Bedtime for Democracy

 

(Apologies…I couldn’t come up with a better title, so I borrowed from The Dead Kennedys.)

The Supreme Court wrapped up its term last week, and it was predictably disheartening.  Former (for now) president Trump got his executive immunity.  Attempted election tampering and inciting insurrection are no barriers to the highest office.  The Sackler family is immune from being sued for Perdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis. The courts no longer have to defer to the expertise and judgment of administrative agencies.  The Biden administration has been blocked from its efforts to curb air pollution.

And so forth.  None of this is surprising, just more of the usual.  Long standing protections and safeguards are falling one by one and there seems to be little will to push back.  Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate seems to augur worse tidings to come.

Time has blunted the sense of shock surrounding J6.  It’s hard to reconjure the feelings of dread pervading the pandemic year as emboldened armed nutters tested the boundaries of duly constituted authorities and the law itself.  But it seems we are careening toward a repeat performance.  Donald Trump is a master of self-reinvention, and it is becoming evident we are on the threshold of a second Trump presidency with all the implications that carries.

There’s always been an underlying current of violence beneath the placid surface of American life which periodically erupts as sudden, startling paroxysms of carnage.  Nine short years ago some laughed and shrugged as long-shot candidate Trump bragged he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and get away with it.  But January 6^th demonstrated that his words could move bad actors to commit bad acts. 

It’s tempting to reflexively paint Trump and his devotees as fascists, which isn’t always a subtle enterprise, but there are historical parallels.  An apt comparison is the assassination of Italian politician Giacomo Matteotti a century ago.  Matteotti had challenged the victory of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party in the 1924 parliamentary elections, charging intimidation and election fraud.  Days after making the accusation on the floor of parliament, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered.  The antifascist opposition then miscalculated and abandoned its parliamentary forum and counted on a general strike to topple Mussolini’s government.  The strike failed and the withdrawal of the opposition only solidified Mussolini’s hold on power, moving Italy toward the totalitarian state it became. Mussolini eventually took credit for Matteotti’s death, framing it as a necessity and condoning the actions of the assassination squad. 

It is not a broad inferential leap to see something comparable in present-day America.  The Democrats won’t withdraw from electoral politics to be sure, but the Republicans use razor-thin majorities in Congress much more effectively than the Democrats.  If Trump wins and the Republicans regain the Senate in November, matters could deteriorate quickly.  With SCOTUS loosening its oversight of the executive and with Trump’s stated intention to replace civil service merit hires with handpicked loyalists, it won’t take a large majority in Congress to advance the MAGA vision.  The roadmap is already there in the Project 2025 policy document published by the Heritage Foundation.  The conservative long game that began with the Powell Memorandum in the 1970s is about to pay off magnificently.

But then there is a faint glimmer of hope amidst the dark tidings.  New York state just disbarred Rudy Giuliani.  For election denial.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Backsliding

Everyone knew it was coming, of course.  That didn’t make the news any easier to accept. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has formally handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, nearly two months after Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion was leaked to the public.  The resulting backlash notwithstanding, it appears the final draft is identical or nearly so to the preview.  There is no longer a nationally recognized right to abortion.  

The extent to which a woman enjoys reproductive freedom now depends upon the state where she lives.  In my own state, little or nothing will change in the wake of Dobbs.  There has been talk of making our state a sanctuary for women seeking safe terminations.  But even then, measures elsewhere such as the Texas snitch law may thwart this particular haven unless the woman doesn’t return home. 

Emboldened by their right-wing supermajority, there is already talk of harsher actions to come.  Clarence Thomas has publicly said it may be time to consider limiting access to contraception. Rights such as same-sex marriage may also be at risk now that SCOTUS has issued a total reversal of what was once considered settled law. 

Despite having won, the right is nevertheless taking refuge in their perennial claims of persecution by a malevolent “woke” left.  Congressional wingnuts are already conjuring specters of a violent backlash to further entrench the hysterical tendencies of the base.  Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (where else?) warned of a potential “constitutional crisis” resulting from a rumored “invasion” of the Supreme Court by the “pro-abortion left.”  (Sorry, Mikey, inciting mob violence is your party’s brand.)  

The decades-long assault on reproductive rights is deeply disturbing to me on a visceral level.  This may read counterintuitively considering men can’t get pregnant (except in emojis).  But the two things I value most are my privacy and my autonomy.  If I insist upon these for myself, then it is only right that I want them for you as well.  Anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive policies limit privacy and autonomy for women of childbearing age, and that is wrong.  

Dobbs is a landmark on the backsliding route our country is traveling.  It is also a warning.  We have arrived at a place where a moderate majority are increasingly subjected to the superstitious fanaticism of right-wing leaders and their legions of scruffy devotees.  It’s sickeningly awful to witness them fouling our nest while our freedoms erode and life in America becomes harder to bear.  We face more grim days such as this.  The darkness is gathering fast.

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Headlong into the Past

 

It was only a coincidence, but a fitting one just the same.  This past week, I’ve been bingeing The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.  Absently scrolling through my newsfeed as I watched, one headline caught my eye.  The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari in a case involving a Mississippi statute banning abortion after the first fifteen weeks of pregnancy. 

While such a story is troubling under normal circumstances, the ideological shift of the federal judiciary to the right during the Trump administration provokes outright angst.  Before 2017, any ruling re Roe v. Wade was tempered by a reluctance to overturn it outright.  For instance, when Chief Justice John Roberts was undergoing his confirmation hearings in 2005 he noted that Roe was settled law. 

But perhaps not for much longer.  The influx of right-leaning judges into the federal courts, together with the new conservative SCOTUS supermajority, puts that into question.  A president’s lasting legacy are his judicial appointments.  In that sense, Donald Trump has created a threat to hard-won rights that will persist years after his tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

The world of The Handmaid’s Tale is a funhouse mirror version of a right-wing utopia.  More to the point, it’s a reflection of present-day phenomena which, on a slippery slope, might result in something like it.  

Life in the postrevolutionary theocracy of Gilead is chockfull of slightly tweaked aspects of daily American life in 2021.  We have militarized law enforcement and omniscient public surveillance.  There is a growing tolerance of officially meted punishment in the guise of justice, with “othered” minorities particularly singled out.  Politicized evangelicals influencing public policy.  Propaganda and misinformation substituted for news.  

The series was especially prescient with Gilead’s backstory.  In the series universe, a terrorist attack against the White House and U.S. Capitol led to rule by decree by a cabal of religious fanatics. The Great Redneck Riot of January Sixth was an eerie evocation of an otherwise unthinkable event.  (Imagine what could have happened if the rioters had been organized…and planned ahead.) 

The rest of the quasi-fictional nightmare could be made more real through the law courts.  Central to the narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale is an unspecified environmental disaster affecting fertility rates.  Women who could still conceive were rendered as property, stripped of their old identities and forced into reproductive servitude to the male “commanders” who govern Gilead.  Although The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction, it is also food for thought in the face of a gradual erosion of the personal rights gained by women over the past century.  

Concerning the pending abortion case, an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade seems attainable for the first time.  SCOTUS has bounded and further refined the legal protections afforded by Roe, but until now they remained comparatively slight.  No longer. 

Although it has no direct legal bearing on how the case is argued and decided, public opinion’s effect on politics cannot be ignored.  Over time I’ve detected a worrisome trend among my students, particularly the working class white males.  They are quite forward with their anti-abortion stance and their taste for authoritarian policies.  I think I know why.  Populist conservatism’s appeal stems from the feeling that the economic immiseration of white workers and America’s supposed loss of greatness is the result of our abandoning traditional values.  Traditional values which privilege men and subordinate women and people of color.  Things will get better if we just turn back the calendar.  After all, that’s what Jesus wants, right? 

The three most recently appointed justices were chosen with right-wing policy objectives in mind.  The views of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are no secret.  The touchstone issue, the long-running litmus test for the conservative base, is abortion. This in turn is prompted by a retrograde worldview informed by evangelical Christian tenets.  Taken literally, biblical law affirms ideas which privilege some and abuse many.  

Here is what is at stake.  Several states have enacted six-week abortion bans; a few more have passed bills imposing an outright ban in anticipation of Roe being overturned.  Should the Mississippi law be upheld, as it very well may, then we have taken the first step in rolling back equal rights for women.  We all must ask ourselves if this is the kind of society we want to live in.

If you want a nightmare vision of what that society may end up looking like if present trends persist, watch The Handmaid’s Tale. 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Oh, no! It's Antifa!

The protests over the killing of George Floyd continue across the country.  In some cities, widespread rioting and looting have occurred.

One of these cities was Sacramento, where the losses have been estimated at $10 million.  City officials have been quoted as saying that “outside agitators” were to blame.  Arrest records demonstrate otherwise, with the majority of those taken into custody being locals.

The vague catchall “outside agitators” has a familiar ring.  It came up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement as organizers worked to build solidarity against Jim Crow.  It came up again during the antiwar protests of the 1960s.  (I once visited a military museum where the narrative for its Vietnam War exhibit solemnly informed us that the demonstrations were provoked by agitators in the pay of the Soviets and Red Chinese.)  Now we are hearing it in the context of this week’s uprisings.

The agitators in this case are reputed by sundry sources to be the mysterious and menacing “Antifa.”  Conservative media for the past several years have conjured the specter of a frighteningly monolithic force of exceptionally well-organized fanatics poised to strike at the American heartland. 

The references have been sporadic until now.  The Tweeter-in-Chief, needing to be on the cusp of whatever flight of fancy has seized the “base” at any given moment, messaged that he would issue an executive order designating Antifa as a terrorist organization, an authority he does not possess, although reality has never stopped him from such sweeping proclamations.

Coming back to the situation in Sacramento, local news outlets reported yesterday that some residents in the suburbs had called law enforcement reporting suspicious activity they thought was protest-related.  Posters on social media platforms such as NextDoor stoked anxieties cautioning residents to be on the lookout for phenomena such as stacked rocks or bricks, individuals carrying water bottles filled with “a non-water substance,” and (my personal favorite) antifa who “like to dress up like wannabe ninjas, all black and face masks and usually carrying a backpack.”

The fears mostly proved unfounded, with only a few scattered street corner demonstrations.  People in those communities were probably more at risk from “patriots” who like to dress up like wannabe soldiers, all camouflage and all too often brandishing firearms. 

All of this begs the question of what is everyone from the White House to Fox News to suburbanites so worked up about.  Let’s keep our feet firmly planted on terra firma, shall we?

Firstly, antifa is short for “anti-fascist.”  Aren’t we supposed to be against fascism?  Nothing wrong there ideologically.

The next important thing to keep in mind is that hierarchical organization is antithetical to the antifa movement.  Antifa groups span a wide political spectrum, though they have certain shared values such as opposition to capitalism and discrimination.  Much of antifa activity appears to consist of information sharing and ad hoc confrontations with far-right agitators, such as those at the 2017 Unite the Right rally.  Many of them dress in dark colors as an expression of solidarity, and the masks afford protection from being identified as targets for retaliation.   

Antifa isn’t even a new movement.  I remember talk of antifa when I was an undergrad thirty years ago though I never knew anyone involved.  It has gained prominence since the 2016 election in large part because the far-right has become emboldened by a Trump presidency.

The relative tolerance for the far-right among white suburban Republicans is because it says things they agree with but are inhibited from expressing themselves on account of the thin veneer of civility remaining in the national discourse.  Consider some of the reasons the suburbs emerged.  Folks certainly wanted to escape the crowding of big cities, but just as importantly they didn’t want share their neighborhoods with people of color.  Redlining and restrictive covenants kept out any upwardly mobile African Americans and Latinos.

Even after these racist practices were outlawed decades ago, income inequality has kept suburbia predominately white.  However, slow as progress has been, acceptance of a multicultural society is growing.  Antifa’s perceived threat to people living outside the urban core, then, is purely symbolic.  It openly stands up to white suburbanites’ last best hope for preserving their way of life without getting their own hands dirty, whether that takes the form of President Trump’s dog whistle rhetoric or the overt militancy of neo-Nazis and Klansmen.  This is even more true of genuine mass movements like Black Lives Matter which may actually lead to dismantling the repressive structures people of color have confronted throughout the nation’s history.

But you needn’t worry for now, dear suburbanite.  Antifa isn’t interested in suburbia.  They aren’t coming for your tract houses and SUVs.  Not today, anyhow. Nor are they coming for your tacky strip malls, big box stores, and megachurches.  Don’t lose sleep over the fate of Walmart or Chick-fil-A for the time being, or that of your kids’ Little League games and your backyard barbecues.  This is a long-run struggle over hearts and minds, of how we define ourselves as a society.  You may wish it away, but a reckoning will be upon all of us soon enough.  It’s a question of being part of the problem or the solution.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Wrapped in the American Flag?

It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly nine years, but I vividly remember the night the Iraq War began. 

I was in graduate school at the time, and I was walking with a friend toward the University Union to have a cup of coffee.  As we approached the door, a woman thrust an antiwar leaflet at us – “Stop the invasion!”  My friend waved her away.  As we walked off she hissed, “Fascists!”

I was taken aback, and a little bemused.  The leaflet lady didn’t know me, of course, but I had spent much of that week engaged in various campus activities concerning the impending conflict.  I’d participated in two antiwar demos already and had been part of a panel symposium on the war and its likely consequences.  But the epithet stung.

For many in the American left, “fascist” is a catchall label for people and ideas they oppose, a word thrown around much in the way right-wingers so often did with “Communist” in earlier generations and do with “anti-American” and “terrorist” today.   All these terms can be thought-terminating clichés.  But remembering that encounter all those years ago outside the University Union has made me reflect on what fascism is and whether it could take root on American soil.

This is a worrisome question that has recurred in times of social ferment since the 1930s.  In fact, we often allude to it in everyday discourse—consider the popularity of the reductio ad Hitlerum as a rhetorical device.  However, since 9/11 there has been particular cause for concern.  In spite of the best efforts of civil libertarians to raise the alarm the American public as a whole has been remarkably quiescent in the face of the PATRIOT Act, no-fly lists, increased surveillance, ever-tightening airport security measures, and a policy of extrajudicial killings abroad.  Although Americans have unprecedented access to news and information most seem to believe ignorance is bliss.     

As they did in many Western countries, various fascist movements took hold in the United States in the years before the Second World War.  While none of them had large memberships or gained widespread support, the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts are still mentioned in histories of the time.  Similarly, demagogic public figures such as Huey Long, William Dudley Pelley, and Fr. Francis Coughlin were characterized by their detractors as fascist. 

After the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, it became socially unacceptable to openly espouse fascist ideologies.  However, the anti-Communism engendered by the Cold War represented the sort of sociopolitical reaction that too often aped fascism, albeit loosely.  To this day, currents of fascist tendencies run beneath the surface of American political discourse.

Fascism is one of those elusive concepts that form in the eye of the beholder, as we saw in my opening anecdote.  But we do have a few good rules of thumb for recognition.  For instance, Umberto Eco points to characteristics such as preoccupation with tradition, anti-intellectualism, intolerance of dissent, xenophobia, middle class fears of economic distress, populism, and the need for an external enemy to provide unity.  Stanley Payne identifies like attributes, among them the belief in a need for strong political authority, anti-liberalism, and anti-Communism. 

Certain character types may be particularly attracted to fascist ideas, such as the authoritarian personality described by Hannah Arendt.   Similarly, Richard Hofstadter’s description of American anti-intellectualism incorporates fascist tropes such as resentment of cosmopolitan urbanites and foreigners.  The American preference for practical pursuits over the contemplative life is reminiscent of the pronouncement of Benito Mussolini’s in-house philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, that while fascism wasn’t opposed to intelligence per se it was emphatically against intellectualism.

While we like to see ourselves as individualists, and while our national self-image is largely built on this belief, there is a strong current of conformism and deference to authority in our daily lives.  I don’t think this is case just with blue collar red staters, either.  Training in the top-down group ethos begins early regardless of social background, whether we recognize it or not.  Parenting practices may range from strict, “Because I said so” demands for unquestioning obedience to presenting a narrow range of “choices” to follow, but few parents teach their kids to be truly autonomous.  Starting in elementary school, we sit in orderly rows reminiscent of soldiers in ranks.  By high school, our teachers and administrators choose our leaders and heroes for us; they seldom if ever rise from below.  We’re also told, sometimes overtly, sometimes by default, who doesn’t fit in and should thereby be socially excluded. 

As adults our work is often highly structured.  We attend church much more frequently than our brethren in other Western countries -- a belief in revealed religion is not normally conducive to independent thought.  Our heavily corporatized media presents a homogeneous viewpoint that doesn’t challenge the status quo.  The propaganda function of the mainstream media is well-documented and we can’t blame it all on Fox News or AM talk radio, either.  Minor editorial differences aside, news content varies little from source to source.  Rarely do we ever see or hear progressive views.   

And so we're always ready to rally ‘round the flag.  Patriotism is defined as unquestioning support for our leaders, politicians of all ideological stripes sport flag lapel pins as a silent protest of their loyalty, and anyone who questions the direction in which the country is heading clearly “hates America.”  The chilling effect on dissent over the past ten years has been significant; peer pressure and deference to authority has become the norm.  While we look away from the acts of the powers that be, we focus all the more on the powerless.

The current economic crisis has the middle class groping blindly for culprits.  Not the obvious ones, mind you.  Since your typical suburbanite feels a stronger affinity for CEOs, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers than for the poor and marginalized, it’s the latter whom he blames for the subprime mortgage meltdown.  In his mind it was Democrat-imposed legislation forcing banks to lend to low-income borrowers, particularly minorities, that pushed us down the slippery slope to disaster.  In this climate it’s no surprise that James O’Keefe’s prank on ACORN resonated with conservatives and that President Obama’s past work as a community organizer raised hackles during the 2008 campaign.  It’s probably best for him that he didn’t try to organize immigrants.       

Nativism is alive and well in America, as a cursory look at recent events shows.  It’s hardly new, though.  The escalating war on immigrants, documented or not,  reflects a cyclical phenomenon in our history stretching back all the way to the Know-Nothings of the early nineteenth century.  But despite the progress we tell ourselves we've made since the Civil Rights Movement, the enactment of SB 1070 in Arizona and HB 56 in Alabama lays bare a decidedly ugly vein of bigotry.  Another example is our exaggerated fear of Muslims and people who are or are perceived to be Middle Eastern.  Racial profiling in general is a result of a deep-seated fear of people unlike us.            

The phrase, “people unlike us” may well apply to the so-called Red/Blue state divide though this is hardly a new development.  The rapid urbanization of American society a century ago engendered a deep-seated distrust of cities among rural and small-town people.  For them cities were breeding grounds of sin and magnets for un-American elements.  The Scopes Trial, rural support of Prohibition, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s were all signs of a emerging social chasm that has persisted to this day.           

Another hint of a latent fascism shows in how we’ve constructed our national identity.  Our society valorizes toughness and violence.  It isn’t just our penchant for action films, first-person shooter video games, and other escapist pastimes.  It’s interwoven in our heritage of conquest and global hegemony.  The cult of strength also reveals a certain misogyny—if masculinity is good, its inverse, femininity, is implicitly bad for its presumed weakness.  Moreover, this bias is reflected in statements from our national leaders.  President Bush’s taunt to Iraqi insurgents to “Bring it on” played well with the public, despite the backlash from his political opponents.  When Donald Rumsfeld claimed “weakness is provocative,” he was not just pointing out the need for a strong defense.  He was expressing a contempt for those who fail to live up to the ideal of the taciturn lone hero of our popular self-imagination. 

I suppose we don’t notice these tendencies as we’re a steadfastly apolitical people not given to reflection.  We’re put off by the drone of daily coverage in no small part because we aren’t offered any real choice with the two major parties.  We vote—that’s the extent of our political activity.  Otherwise, we tune out.  Without any meaningful outlet for involvement we turn inward to our private concerns.  Because we’ve largely abandoned the public sphere, the vacuum has been filled by those who don’t have the public good as their priority.  And their manipulation of public sentiment puts us at risk of being ultimately complicit in our own oppression.   

Do I believe that the United States is fascist?  Of course not.  Do I believe that our country has the potential to become fascist?  I believe that we're susceptible given our cultural proclivities.  If and when fascism does come, it won’t be with banners, black shirts, and jackboots.  Sinclair Lewis’ pronouncement is as prescient now as it was 75 years ago: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar