazis that republicans can't get away with ambiguous statements like what Lyin' Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin made after donny tried to falsely equate "many sides" for violence by broadly generalizing about all hate and all bigotry is bad. No, we're talking about what actually happened, real people with real names who gathered together to support monuments to confederate traitors, the neo-nazis whose antecedents nearly succeeded in exterminating all of the Jews in Europe. It was a big step for Vice President Biden to actually refer to the current president, not some generalization, even if he didn't say the name. Unlike the Democratic Party's latest slogan of "a better deal" that doesn't even acknowledge the existence of an opposition party that made it this bad for regular Americans and constantly try to make it worse. Of course the better deal platform was a response to the fact that the Democrats really don't stand for anything, even if Progressives want to believe and continue to work in the direction of equality, social and economic justice etc., as polls reported in July.

Really, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. If you act as though current conditions are something that just happened, like a bolt of lightning hitting your home, instead of something that was done deliberately as in a burglar stealing everything before burning it down, then yes people are going to believe that you don't stand for anything. It makes the current state of the union to be fate, instead of something that was consciously made over decades. Which brings me to the response to Biden's article from Ben Cohen of The Daily Banter. Now I don't mean to single Ben out or come down on him too hard, his heart is in the right place and I generally support his positions. And I hear the same sort of thing from his colleague at the banter, Bob Cesca, and from the Stephanie Miller show to name two examples. The problem is letting past republicans off the hook because they weren't the unbelievable shit show that doughfacedonny has been.

Ben starts his analysis like this:

 Whatever you might think of Joe Biden and his politics, he never sought to divide Americans or appeal to their hate. Biden didn’t use minorities as scapegoats, insult women or deride allies, and while he wasn’t perfect, Biden was a man of dignity who always appealed to our better nature.

Why the weasel words? Who do you think this kind of appeal will win over? People aren't perfect, there's no reason to state this. And even the comparison of donny's antics to what Biden stood for in office is ridiculous, that's not the bar of statesmanship. Lakoff would point out that there's no reason to qualify Biden or his politics, that simply gives the right ammunition. And it deactivates the frame of what he's talking about, nothing that is happening today has anything to do with Joe Biden.

Then the gut punch that sucks all the wind out of any Progressive impact Ben Cohen could have with this article:

I’m not a fan of Ronald Reagan and completely disagree with his politics, but he did not appeal to hate while in office. He did not vilify immigrants, demean women, or equate Neo-Nazis with anti-fascist protesters. This is why many conservatives and almost all liberals recognize the danger in Donald Trump. This isn’t so much about policy, it’s about politics and the devastating effect divisive language and demagoguery has on the psyche of a nation.

First, what the hell does any of this have to do with Reagan? Why bring him up? That just activates the frame of divinity surrounding Reagan that obviously liberals give some credence to as well. Trying to negate a frame by invoking a supposed "good conservative" only reinforces it. And you might want to check with an actual Reagan scholar like Rick Perlstein before making these claims. Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi by talking "states' rights" clearly dog whistling his continuation of Nixon's southern strategy. Then as president he visited the nazi cemetery at Bitburg despite strong opposition from Jewish groups. What about the lying stories about "welfare queens", did those not demean women? Reagan was really hot to "reduce labor costs" (i.e. Your Pay) by breaking unions and deregulating everything, the undocumented immigrant amnesty was a big part of that and contributed to the anti-immigrant backlash today.

So why commit an unforced error like this? To achieve some sort of artificial balance? Appeal to the brain dead reprogrammable meat sacks that still support donny? Please stop doing this, anyone on the left. I have seen enough sentiments to "George W. Bush is so happy he's not the worst president in history" that I want to tear my own tentacles off. This accomplishes nothing positive and only legitimizes past republican crimes against the American people. I know so many activists and writers are desperately trying to break the cycle of "normalizing" Trump, but letting everyone from Nixon to Bill Kristol off the hook for the harm they did to discourse and society isn't the way to go.

It really has been an almost straight line of crimes from Reagan to Trump, each successive republican raised the bar of awfulness to where we are actually seeing democracy fade away and racism become just another political opinion. They are different only by degrees, not in kind. There is no set goal, Reagan most likely never thought he was pointing us in the direction of a fascist dictatorship, but his actions and the words and deeds of subsequent republicans have led us to this point. Stop falling for it!

They are all Nazis

Is there a word for a feeling of surprise at something that was completely predictable? That was my feeling after the white riot in Charlottesville, VA last weekend. Something like that was bound to happen with 'god-emperor' trump embedded in the White House like a tick. So now that it has, the three quarters plus of Americans who oppose the republican reign of terror are presented with a choice of how to deal with the other quarter whose white supremacy has been exposed to the world like a festering boil of hate and bigotry. It is as though now that the veneer of ambiguity has been ripped away to reveal swastikas and Nazi slogans alongside the confederate stars and bars it suddenly got easier for mainstream media to drop, at least partially, their go-to defense of both sides are equally bad. Good for them, yes hating Nazis should be something we all agree on and as the new meme goes "antifascist should be the default setting for Americans". So finally we can stand up to the republican menace that sympathizes with white supremacy by calling them what they are. Or can we?

This Vox article crossed my feed when published on August 18th but I didn't get a chance to read it. Written by a PhD student named Lindsay Jones whose project is on female African-American education in Virginia and a native of Charlottesville, she is also an intellectual historian and it is on that score that I have to critique her article. Jones probably knows more about Nazism than I know about African-American education but in the realm of current events the former is more valuable. She argues that the very term that permits corporate media to finally blame these assholes for their violence and hate should be dropped because white supremacy is as American as apple pie. However the weasel words start right from the title:

Don’t call all American white supremacists “Nazis.” Their ideology of hate is homegrown.

Using the term distances us from our reality.

...“Nazis” are easily legible as a long-since-conquered enemy to human decency. Neo-Nazis are easily dismissed as clinging to an antiquated ideology of white racial superiority in an age when the idea of a “master race” has long been banished in polite society.

To utter the term “Nazi” is to invoke universally condemned images of death camps, terror. To say “Nazi” is to imply backwardness — that this ideology is a throwback to a more ignorant and intolerant age in human history. To say “Nazi” is to disavow the Americanness of anyone who dons a swastika or gives a Nazi salute, to reflexively cast them as counter to the values of tolerance and diversity that our nation holds dear.

To say “Nazi” in reference to the mobs who wrought havoc on Charlottesville this weekend, arguably, is expedient. After all, reasonable Americans have reached a consensus that the genocidal violence of Nazi Germany was some of the worst the world has ever seen and that the ideas and actions of today’s neo-Nazis are abhorrent. Why split hairs in a search for more precise terminology? Why not refuse to adopt the terminology of “alt-right” and “white nationalist” and instead use a label that we can all understand and that ultra-effectively resists euphemism?

Some people at Saturday’s rally identified as actual members of the American Nazi Party and carried flags with swastikas. But the label doesn’t encapsulate the people who showed up representing America's homegrown ideology of white supremacy.

For me, as a scholar and a resident of Charlottesville, the Nazi label erases the ordinariness of this impulse to display and defend the symbols of a fallen iteration of white patriarchy. The people I grew up with — the families that fly the flag on their property, the teenage boys who wear the flag stitched onto their khaki baseball caps — are not Nazis. They are ordinary white people who deny that their veneration of a mythologized South amounts to white nationalism. The spectacular displays of violence characterizing Charlottesville’s conflicts over Confederate monuments, when viewed in local and historical context, point to white racial pride that has its source right here in Virginia, not Nazi Germany.

I have some bad news to share with you candidate Jones, National Socialism in Germany was highly and extensively influenced by exactly that homegrown hate you are describing. And shame on you as a scholar to write this article without even a sideways glance in this direction.  Far be it for me to explain racism or hate to you, your story is moving and I have no reason to doubt it's sincerity, but the neo-confederate white supremacy has more in common with nazism than you'd think. James Q. Whitman wrote a whole book on the American roots of nazism that I discovered after less than thirty seconds of searching on Google. Much like the African-American blues men that went to England and enjoyed success, in turn leading to the British Invasion, Hitler looked at American race relations and found much to expropriate. Tortured metaphors aside, Indian removal, westward expansion aka Manifest Destiny, slavery, Jim Crow, Eugenics, the Creel commission propaganda during WWI, the Palmer raids, expulsion of Alien radicals, and immigration quotas were parts of American history that the Nazis wanted to emulate and largely did execute. 

American white supremacy historically took two forms; exclusionary in the North, and dominating in the South. Yankees just didn't want Black folks living anywhere near them. Southerners wanted separation of the races but also wanted to exploit Black folks' labor so they built the convoluted system of segregation, and a system of intimidation through outright KKK style vigilantism all the way to building the monuments to confederate leaders as an ever present reminder of who was in charge. Nazism in Germany borrowed from both of these traditions, even the Lost Cause mythology through their "stab in the back" theory. Though admittedly if you search for any kind of consistency in Nazism you'll be hard pressed to find any. They worshiped technology and strove to return to the land for a simpler life. The only thing that really held them together was the shared hatred of out groups. It is completely understandable that hate is hate from the victims' point of view, but as intellectual historians we must dig deeper no matter how distasteful it may be.

This hatred towards the Other really isn't different than the various strands of derpitude displayed by the mass rally (ho ho) in Charlottesville of white supremacists. Maybe this group hates Jews a little more than immigrants, maybe that one puts Islam at the top of their hate list. Does it really matter? This is one time where generalization is warranted. At a time when good jobs are hard to find and most manual labor has been eased by machines and technology, does the old Klan ideology of keeping African-Americans on the land and in their place hold true? If the Klan no longer seeks to dominate but chants the same slogans of extermination that self-proclaimed Nazis bluster about, is there really any difference between home grown hate and imports? 

It is not expedient to lump them all together, it is necessary. In order to get the elite media to pay attention to this disgusting underbelly we need to shock and sensationalize, or they will just get back to blaming both sides and normalizing the fascist takeover of America. If Hitler and the Nazis in Germany were inspired by what they saw in America, then it is correct to tar them all with the same brush. What word would you like to use instead? This is the area of the internet where we actually can debate ideas. Yes, the hate is real. Yes, it comes from right here in white America. And yes, we absolutely have to shine as bright a light on it as possible so it will slither away again. But to say Nazism is simply an exotic foreign import and puts too much distance between the idea and the actions is doing a disservice to intellectual history.