Unless democracy defend itself, autocracy will destroy it

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, writes this in The Atlantic:

In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg. “They form the prerequisite of a viable democracy.” His country, having regained its independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier, believed in these values: “The Estonian people never abandoned their faith in this freedom during the decades of totalitarian oppression.”

But Meri had also come to deliver a warning: Freedom in Estonia, and in Europe, could soon be under threat. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the circles around him were returning to the language of imperialism, speaking of Russia as primus inter pares—the first among equals—in the former Soviet empire. In 1994, Moscow was already seething with the language of resentment, aggression, and imperial nostalgia; the Russian state was developing an illiberal vision of the world, and even then was preparing to enforce it. Meri called on the democratic world to push back: The West should “make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance.”

At that, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, got up and walked out of the hall.

Meri’s fears were at that time shared in all of the formerly captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and they were strong enough to persuade governments in Estonia, Poland, and elsewhere to campaign for admission to NATO. They succeeded because nobody in Washington, London, or Berlin believed that the new members mattered. The Soviet Union was gone, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg was not an important person, and Estonia would never need to be defended. That was why neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Nobody else anywhere in the Western world felt any threat at all. For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.

This is just a reminder of how threats can sneak up on a society and an ideal and then wreak havoc once the threat becomes strong enough to act. Society and the ideal feels safe, but they aren't. A few keep raising the alarm, but they get buried and swept away in the ocean of comforting everyday noise. Everything from profit motive to mistaken reasoning and lack of time to think helps hide the threat and keep minds dulled. 

Germaine’s definition of American fascism

The label “fascism” or “Nazi” I allegedly use to characterize the Republican Party and certain groups of people keeps getting criticized. Instead of trying to explain myself over and over, I give an explanation here. If need be, I’ll revise this 

First, I do not use the label fascist or Nazi, out of respect for those who suffered and/or died in the 20th century from those authoritarian political ideologies. I know the situation in the US is not yet as bad as it was in 1920s, 1930s and 1940s Germany or Italy. Instead, I use qualified labels in a desperate attempt to try to get all people, especially Americans, to get a feel for how grave and urgent right wing attacks on American democracy, truth, etc. really are right now. 

I usually only use qualified labels like American fascism, American fascist(s), neo-fascism and neo-fascist(s) to characterize the people and groups in the modern radical right American political movement. That movement is anti-democratic, anti-inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning, anti-secularist, anti-civil liberties, including anti-free and fair elections, pro-authoritarian, pro-Christian theocratic, and/or pro-laissez faire capitalist. The focus and power of this anti-democratic movement is located mainly in the Republican Party. Due their hate of government, at least some libertarians are also neo-fascist in their policy preferences, not necessarily in their own minds.

I use those qualified labels to avoid descending into demagoguery or disrespect for those who suffered and died in the last century. Whether the qualified labels succeed in avoiding demagoguery or disrespect will be in the beholder’s eye. That won’t change. But at least my good faith intent should be clear.

Germaine’s American fascism & neo-fascism

Messy 21st century American fascism

These traits are present to varying degrees at various times among various groups and individuals, particularly the Republican Party leadership, most of its rank and file, nearly all of its major donors, and all or nearly all of its propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Fox News. My conception of American fascism and neo-fascism is people, groups or special interests who, to some non-trivial extent, adhere to or share at least five of the following eleven beliefs or traits:  

• Due to decades of intensely deceptive propaganda, most rank and file supporters probably do not know that they support a version of fascism; most (~96% ?) mistakenly believe they are fighting for democracy, truth and civil liberties from grave threats; “Many would be unhappy to learn all of the details about what their leaders are proposing. Much of this group votes identity, not policy.”; personal ignorance and false beliefs do not change the fact of support for anti-democratic authoritarian politicians and policies 

• Hostility toward and distrust of the professional, not partisan, American free press; “The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

• Anti-democratic hostility toward and distrust of free and fair elections; More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election

• Heavy reliance by elites and donors on relentless torrents of well-funded, well-researched propaganda to deceive, divide and foment irrational distrust, fear, rage, hate and intolerance; inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning are ignored, denied, distorted or downplayed and replaced by lies, deceit and objectively flawed partisan motivated reasoning; blatant lies, hypocrisy and double standards are normalized and mostly uncritically accepted by the rank and file

• Hate and/or irrational distrust of government, including government regulations on businesses; advocacy of laissez-faire capitalist policies that are claimed to be pro-liberty, but that actually transfer power from governments to private sector special interests, thereby tending to damage individual liberties while special interest power over individuals expands 


• Distrust and blind rejection of experts, science and empirical data, particularly when the content is inconvenient, e.g., assertions of inconvenient truth such as human caused climate change is not a hoax, American was not founded as a Christian nation, or COVID vaccines are reasonably safe and effective and their use has saved many lives 

• Support, knowing or not, for anti-democratic policies, including laws that make voting harder or more intimidating, or that give power to state politicians to overturn an election outcome they dislike

• Refusal to reasonably compromise; When Compromise Was Not Regarded As Treason -- You have to be older than 40 to remember when government worked properly

• Attacks on or unwarranted distrust of disfavored out-groups including the LGBQT community and racial and ethnic minorities

• Nationalist fervor to the point of causing damage to national interests, such as attacks on allies and international cooperation, and support for dictators and anti-democratic demagogues 

• Continuing support for Trump and/or justification of the 1/6 coup attempt

20th century fascism & a theory of fascism

Italy’s 20th century fascism

Fascism was usually hostile to a free press and generally relies heavily on deceit and division propaganda. It tended to glorify things that are claimed, true or false, to characterize the national race and ethnicity, while vilifying different races and ethnicities. Fascism had a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control of government and society.

Wikipedia: 

Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, liberalism, and Marxism, fascism is placed on the far-right wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.

CBS News: 

Fascism is generally defined as a political movement that embraces far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of any opposition, all overseen by an authoritarian government. Fascists strongly oppose Marxism, liberalism and democracy, and believe the state takes precedence over individual interests. They favor centralized rule, often a single party or leader, and embrace the idea of a national rebirth, a new greatness for their country. Economic self-sufficiency is prized, often through state-controlled companies. Youth, masculinity and strength are highly fetishized.

The end of World War II saw the downfall of several fascist regimes, but not all. In Spain, Francisco Franco, who incorporated fascist elements in his military dictatorship, hung around for several decades, while other governments, such as that of Juan Perón in Argentina, enacted a kind of fascism-lite, modeling its economy somewhat after fascist Italy.

Jason Stanley -- a theory of fascism: 

....the concept of fascism has wide interpretive applicability across societies that otherwise differ quite drastically from one another.

To rescue the concept of fascism for philosophy requires arguing that fascism has the kind of universal significance and centrality characteristic of philosophical concepts. It must have a recognizable structure that abstracts from local historical contexts, and be capable of being interpretively useful in locations that differ significantly from one another. .... If fascism is a historically located concept, however, then we do not need to be worried about confronting it. Fascism cannot reoccur, and political philosophers in recent decades have been right to ignore it.

If I am right, the view that fascism is a historically located concept is not just false, it is dangerously false. If fascism describes a dangerous ideology with universal appeal, representing it as an artifact of particular past historical circumstances masks a real danger. By not studying fascism philosophically, philosophy lends credence to the view that fascism is not a risk.

Tactics and traits of 20th century fascism

(Jason Stanley)

Capitalism's moral core: The lead paint story

CONTEXT

A second generalization from experience is that the appeal to “social responsibility” has little effect, unless there is an iron fist in the velvet glove of appeals to voluntary restraint. The program either breaks down and is discarded, or it is replaced by a compulsory program—as voluntary price control in the United States in 1941 was replaced by legally imposed maximum price legislation in early 1942. The failure of truly voluntary programs is inevitable and has nothing to do with a lack of “patriotism” or social consciousness. Indeed, the doctrine of “social responsibility,” if taken seriously, is a truly subversive doctrine in a free society. This can be seen in the kind of challenge it offers to a free society. 

Almost without exception, appeals to “social responsibility” arise from an unwillingness to let the price system work. But no one has yet invented or discovered a substitute for the price system in coordinating the activities of millions of people without central control. Because the price system works impersonally, automatically, continuously, and quietly, because it has no press agents, there is a tendency when all goes well to take it for granted and to forget that a function is being performed by it. Almost without exception, however, attempts to replace the price system, or to prevent it from working, have ended in chaos. -- Milton Friedman, Social Responsibility: A Subversive Doctrine, National Review, 24 August 1965, pp. 721–723

In the article cited above, Friedman argues for government to get the hell out of the way of companies, i.e., no regulations, no social conscience. They can be trusted to do the right thing and besides, government itself is incompetent and corrupted by lust for political power. Friedman probably drinks his own Kool-Aid. He actually believes his own nonsense. 

He is wrong to argue that trying to regulate the profit motive nearly always results in chaos. That propaganda leads directly to the false implication that when markets are left alone, chaos does not happen. US history in the days of hard core, unregulated laissez-faire capitalist markets is full of economic chaos and misery for the masses. What causes chaos is not always mostly due to regulations. Unregulated markets can lead to just  as much or more chaos, misery and death.

He is also wrong to argue that a capitalist price system works impersonally. What a staggering load of crap. What the hell did he think that special interests, lobbyists, campaign contributions and wealthy capitalists do with politics -- advocate for the best interest of everyone, with little regard for profit? It is very personal to people with money asking government for favors that are usually pro-wealth accumulating to them personally and often or usually detrimental to the public interest and competition. 

Yes, the price system works as quietly as the people who control it can be. Capitalists want the real workings of the price system out of public view as much as possible, whenever possible. Obviously, capitalists do not want the public to understand or know how they purchase and use government to their benefit and our detriment. Capitalists do not want transparency. Neither does our complicit, corrupt two-party pay-to-play system. Transparency tends to kill rot and most capitalists and most people with political power like lots of rot. For them, opacity is far better than transparency.

The lead paint story

The little guy, JJ, he got lead in him from paint --

a 19-day treatment got some out of him

I frequently refer to moral rot in our two-party political system. Other than lust for profit, assuming that is a moral value, moral rot seems to characterize most big businesses along with the always-present profit lust. The New York Time writes in an article, How 2 Industries Stymied Justice for Young Lead Paint Victims:

The U.S. insurance and real estate industries have waged a decades-long campaign to avoid liability in lead cases, helping to prolong an epidemic. The cost for millions of children has been incalculable.

When Selena Wiley signed the lease for an older rental home in South Bend, Ind., she asked the property manager about lead paint and was assured the house was safe.

But in November 2018 — almost two years after moving in with her partner and three children — Ms. Wiley noticed that their 2-year-old’s appetite had vanished and his constant chattering had stopped.

A doctor soon discovered that the boy, Joevonne, known as J.J., had lead poisoning. The level was so high that he immediately began a 19-day treatment to help rid his body of the toxin, which can cause irreversible damage to a child’s brain and nervous system. A health inspector soon found lead paint and dust throughout the family’s rental home.

Although lead poisoning has decreased substantially since the late 1970s as a result of regulatory actions and public health initiatives, about 500,000 children under 6 have elevated blood lead levels in the United States and are at risk of harm. The issue has only intensified in the era of Covid-19: Rental inspections lagged, exposure increased as people spent more time at home and testing of children fell by 50 percent at times in 2020.

But with little public attention and the approval of state officials, insurance companies across the country excluded lead from their policies, declining to pay out when children were poisoned on properties they covered, according to interviews with health and housing officials, regulators and lawyers who represented children and their families. The move also eased pressure on landlords to fix up their rentals.

Without insurance, there is little chance of recovering money for a child when a landlord has few resources. Property owners who do have substantial holdings have found ways to legally distance themselves from problem rentals, increasingly using L.L.C.s to hide assets and identities. In 2019, for example, a Virginia family that had been awarded a $2 million judgment agreed to accept just $140,000 after the landlord, a major developer, dodged collection efforts.  

As a result, plaintiffs’ lawyers — who often work on contingency, fronting costs and collecting payment only if there is a favorable judgment or settlement — are increasingly declining to file lawsuits.

If not for the obstacles, “I would still be getting up in front of juries,” said Richard Serpe, a lawyer who represented the Virginia family and stopped taking lead cases last year after working on them for three decades. “We have shifted the burden to the people least able to handle it, which is these kids.” (emphasis added)

Once again our rotten two-party political system works quietly with big companies to shield the companies from accountability and social responsibility. Shift the burden of proof to the victims. That is a brilliant profit-boosting strategy.

America has long suffered under a corrupt pay-to-play two-party system. That system now includes a press mostly neutered and corrupted by capitalism (need for profit) and corporate owners. Those owners do not want inconvenient truth about capitalism to be publicly known or understood. 

Protection from taxes, regulations and competitors can all be routinely bought from politicians for special interest cash. For America's brand of laissez-faire capitalism, profit talks and social responsibility walks. That includes human health and life walking whenever big profit is talking. 

Christian nationalist aggression on 1/6

Religion News Service writes: 

A team of scholars, faith leaders and advocates unveiled an exhaustive new report Wednesday (Feb. 9) that documents in painstaking detail the role Christian nationalism played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling it an unsettling preview of things to come.

Christian nationalism was used to “bolster, justify and intensify the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” said Amanda Tyler, head of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which sponsored the report along with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Tyler’s group is behind an initiative called Christians Against Christian Nationalism.

The organizations touted the report as “the most comprehensive account to date of Christian nationalism and its role in the January 6 insurrection,” compiled using “videos, statements, and images from the attack and its precursor events.”

An expert analysis of the coup attempt

On February 9, 2022, a team of seven experts released a 66 page analysis of the role of Christian nationalism (CN) in the 1/6 coup attempt. The bottom line is that CN played a significant but complex role. The movement was firmly on the side of those trying to overthrow the government, although it is an open question as to how deluded the rank and file were and still are. Probably highly deluded. 

Katherine Stewart, author of the 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (chapter review here), wrote this:

Because Christian nationalism is identified (or, more accurately, because it identifies itself) with a religion, the movement is often understood as a set of religious and/or theological positions that are then assumed to lead in a deductive way to a certain set of cultural and policy preferences, and from there to a certain kind of politics. But Christian nationalism is, first and foremost, a political movement. Its principal goal, and the goal of its most active leaders, is power. Its leadership looks forward to the day when they can rely on government for three things: power and influence for themselves and their political allies; a steady stream of taxpayer funding for their initiatives; and policies that favor “approved” religious and political viewpoints.

The strength of the movement is in its dense organizational infrastructure: a closely interconnected network of right-wing policy groups, legal advocacy organizations, legislative initiatives, sophisticated data operations, networking groups, leadership training initiatives, and media and messaging platforms, all working together for common political aims. Its leadership cadre includes a number of personally associated activists and politicians, some of them working through multiple organizations. It derives much of its power and direction from an informal club of funders, a number of them belonging to extended, hyper-wealthy families.

At the conferences and presentations I have reported on over the past year, audiences were told, heatedly and repeatedly, that America is and always has been a Christian nation, that the Bible is on the verge of being outlawed, and that the 2020 election was corrupt. This is part of the reason why the hold of Mr. Trump on this wing of the Republican Party has been so hard to break: because Christian nationalist gatherings generally don’t involve open debates about facts or policy, but rather displays of fidelity to a message and loyalty to the leaders who have managed to identify themselves with that message.

Today, many of the movement’s most influential organizations have embraced the cause of “election integrity” as a fairly transparent means of undercutting faith in elections as a cornerstone of our democracy. 

The rank and file come to the movement with a wide variety of backgrounds, ideas, and interests, and a very substantial number do not explicitly support anything like a “theocracy.” Many would be unhappy to learn all of the details about what their leaders are proposing. Much of this group votes identity, not policy. When they vote for the candidates who promise to end abortion or defend the traditional family or re-unite church and state, they aren’t explicitly aiming for major fundamental changes in the way American government is organized; they are making a statement about who they are, what they value in themselves, and perhaps what they fear in other people.  

They may also be drawn to the movement’s promise of certainty in an uncertain world. Against a backdrop of escalating economic inequality, deindustrialization, rapid technological change, and climate instability, many people, on all points of the economic spectrum, feel that the world has entered a state of disorder. The movement gives them confidence, an identity, and the feeling that their position in the world is safe. (emphasis added)

That last paragraph makes an important point. There is a shocking disconnect between what is in the minds of the CN leadership compared to the rank and file. For the rank and file, the CN movement is firmly grounded in lies and deceit. The elites know what they are doing and what they want, i.e., wealth, power and anti-democratic theocratic autocracy. By contrast, the rank and file believe they are defending democracy, and more or less, the status quo.  

Although it may appear counter intuitive and thus be hard to grasp, it is critical to understand that when people vote identity, not policy, some or most of them are supporting something they would strongly oppose if they understood what policies their identity actually stands for. The leadership knows exactly what it is doing, but most of the rank and file probably does not.

Andrew L. Whitehead (Associate Professor of Sociology) and Samuel L. Perry (Associate Professor of Sociology), co-authors of the 2020 book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, wrote this:

One fascinating finding in almost all of these [social science] studies, though, is that religious practice and Christian nationalism are not one and the same. Pointing out the negative influence of Christian nationalism is not to be equated with decrying religious practice or Christianity, writ large. In fact, once researchers account for the influence of Christian nationalism and hold it constant, the influence of religious practice works in the exact opposite direction of Christian nationalism.

Current research indicates that, among other beliefs, CN adherents generally (i) oppose federal gun control restrictions because the Second Amendment is divinely inspired, (ii) hold anti-vaccine attitudes, (iii) distrust science and scientists, (iv) are scientifically illiterate toward religiously contested scientific claims, (v) support Trump and Trumpism in the last two national elections, (vi) endorse traditional gender roles (men lead and women follow), and (vii) hold anti-democratic attitudes favoring restricting the vote and denying the existence of voter suppression. 

There is a major structural and propaganda network of churches and radical right disinformation sources, e.g., Fox News, where the CN leadership pushes disinformation to deceive and motivate the rank and file. Interestingly people who are more active in church activities are less inclined to hold core CN beliefs. In other words, politically active CNs tend to claim to be following Christian teachings but do not engage in Christian practices as much as more active Christians. In a sense, they can be seen as faux Christians who are deluded by CN movement propaganda that elites use to trap and manipulate them into supporting a spiritual war against the forces of evil such as church-state separation, secularism including secular public education and same-sex marriage. 

The report goes into details of events that led up to the 1/6 coup attempt. Most of it is sordid and frightening. The grip that CN leaders' lies and crackpottery exert their have on millions of people is astonishing.

A treasonous CN crackpot, later arrested

Mug shot of another CN traitor arrested 

after the insurrection

A section of the report by Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and leader of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, makes it clear that not all Christian clergy supported the coup attempt or the dragging of Jesus into CN muck. Here are some quotes from some, including some supporters of the ex-president:

“Peaceable transitions of power have marked our Republic since the beginning. It is part of honoring and submitting to God’s ordained leaders whether they were our choice or not. We need you, @POTUS to condemn this mob. Let’s move forward together. Praying for safety.” -- Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear, via Twitter

“This mob attack on our Capitol and our Constitution is immoral, unjust, dangerous, and inexcusable. What has happened to our country is tragic, and could have been avoided. … President @realDonaldTrump, you have a moral responsibility to call on these mobs to stop this dangerous and anti-constitutional anarchy. Please do so.” -- Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore, via Twitter

“Armed breaching of capitol security behind a confederate flag is anarchy, unAmerican, criminal treason and domestic terrorism. President Trump must clearly tell his supporters ‘We lost. Go home now.’ ” -- California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, via Twitter

“I don’t know the Jesus some have paraded and waved around in the middle of this treachery today. They may be acting in the name of some other Jesus but that’s not Jesus of the Gospels.” -- Bible teacher Beth Moore, via Twitter

A few critics called CN out by name:

“The violence and sedition unfolding at the Capitol today — both inside and outside the building — are an unprecedented, anti-American, and anti-Christian attack on our democracy and on our people, one fueled by white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and the actions of self-serving Republican politicians.” -- Rev. Nathan Empsall, campaigns director, Faithful America

But for every real Christian who openly criticized the treason and violence, there were probably a million or two who were complicit by silence, including most Republicans in congress. 

The report includes several hundred citations and live links to primary information sources, making the fact assertions in it easy to check.

News bits

A New York Times article, How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions, is interesting:

At every step of his political career, Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action.

Fifteen miles south of the Pennsylvania border, looms a fortresslike structure with a single smokestack, the only viable business in a dying Appalachian town.

The Grant Town power plant is also the link between the coal industry and the personal finances of Joe Manchin III, the Democrat who rose through state politics to reach the United States Senate, where, through the vagaries of electoral politics, he is now the single most important figure shaping the nation’s energy and climate policy.

Mr. Manchin’s ties to the Grant Town plant date to 1987, when he had just been elected to the West Virginia Senate, a part-time job with base pay of $6,500. His family’s carpet business was struggling.

Opportunity arrived in the form of two developers who wanted to build a power plant in Grant Town, just outside Mr. Manchin’s district. Mr. Manchin, whose grandfather went to work in the mines at age 9 and whose uncle died in a mining accident, helped the developers clear bureaucratic hurdles.

Then he did something beyond routine constituent services. He went into business with the Grant Town power plant.

Mr. Manchin supplied a type of low-grade coal mixed with rock and clay known as “gob” that is typically cast aside as junk by mining companies but can be burned to produce electricity. In addition, he arranged to receive a slice of the revenue from electricity generated by the plant — electric bills paid by his constituents.

He created his business while a state lawmaker in anticipation of the Grant Town plant, which has been the sole customer for his gob for the past 20 years, according to federal data. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant. He urged a state official to approve its air pollution permit, pushed fellow lawmakers to support a tax credit that helped the plant, and worked behind the scenes to facilitate a rate increase that drove up revenue for the plant — and electricity costs for West Virginians.  

Records show that several energy companies have held ownership stakes in the power plant, major corporations with interests far beyond West Virginia. At various points, those corporations have sought to influence the Senate, including legislation before committees on which Mr. Manchin sat, creating what ethics experts describe as a conflict of interest.

Legal corruption is not limited to the Republicans. It is bipartisan. This exemplifies the corruption of our two-party system and the moral rot that enables it.

Another NYT article, When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained, shows the moral only moral concern for that motivates most big companies, profit: 

Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network.

The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia. 

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian intelligence and digital surveillance who reviewed some of the Nokia documents at the request of The Times, said that without the company’s involvement in SORM, “it would have been impossible to make such a system.”

“They had to have known how their devices would be used,” said Mr. Soldatov, who is now a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Money talks, everything else walks.

And, as we all know, demagogues and tyrants block inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning as much as possible:

Zelensky Gives Interview to Russian Journalists. Moscow Orders It Quashed.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave a 90-minute-long Zoom interview on Sunday to four prominent journalists from Russia, the country invading his. Hours later, the Kremlin responded. A government statement notified the Russian news media “of the necessity to refrain from publishing this interview.” Journalists based outside Russia published it anyway. Those still inside Russia did not.

That speaks for itself.

Ukrainian soldier by the wreck of a Russian tank

Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism

“The fact of the matter is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1927

“My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1927

“Politics is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1948

Ivan Ilyin, ~1920

This was written by historian Timothy Snyder, a well-known expert on democracy and tyranny. This is pretty creepy stuff with some close parallels to American radical right thinking, morality and propaganda tactics.  

Ivan Ilyin provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. Today, his ideas have been revived and celebrated by Vladimir Putin.

And so the Russian, a philosopher, understood history as a disgrace. Nothing that had happened since creation was of significance. The world was a meaningless farrago of fragments. The more humans sought to understand it, the more sinful it became. Modern society, with its pluralism and its civil society, deepened the flaws of the world and kept God in his exile. God’s one hope was that a righteous nation would follow a Leader into political totality [wholeness], and thereby begin a repair of the world that might in turn redeem the divine. Because the unifying principle of the Word was the only good in the universe, any means that might bring about its return were justified.

Thus this Russian philosopher, whose name was Ivan Ilyin, came to imagine a “Russian Christian fascism”. Born in 1883, he finished a dissertation on God’s worldly failure just before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Expelled from his homeland in 1922 by the Soviet power he despised, he embraced the cause of Benito Mussolini and completed an apology for political violence in 1925. In German and Swiss exile, he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s for White Russian exiles who had fled after defeat in the Russian civil war, and in the “1940s and 1950s [he wrote] for future Russians who would see the end of the Soviet power.”

A tireless worker, Ilyin produced about twenty books in Russian, and another twenty in German. Some of his work has a rambling and commonsensical character, and it is easy to find tensions and contradictions. One current of thought that is coherent over the decades, however, is his metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. A crucial concept was “law” or “legal consciousness” (“pravosoznanie” [compound word pravo=law & soznanie=consciousness]). For the young Ilyin, writing before the Revolution, law embodied the hope that Russians would partake in a universal consciousness that would allow Russia to create a modern state. For the mature, counter-revolutionary Ilyin, a particular consciousness (“heart” or “soul,” not “mind”) permitted Russians to experience the arbitrary claims of power as law. Though he died forgotten in 1954, Ilyin’s work was revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and guides the men who rule Russia today.

Marxists such as Lenin were atheists. They thought that by Spirit, Hegel meant God or some other theological notion, and replaced Spirit with society. Ilyin was not a typical Christian, but he believed in God. Ilyin agreed with Marxists that Hegel meant God, and argued that Hegel’s God had created a ruined world. For Marxists, private property served the function of an original sin, and its dissolution would release the good in man. For Ilyin, God’s act of creation was itself the original sin. There was never a good moment in history, and no intrinsic good in humans.The Marxists were right to hate the middle classes, and indeed did not hate them enough. Middle-class “civil society” entrenches plural interests that confound hopes for an “overpowering national organization” that God needs. Because the middle classes block God, they must be swept away by a classless national community. But there is no historical tendency, no historical group, that will perform this labor. The grand transformation from Satanic individuality to divine totality must begin somewhere beyond history.

According to Ilyin, liberation would arise not from understanding history, but from eliminating it. Since the earthly was corrupt and the divine unattainable, political rescue would come from the realm of fiction. (my emphasis) In 1917, Ilyin was still hopeful that Russia might become a state ruled by law. Lenin’s revolution ensured that Ilyin henceforth regarded his own philosophical ideas as political. Bolshevism had proven that God’s world was as flawed as Ilyin had maintained. What Ilyin would call “the abyss of atheism” of the new [Soviet] regime was the final confirmation of the flaws of the world, and of the power of modern ideas to reinforce them.

After he departed Russia, Ilyin would maintain that humanity needed heroes, outsized characters from beyond history, capable of willing themselves to power. In his dissertation, this politics was implicit in the longing for a missing totality [wholeness] and the suggestion that the nation might begin its restoration. It was an ideology awaiting a form and a name.

Although Ilyin was inspired by fascist Italy, his home as a political refugee between 1922 and 1938 was Germany. As an employee of the Russian Scholarly Institute (Russisches Wissenschaftliches Institut), he was an academic civil servant. It was from Berlin that he observed the succession struggle after Lenin’s death that brought Joseph Stalin to power. He then followed Stalin’s attempt to transform the political victory of the Bolsheviks into a social revolution. In 1933, Ilyin published a long book, in German, on the famine brought by the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.

Writing in Russian for Russian émigrés, Ilyin was quick to praise Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. Hitler did well, in Ilyin’s opinion, to have the rule of law suspended after the Reichstag Fire of February 1933. Ilyin presented Hitler, like Mussolini, as a Leader from beyond history whose mission was entirely defensive. “A reaction to Bolshevism had to come,” wrote Ilyin, “and it came.” European civilization had been sentenced to death, but “so long as Mussolini is leading Italy and Hitler is leading Germany, European culture has a stay of execution.” Nazis embodied a “Spirit” (Dukh) that Russians must share.

According to Ilyin, Nazis were right to boycott Jewish businesses and blame Jews as a collectivity for the evils that had befallen Germany. Above all, Ilyin wanted to persuade Russians and other Europeans that Hitler was right to treat Jews as agents of Bolshevism. This “Judeobolshevik” idea, as Ilyin understood, was the ideological connection between the Whites and the Nazis.

The article is long. Those are some selected parts.

Germaine’s fraught descent into mindreading and clinical diagnosis

What baffles the hell out of me are the recurring thoughts and behaviors among authoritarians, including the ones ruining American society today. They include morally noxious and ridiculous beliefs that (i) inconvenient truth is nothing at all, literally nothing, and (ii) they know how fix all problems and save humanity, which they are happy to do by force. Those minds reek of deep, cold sociopathy. They will kill if they have to, and probably enjoy it. There is no room for logic, morality or empathy in that black place. Unquestioning self-delusion of perfection manifests as dumb, cold arrogance. 

Presumably Ilyin really believed what Snyder finds from his published works. But the idea that people like Putin sincerely relies on the same reasoning feels wrong. Putin very well could point to Ilyin as moral justification for his brutal tyranny, but does he really buy all that crap about flawed God, national restoration and whatnot? I doubt it. It’s a buttload of garbage, useful only as an smoke screen.

In my opinion, Putin is a sociopath with intelligence, viciousness and a good work ethic, not someone concerned with God’s mistakes or any other high-minded reasoning. He does not care about dense philosophical argument. That is just a foil to elevate his joy of brutality and mega-scale theft to a learned excuse to be a cruel, rotten tyrant-kleptocrat. He likes wealth and power. That’s it. 

Well, maybe he also likes killing people.

Question: Is Germaine off the rez, out of his depth and/or just shooting blanks, or are Putin and radical right American authoritarians really drinking Kool-Aid and blither cocktail?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to fuster for citing this article.