Book Review: On Tyranny

'People Would Revolt' if Trump is Impeached is Not His Opinion, it's an Instruction to commit violence

Historian Timothy Snyder's 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century, is a warning aimed directly at President Trump and his now obvious political goal of establishing anti-democratic, right wing tyranny in America. There's nothing subtle about this short, easy to read book (126 pages). It gets right to the point by comparing the tactics, rhetoric and mindset of 20th century tyrants like Hitler and Stalin to what Trump is doing today in America. Each of the twenty lessons constitute a short chapter. It can be read in a several hours. What Snyder is arguing here is generally in accord with how some others, e.g., Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, have described the 20th century's political monsters.

Unilateral surrender: Snyder's first lesson, do not obey in advance, makes the point that in the face of the tyrant or tyrant wannabe, many people simply let their own freedom go. Power flows from the people to the tyrant. Snyder writes: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. . . . . A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." Examples include a willing transfer of power by the people to Hitler in Germany in 1932 and to the communist tyrants in Czechoslovakia in 1946.

Institutional defense: Snyder argues that democratic institutions do not defend themselves, people defend them: "We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government." Snyder asserts that many Americans are making this same mistake again today. He suggests people pick an institution such as a pro-democracy law, a court, a newspaper or a labor union and defend it publicly.

It is worth noting that a court or labor union would need to be defended. Courts strike many as a rock solid and unassailable institution. However, Trump and senate republicans are packing the federal courts with radical authoritarian ideologue judges. The time is coming when more temperate courts and court decisions will be attacked and the tyrant will foment both public and executive branch resistance to those courts, judges and decisions. We are seeing the beginnings of that right now.

Also consider the proposition that, unless they are co-opted and/or corrupted, labor unions are pro-democratic institutions. Powerful, persuasive arguments by other careful observers make this case. Both Nancy MacLean in her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America, and Jane Mayer in her 2016 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, make it clear that a key target of anti-democratic authoritarians is labor unions. Powerful billionaires exemplified by the radical right political movement built and still funded by the Koch brothers have a raging, visceral hate of labor unions. Labor unions allow collective action, which is pro-democratic in that they represent some collective power and wealth. That literally enrages the radical libertarian, authoritarian right. Before reading Snyder on this point, the idea of labor unions being a democratic institution seemed out of synch with reality for me at least. But on reflection, Snyder makes an excellent point. He's right.

Resist toleration of violence: Some of Snyder's lessons seem far-fetched. But on consideration, maybe they are not far fetched at all. His lesson six, be wary of paramilitaries, brings this point home: "When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. . . . . For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics." Snyder points out that non-authoritarian governments try to hold a monopoly on violence mediated by official police, secret services and sometimes the military, but always constrained by the rule of law. Snyder defines a paramilitary broadly, and it can include an authoritarian leader's personal bodyguard. People in Germany and Austria made the grave mistake of tolerating paramilitary intimidation and violence, and many of the survivors among them came to regret it.

Snyder points to Trump as an example: "As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. . . . . . At one campaign rally [Trump] said, 'There's a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out." When the pro-Trump mob tried to do that, Trump was pleased, saying: "Isn't this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it's fun." Other recent events have made it clear that Trump is actively fomenting violence by his supporters against political opposition.

So, after announcing his candidacy for president in 2020, Joe Biden's opening attack on Trump led with "Charlottesville", referring to the fascist, white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, South Carolina, he was directly attacking a core tyrant tactic. Trump had defended the fascists by calling them 'good people'. Biden threw that directly back in Trump's face as he should have.

Snyder's book is useful to help put tyranny and Trump in better historical and current context. It makes Trump look even more threatening than viewing him without the context.


Originally posted 5/2/19

Ready or Not, The Tyrant Commeth

Since February or March of 2017, I've been arguing that the president wants to convert America from a rule of law democracy into some kind of kleptocratic tyranny-oligarchy-theocracy. Before then, I believed that is what the president wanted to do, but thought it made sense to see how he would speak and otherwise behave once in office. Early on, most Americans, but not all, would have dismissed the Trump tyrant-kleptocrat argument as nonsense, hyperbole, a lie or whatever was needed to make the argument go away. That was dismissed here as recently as a couple of weeks ago, with the argument that any tyrant-kleptocrat argument was gross hyperbole and such a thing as a kleptocratic tyranny didn't even exist. As usual, citation of contrary evidence changed absolutely nothing.

Some saw this coming right from the get go

One of the early warnings about impending authoritarianism came from Russian-American reporter Masha Gessen, who wrote this about in an article, Autocracy: Rules for Survival, for the New York Review of Books, in November of 2016:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.” 

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday [in her concession speech to Trump].

Gessen had seen how quickly Putin dismantled Russia's democracy and built his kleptocratic tyranny. She could see the threat of the same thing happening to America. Gessen's argument that it is immoral to fail to see reality is very rare. I recall no one ever saying this in the context of politics.

Despite minds that usually do not change despite contrary evidence, increasing numbers of people came to a similar conclusion. Concern is increasing that the president really does want to convert America from a rule of law democracy into some kind of kleptocratic tyranny-oligarchy-theocracy. The alarms on this are finally becoming truly strident, as they should have been for quite some time. Evidence of what the president wants to try to do are now blatantly obvious to open minds. Of course, the president and his enablers and supporters either see none of this, or they support it. For the blind, their minds simply won't let them see the threat to democracy and the rule of law that the president constitutes.

Corrupt the Department of Justice and kill the rule of law

The events of the last few weeks make it quite clear that the president just might succeed in his goal. The president is now intent on corrupting the rule of law by converting the Department of Justice to a political tool to attack and silence all opposition, political and otherwise. The president's active interference in reducing the sentencing of his political ally Roger Stone is undeniable evidence of direct attack on the rule of law. The president applauds the defense of his convicted felon allies.

America is now undeniably on the way to some kind of kleptocratic authoritarian-oligarchy-theocracy. Whether it gets there is still an open question. Despite the uncertainty, corrupt tyranny is coming closer. Attacks on democracy and the rule of are now completely in the open and enabled by anti-democracy, anti-rule of law Trump administration appointees and the pro-authoritarian GOP.

This 8 minute video summarizes the situation nicely.




One question this raises is whether we still stand at the edge of an abyss as Gessen argued in November 2016, or have we gone over the edge and it is now too late to save democracy or the rule of law?

The Impact of Globalization on Economic Growth

Globalization aims to benefit individual economies around the world by making markets more efficient, increasing competition, limiting military conflicts, and spreading wealth more equally.

Globalization Benefits World Economies

The Milken Institute's "Globalization of the World Economy" report of 2003 highlighted many of the benefits associated with globalization while outlining some of the associated risks that governments and investors should consider, and the principles of this report remain relevant.

Some of the benefits of globalization include:

• Foreign Direct Investment: Foreign direct investment (FDI) tends to increase at a much greater rate than the growth in world trade, helping boost technology transfer, industrial restructuring, and the growth of global companies.
• Technological Innovation: Increased competition from globalization helps stimulate new technology development, particularly with the growth in FDI, which helps improve economic output by making processes more efficient.
• Economies of Scale: Globalization enables large companies to realize economies of scale that reduce costs and prices, which in turn supports further economic growth. However, this can hurt many small businesses attempting to compete domestically.

Some of the risks of globalization include:

• Interdependence: Interdependence between nations can cause regional or global instabilities if local economic fluctuations end up impacting a large number of countries relying on them.
• National Sovereignty: Some see the rise of nation-states, multinational or global firms, and other international organizations as a threat to sovereignty. Ultimately, this could cause some leaders to become nationalistic or xenophobic.
• Equity Distribution: The benefits of globalization can be unfairly skewed towards rich nations or individuals, creating greater economic inequalities.

Writing in the quarterly Milken Institute Review in late 2017, Dani Rodrik, author of “Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy,” argued that a rebalancing of globalization is necessary to restore more voice to labor and its needs for job and income stability while focusing attention globally on where the biggest economic gains can be made.

Tariffs and Other Forms of Protectionism

The 2008 economic crisis led many politicians to question the merits of globalization. According to a McKinsey Global Institute analysis of data from the International Monetary Fund, global cross-border capital flows shrank by 65% between 2007 and 2016. The decrease from $12.4 trillion to $4.3 trillion in those nine years includes declines in lending, FDI, and equity and bond purchases.

The U.S. and Europe introduced new banking regulations that limited capital flows, and tariffs have been put in place at times to protect domestic industries seen as vital, such as a 127% U.S. tariff on Chinese paper clips or Japan’s 778% tariff on imported rice. In Brazil—where import tariffs run between 10% and 35%—the new government announced in May 2019 that it plans to reduce them by 10 percentage points through 2023.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump in the U.S. and the British vote to leave the European Union (known as the Brexit) have also contributed to the anti-globalization movement. These trends have been driven by anti-immigration sentiments in Europe, although the 2018 election results veer more pro- than anti-globalization.

Future Outlook

Economists suggest that nowadays, cross-border investments are not being made so much to build capital infrastructure as they are to seek countries with the lowest taxes. Some form of globalization may be inevitable over the long-run, but the historic bumps spurred by economic crises and other consequences suggest that change is the only reliable constant.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, escalated U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports raised $20.8 billion through mid-July 2019. American farmers hurt by China diverting crop purchases to other countries were promised $28 billion in federal compensation, making it an overall net loss.

https://www.thebalance.com/globalization-and-its-impact-on-economic-growth-1978843

Globalization is Bad For You

Globalization, speaking roughly is a move toward eliminating the barriers between nations and enabling things like unfettered trade all the way up to and including softening immigration and borders in general.

Capitalists have already taken advantage of this to the detriment of workers. In the past, prior to things like multinationals corporations, capitalists were tied to a nation, and had some reason to invest in it - tax breaks aside. It's home - or was. National borders no longer apply to the capitalists.

What does that mean for us? It means it's near impossible to organize labor against them because they can just pull up stakes in one nation, while doing business in another. Just the threat of that is enough to fuel union busting efforts. It means it's near impossible to regulate them, since they operate under several different nations, and they again pose a "flight risk" if regulations or taxes get too onerous for their taste. There's no loyalty, no ties to the nation it operates in, and that hamstrings us. They know it, and level threats of leaving whenever it benefits them. Boeing moving its headquarters to Chicago is a microcosm of this.

The other problem with globalization is hegemony. As we soften borders and more freely travel, we will naturally homogenize as we're exposed to other people groups. We'll start sharing language, even cultural and value norms - we become a "melting pot" which sounds nice until you learn a little bit about the history of this and how it decimated indigenous cultures like the Mixtecs and Triquis of Mexico as all the leadership of those groups assimilated and learned Spanish and forgot their own language over generations. They lost their written language, they lost their history, the Mixtecs that remain lost everything. I could digress and write about them for pages, but it wasn't just colonization that did their culture in, it was voluntary assimilation by the leaders and bourgeois segment of their society - the ones who could read and write, and owned property. They took all that with them.

I want to be clear, this isn't about race mixing which people will do anyway, but about the erosion of sovereignty and the cultural attrition that goes with that, as happened to the Mixtecs in Mexico and many Indeo tribes here, and there's real tangible loss that goes with that.


It's not just indigenous people this impacts. Muslims have been assimilating swaths of Africa as they expand. What happens to local cultures when that happens? As brutal as that expansion is, the developed world uses the brutality of economics to achieve their own ends in that regard - and then there's the droning. At least Iraq has a McDonalds now? How voluntary is it when the bombs preceded it? The bombs always come first when we bring "freedom" to your country.

All of this is part and parcel to the construction of a global world order, which sounds like a conspiracy but it's not. Agencies like the Trilateral Commission under Carter, or the more recent WTO and IMF are key to it, and have been pushing their neoliberal economics and policies precisely to that end.

The EU is a step in that direction as well. A unified Europe on the one hand is good. A huge, centralized government presiding over vastly different countries? Maybe not so much.

Nations need their national identity. Globalism may not eliminate it, but it erodes it over time.

There's perhaps a more important issue of it, and that is a centralized body cannot adapt to change as well as multiple decentralized bodies. Several complex adaptive systems is better than one. It's more stable. If one falters it's not a crash for everyone. What happens if the EU leadership implodes the way the US leadership has?

If a global society goes off the rails the damage won't be containable. At least with individual societies if they go on tilt they don't necessarily take the world with them.

What happens when a global governmental body goes on tilt? What happens when a fascist manages to get control of it and in control of a global military?

This shouldn't be read as a treatise on nationalism. It's not. This isn't a simple dichotomy. Read this as an appeal to consider the preservation of cultural and ethnic habitat for all people, as well as the safety in diversity of government and leadership.