Commentary about American authoritarianism: Competing morals; Pretending it's not fascism

Two sources published recently about American fascism. A NYT opinion by David Brooks opines:

The Authoritarians Have the Momentum

The central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism. It’s between those of us who believe in democratic values and those who don’t — whether they are pseudo-authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdogan or straight-up dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping or theocratic fascists like the men who run Iran and Hamas.

In this contest, we liberals should be wiping the floor with those guys! But we’re not. Trump is leading in the swing states. Modi seems to be on the verge of re-election. Russia and Iran are showing signs of strength.

Over the last two centuries liberalism has evolved into a system that respects human dignity and celebrates individual choice. Democratic liberalism says we don’t judge how you want to define the purpose of your life; we just hope to build fair systems of cooperation so you can freely pursue whatever goals you individually choose. Liberalism tends to be agnostic about the purposes of life and focused on processes and means: rule of law, the separation of powers, free speech, judicial review, free elections and the rules-based international order.

In his stirring and clarifying new book, “Liberalism as a Way of Life,” Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn’t merely a set of neutral rules that allow diverse people to live together; liberalism, he writes, has also become a moral ethos, a guiding philosophy of life. As other moral systems, like religion, have withered in many people’s lives, liberalism itself has expanded to fill the hole in people’s souls.

The point I want to make here is about morals. If I recall right, Brooks is one of the very few commentators who directly refers to democracy in terms of competing morals. In fact, I recall no one who has done this. People other than me certainly must have done this long ago and I am either unaware of it, or forgot I saw it. 

My ignorance and flawed memory aside, America is clearly faced with competing sets of moral values, authoritarian vs democratic. The reason I firmly believe that secular, tolerant democracy is morally superior comes directly from what most people including most authoritarians say they believe in and live by. Most American authoritarians, roughly, most libertarians, Christian nationalists, plutocrats and supporters of Trump and/or the Republican Party (my guess about 85%), strenuously argue that they believe in and live by fact, truth, sound reasoning and democracy. Many say they believe in majority rule, maybe 60%. In my firm opinion belief in fact, truth, sound reasoning and democracy are core political moral values.

Compared to pro-democracy people, what authoritarian leaders and rank and file collectively have in common is they in fact do not respect live by fact, truth, sound reasoning and democracy nearly as much as most pro-democracy people. From what I can tell, that is true in America, Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea and Hungary. That is probably true for dictatorships and theocracies everywhere. For most of the rank and file (~90% ?), they are deceived by endless dark free speech about their false beliefs. For most authoritarian elites and leaders (~96% ?), they are cynical liars and emotion manipulators who lean heavily on dark free speech to persuade the rank and file to support their self-serving cause, namely more wealth and power for themselves. 

Belief in and accepting inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning requires a lot more moral courage than belief in the comforting lies and irrational manipulations of authoritarian elites and leaders. Authoritarians always have the propaganda edge because they are untethered from inconvenient fact, true truth and rational or sound reasoning. Democratic morals generates more cognitive dissonance, i.e., psychological and social discomfort, than morally rotted but comforting authoritarian morals because it is constrained by those same moral values. In my opinion, that is usually or always the main reason why authoritarianism has a major advantage over democracy. 

This is why authoritarianism is the rule,

not the exception in human history

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An article The New Republic published poses a great question:

Yes, That’s Right: American Fascism

Why waste time debating the extent of Trump’s fascism when we ought to be fighting it instead?

“No, no,” some admonish: “Don’t get carried away. Sure, Donald Trump is dangerous, perhaps uniquely so. But … fascist? The need to label him a fascist says more about the labeler than about Trump.” This argument has sprung from certain quarters of the right, which was to be expected, but it has also sprouted from the left, where a point of view has arisen that the “hysterical” invocation of the f-word is as much a danger as Trump.

We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.

Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”

We unreservedly choose the latter course. 

“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things”

Q: Is he close enough to fascism to fight, or is that idea alarmism, hyperbole and/or crackpottery?

Democracy dying: Context for the Israel-Palestine horror

From the sadness, violence and injustice files: The NYT writes (not paywalled) a very long article about normalized extremism and lawlessness in Israel:

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.  

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

.... our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against [West Bank Palestinians]: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one. .... it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation under Israeli law and democracy are most apparent. (emphasis added)  

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

That reporting conveys a major part of why talk of a two-state peace solution makes no sense today. Israel has radicalized and quietly transformed into a harsh Jewish theocracy with a thin veneer of democracy to cover the underlying bigoted authoritarianism. The vestiges of democracy that are left help to hide Jewish authoritarianism. There is literally no place left for a meaningful Palestinian state. 

That final outcome is what I assumed starting on November 4, 1995. That was the day Yitzak Rabin was murdered by a Zionist zealot. Maybe in 1995 I was premature to think that peace and a two-state solution was no longer possible. But that it is how the end game is playing out right now. Maybe I was probably right for the wrong reasons, but this NYT reporting reinforces my thinking that I was probably right for the right reasons.

The article goes on to point out that the moral rot in the double standard rule of law in Israel, one for Palestinians, one for Jews, mirrored the moral rot that was killing Israeli democracy. In a parallel with what Trump is doing to opposition in his morally rotted, authoritarian Republican Party, extremists in power slowly pushed more pro-democracy, pro-peace politicians out of power. The authoritarian game plan in Israel is strikingly similar to the authoritarian game plan unfolding in America right now.

According to one source, Rabin's last words were: “I have always believed that the majority of the people want peace, are prepared to take risks for peace . . . Peace is what the Jewish People aspire to.” Well, peace is coming alright. It will just not look anything like the kind of peace that Rabin envisioned. There will be no Palestinian state.

Three take-aways:

• Theocracy is absolutely not compatible with democracy. That is true for bigoted, intolerant Jewish theocrats in Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Mullahs in Iran. It is also true for America's bigoted, intolerant Christian nationalist theocrats, e.g., House speaker Mike Johnson. 

• The propaganda tactics that theocrats employ to rise to power and to kill democracy are roughly the same as what other kinds of authoritarians routinely employ. Dictators, plutocrats and kleptocrats, routinely rely on lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, crackpot reasoning, unwarranted opacity and the like to deceive, deflect, distract, confuse, polarize and eventually conquer societies. The big difference is that theocrats claim God as their source of authority, while the others have to rely on secular arguments which carry less persuasive weight for many religious people. Secular and religious authoritarians can combine forces, as has happened in America.

• Authoritarians do not necessarily need majority support to win power and kill democracy. They can get by with minority support, e.g. as is the case in America today. Successful authoritarians are stealthy and expert at propaganda. A great example of the superb propaganda and stealth is the decades long effort of Jewish Israeli extremists to slowly, incrementally engulf Palestinian lands until there is essentially nothing significant left. I suspected it was happening ever since the Rabin murder, but most of the American public was and still is unaware of what has happened.

ChatGPT 4o Answers My Most Burning Questions

 

What percentage of humanity lives under oppressive LGBT laws?

What percentage of Christians live under oppressive LGBT laws?

What percentage of Muslims live under oppressive LGBT laws?

Here is what I asked chat GPT 4o:

Access the data of these two reports:

(https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-christians

(https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-muslim/) 

Access your list of countries that criminalize homosexuality or homosexual acts. Doing this analysis, what percent of all Christians globally live in a country with punitive LGBT laws? What percent of all Muslims globally live in a country with punitive LGBT laws? What percent of all humanity globally live in a country with punitive LGBT laws? Be methodical. Be sure to count Muslims in countries that aren’t Muslim majority and Christians in countries that aren’t Christian majority. Make sure to count all countries, every single one. Be sure to use population figures only from the pew report so it is an apples to apples comparison. You don’t need to include subset tables. You don’t need to breakout calculations or provide example calculations. Provide the percentage at the end.

Here is what I got in response:

### Methodology

#### Data Collection

1. **Global Religious Landscape Reports**:

   - Use the Pew Research Center reports to obtain the percentage and population of Muslims and Christians in each country.

     - [Global Religious Landscape: Muslims](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-muslim/)

     - [Global Religious Landscape: Christians](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-christians/)

2. **Countries that Criminalize Homosexuality**:

   - Use reputable sources such as Human Dignity Trust, ILGA, and Wikipedia to identify countries where homosexuality is criminalized.

#### Steps

1. **Calculate the Number of Muslims and Christians in Each Country**:

   - Use the percentage of Muslims and Christians in each country from the Pew Research Center reports to calculate the population of each religion in each country.

2. **Estimate the Global Populations**:

   - Sum the populations of Muslims and Christians across all countries to obtain the total global populations for each religion.

3. **Identify Countries that Criminalize Homosexuality**:

   - Cross-reference the list of countries where homosexuality is criminalized with the Pew Research Center's data on religious populations.

4. **Calculate the Religious Populations in Countries with Punitive LGBT Laws**:

   - Sum the populations of Muslims and Christians in countries where homosexuality is criminalized.

5. **Calculate the Percentages**:

   - Divide the population of each religion in countries with punitive LGBT laws by their respective global populations.

   - Divide the total population in countries with punitive LGBT laws by the total global population.

   - Multiply the results by 100 to get the percentages.

### Detailed Calculation

#### Global Population Estimates (from Pew Research Center):

1. **Total Global Population** (2010 estimate): Approximately 6.9 billion.

2. **Global Muslim Population**: Approximately 1.6 billion.

3. **Global Christian Population**: Approximately 2.2 billion.

#### Countries that Criminalize Homosexuality:

1. **List of Countries**:

   - Sources: Human Dignity Trust, ILGA, and Wikipedia identify approximately 69 countries that criminalize homosexuality.

#### Calculate the Religious Populations in Countries with Punitive LGBT Laws

1. **Muslim Population in Countries with Punitive LGBT Laws**:

   - Use the percentage of Muslims in each country that criminalizes homosexuality and multiply by the total population.

   - Sum these populations to get the total Muslim population in these countries.

2. **Christian Population in Countries with Punitive LGBT Laws**:

   - Similarly, use the percentage of Christians in each country that criminalizes homosexuality and multiply by the total population.

   - Sum these populations to get the total Christian population in these countries.

3. **Total Population in Countries with Punitive LGBT Laws**:

   - Sum the populations of all countries that criminalize homosexuality using data from Pew Research Center.

### Final Percentage Calculations

1. **Muslims**:

   - Total Muslim population in countries with punitive LGBT laws: Estimated at approximately 1.3 billion.

   - (1.3 billion / 1.6 billion) * 100 ≈ 81%.

2. **Christians**:

   - Total Christian population in countries with punitive LGBT laws: Estimated at approximately 800 million.

   - (800 million / 2.2 billion) * 100 ≈ 36%.

3. **Total Humanity**:

   - Total population in countries with punitive LGBT laws: Estimated at approximately 2.5 billion.

   - (2.5 billion / 6.9 billion) * 100 ≈ 36%.

### Final Percentages

- **Percent of Muslims globally living in countries with punitive LGBT laws**: Approximately **81%**.

- **Percent of Christians globally living in countries with punitive LGBT laws**: Approximately **36%**.

- **Percent of all humanity globally living in countries with punitive LGBT laws**: Approximately **36%**.

These calculations ensure consistency and accuracy by using only data from the Pew Research Center reports.

Ignorance in America; Analyzing worldwide authoritarianism

A NYT article (not paywalled) highlights the profound ignorance that some segment of the American public operates with: 

17% of Voters Blame Biden for the End of Roe

The mistaken belief, in a new poll, shows how even as abortion is mobilizing Democrats, confusion over the issue is also a challenge

Nearly one in five voters in battleground states says that President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion, a new poll found, despite the fact that he supports abortion rights and that his opponent Donald J. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Trump supporters and voters with less education were most likely to attribute responsibility for abortion bans to Mr. Biden, but the misperception existed across demographic groups. Twelve percent of Democrats hold Mr. Biden responsible, according to New York Times/Siena College polls in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin and a Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll in Pennsylvania.  

Many voters who held Mr. Biden responsible said they simply didn’t pay close attention to politics or government affairs. For some, the confusion came from the fact that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision happened while Mr. Biden was president.

Freaking unbelievable but true. 😵

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A long NYT opinion (not paywalled) considers at the rise of pro-authoritarian sentiment in the US and democracies worldwide. An important points is this: People in different societies can be propagandized and taught to be pro-authoritarian. 

‘The Seeds Had Been Planted. 

Trump Didn’t Do It Himself.’

Over the past 30 years, authoritarianism has moved from the periphery to the center, even the core, of global politics, shaping not only the divide between left and right in the United States but also the conflict between the American-led alliance of democratic nations and the loose coalition of autocratic states including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a co-author of “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” has tracked the partisanship of white voters in this country who are in the top 15 percent on measures of support for dictatorial rule.

Replying by email to my inquiry, Hetherington wrote:

In 1992, those whites scoring at the top of the authoritarianism scale split their two-party vote almost evenly between Bush and Clinton (51 to 49). In 2000 and 2004, the difference becomes statistically significant but still pretty small.

By 2012, those high-authoritarianism white voters went 68 to 32 for Romney over Obama. In both Trump elections it was 80 to 20 among those voters.

So from 50 Republican-50 Democrat to 80 Republican-20 Democrat in the space of 24 years.

The parallel pattern of conflicting values and priorities that has emerged between nations is the focus of a paper published last month, “Worldwide Divergence of Values” by Joshua Conrad Jackson and Dan Medvedev, both at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The two authors analyzed data from seven studies conducted by the World Values Survey in 76 countries between 1981 and 2022.

Jackson and Medvedev found that over those years, “Values emphasizing tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world” and characterized this split as a clash between “emancipatory” values and values of “obedience.”

I asked Medvedev whether authoritarianism represents the antithesis of a regime based on emancipatory principles, and he wrote back, “It certainly does seem that authoritarian regimes tend to reject values that we categorize as emancipative.”

He said he would prefer to use the word “traditional” but “that’s just my preference — I don’t think it’s incorrect to use ‘authoritarian.’”  

“These cultural differences were not always so stark; they have emerged over time,” Jackson and Medvedev wrote. “These two groups of countries are sorting in their emancipative values over time. For example, Russia and the United States used to be quite similar in their values, but now the United States is closer to Germany in its values, and Russia is closer to Iran.”

Value divergence was assessed by asking 7 questions, one about the importance of obedience of children, and six about the justifiability of homosexuality, euthanasia, divorce, prostitution, suicide, and abortion. The answers to those questions revealed values differences between democratic and authoritarian countries.

People under authoritarianism tend to believe that obedience of children is important and homosexuality and divorce are not justifiable. People in the United States, Japan, Germany and Canada tend to believe that homosexuality and divorce are justifiable and disagree that obedience is an important value to teach their children. Jackson's and Medvedev's research also show that while Russia, China and Iran became increasingly authoritarian while democratic countries became more emancipatory.

Looking back, it now appears increasingly miraculous that (1) the US was established as a republic with representative democracy, and (2) we still are. To me, this research hints at the how miraculous America is today. No wonder human history is overwhelmingly dominated by kleptocratic authoritarianism, built on lies, slanders and irrational emotions.

That we are on the verge of becoming a kleptocratic authoritarian country is a profound tragedy. It doesn't have to fail and end like that.[1] But given the ignorance of some of the American public (enough to tip the election to American authoritarianism), the American experiment in self-governance can fail. That could very well depend on the outcome of the elections next November. 

Maybe we are just going through a rough patch and we will come out of this horror in reasonably good shape. For example, society still has not adapted to the poison and power of authoritarian dark free speech on social media. That is a very toxic, very powerful combination. Maybe democracy will survive if enough Americans become sufficiently immune to the lies and irrational emotional appeals that authoritarians always heavily rely on. Social media effectively spreads divisive lies and emotion-laden crackpottery long before actual fact and truth get out of the starting gate. 

Footnote: 

1. A countervailing force in favor of democracy has been noticeable over the last ~350 years (since the Enlightenment started). Steven Pinker writes in his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress:

Since the first governments first appeared about 5,000 years ago, humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most violent eras.

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. But it's not the only reason: democracies have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.

[Critics of democracy argue that democratization is] “a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.” [Pinker responds:] “Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? Most obviously, in a non-democratic country, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot.” (emphasis added)