How democracies promote tyrants to power

Brazil's corrupt dictator and 

his corrupt offspring units

These are comments that PD left here a couple of days ago. He is commenting on a 2 hour documentary that PBS broadcast about the rise to power of Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and his corrupt children. He is another anti-democratic demagogue-criminal-fornicator-liar like our ex-president and his corrupt offspring. The parallels between the two thug political leaders and how they rose to power are striking and depressing. PD's comments speaks for themselves. 

I saw the doc last night (googled it and streamed it). It was good, and it reaffirmed my conviction that people like Trump and Bolsonaro move from the fringes to the halls of power largely because of the convergence and interplay of 3 critical factors: 1) many idiots in society, 2) a powerful, 24/7, dumbed down media which puts idiocy (e.g. birtherism, Bolsonaro's stunts etc.) in the spotlight (began in 90s when entertainment and news merged in various cable TV outlets), and 3) recent forms of social media that allow ambitious politicians who are fringe and get in the dumbed down headlines to inflame the passions of the aforementioned idiots who quickly reciprocate by devoting all their free time to posting stupid, toxic memes, fake news, thus creating an "alternative information ecosystem" in which truth and fiction are nearly interchangeable, and crowd-sourced mass political movements upstage formerly legitimate (but more "boring") politics.

Put simply, politics is being conducted at the level of, say, the Jerry Springer Show, here and in many places (Brazil, much of Europe swept up in its own faux populists bashing minorities etc.).

Walter Lippmann was right (in his 1922 book, Public Opinion) when he said political reality is too complex for the masses to digest thoughtfully, and that confronted with it they descend to levels of idiocy that would make their input dangerous. He was WRONG to imagine that there would or should be an elite group of "experts" who socially engineer a relatively benign public consensus through think-tanks, media and the like. The more advanced media gets, the more we see educated "experts" and "pundits" happily feeding dumbed down sensationalism to the many eager consumers of idiocy.

The answer isn't Lippmann's "manufactured consensus" or the more sinister option of state-controlled media which is where all this is leading anyway. No, the educated journalists and "pundits" must stop putting idiots and their stunts online as well as on the front pages, essays and books where they are recycled and manipulated and distorted on Twitter, Facebook or whatever. When pols started getting Twitter accounts, I argued they should not have such accounts as "official" accounts. It would allow them to use legitimate government status and roles to disseminate bullshit at will. Sure enough, we got a lurid and obsessive Tweeter shortly thereafter in the WH. A president with an "official" Twitter account is like a modern-day equivalent of say Reagan or Clinton having their own TV Channels in the 80s or 90s plus having fan clubs (the equivalent of sympathetic "followers" online). Same idea.

Imagine a Reagan or Clinton skipping most press conferences in favor of controlling the flow of OFFICIAL information on TV shows they would produce themselves, and which would bear the imprimatur of the US Gov't. Unaccountable to even the press (which has become itself a Twitterized group of pundits each with their own fan-clubs and often TV shows or slots). The crass commercialization of the serious business of statecraft is really alarming when you stop and think how far it has sunk and how rapidly.

In the same way, journalists have used their increasingly glamorous status (remember when almost all journos were just schlubs who had their gigs and were mostly unknown and invisible?) to tantalize hordes of entertainment hungry consumers with gossip and lurid bullshit (Palin, birtherism, meaningless scandals etc.) to sell themselves and their product. Had they not covered Bolsonaro's idiot-stunts so much, his candidacy and even his stabbing would not have been such gigantic media feeding frenzies. If CNN and MSNBC had not given Trump SO MUCH airtime to spout out his bullshit Birther claims, he might not have run. If he had run but the media had not used footage and discussions of him and his candidacy as a go-to staple of entertainment, his success in politics would have been, imo, far less likely.

As one Republican operative said, "If you treat politics like a game show, you might end up with an unhinged star from a game show in the White House."

A quote from a 2016 book by two social scientists that I've posted here about 20 or 30 times roughly echoes what Lippman intuitively understood in 1922:

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

The ex-president plans for his second term

In a nutshell, T**** plans to kill American democracy, mostly following the path Viktor Orban used to kill democracy in Hungary. The Atlantic writes: 

Ever since the U.S. Senate failed to convict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection and disqualify him from running for president again, a lot of people, myself included, have been warning that a second Trump term could bring about the extinction of American democracy. Essential features of the system, including the rule of law, honest vote tallies, and orderly succession, would be at risk.

Today, however, we can do more than just speculate about how a second Trump term would unfold, because the MAGA movement has been telegraphing its plans in some detail. In a host of ways—including the overt embrace of illiberal foreign leaders; the ruthless behavior of Republican elected officials since the 2020 election; Trump allies’ elaborate scheming, as uncovered by the House’s January 6 committee, to prevent the peaceful transition of power; and Trump’s own actions in the waning weeks of his presidency and now as ex-president—the former president and his allies have laid out their model and their methods.

Begin with the model. Viktor Orbán has been the prime minister of Hungary twice. His current tenure began in 2010. He is not a heavy-handed tyrant; he has not led a military coup or appointed himself maximum leader. Instead, he follows the path of what he has called “illiberal democracy.” Combining populist rhetoric with machine politics, he and his party, Fidesz, have rotted Hungarian democracy from within by politicizing media regulation, buying or bankrupting independent media outlets, appointing judges who toe the party line, creating obstacles for opposition parties, and more. Hungary has not gone from democracy to dictatorship, but it has gone from democracy to democracy-ish. Freedom House rates it only partly free. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s ratings show declines in every democratic indicator since Fidesz took power.

The MAGA movement has studied Orbán and Fidesz attentively. Hungary is where Tucker Carlson, the leading U.S. conservative-media personality (who is sometimes mentioned as a possible presidential contender), took his show for a week of fawning broadcasts. Orbán is the leader whom the Conservative Political Action Conference brought in as a keynote speaker in August. He told the group what it loves to hear: “We cannot fight successfully by liberal means.” Trump himself has made clear his admiration for Orbán, praising him as “a strong leader and respected by all.”

The U.S. is an older and better-established democracy than Hungary. How, then, could MAGA acolytes emulate Orbán in the American context? To simplify matters, set aside the possibility of a stolen or contested 2024 election and suppose that Trump wins a fair Electoral College victory. In this scenario, beginning on January 20, 2025, he and his supporters set about bringing Budapest to the Potomac by increments. Their playbook:

First, install toadies in key positions. Upon regaining the White House, the president systematically and unabashedly nominates personal loyalists, with or without qualifications, to Senate-confirmed jobs. Assisted by the likes of Johnny McEntee, a White House aide during his first term, and Kash Patel, a Pentagon staffer, he appoints officials willing to purge conscientious civil servants, neutralize or fire inspectors general, and ignore or overturn inconvenient rules.

Second, intimidate the career bureaucracy. On day one of his second term, Trump signs an executive order reinstating an innovation he calls Schedule F federal employment. This designation would effectively turn tens of thousands of civil servants who have a hand in shaping policy into at-will employees. He approved Schedule F in October of his final year in office, but he ran out of time to implement it and President Biden rescinded it.

Career civil servants have always been supervised by political appointees, and, within the boundaries of law and regulation, so they should be. Schedule F, however, gives Trump a new way to threaten bureaucrats with retaliation and termination if they resist or question him. The result is to weaken an important institutional safeguard against Trump’s demands to do everything from harass his enemies to alter weather forecasts.

Third, co-opt the armed forces. Having identified the military as a locus of resistance in his first term, Trump sets about cashiering senior military leaders. In their place, he promotes and installs officers who will raise no objection to stunts such as sending troops to round up undocumented immigrants or intimidate protesters (or shoot them). Within a couple of years, the military will grow used to acting as a political instrument for the White House.

Fourth, bring law enforcement to heel. Even more intimidating to the president’s opponents than a complaisant military is his securing full control, at long last, over the Justice Department.

In his first term, both of Trump’s attorneys general bowed to him in some respects but stood up to him when it mattered most: Jeff Sessions by recusing himself from the Russia investigation and allowing a special counsel to be appointed; Bill Barr by refusing to endorse Trump’s election lies and seize voting machines. Everyday prosecutions remained in the hands of ordinary prosecutors.

Fifth, weaponize the pardon. In Trump’s first term, officials stood up to many of his illegal and unethical demands because they feared legal jeopardy. The president has a fix for that, too. He wasn’t joking when he mused about pardoning the January 6 rioters. In his first term, he pardoned some of his cronies and dangled pardons to discourage potential testimony against him, but that was a mere dry run. Now, unrestrained by politics, he offers impunity to those who do his bidding. They may still face jeopardy under state law and from professional sanctions such as disbarment, but Trump’s promises to bestow pardons—and his threats to withhold them—open an unprecedented space for abuse and corruption.

Sixth, the final blow: defy court orders. Naturally, the president’s corrupt and lawless actions incite a blizzard of lawsuits. Members of Congress sue to block illegal appointments, interest groups sue to overturn corrupt rulemaking, targets of investigations sue to quash subpoenas, and so on. Trump meets these challenges with long-practiced aplomb. As he has always done, he uses every tactic in the book to contest, stonewall, tangle, and politicize litigation. He creates a perpetual-motion machine of appeals and delays while court after court rules against him.

At first, the president’s lawlessness seems shocking. Yet soon, as Republicans defend it, the public grows acclimated. To salvage what it can of its authority, the Supreme Court accommodates Trump more than the other way around. It becomes gun-shy about crossing him.

And so we arrive: With the courts relegated to advisory status, the rule of law no longer obtains. In other words, America is no longer a liberal democracy, and by this point, there is not much anyone can do about it.

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And so, after four years? America has crossed Freedom House’s line from “free” to “partly free.” The president’s powers are determined by what he can get away with. His opponents are harried, chilled, demoralized. He is term-limited, but the MAGA movement has entrenched itself. And Trump has demonstrated in the United States what Orbán proved in Hungary: The public will accept authoritarianism, provided it is of the creeping variety.

“We should not be afraid to go against the spirit of the age and build an illiberal political and state system [a dictatorship],” Orbán declared in 2014. Trump and his followers openly plan to emulate Orbán. We can’t say we weren’t warned. 

Q: Have we been adequately warned? (IMO we have not)

Acknowledgement: Thanks to milo for bringing this article to my attention.

Maybe the ex-president made a big boo-boo

Multiple sources are reporting that mistakes were made, as people responsible for mistakes like to say. The ex-president hoped to slow down the kerfuffle over documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago by asking the court of a special master to do special master things. Looks like the usually successful delay tactics the ex-president has relied on for decades backfired in this case. The New York Times writes:

Former President Donald J. Trump may have thought that he was playing offense when he asked a federal judge last week for an independent review of documents seized from his residence in Florida — a move that, at best, could delay but not derail an investigation into his handling of the records.

But on Tuesday night, the Justice Department used a routine court filing in the matter to initiate a blistering counteroffensive that disclosed new evidence that Mr. Trump and his legal team may have interfered with the inquiry.

In the filing, in Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, department officials revealed more details about the classified materials that Mr. Trump had taken from the White House, including a remarkable photograph of several of them arrayed on the floor of Mar-a-Lago, his home and private club in Florida. In what read at times like a road map for a potential prosecution down the road, the filing also laid out evidence that Mr. Trump and his lawyers may have obstructed justice.

It was as if Mr. Trump, seeming not to fully grasp the potential hazards of his modest legal move, cracked open a door, allowing the Justice Department to push past him and seize the initiative.

“The Trump team got more than they bargained for,” said Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan and a longtime critic of Mr. Trump. “In response to a thin and tardy special master motion, D.O.J. was given the opportunity to be expansive.”

Covering its final page was what Mr. Bharara called “an extra proverbial thousand words”: an image of five yellow folders marked “Top Secret,” and a red one labeled “Secret,” lying on the ground beside a box of magazine covers.

The image, which seemed to be a standard evidence photo, was the sort of thing the government collects all the time for use at possible trials. But because Mr. Trump and his lawyers made disputed statements about their handling of the records, it gave the Justice Department an opportunity to publicize the photo, which has now appeared repeatedly on TV news.

 

On Wednesday, going back on the offensive, Mr. Trump attacked the image.

“Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid on Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor,” he wrote on his social media platform. He went to say, in a just-asking sort of way: “(Perhaps pretending it was me that did it!)”

John P. Fishwick Jr., an Obama appointee who served as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia and had been critical of the department’s previous, less expansive filings, said that the Justice Department had started to shift its tactics.

“They are starting to understand that you not only need to be speaking to the judge with these filings, you need to be speaking directly to the American people,” he said.

Over the past week, what was initially meant to be a tightly argued legal brief focused on objecting to the appointment of a special master expanded into something much broader, the officials said. The filing became a more pointed presentation of evidence of the Justice Department’s belief that it had no choice except to seek a warrant for the search at Mar-a-Lago.

Who knows? Maybe this time the ex-president's delay and obstruct tactics landed him into trouble he cannot squirm out of as usual. Maybe. One can hope, but not be sure.

An interview with an expert on democracy and government

In the NPR program, The Takeaway, Melissa Harris-Perry interviewed Duke U. Professor of Law Jedidiah Purdy. Purdy believes that our democracy is imperfect and messy, but nonetheless its better than autocracy-theocracy. Some of his comments are quite interesting.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right now, about the dangers to our existing democracy, imperfect as it might be, what do you identify as the biggest dangers to democracy?

Professor Jedediah Purdy: I see a few dimensions of threats. The fact that the Republican Party increasingly identifies itself with the denial of valid election results and is flirting aggressively, maybe more than flirting, with the idea that if the wrong people win an election, that election can't be valid. That is the most basic existential threat to a democracy if elections can't solve the question of who's in charge.

I think there are some subtler threats. One is that the constitution itself as it's been interpreted is a deeply anti-democratic document in some ways. The Electoral College is an anti-democratic institution. The Senate is an anti-democratic institution. The Supreme Court is an anti-democratic institution. A lot of people who grew up thinking, "Basically, whatever democracy is, it probably is what's in the constitution. The Supreme Court is probably a wise and good interpreter of that idea," have been reminded that the reality can be exactly the opposite.

I guess I would put it this way. A party, Republican Party that has developed an increasingly anti-democratic politics, depends existentially on the support of an anti-democratic constitutional design. A Supreme Court that has become a leading threat to democracy values is produced and sustained by the anti-democratic presidency and the anti-democratic Senate, as well as by a constitution that, because it's so hard for living democratic majorities to affirm or amend, ends up meaning that our fundamental law is decided by a small set of judges.

I think the problem with the constitution is that they did constitutional politics essentially once and then froze it by making the barrier to amend so high that we haven't had a meaningful constitutional amendment in 50 years. We're not currently expecting to see one anytime soon. The beauty of the constitution in some ways is in the opening phrase, "We, the people," because it says the authority of this thing, what makes it fundamental law, is that it's made by a democratic politics of people deciding together what their own binding basic law is going to be.

I think that shouldn't be once and for all. As it recedes further into history, and we can't pick that ball up again and take it in a new direction, it becomes less democratic. It becomes a kind of tyranny of the past over the present and it also becomes a tyranny of the interpreters over the rest of us. It's often been thought that it is a perfect document or perfect enough that we can just interpret it a little better and it will guide us forever into the future. I think that can't be right.

I think questions like, "Is there a fundamental right to choose abortion? Are corporations allowed to spend unlimited funds in politics? Are race-conscious policies' affirmative action permitted or not under the equality principle?" I think, fundamentally, these are questions that the people who are going to live with them have to answer. The constitution is set up now in such a way that we can't. "We, the people," is only them. It's not us. We can't be framers anymore. I think that's an unnecessarily undemocratic place for our fundamental law to get stuck.

I've seen arguments by experts that the barriers to amending the constitution were intentionally made to be high so that one group cannot easily overthrow democracy and install some form of tyranny. That is understandable. 

On the other hand, the constitution's inflexibility needed to be deal with somehow to adopt the law to changes in society and technology. The courts responded to natural changes by relying on American Legal Realism, which I discussed in this book review. 

At present, the Republican Party in its authoritarianism-Christian theocracy rejects and crushes ALR whenever it gets in the way of Republican dogma demands. To get what they want, Republican Supreme Court judges invent (i) unworkable legal theories like Originalism and Textualism, (ii) make their reasoning up out of nothing, or (iii) do some of both and/or God only knows what else, e.g., latter day haruspication.*

* Divining the law by looking at a fresh pile of animal guts. 

I've posted this quote about ALR many times, but it's relevant and worth recalling again:

“This is an attempt to describe generally the process of legal reasoning in the field of case law, and in the interpretation of statutes and of the Constitution. It is important that the mechanism of legal reasoning should not be concealed by its pretense. The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions it makes it possible to take the first step in the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community.”

Those comments reflect the need in law for some mechanism like ALR to respond to natural social and technological changes. Amending the constitution is not a practical means to do that. Legislatures either cannot keep up with change, or they do not want to keep up. That leaves it to the courts to try to keep up, assuming that is what the judges want to do.

It is not the case that Republican Party authoritarian-theocratic dogma wants no changes. It demands massive changes to society. Most of those ordained-by-God changes involve undoing important things that ALR led to, e.g., same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, secular public education, due process, and anti-discrimination laws.

This is just another warning about the dire threat that modern Republican Party authoritarianism-Christian fundamentalist theocracy poses to American democracy, the rule of law, tolerant pluralism and civil liberties. The anti-democratic threat is right now, not sometime in the future.