THE FIRE THIS TIME

January 6, 2021 now joins December 7, 1941 and 9/11/2001 in the dark and ignoble gallery of days of infamy in American history.

Not this time because of a surprise attack by an external enemy raining death from above, but even more dangerously as a foreseeable and virtually predictable uprising from fractures deep within the body politic itself, manipulated by a disturbed leader and tolerated and even encouraged by the political enablers in his own Party.

US Capitol under attack 1/6/21

Credit: Deusche Welle

Donald Trump's insurrection against his own government failed, but what he succeeded in doing in his final days in office was to drag the nation with him down the rabbit-hole of his own troubled psyche, leaving a country shaken to the core and even more deeply confused and divided.

“Madness in great ones must not go unwatched,” Shakespeare warns in Hamlet, knowing well the corrupting influence of power and the frailties of human nature. And despite repeated warnings and unmistakable signs of Trump’s instability, narcissism, sociopathic tendencies and increasingly authoritarian behavior over the past four years, and particularly during the past months, governmental guardians willfully denied the reality of what they were seeing. A reality culminating in the President’s unbalanced and increasingly anti-democratic rhetoric and actions; most recently his absolute refusal to accept or admit an electoral reality verified by governments and courts across the land.

Even now, there are Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, along with craven Congressmen such as Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes and more than 100 other Republicans who continue to parrot President Trump’s lies about election-rigging and fraud, defending the indefensible and feeding the miasma of untruth that carried thousands of true-believers, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and misguided and blind followers to attack the National Capitol, bringing death and destruction, in an ultimately futile effort to stop the democratic process of ratifying the election.

Unlike “Coxey’s Army” of unemployed workers in 1894 protesting economic inequality or the “Bonus Marchers” of 1932 petitioning for cash payment for their World War I service during the depth of the Great Depression, “Trump’s Army” was no spontaneous movement of desperate citizens for equality or justice. Instead, it was the deliberate creation of a disturbed and amoral President obsessively focused on mobilizing his “base” to pressure Congress by any means necessary to force lawmakers to overturn a democratic election. In short, an undemocratic power-play sustained and enabled by multiple purveyors of his self-serving delusions and unremitting lies: essentially an attempted coup to keep Trump in power and assuage his deeply wounded ego.

“Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away,” the Conservative thinker Peter Viereck once wrote, a statement of particular significance today when denial of the reality of a pandemic has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, when denial of climate change threatens the future well-being of millions, and when the blindness, incompetence and furious denial of reality by a ‘mad’ king threatens to further undermine both the nation’s political and psychological stability.

Recovery from the trauma of this tragic descent into madness may be possible, but not before an effective truth serum has been developed capable of providing “herd immunity” against the highly-infectious virus of untruth and denial of reality that has characterized Trump and his Era.

Les Adler

January 9, 2021

DONALD TRUMP CHANNELS JOSEPH MCCARTHY

Joseph McCarthy, February 9, 1950:

"I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." 

Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, 1950

Credit: Getty Images

Donald Trump, March 2, 2019:

"We have people in Congress right now that hate our country. And you know that. And we can name every one of them if they want."

 Trump at CPAC 2019

Credit: Rolling Stone

It can't happen here? It's happening right in front of our eyes.

We can only hope that the American people and their representatives of both parties will eventually see through Trump's flag-hugging sociopathy, as they did with McCarthy.

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BREAK POINT

The swift rise and rapid collapse of McCarthyism more than sixty years ago offers evidence and a relatively recent example of the capacity of American society and democratic institutions to recover from the paralyzing sway the politics of fear, xenophobia, ethnic division and subversion can temporarily hold over the body politic.

Donald Trump and Joseph McCarthy

Credit: NYMag.com

Surfacing during eras of extreme cultural stress, and highly dependent on the symbolic appeal of simplistic purifying or redemptive solutions targeting infectious ‘alien’ agents—the Red Menace in the ‘50s or terrorist Muslims and Central American caravans today-- such movements rely on two basic ingredients. First, a heightened fear that ‘enemies’ have penetrated the nation’s porous borders, taking advantage of our over-tolerant institutions; and second the powerful appeal of a self-appointed charismatic leader willing to transcending normal institutional limits in order to protect the vulnerable homeland and root out by any means necessary subversive elements within and without.

There have been previous outbreaks of what historian Richard Hofstadter first described as the “Paranoid Style” in American politics. But the infectious America First nationalism and anti immigrant fear-mongering of Donald Trump today has only one major parallel: the fierce anti-communist witch-hunt fanned to a fever pitch by the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, in the early 1950’s. Though different in scope and scale, both McCarthyism and Trumpism share a common script, and, if history is any guide, contain similar seeds leading to their own ultimate devolution and destruction.

McCarthy was late to recognize but quick to exploit the enormous potential and power that extreme and undocumented charges against ‘elite’ government officials could bring at a critically unsettling moment in the early Cold War. Aided and enabled by ambitious politicians, credulous reporters and officials like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover willing to use the Senator for their own purposes, McCarthy was suddenly elevated to a position where even the threat of his investigations could silence or destroy powerful individuals and institutions at every level of government and society. Even without Trump’s enormous degree of institutional authority, McCarthy’s assumed power, for a time, seemed unlimited.

Though initially challenged by a few members of his own party who recognized the danger he posed to constitutional freedoms, and later, publicly, by media figures such as the respected broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow, it was, importantly, McCarthy himself whose continuing excesses brought him down.

Legal decisions ultimately prevented some of his most extreme actions, though not before thousands of individuals had their careers and lives destroyed by mere threats or charges. Exposed to a national audience during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn’s bullying misuse of power, prompting the famous line uttered by Attorney Joseph Welch: “Senator, have you at last no decency left?” exposed him for the demagogue he was.

Once the “spell” was broken, the air went rapidly out of the balloon. Public approval diminished; previous supporters backed away from the spectacle. McCarthy’s political power in congress soon evaporated, and though in some cases it took decades, individuals and institutions McCarthy had attacked could begin to respond and rebuild.

We don’t know yet how many insulted American heroes, generals or admirals it will take, or how many humiliated or berated intelligence agents, or agencies. Nor how many ignorant and un-empathetic comments about the Puerto Rican hurricane, synagogue shooting or Californian fire victims.

How many juvenile or vile name-calling tweets belittling basketball players, commentators or political critics it will take to break the spell. But the spell will break. Indecency has its limits!

On the political side, the scale of the country’s growing repudiation of Trumpism is becoming increasingly evident as final vote counts in various regions confirm the strength of an actual ‘blue wave’ in national and state elections. Where Trump’s acolytes and enablers did win, their victories were hard-fought and far narrower than expected, often dependent on deliberate techniques of voter suppression and political gerrymandering. Denied or not, rising blue tides do indicate gradually melting poles of support.

True to form, and much like that of the earlier demagogue, the President’s immediate response was to attack: first by deriding losing candidates who had not sought his blessing; then by firing the Attorney General whom he had long blamed and demeaned for not sufficiently protecting him from the Mueller investigation, and then by appointing a strong supporter who would do so. Attempting to reassure his base, Mr. Trump then reignited his war with the “fake news” media, berating African American reporters at his first full news conference and then banning an assertive CNN reporter who insisted on asking difficult questions.

As vote counts tightened, he was quick to charge election officials with fraud, whipping up resentment and public passion against nameless ‘enemies’ as well as against the legitimate mechanisms of democratic governance. Most recently, in attacking a Federal Appeals Court ruling against his asylum policies, he incurred an unheard of rebuke by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who defined the independence of the Judicial System as a critical feature of American democracy countering the President’s attack by saying “there are no Obama judges, or Bush or Clinton judges…..”

Continual exposure to a Chief Executive whose authoritarian tendencies, willingness to incite violent passions, compulsion to lie, lack of empathy towards minorities, asylum-seekers, victims of natural disasters—and even homeless children-- and vindictiveness toward those in the press or public who dare to question his policies and behavior, appears to have begun to awaken a significant portion of the public, among them former supporters.

We may not know yet whether the “spell” has fully been broken, or where the  “break point” actually is, but it is clear politically that his self-inflated balloon has sprung leaks. Attacks on old ‘enemies’ (Hillary, ‘fake news’ media, congressional opponents, proponents of climate change, NATO allies) will go on, as well, but have passed their sell-by date. Those, and even newer threats like the ‘invasion’ of legitimate asylum-seekers from Central America may no longer serve to patch the increasingly visible holes. Failed tax policies, disruptive tariff wars and unexpected foreign events emanating from the Middle East—as well as the fallout from the Mueller investigation—may well complete the process.

Just as McCarthy’s rampage weakened democratic institutions at home while endangering America’s standing abroad, Trump’s embrace of authoritarian leaders and murderous tyrants can only undermine any remaining sense of America’s moral capacity to guide international affairs in a positive direction.

Yet, cultural and institutional limits to coarse, brutal and amoral practices in the name of public welfare do exist, and if modern American history is any guide, there is a point when ‘fevers’ (political or otherwise) do break. The question then is how basically healthy bodies can slowly recover and rebuild, and how much lasting damage has been done.

Les Adler

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You can also view this post on OpEdNews. 

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"GET ME ROGER STONE" -- A MUST-SEE DOCUMENTARY

“Get Me Roger Stone” Netflix documentary 2017

Those still attempting to make sense of how the country has reached its

current political impasse could hardly do better than viewing the new Netflix documentary,

“Get Me Roger Stone.”

 Roger Stone

Credit: Wikipedia

Stone, whose career closely tracks the Republican Party's evolutionary descent from Nixon to Reagan to Trump (sad) appears first as a ideologically driven Young Republican partisan in the 1970's, then a fervent Reagan campaign staffer and later big-time Washington consultant/lobbyist in the 1980's and 1990's, and most recently as a key strategic adviser to Trump's campaign team. With a history of lobbying for a variety of unsavory foreign governments, his name has currently appeared in a number of recent investigative reports and articles delving into the relationship between close Trump associates and Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign. 

As his public profile has risen, so has his ego, which the documentary highlights in full graphic display-- to Stone's evident delight. Like Trump himself, one of Stone's acknowledged mentors in the darker arts of politics was the infamous Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel and hatchet man during the Senator's anti-Communist crusade in the 1950's. It was, in fact, Cohn who introduced Stone to Trump in the early 1980's; and Stone, who later in the decade began urging Trump to consider running for President.

Central to Stone's 'brand' has been a mastery of the techniques of negative campaigning, including character assassination, dirty tricks, disinformation and behind-the-scenes manipulation of groups, individuals and causes. In interviews, he is openly and aggressively unapologetic about his commitment to winning at all cost, using any weapons available. Unfortunately, his model seems to have been increasingly adopted by Republican leaders in Washington where policy and public interest concerns, along with any commitment to bipartisanship or shared governance have given way to the single-minded goal of defeating and demeaning the opposition. With no fixed ideology, available to the highest bidder, and certainly without shame, Stone is the perfect hired gun and exemplar of the new Trumpian world. 

The documentary's chief impact, however, is its shocking revelation of just how far and how fast we have come from a world in which at least the ideals and standards of acceptable political and personal behavior in a democracy were promoted and proclaimed –if not always followed. What we are experiencing is not a new normal, but what can best be described as a 'new abnormal' in which 'alternative facts', denial of evidence, blatant lies, deliberate distortions and a generous admixture of the politics of fear have effectively undermined a sense of shared reality and trust in national institutions.

In their effort to win at all cost, freely employing the politics of personal destruction while demeaning the very instruments of democracy, Trump, Stone and their enablers have brought the nation to its current debased level of national division and crisis. Joe McCarthy and his amanuensis, Roy Cohn, have very nearly triumphed. While perhaps not explaining fully the shape of the elephant in the room, “Get Me Roger Stone” is a timely examination of a significant portion the beast.

Les Adler

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Zerospinzone published the above piece in July, 2017. It now (January 25, 2019) appears that Stone may have pulled a few too many "dirty tricks." He was arrested early this morning at his home in Florida by heavily armed FBI agents and charged with one count of obstructing an official investigation (the House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation), five counts of making false statements to Congress and one count of witness tampering. We'll see how Stone's notorious arrogance holds up in the face of Mueller's notorious diligence.

And today, 11/16/19, we learned that Stone has been found guilty on seven counts, including lying to Congress and witness tampering, and could spend up to twenty years in prison. Of course, it seems almost guaranteed that the man Stone mentored in the darkest political arts, Donald Trump, will pardon him.

Again, you can view the excellent Netflix documentary on Stone here.

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Roy Cohn would be proud of Donald Trump

After viewing the second presidential debate, historian Lev Adler posted this commentary on the Daily Kos. He paints Trump as Roy Cohn's prize pupil, a master of the dark arts of demagoguery that Cohn honed as Joseph McCarthy's hit man during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) witch hunts of the 1950s.

Donald Trump at a 2016 rally. Credit Wikipedia