The guy who tried to sell us on the idea of having Sarah Palin as VP is telling us not even to consider Trump because Marjorie Taylor Greene could be right on his coattails.
The party of personal responsibility is scrambling mightily to avoid taking any responsibility for their cowardice in the face of real threats to democracy.
That's true enough in perhaps most cases, but I'll diverge slightly from Schmidt's assessment, and say that a lot of Republicans aren't being cowardly at all. They aren't "standing up to Trump" precisely because they think he's getting them closer to their goal of toppling our system of democratic self-government.
Authoritarian rule, and theocracy, and business management mesh nicely because it's always top-down, do what I tell ya, and keep your tater trap shut kinda shit.
Especially that religion thing: Compliance is obligatory on pain of death.
Nothing fits better with what we've been seeing from the MAGA gang lately, as the puppeteers and plutocrats who're funding them keep us distracted just enough to let a tiny little doubt sneak into our brains if we start to think maybe this whole fascist thing is in process right now.
A farmer hears the guy on the radio saying there's a bad flood coming his way. He says to himself, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me."
The water rises and the farmer retreats to his porch.
A sheriff's deputy stops by as the road is beginning to flood and offers to take him to safety. The farmer replies, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me." And the deputy drives away.
The water rises and the farmer retreats to a room upstairs.
A man comes by in a boat and offers to take him to safety. The farmer replies, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me." The man in the boat motors away.
The water rises and the farmer is up on his roof, barely hanging on. A helicopter appears with a rope ladder. The farmer waves them off, yelling, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me." The helicopter flies away.
The water surges, destroying the farmer's house and washing him down river to a watery grave.
The farmer arrives at the pearly gates to find god waiting for him. The farmer says, "I was a god-fearing man - I went to church - I had faith - why didn't you save me?"
God replies, "I sent a car, a boat, and a helicopter - what the fuck you are doing here?"
Joe POTUS brought the fire last night, and today, Republicans are still insisting he's being mean to them. They're trying to spin it, saying he's the one being divisive - that he wants us to hate "half the country" and blah blah blah.
First - not "half the country". Gotta admire a buncha numb-nuts who look at maybe 10 or 15 percent of the country, then turn around and try to sell the notion that it's actually "half".
(I'm not sure "admire" is the right word, but that's what I've got for now)
Second - if you're not among the fascist assholes Biden's talking about, then don't go gettin' any knots in your Underoos.
Third (and kinda the big one) - Biden keeps offering the "mainstream old guard GOP" a way out of the totally fucked up mess they've gotten themselves into (see car, boat, helicopter above).
But it's like they've become frozen in place, which is the basic problem with the kind of monumental ego some of these clods have always had, or develop over a career spent figuring out what ass to kiss and how deep into the shit they need to dive without blowing it all up or revealing to the world what craven, opportunistic, cynically manipulative transactional assholes they really are.
It's pretty annoying that we have to keep explaining the point that certain phrases and the ideas they signify are shitty things that we've had to deal with more than a few times before.
The phrase “America First”
became a national slogan in 1915....
...Then it became a wartime jingoistic slogan on par,
as was noted at the time, with “Deutschland über Alles”...
...At the same time, a new political group was organizing and asserting a national presence – the Ku Klux Klan. By the mid-1920s, the Klan had as many as five million members.
In other words, one out of every three or four white Protestant American man was a Klansman.
10-Minute Talks: America first and American fascism
by Professor Sarah Churchwell
06-20-2020
Hello, my name is Sarah Churchwell. I'm the Director of the Being Human Festival, the UK's national festival of the humanities, and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where I research and write about American cultural history. For this special Summer Showcase 10-Minute Talk, I'm going to give a brief history of the slogan “America First” and its relation to lesser-known histories of American fascism.
When Donald Trump chose “America First” as one of his favourite political slogans – a phrase he went on to emphasise not only on the campaign trail but in his inaugural address and countless times during his presidency, many observers pointed to the troubling history behind the slogan.
What may seem at first glance merely a patriotic or nationalistic slogan – one that implies economic protectionism – in fact has a much longer and darker history in American political discourse than many people realise.
When Trump resurrected “America First” worried observers pointed to the most notorious iteration of the phrase – the America First Committee of 1942/1941, eventually led by Charles Lindbergh, whose anti-Semitic prejudices were well known at the time, and clearly demonstrated historically in the publication of his diaries and correspondence, where he privately mused about the so-called “Jewish problem” and the “Jewish question”, but also in public speeches he made, drawing on anti-Semitic tropes from the notorious forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which claimed that a Jewish conspiracy of bankers and media moguls was controlling the world. The same tropes that Hitler and Goebbels used in their own anti-Semitic propaganda.
The America First Committee, or AFC, sought to keep the United States out of World War II, on the basis that the fight against fascism was not America's fight. Some supported this position for motives of isolationism, others as pacifists or conscientious objectors, but a great many – like Lindbergh himself – also believed that what they called “Jewish interests” were trying to manipulate America into joining the war against its national interests. Implying, again as did the Nazis, that only Jewish people criticize Nazis and that Jewish interests were not only distinct from, but opposed to, America's national interest. The obvious implication being that Jewish-Americans are not really Americans at all. Lindbergh repeatedly said in his “America First” speeches that America should only join a European war if it was to protect what he called “the white races” from foreign invasion by “some Asiatic intruder”. That was reason to go to war in Europe, but fighting fascism for Lindbergh was not. As long as white people were in charge, he said, in so many words, it didn't matter if they were German fascists or British democrats. The AFC was denounced by many at the time as a force for appeasement; Lindbergh a Vichy figure – an American collaborator.
Part of the objection expressed by American anti-fascist voices at the time, however, was also to the long history of the phrase “America First” itself. This was not in fact a slogan that emerged with the Second World War, but rather with the First. American adults in 1940 had grown up with this phrase and they knew it was what we call a ‘dog whistle’ – a coded reference intended to be understood by a target audience, that might seem innocent to the unaware.
The phrase “America First” became a national slogan in 1915. President Woodrow Wilson used it to tell the country that what were known as “hyphenate Americans” at the time, which is to say immigrant communities – German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans – needed to identify their loyalty. Was it “America First”, he demanded, or was it not? In other words, the President of the United States used the phrase “America First” as a loyalty test for recently naturalised American citizens. The slogan immediately exploded into a national catchphrase. Both Wilson his Republican opponent used it in the 1916 election, then it became a wartime jingoistic slogan on par, as was noted at the time, with “Deutschland über Alles”.
After the war, “America First” was used by isolationists, including William Randolph Hearst, to keep America out of the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations. Then Warren G Harding successfully campaigned in 1920 on an isolationist, protectionist, “America First” platform, before the phrase was used to pass anti-immigration, eugenicist, restrictionist legislation in the mid-1920s. At the same time, a new political group was organising and asserting a national presence – the Ku Klux Klan. By the mid-1920s, the Klan had as many as five million members. In other words, one out of every three or four white Protestant American man was a Klansman.
The first Klan had been established in 1866 by a bunch of disaffected white supremacists in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, after the emancipation of slaves and the extension of the franchise to African-American men. The Klan was only the most famous of many white supremacist groups that committed atrocities after the Civil War across the American South including torture, mutilation, dismemberment and burning human beings alive. They murdered black politicians in public, in broad daylight to stop them asserting their new legal and political rights. Their behaviour was so vicious and so lawless that the federal government took action and brought the organisation down, so the Klan was defunct by the mid-1870s, but although the organisation was gone, its savage and malevolent beliefs and behaviours survived.
It was at this time that the white south began erecting Confederate monuments to leaders of the Klan and the Confederate Army that marched against the United States government to secure its right to hold other human beings in bondage. It was also at this time that the white south began to whitewash, in every sense, its motives and actions during the conflict, rewriting history to say that slavery and white supremacism had not motivated the war but rather the incursion of federal government into state’s rights. The specific states right that they had fought over was in fact their right to keep slaves, but they began to skip that part and then to deny it outright.
In 1915, the same year that President Wilson who was born in the slaveholding south, before the Civil War and an avowed segregationist made “America First” a catchphrase, a Jewish man named Leo Frank was lynched in Atlanta a few months after a film called The Birth of a Nation was released. The film glorified the first Klan as a noble uprising of white people protecting their way of life from vicious marauding black people, when in historical fact it was exactly the other way around. The two events together sparked the rebirth of the Klan. The second Klan declared itself a 100% American organisation that believed in Christian nationalism and ‘upheld white supremacism’. That is their language. One of its favourite slogans was ‘America First’ which is printed on pamphlets and ads announcing its explicit commitment to white supremacism.
At exactly the same time, in the early 1920s a new political phenomenon arose in Italy called fascism, as Mussolini took power. Americans instantly recognised what they were watching, as just a few quotations from American newspapers in 1921 and 1922 – as Mussolini took power – attest. The “Fascisti'”, they said, “might be known as the Ku Klux Klan” or “the Klan is the Fascisti of America” or “the single success of the Fascisti, or Italian Ku Klux Klan” or “the Fascisti is a secret order having some of the Ku Klux Klan method” and so on.
By the end of the 1920s, the second Klan was in decline – brought down by corruption and sex scandals – plus ça change! But in its stead soon sprouted a host of nativist, Christian nationalist, conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, white supremacist and xenophobic groups that borrowed many of the impulses and symbolisms of European fascism, including coloured shirts. In America in the 1930s there were the Blackshirts, the Khaki Shirts, Silver Shirts, White Shirts, the Brownshirts of Father Coughlin, the Greyshirts and the Dress Shirts – among many other extreme right-wing groups. The German American Bund began its existence as the “Friends of Hitler” movement before holding rallies and parades that matched the American stars and stripes with swastikas. All of these groups professed themselves “100% American”, and said they “put America first”. By the late 1930s they were referred to collectively and pejoratively in interchangeable terms as “Bundists”, “100 Percenters” and “America Firsters”. When the America First Committee formed in 1940 and began to urge America to stay out of the war, it was drawing on this long rhetorical history that everyone knew, and all of these groups flocked to it, seeing in it the political legitimacy they had long sought. Not everyone in the AFC agreed with the positions of what was called the lunatic fringe at the time, but they singularly failed to separate themselves from it – to denounce these supporters.
Ten minutes is not enough time to explain this complex, dark, controversial and inflammatory history. I have left an enormous amount out of this story, including how much European fascist movements learned from the structures and arguments of American white supremacism and anti-Semitism. But even the bare bones I presented in these brief minutes should help us hear the ferocious irony in the title of Sinclair Lewis’ best-selling 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, women, in the face of what the fascist leader says is a takeover of the country's media, cultural institutions, schools by these forces.
Fascist movements typically, though not invariably, rest on an urban/rural divide. The cities are where there's decadence, where the elites congregate, where there's immigrants, and where there's criminality.
Each of these individuals alone is not in and of itself fascist, but you have to worry when they're all grouped together, seeing the other as less than. Those moments are the times when societies need to worry about fascism.
I just finished listening to Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny" for the 2nd time.
Snyder put it out as Trump was beginning his efforts to entrench the Daddy State in 2017.
So even though Trump himself is slowly being extricated, the Plutocracy Project continues apace - and it's every bit as lock-step authoritarian as anything Qult45 tried to do, but maybe even more dangerous because they're very busily trying to put a friendlier face on it - Glenn Youngkin and Josh Hawley come to mind.
The outline:
Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.
When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.
Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don't fall for it.
Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don't use the Internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.
Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.
Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.
Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.
Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.
Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.
Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.
Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the Internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.
Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.
Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.
Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)
Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.
Be a patriot. President Trump is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.
