America on the Road to Fascism Can Be Stopped by Henry Giroux

 

The election of Trump not only attempts to legitimate an upgraded form of fascism, it raises the question of how Trump as a symptom of fascism was able to rise out of the dread, fear and anxieties fueled by a savage gangster capitalism neoliberalism combined with a culture of hate and racism to cancel out the authoritarian impulses, past and present that point to Trump's victory.

I don't want to underestimate how American society changed with the election of Reagan and the rise of the corrupt billionaire elite, but at the same time liberals aligned themselves with the Goldman Sachs crowd and implemented elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class. From Clinton's racist policies to Obama's centrist liberalism and unyielding believe in the ugly spirit of the financial elite, to Biden's death-driven foreign policy, a culture was put in place that made Trump possible.

But perhaps the most significant failure of liberalism, and even parts of the left, was the neglect of education and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering a collective movement. This failure wasn’t just about policy but about forgetting, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, that domination operates not only through economic structures but also through beliefs and cultural persuasion.

Trump and his engineers of hate and revenge have not only rewritten history but obliterated historical consciousness as fundamental element of democratic societies. In addition, they have taken advantage of the fact that matters of subjectivity, critical literacy, and education are fundamental to resistance and emancipation. Being far removed from any viable movement for social change, Trump and his Brown shirts filled the void with hatred, fear, anxiety, and spectacles not unlike those at Nuremberg in the 1930s.

If we are to confront this fascistic momentum, we must urgently return to the tools necessary to rebuild a mass consciousness as a precondition for a mass movement—one that can use strikes and other forms of direct action to prevent this new fascist regime from governing. We need to stop this machinery of death from enacting the mass suffering, misery, violence, and power that gives it both a sense of pleasure and reason for enduring.

American citizens have voted for a fascist regime that will transfer wealth to the ultra-rich, destroy the welfare state, ruthlessly deport millions of immigrants, and destroy as much as possible all institutions that hold power accountable and support critical thinking, conditions that create informed citizens, and struggle to expand the boundaries of a radical democracy.

In the shadow of fascism's rise, Seyla Benhabib echoing Adorno and Arendt, raises a profound question: “What does it mean to go on thinking, which suggests the urgent need to learn theory, politics, struggle, education, anew in “learning to think anew.” This challenges us to radically reconsider how we address, understand, and resist a culture that has, once again, paved the way for fascism.

Now, more than ever, we must reimagine theory, education, and the transformative potential of learning to ignite a truly working-class mass movement that is deeply anti-capitalist and fiercely democratic in its vision and practices.

-Henry Giroux

"...A convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies..." by Thom Hartmann

 

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848). 

We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have follow it.

It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them.

As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything. Even a convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies.

America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations.

Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just this election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.

They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.

All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.

For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and mega-yacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.

Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.

None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes, they legalized that same behavior for themselves. As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.

Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.

In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.

In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.

The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out: “Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”

But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.

Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires.  Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.

Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented: “The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”

But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured. Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt. It’s no coincidence. 

And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s.

Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government. No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping. It’s why they are still functioning democracies. The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate.

This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal. Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich. And so will I.

-Thom Hartmann

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"Sometimes fear triumphs over hope" by David Smith

 

Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the 2016 US presidential election was described as a leap into the political unknown. This time there is no excuse. America knew that he was a convicted criminal, serial liar and racist demagogue who four years ago attempted to overthrow the government. It voted for him anyway.

The result is a catastrophe for the world. It saw Kamala Harris’s competence and expertise, her decency and grace, her potential to be the first female president in America’s 248-year history. It also saw Trump’s venality and vulgarity, his crass insults and crude populism, his de-humanization of immigrants that echoed Adolf Hitler. And the world asked: how is this race even close?

But elections hold up a mirror to a nation and the nation does not always like what it sees.

Future historians will marvel at how Trump rose from the political dead. When he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, people gathered outside the White House to celebrate, brandishing signs that said, “Bon Voyage”, “Democracy wins!”, “You’re fired!”, “Trump is over” and “Loser”. There was a tone of finality, a sense that, after four grueling years, this particular national nightmare was over.

For many, there was the comforting idea that moral order had been restored. It was Trump who was the aberration, not Barack Obama, the first Black president who had preceded him. Hope, not fear, was the national default. Now America was back on course after its unfortunate zigzag of history.

Then came Trump’s ultimate disgrace, the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. He seemed at peace with the idea that his own vice-president, Mike Pence, might be hanged by the rampaging mob. He had finally gone too far. “Count me out,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, once a devout Trump loyalist, said in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor.

But the political obituary writers forgot that 78-year-old Trump is the luckiest man in the world. A series of opportunities to snuff out his political career, banishing him to golf courses in Florida for the rest of his days, were squandered.

Trump was impeached, for the second time, by the House of Representatives. At his Senate trial, Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has called Trump “stupid” and “despicable”, could have instructed his colleagues to convict, barring him from ever running for office again. But McConnell choked and Trump was acquitted.

Trump immediately began regathering political strength. Representative Kevin McCarthy, who had initially denounced him, made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and bowed the knee. From that moment on, it was clear that the Republican party was still the Trump party. Not even electoral defeat and its violent aftermath could break the fever.

Trump failed again at the ballot box in the 2022 midterms, throwing his weight behind a parade of grotesques and misfits who lost winnable races. Again there was a shaft of light, a moment when Republicans could have course-corrected. But would-be challengers such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were steamrollered by the “Make America great again” movement.

Trump got lucky again on 13 July this year when a would-be assassin’s bullet struck him in the ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A last-second tilt of the head to look at a chart showing immigration figures spared his life.

A photo of Trump standing with blood streaked across his face as he raised his fist and shouted “Fight!” became the indelible image of his campaign. Still, the man who lost his first popular vote by 3m, and his second by 7m, had to convince America that he was worth a second look.

His next stroke of good fortune was to be initially up against Biden, an incumbent even older than himself, who was given little reward by voters for his significant legislative and economic achievements.

In panic, Democrats swapped Biden out for his vice-president, Kamala Harris, with only about a hundred days to go. They claimed that her campaign was not a case of having to build the plane in midair but rather the same plane with a different pilot. Either way, she faced concerns over inflation and the daunting task of defining herself to the electorate as neither Biden-lite nor overly eager to throw her boss under the bus.

She was up against a man who drove wedges between men and women, Black and white, urban and rural, young and old. As a woman of color, she was held to a different standard by a nation grown numb and indifferent to Trump’s excesses. “He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless,” CNN senior political commentator Van Jones observed.

Many voters spoke of the Trump presidency with a rosy glow of nostalgia, apparently overlooking its 400,000 coronavirus deaths, worst year for jobs since the second world war and systematic effort to divide, not unite, the American people. He could do no wrong in the eyes of his cult-like following, a freakishly resilient appeal that has three main components.

First, there is the celebrity and successful businessman persona, fashioned over years by his book The Art of the Deal and the reality TV show The Apprentice. Harris recruited numerous big-name endorsers such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé; Trump was star of his own show.

Second, Trump has understood that, whereas Ronald Reagan and Obama resonated in an era of aspiration, this is an age of anxiety. The upper-working class and lower-middle class fear loss of status and yearn for a safety blanket. Young people worry they will be worse off than their parents’ generation and unable to buy homes. Many, wrongly, perceive Trump as an economic populist because he rails against elites and “says it like it is” or “speaks how they feel” or “doesn’t give a fuck”.

Third, there is Trump the culture warrior. For nearly a decade he has tapped into America’s id: a long and painful racial history of progress and backlash, stoked anew by the election of Obama and white Christians finding themselves in the minority. Xenophobia is at the heart of his political identity. In addition, his campaign spent millions on ads fueling hysteria about transgender rights (“Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you”).

Together, with a sinister assist from billionaire Elon Musk, it was enough to eke out victory. Now brace for another Trump inauguration – American carnage redux – and another fantastical claim about his crowd size. Brace for norms to be trampled, institutions to be undermined, opponents to be targeted for retribution. Brace for an Oval Office occupied by a malignant narcissist without guardrails this time. Brace for unhinged all caps tweets that trigger news cycles and move markets. Brace for national anxiety off the charts and global tremors from China to Ukraine. Brace, also, for a new resistance and surge of anti-Trump energy.

How did it happen here? America had plenty of opportunities to stop Donald Trump but blew it each time. It will not become an autocracy overnight but there is now no doubt that this is a democracy in decay. As Oscar Wilde never said, to elect Trump once may be regarded as a misfortune; to elect him twice looks like craziness.

-David Smith, The Guardian

The Morning After the Election

 

Let us also recognize our universal human nature and solidarity in the face of the absurd. Let us continue to protest against injustice and suffering in this world. Like Sisyphus, we shall continue to oppose oppression.    

Election Prediction

 

Here’s an early prediction: Donald Trump will unilaterally declare victory sometime this evening. He’ll do it no matter what’s going on. He lies about everything—he lied about where Obama was born, he lied about bleach curing Covid, he lied about winning the election in 2020, and he’s lied about Kamala Harris throughout the campaign, including claiming she just “turned black.” It should come as no surprise that he will lie about the outcome of this election.

Trump will lie; he will do it convincingly in the view of his base, more than likely. He will do it without regard for the truth in order to suit his purposes. He makes stuff up, like Monday night when he said there was a 96.2% chance he would win—completely baseless. I know it’s not the prediction you wanted, but we should all be prepared for this. Hopefully the media will be prepared to simultaneously fact-check him as it’s happening.

Some states will have final tallies, or close to them, tonight. Michigan, for instance, has new rules that are designed for a faster count. Others may take a day or longer, including Arizona and Georgia, especially if it’s close. Litigation can also delay results, but as we know from 2020, just because the Trump campaign or the RNC files a case, it doesn’t mean they’ll win. As Marc Elias is quick to point out, he won 61 of 62 cases in 2020, and the one he lost was just an early-stage procedural issue.

We may see certification-resister officials at the county level, like the Georgia cases we’ve been tracking. Some of this could delay results too. But, at least so far, courts have taken a dim view of election deniers who claim that state laws that say they have a mandatory duty to certify election results don’t actually mean that. It may take a court decision or two to get final results in some places.

We all want to know the outcome of the election as soon as possible, but just like in 2020, delay doesn’t mean fraud is happening or something else is amiss. It means all of the votes are being counted. No matter what Trump says.

Federal officials continue to be on high alert for the risk of violence at polling places. Again, be cautious as news emerges. There are reports that Russia is circulating disinformation. Wait for confirmation—from credible sources—of anything you hear.

Late Monday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency put out a joint bulletin cautioning that Russia and other foreign interests were using disinformation campaigns to undercut Americans’ confidence in the integrity of the election and stoke divisions. They said they expected to see more of this on election day and after.

We all know the most likely scenarios for how today could unfold. I'm sure you've been playing them over and over in your head, just like I have:

• American women and the men who love them, outraged by Dobbs and Trump’s misogyny, reject a return to second-class citizenship for themselves and their daughters. They turn out and vote in record numbers, especially white suburban women, independents, and centrist Republicans. The polls close, and it's over within hours. It's a romp. Kamala wins by convincing margins. Or,
• It's a virtual dead heat in many of the battleground states. Vote counts go late into the night, but we realize they won't be complete until later in the week when provisional ballots and various types of mail ballots are counted. Or,
• The RNC goes to the mattresses early and an insane number of court challenges crop up in multiple counties, swamping the courts. The country waits in a state of suspended animation while the lawyers do battle.

And so forth.

Lots of possibilities; all just speculation. Let’s wait and see what actually happens.

Today's the day! If you haven't already—if you couldn't in advance, like I can't here in Alabama with its one day of voting—get out and vote. If you know anyone who hasn't, remind them to. Offer them a ride if they need one.

I’ll vote first thing this morning with friends from my neighborhood. Our polling place has been combined with another polling place. Instead of a school, we now vote at a library. It’s a little bit further from our house, but not significantly so. We've been wondering what the lines will be like with the combined precincts. It feels festive, important, and very American to be preparing to vote in this most crucial of all elections.

I’ll keep up with developments and may pop in with a quick post if anything happens while the polls are open. Tonight, we’ll watch the results come in.

In many ways, this campaign has been a form of slow torture. But I have also learned something important in the past few months: We still have what it takes. We are strong. We care deeply about our democracy. We can build community.

Of course, that’s not true for everyone. Some people have gone astray and have given in to the allure of easy money, snake oil and a would-be-strongman who gives them permission to blame all of their woes on immigrants and communist-Democrats. But there are enough of us who still care about democracy and about having the ability to live our lives in freedom and with dignity. And we are going to prevail.

We're in this together,

Joyce Vance

Election Integrity

 

Laika: first dog to be launched into low earth orbit, Sputnik 2, November 3, 1957

 

Laika by Frank Paino

Because she’d gone unbroken
by three years on Moscow’s barren streets,

she’d proved her will to survive simply
by surviving and so was chosen

for a kind of brute salvation, a halfway gift
whose bad conclusion was already written

in a lack of funds and time and the keen
knowing, like something obscene shouted

through cloister halls, there’d be no way
to take it back. And so began fierce weeks

of acclimation: each cage smaller
than the last to accustom her to stricture,

the relentless gyre of the centrifuge, and
crude machines to simulate the cacophonous dirge

of ignition, shrieking metal, everything
it would take to lift a thirteen-pound mongrel

into history. He called her “Little Curly.”
“Little Bug.” As if naming the doomed,

taking her home one night to play
with his two bright-eyed daughters,

could make the great burden of her death
a lighter thing to bend beneath

when it came time to tighten the harness
just once again and no more,

to hold her in waiting three restless days
within that aluminum tomb

where she could stand or lie but never turn,
and late October’s chill settled its silver pall

while the red-lit counter counted
down. Three days and, finally, ascent—

three anxious hours back on Earth
before they saw her heart’s green tracery

slow again to nearly calm
while the unshed core quietly kindled

its black wick inside the polished dome.
Listen, there is no other way to tell a thing

that has no mercy in it:
she burned up from the inside.

Fevered. Frantic. Blood-boiled.
Six hundred miles between herself and

solid ground.
And there’s no faith to be placed

in the weary myth of sacrifice;
no way to make right

the trust that was betrayed—
the muzzle and fragrant paws

and mad tongue of it—
how she was thrust into weightlessness,

into the useless memory of
steady hands, of the man who

spoke softly, who turned, at last,
from the wild extravagance

of the round and riveted window
about which he’d been so adamant,

as if she might somehow savor
the breathless view, the spinning blue

that beckoned like a ball tossed into a street
she could only return to in flames.