Regarding the power of relentless propaganda to dehumanize and harden minds

An aspect of the Israel-Palestine horror that has been of personal interest is how the Israeli people view the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, the ensuing Gaza war and what they want after the war ends. The polling I've seen so far indicates that majority public opinion has hardened into deep anger and desire for revenge. A NYT opinion (not paywalled) exemplifies the situation:

The View Within Israel Turns Bleak

It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.

“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”

It would be nice to think that Mr. Shlezinger is a fringe figure or that Israelis would be shocked by his bloody fantasies. But he’s not, and many wouldn’t be.

Israel has hardened, and the signs of it are in plain view. Dehumanizing language and promises of annihilation from military and political leaders. Polls that found wide support for the policies that have wreaked devastation and starvation in Gaza. Selfies of Israeli soldiers preening proudly in bomb-crushed Palestinian neighborhoods. A crackdown on even mild forms of dissent among Israelis.

This bleak ideological landscape emerged slowly and then, on Oct. 7, all at once.

The massacre and kidnappings of that day, predictably, brought a public thirst for revenge. But in truth, by the time Hamas killers rampaged through the kibbutzim — in a bitter twist, home to some of the holdout peaceniks — many Israelis had long since come to regard Palestinians as a threat best locked away. America’s romantic mythology and wishful thinking about Israel encourage a tendency to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the main cause of the ruthlessness in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 35,000 people. The unpopular, scandal-ridden premier makes a convincing ogre in an oversimplified story.

But Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.
The Israeli left — the factions that criticize the occupation of Palestinian lands and favor negotiations and peace instead — is now a withered stump of a once-vigorous movement. In recent years, the attitudes of many Israelis toward the “Palestinian problem” have ranged largely from detached fatigue to the hard-line belief that driving Palestinians off their land and into submission is God’s work.  

“The issues of settlements or relations with Palestinians were off the table for years,” Tamar Hermann told me. “The status quo was OK for Israelis.”

Ms. Hermann, a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, is one of the country’s most respected experts on Israeli public opinion. In recent years, she said, Palestinians hardly caught the attention of Israeli Jews. She and her colleagues periodically made lists of issues and asked respondents to rank them in order of importance. It didn’t matter how many choices the pollsters presented, she said — resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came in last in almost all measurements.

“It was totally ignored,” she said. Israel’s uneasy detachment turned to rage on Oct. 7.

A handful of songs with lyrics calling for the annihilation of a dehumanized enemy have been circulated in Israel these past months, including “Launch,” a hip-hop glorification of the military promising “from kisses to guns, until Gaza is erased” .... “There is no forgiveness for swarms of rats,” another song goes. “They will die in their rat holes.”

Israeli shops hawk trendy products like a bumper sticker that reads, “Finish them,” and a pendant cut into the shape of Israel, with East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza seamlessly attached.

So many questions and ways to look at it

In view of the Hamas horror of Oct. 7, is it unreasonable or too biased to attribute the dehumanization and attitude hardening of the Israeli public to propaganda? After all, the murderous Hamas terror attack was an unspeakable evil. Yes, it arguably is too biased if one considers the horrible event that triggered the massive public opinion hardening of mind and dehumanization of all Palestinians. 

But what if one looks at all events from ~1946-1948 to 2024? or ~1500 to 2024? Could the horror of Oct. 7 be seen as a final cry of rage and anguish from a group of people who have been oppressed and imprisoned since 1948? Well, Hamas is not all Palestinians. The truth includes the fact, not opinion, that for decades Gaza has been an open air prison and Palestinians in the West Bank have been illegally forced into smaller and smaller areas of land. For decades, extremist Israeli propaganda has dehumanized all Palestinians, not just Hamas.

1517 to 1950

This is messy, isn't it?

This 12 minute video discusses the related topic of what is going on with the Palestinians living in the West Bank. That has nothing to do with Hamas because the Palestinian Authority governs the West Bank, not Hamas. This exemplifies the hardened attitude of Israel toward all Palestinians, not just those in Gaza or just Hamas fighters.

Is the democratic West cynical & hypocritical about

human rights for Russia vs for Israel?

This discusses some evidence that is true

The American Autocracy Threat Tracker

It is encouraging that more groups are waking up to the kleptocratic authoritarian threat that Trump and the Republican Party poses to democracy, civil liberties and the rule law. Someone ought to start keeping tabs on all the threats the thugs are publicly making in their lust for power and wealth at the expense of democracy, the law and our liberties. Oh, someone is keeping tabs. Good.

Last February, the group Just Security published a comprehensive list of threats to democracy that Trump and the Republican Party have made publicly. Just Security includes experts in government and democracy such as Norman L. Eisen, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Siven Watt, Andrew Warren, Jacob Kovacs-Goodman and Francois Barrilleaux. The list is updated when America's authoritarian radical right publicly issues new threats to impose dictatorship and kleptocracy on the American people, the law and government. Just Security writes in part (the intro is very long and detailed):

This autocracy threat tracker is also available as a PDF file. The tracker was originally published on February 26, 2024 and is continually updated.

Introduction

Former President Donald Trump has said he will be a dictator on “day one.” He and his advisors and associates have publicly discussed hundreds of further actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy, the rule of law, as well as U.S. (and global) security. These vary from Trump breaking the law and abusing power in areas like immigration roundups and energy extraction; to summarily and baselessly firing tens of thousands of civil servants whom he perceives as adversaries; to prosecuting his political opponents for personal gain and even hinting at executing some of them; to pardoning some of the convicted January 6th rioters he views as “great patriots,” “hostages,” and “wrongfully imprisoned.” We track all of these promises, plans, and pronouncements here and we will continue to update them.

We assess there is a significant risk of autocracy should Trump regain the presidency. Trump has said he would deploy the military against civilian protestors and his advisors have developed plans for using the Insurrection Act, said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act to conduct deportations of non-citizens, continued to threaten legally-established abortion rights, and even had his lawyers argue that a president should be immune from prosecution if he directed SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political opponent. Trump also seeks the power to protect his personal wealth as he faces staggering civil fines, and to bolster his immunity as he faces 88 criminal charges in prosecutions in different parts of the country. He has predicted a “bloodbath” if he is not elected (although his meaning has been contested, with some saying he was referring to violence and others that “Trump was talking about US automakers.”) At a Veterans Day rally last year, Trump said he would “root out” political opponents who “live like vermin within the confines of our country” warning that the greatest threats come “from within” (words that, according to ABC News and others, “echoed those of past fascist dictators like Hitler and Benito Mussolini,” and alarmed historians.)

While Trump has claimed he will be a dictator for only the first day of his administration, his promise to do so—even for 24 hours—is antithetical to American democracy and consistent with the history of authoritarianism. Dictatorial powers, once assumed, are rarely relinquished. Moreover, Trump cannot possibly achieve his stated goals for the use of that power (in immigration and energy policy) in one day, meaning that his “dictatorship” would of necessity likely last much longer.

Many of Trump’s former Cabinet officials and advisors—those with the most experience watching him govern behind the scenes—believe he poses a grave danger to the country. John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, said, “I think Trump will cause significant damage in a second term, damage that in some cases will be irreparable.” Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said that the former president praised Adolf Hitler’s ability to rebuild Germany’s economy, and admired his maintaining “loyalty” of his senior Nazi officials. Alyssa Farah Griffin, former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications, noted, “Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly.” Mark Esper, Trump’s former defense secretary, has warned of “more … hyper-aggressive behavior” by Trump if he takes office, recounting when Trump asked if demonstrators gathering around the White House following the death of George Floyd could be shot.

Trump’s dictatorial aspirations are complemented by an extensive pre-election plan to fundamentally alter the nature of American government: the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025). Created by Trump allies and staffed by those including his past and likely future administration appointees, it is in the words of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, a plan for “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Trump has returned the compliment, saying of Roberts (and Heritage) that he’s “doing an unbelievable job, he’s bringing it back to levels we’ve never seen … thank you Kevin.”

Project 2025’s plans are set forth in an 887-page document entitled “Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise.” It details a program to consolidate power in the executive branch, deconstruct the federal administration, and strip remaining agencies of their independence. It proposes to dismantle or radically overhaul the Departments of Justice and State; eliminate the Departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Commerce; radically repurpose other agencies; and eviscerate the professional civil service. Project 2025 is complemented by other 2025 planning efforts by, for example, the America First Policy Institute, the Center for Renewing America, and the Conservative Partnership Institute.

Trump and his associates are reportedly discussing building an administration around loyalists who would “stretch legal and governance boundaries” to accommodate an “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” (in the words of Project 2025). Among those Axios reported to be under discussion for senior government posts are Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Clark, who is currently under indictment in Georgia for his role in the fake electors scheme and a co-conspirator in the federal election indictment.

When Trump assumed office in 2017, he and his associates did not have such well developed policies and personnel in waiting. Indeed, he made the “mistake” of including people in senior administration positions who remained loyal to the Constitution. As Sec. Esper told Bill Kirstol in an April 17, 2024, interview, “There were guard rails in place, guard rail number one being the prospect of reelection, and number two being the people he brought in around him. Some of those guard rails won’t be there in number two.” A few days later, RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump told an audience to a round of applause, “He’s not worried about winning another election. It’s four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House.”  

We ignore leaders who promise dictatorship—and those who enable them—at our own peril. To see what America might become under Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, we should look at the regimes of other contemporary autocrats, especially as Trump has been mirroring recent autocratic moves in Hungary and elsewhere. With great fanfare, Trump recently welcomed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to his Mar-a-Lago resort, Florida, and has long expressed his admiration for Orbán’s leadership. The Hungarian’s self-proclaimed drive toward an “illiberal state” has seen extensive democratic backsliding. He packed the judiciary to place that branch of government squarely under his control; rewrote election laws to retain his legislative majority; censored the press; used law enforcement to persecute his enemies; and changed Hungary’s constitution to help achieve his autocratic goals—and he took that “blueprint on dismantling democracy to Mar-a-Lago.” Trump and Orbán’s continuing public alignment on key policy issues also “threatens trans-Atlantic security,”—despite Orban’s repeated claims to the contrary—with the pair reportedly aligning on, among other this, the Russian-Ukraine war and eyeing an end to U.S. funding and aid to Ukraine. The United States, like many other functioning democracies, is hardly immune from backsliding and lurching toward autocracy.

Part of the pdf list of public threats

Partisanship can amount to a divorce from reality; An early warning about DJT

A NYT opinion by David French discusses the usually unpleasant epiphany that some blind partisans feel when they take off the loyalty blindfold and see the divorce from reality it caused:

I Was a Republican Partisan. 

It Altered the Way I Saw the World.

[Intro: Discussion of polls being wrong, but caution about dismissing all of them when they are consistent for a significant period of time]

The purpose of this newsletter isn’t to adjudicate the polling dispute but to show an example of how the partisan mind works and how partisans process negative information. I could use any number of other examples. In a column last week, my colleague Ross Douthat rightly observed that “we are constantly urged to ‘stand with Israel’ when it’s unclear if Israel knows what it’s doing.” [Israel knows exactly what it is doing, French and Douthat are shockingly naive on this point]

I remember when supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom constantly hyped good news from the battlefield and minimized bad news — right until the bad news became so overwhelming that the need for a radical strategy change was clear to everyone, from the soldier walking the streets of Baghdad to President George W. Bush and his team of national security advisers.

In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds. It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.

To put it another way: Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires. When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.

If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized. When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved. In fact, allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”

You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.

The result is a kind of divorce from reality.

I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses. Among them: Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books. Also, when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.

And when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence. Your opponent may be right, your friend may be wrong, and your emotions will often lead you astray.

By golly, I do believe that Mr. French has gone woke about human cognitive biology and social behavior. Bravo, Mr. French! 👏👍

_____________________________________________________________

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This is an article Washington Monthly published Jan. 31, 2017, 11 days after Trump was sworn into office:

The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism

Guess how many Trump has already checked off

If you go to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, you can see a sign hanging there that tells you what to look for if you’re worried that your country may be slipping into fascism. Let’s take a look at their twelve [14 actually] early warning signs of fascism.

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
2. Disdain for human rights
3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
4. Rampant sexism
5. Controlled mass media
6. Obsession with national security
7. Religion and government intertwined
8. Corporate power protected
9. Labor power suppressed
10. Disdain for intellectual and the arts
11. Obsession with crime and punishment
12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

You can follow the links above, but it shouldn’t be necessary if you’ve been paying any attention. Trump’s message is based on putting America “first,” making America “great again,” and is clearly a powerful form of nationalism that we’re also seeing arise in other countries in Europe and Asia.

Trump’s disdain for human rights is legend, but examples include his desire to kill the relatives of terrorists (something he accomplished this week), his insistence that he’ll do “worse than waterboarding” and his statement in the White House that “torture absolutely works.”

Trump has used Mexican “rapists” and Islamic terrorists as unifying enemies. This tactic is actually perhaps the core of his political strategy.

Trump’s sexism is one of the most transparent and well-established things we know about him.

Just this week, Trump advocated that someone friendly to him buy the New York Times. His chief adviser Steve Bannon comes from the Breitbart media dynamo and has told the media to shut their mouth. So far, Trumpists do not own much of the media, so they seek to marginalize and intimidate them. In any case, Fox News does a pretty good job on their own, and the right owns talk radio.

As for entwining religion and government, that can be seen in Mike Pence’s entire political career, but it’s also evident in the way that Trump has nakedly tried to make his immigration ban apply more fully to Muslims than to Christians. The Republican Party has had fascist tendencies in this regard that long predate Trump, but Trump has really run with (white) Christian nationalism as a fundamental part of his appeal. He cast himself as the defender of this group.

Trump has appointed the richest cabinet in history and proposes corporate friendly policies to match.

His nominee for Labor Secretary is a strong opponent of organized labor and Trump has had a poor relationship with labor in his business career. Most recently, this has been in the news in relation to the labor force at his Las Vegas hotel. Overall, Trump will go after unions across the board, especially public service unions and government employees.

So, there you have it. Twelve early signs of fascism, and Trump and his movement have already checked 11 of the boxes and are assured of checking the twelfth.

Project 2025 about public education and just about everything else

The conservative threat is real, not a mirage

America’s authoritarian radical right has laid out its policy wish list in a document called Project 2025. Most of the policies are radical. They typically involve a taking power from the federal government and individual citizens. The stolen power* will flow to states and powerful, wealthy elites and special interests. Project 2025 is truly an authoritarian manifesto aimed at neutering democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. If Project 2025 is mostly implemented, Americans will be governed by some form of a combination of (1) kleptocratic dictatorship, (2) kleptocratic, bigoted Christian fundamentalist theocracy, and (3) kleptocratic, unregulated capitalist plutocracy. The 887 page manifesto is online at this link.

* Stolen because a majority of Americans would oppose most of what is in Project 2025 if they understood what it advocates implementing

One of the Project 2025 goals is gutting public education. That is a cherished goal of America's Christian nationalism (CN) wealth and power political movement. The CN goal is to eventually replace all secular education with mandatory Christian religious “education”, whatever that is.

Commentary from a North Carolina news source:

The Trump team’s radical plan to gut American public education

Not surprisingly, low-income children of color are among the chief targets

In many ways, it’s one of the great mysteries of modern American policy debates: What does the political right aim to achieve by destroying public education?

The idea of siphoning off billions of public dollars to fund private school vouchers is more obvious: It’s a straight money [and power] grab that abets the longstanding desire of many people of means to avoid having to send their children to melting pot schools that include poor kids and kids of different races and ability levels.

But why the relentless attack on the public schools and the kids and families who remain in them?

Is it simply a matter of the fact that – as Willie Sutton infamously said of the banks he robbed – “that’s where the money is”?

Is it born of that strange passion still found in some corners of the market fundamentalist right that all things public are inherently evil and a threat to their “freedom”?

Is it just a function of the fact that public schools in states like North Carolina have become majority-minority?

Whatever the explanation, it’s impossible to deny that such a mission of destruction is a top conservative priority these days and well underway in many places.

The document is chockful of remarkably extreme objectives in dozens of areas, but few are more striking than the field of public education, where the plan calls for:

• Ending the nation’s oldest and largest federal program for the support of public education – Title I.
• Gutting the nation’s free school meals program.
• Eliminating the Head Start program.

Title I is the nation’s signature initiative for aiding schools with large numbers of low-income students. In the current fiscal year, $20.5 billion has been allocated across the nation. Ninety percent of the nation’s school districts and all 115 in North Carolina benefit. About half the public schools in North Carolina, as well as many private schools, receive Title I funding.

Amazingly, however, Project 2025 calls for “phasing” Title I out of existence and turning the responsibility over to the states. North Carolinians familiar with their General Assembly’s cheapskate approach to funding schools will find that notion laughable.

And the same is true with the other proposed draconian cuts.

Free school meals – an initiative that has been expanded wisely and to great benefit in recent years – is one of the most obvious and affordable things the U.S. government does to directly enhance the lives of millions of children.

Given the intense hostility of the authors of Project 2025 to domestic and social welfare spending, it is reasonable to assume that the unspoken intent of Project 2025 is complete elimination of federal programs like free school meals and food stamps. The language of the document is more moderate and speaks only of “reform” and means testing of various programs to stop “misuse” of taxpayer money.

For example, at page 298, Project 2025 calls for separating the agricultural provisions of the annual farm bill from the nutrition provisions. This would be the first step in completely eliminating federal food programs because the the radical right has to protect the farm bill to keep rural voters in line. Years ago, Democrats explicitly combined food programs with the farm bill to insure that government haters would refuse to pass food programs while passing the farm bill.

Q: It is reasonable to distrust the expressed intentions of Project 2025 in view of the authors’ radicalism, hate of government, hate of domestic spending programs and sympathy for authoritarianism?[1]

Footnote: 

1. Project 2025 authors include fanatic Trump supporter Peter Navarro, presently in jail for contempt of congress. Trump and his campaign are openly collaborating with key Project 2025 proponents. One source comments:

The Mandate’s veneer of exhausting technocratic detail, focused mostly on the federal bureaucracy, sits easily alongside a Trumpian project of revenge and retribution. It is the substance behind the showmanship of the Trump rallies.

Developing transition plans for a presidential candidate is normal practice in the US. What is not normal about Project 2025, with its intertwined domestic and international agenda, are the plans themselves. Those for climate and the global environment, defense and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly aim for nothing less than the total dismantling and restructure of both American life and the world as we know it.

The unapologetic agenda, according to Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is to “defeat the anti-American left – at home and abroad.”  

Recommendations include completely abolishing the US Federal Reserve in favor of a system of “free banking”, the total reversal of all the Biden administration’s climate policies, a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use, ending economic engagement with China, expanding the nuclear arsenal and a “comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations” including the UN and its agencies. And that’s not all.

Wikipedia comments, highlighting the authoritarianism (autocrat and plutocrat) and hate of government that dominates the document:

Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is a collection of policy proposals to thoroughly reshape the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Established in 2022, the project aims to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to the District of Columbia to replace existing federal civil servants—whom Republicans characterize as part of the “deep state”—and to further the objectives of the next Republican president. It adopts a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory—which asserts that the president has absolute power over the executive branch upon inauguration. Unitary executive theory is an interpretation of Article II of the Constitution of the United States. 

Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the entire government, particularly with regard to economic and social policies and the role of the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes slashing funding for the Department of Justice, dismantling the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor of fossil fuel production, eliminating the Department of Commerce, and ending the independence of various federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. The blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts, though its writers disagree on the wisdom of protectionism.  

Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be either transferred to other government agencies, or terminated. Scientific research would only receive federal funding if it suits conservative principles.  

The Project urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care and to restrict access to contraception.  

The Project advises the future president to immediately deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and to direct the DOJ to pursue Trump's adversaries by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. It recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants across the country. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of such sentences. Project director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, explained that Project 2025 is “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”

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.