Saving Democracy Is A Ruse
‘Saving Democracy’ is a vacuous rallying message. America is “post democracy.” It’s about transition of power and being held accountable.
Consider ‘Saving Democracy’ as Trump’s long game:
“Prosecutors have accused Trump of hatching various plots to subvert the election. He tried, for instance, to enlist the Justice Department, they say, into validating his claims that the vote count had been rigged. And he pressured state officials, they claim, to draft fake slates of electors saying that he won in states where he lost.
While Trump’s lawyers are not quite disputing that all of this took place, their first line of defense is to claim that none of it is criminal. In fact, they’re asserting more: They contend that Trump is immune from the charges altogether because everything he did after losing the race was part of his presidential duties to preserve the “integrity” of the election. They also maintain that as he sought to persuade his aides and allies to help him stay in power, his actions were protected by the First Amendment.” (1)
Fifty years ago, I was campaigning door-to-door for George McGovern for President in Champaign, Illinois. Candidate Richard Nixon, running for re-election, was attempting to outflank Candidate George McGovern on the issue of ending the war in Viet Nam. As I worked a collection of middle class subdivisions, I ran up against a surprising push back to McGovern, a popular Senator who was advocating ‘stopping’ the war, conditional on releasing the POW’s.
The independent voters I tried to convince to vote for McGovern understood and agreed with his position on the War in Viet Nam but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for McGovern.
Here’s what one voter told me who when I asked, “How do you vote into a second term a man who is implicated in a criminal break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters?” (The Watergate break-in had occurred June 17, 1972. It was well over a year before the ‘Saturday Night Massacre,’ a tipping point in the Watergate investigation, October 20, 1973)
“Well, he hasn’t been convicted. Better the devil you know, then the devil you don’t.”
I chalked this up to another cynical version of following the status quo tradition of giving an incumbent President a second term. What I wasn’t prepared to hear was my outrage at the equivocating what I felt was grossly evident: the candidate was alleged to have participated in a conspiracy.
What, like others, I didn’t yet know … is how sensitive to a functioning democracy is the transition of power.
“Transition of power” — what most Americans seem to take for granted, whereas Trump acts as if he uncannily respects this vulnerability. Revelations about Trump orchestrating January 6 have made little difference poll-wise, and legal-wise will generate a bevy of appeals carrying “accountability” well past the 2024 elections. And despite the 91 charges and the multiple cases, the Trump legal teams are sounding a consistent drum beat: ‘Trump did nothing wrong. In fact, he attempted to save the country from a takeover.’
For a sampling of where America is on this and related issues, consider the opprobrium which surfaced as Trump lawyer Steven Sadow proposed in court this past week that Trump would not receive equal protection in the Georgia case until 2029 — after Trump had served his term upon winning in 2024. Assuming Trump were alive — he would be 83 in 2029 — his defense of ‘saving democracy’ would have the added benefit of coming from a high profile elected official.
Blaming a political party for the erosion of “democracy” is … blaming a political party for the erosion of “democracy.”
Who could argue?
Some active political theorists currently address this “shorting of democracy.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2) and Timothy Snyder (3) come to mind.
In a recent post, Dr. Ben-Ghiat links what she calls “fake populists,” stand-ins for “true advocates of democracy,” to what could be called “imaginary populism,” typically confused with authoritarianism:
The recent election of Javier Gerardo Milei as Argentina’s president adds another member to the tribe of fake populists. These are politicians who claim they represent “the people” against exploitative elites and foreign interests, but who often form part of that same cosmopolitan elite class. Fake populists often vaunt credentials of national purity and launch campaigns to “drain the swamp” (a term invented by Benito Mussolini), but their “anti-corruption” campaigns often target those who might reveal their thievery.
Such strongmen scams recur throughout authoritarian history, not least because they are at the heart of autocratic personality cults that celebrate the leader as a man of the people. Speaking in the plain and blunt language of the truth-teller, such individuals pose as one of us, us being the pure expression of the nation unadulterated by foreign origins or “globalist” affiliations.
Former president Donald Trump played this game well. A 2017 study found that his speech patterns matched those of fourth-graders, and the touching misspellings and capitalizations of his tweets, which shouted “notice me!,” helped to create his populist profile. Indian leader Narendra Modi’s I-am-everyman Instagram persona serves the same purpose.
Of course, that everyman is also the man above all other men, a dynamic being admired for his worldliness and glamour. Yet the faux populist presents any superior knowledge and wisdom he has gained in his life journey as benefiting the nation by preparing him for his mission of making his country great (again). Put differently, unlike the elites who prey on the nation and do the bidding of unsavory foreign-linked forces, his expertise will be applied to repairing the nation’s ills. (4)
Snyder and Ben-Ghiat are not alone in citing examples of “authoritarian creep.” Journalist/advocate Naomi Klein eloquently describes a kindred phenomenon — what she cites in her recent book, Doppelganger, (5) as “diagonalism.”
Reflecting on the unlikely media team of self-described autocrat, Steve Bannon, and virulent anti-vaxxer, Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein writes,
“What I was trying to figure out was this: what does this unlikeliest of buddy movies say about the ways that COVID has redrawn political maps in country after country, blurring left-right lines and provoking previously apolitical cohorts to take to the streets? What did it have to do with the “freedom fighters” blocking ambulances outside hospitals that required their staff to get vaccinated? Or refusing to believe the results of any elections that didn’t go their way? Or denying evidence of Russian war crimes? Or, or, or…
“These new alliances eventually kicked off the self-described Freedom Caucus that shut down Ottawa, the capital city in my own country, for three weeks, and then spread to the United states and Europe, branching out from COVID-related grievances to a more general amorphous cry for “freedom”…
“…What’s new is the force of the magnetic pull with which they are finding one another, self-assembling into what Vice reporter, Anna Merlan has termed a “conspiracy singularity.”
“In Germany, the movement often describes its politics as Querdenken {which means lateral, diagonal, or outside-the-box thinking) and it has forged worrying alliances between New Age health obsessives… and several neo-fascist parties which took up the anti-vaccination battle cry as part of a COVID-era resistance to ‘hygiene dictatorship’…
‘Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right, (while generally arcing towards far right beliefs) to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.’ (6)
Are 2024 Presidential Campaign Democratic strategists listening?
‘Saving democracy’ is “sexy,” as one Trump lawyer recently inferred (7) which is why Trump’s legal team is using it in Trump’s defense — only Trump on January 6 was willing to save America from a rigged election. Whether Trump believed the election was rigged or not does not alter his intention to conduct a conspiracy in the name of ‘saving democracy.’ As much as the legalistic debate continues about this opportunism, there is also a history being invoked:
In 2008 then President George W. Bush reflected on Hamas aligned militants being voted into power in Gaza, the first election in that region, ‘well, in a democratic election you don’t always get the results you want.’
Democrats have an uphill battle to convince voters that the opposing candidate wants to shred democracy. How many voters actually feel that democracy is at risk?
Who could argue?
Protecting the Constitution, protecting the peaceful transfer of power, as the Constitution stipulates, is the political issue at hand. And this issue the Democrats have deferred to the courts and criminal case juries to decide — some before, but most after the 2024 elections.
Not surprisingly, more than ‘democracy’ is at stake. Like imagining an end to the Viet Nam war in 1972, in 2024 voters will need to imagine an end to authoritarianism in America.
And ‘Saving Democracy’ will not fill the room nor the ballot box.
December 4
Notes
1-Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer, “How Trump’s lawyers are trying to flip the script,” Trump on Trial, November 10, New York Times
2–https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ruth_Ben-Ghiat&oldid=1183992383
4-Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The New Wave of Fake Populists Who Serve Elites While Claiming to Stand for the People, Trump is Part of a Larger Tend,” substack, November 29
5-Naomi Klein, “Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World,” (2023), p. 100
6-William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, cited in Naomi Klein, “Doppelganger,” op sit., p. 103
7-John Lauro, guest on Ari Melber, The Beat with Ari Melber, MSNBC
ReplyForward
