2018 January 13 — Crooked Timber

“As soon as Trump became a serious contender for the presidency, journalists and historians beganÂ analogizingÂ him to Hitler. Even the formulator ofÂ Godwin’s Law, which was meant to put a check on theÂ reductio ad Hitlerum,Â said: ‘Go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump.’ After Trump’s election, the comparisonsÂ mounted, for understandable reasons.

“But as we approach the end of Trump’s first year in power, the Hitler analogies seem murky and puzzling, less metaphor than mood….

“There’s little doubt that Trump’s regime is a cause for concern, on multiple grounds,Â as IÂ andÂ many othersÂ have written. But we should not mistake mood for moment. Even one that feels so profoundly alien as ours does now. For that, too, has a history in America.

“During the Vietnam and Nixon years,…”

â€”From my weekly digest forÂ The Guardian, on the uptick in Trump authoritarian talk, wherein I deal with Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, Hitler, and the ACLU.

And the question of Trump’s authoritarianism: Contrary to the media and academic discourse, there’s more precarity to Trump’s regime than there is to American democracy.

By way of an epilogue to myÂ Guardian piece, let me add this.

In the wake of the serial abuses of Richard Nixon’s regime, liberals and Democrats led an effort in Congress to rein in “the imperial presidency.” It wasn’t always effective, and it got undermined by the increasing conservatism of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But this coalitionâ€”extending from old-fashioned New Deal liberals to Watergate Babies to moderate Democrats to a sizable contingent of liberal Republicans (they used to exist)â€”did place constraints (sometimes over Nixon’s veto) on the power of the president to make war, the power of the intelligence agencies to engage in domestic surveillance, and much more.

On Thursday, as Glenn GreenwaldÂ reports, liberals and Democrats were given a similar opportunity to rein in a presidency they’ve deemed the most authoritarian in American history. What’s more, they had nearly 60 Republicans willing to join them. 125 Democrats went for it. But 55 of themâ€”including the top two Democrats in the House, the former head of the DNC, and one of the most visible faces of “The Resistance”â€”did not. Thereby sinking the bill.

I’m genuinely unsure what conclusions to draw from this.

That there’s a lack of seriousness to the discourse of authoritarianism, not just at the highest reaches of the Democratic Party but also in the media, which hasn’t focused nearly the attention on this that it has on tweets and other forms of “norm erosion”?

That the danger of Trump, personally, is not nearly as great as that of Nixon, and somehow or another, in their heart of hearts, people know it?

That there is a failure to connect the dangers of Trump to a deeper analysis of the surveillance state?

By way of contrast, think of Arthur Schlesinger. Schlesinger was a classic Cold War liberal, defending J. Edgar Hoover as a model red-hunter as a counter to the crudeness of the red-baiters in Congress. (That the two forces were working in cahoots never seemed to cross his mind.) But in the wake of Nixon’s abuses of power, Schlesinger did not focus his attentions on the man, settling for Victorian shock at the improprieties of the uncouthâ€”and remember, Schlesinger loathed Nixon with every fiber of his being. Instead, he launched a comprehensive revisionist critique of the imperial presidency, seeing in the Cold War state he once supported the seeds of the presidency he now reviled.

That the discourse of democratic decline is so focused on impropriety and norms that it has completely lost sight of the classic forms of repressive state power and abuse? (This is the flip side of the failure to appreciate, as I argue in myÂ Guardian digest, all the ways in which the minimal institutions of liberal democracyâ€”the press, the courts, even, despite this vote, the Democrats as an opposition partyâ€”are far more resilient today than they were as recently as ten years ago.)

As I said, I don’t know what to conclude.

But, as I’ve also said in other contexts, actions speak louder than words. With this vote, the leadership of the Democratic Party has told us something about the political utility and performativity of their rhetoric, how they see the relationship between the repressive state apparatus and the man who leads that repressive state apparatus: namely, that there isn’t one.

But for context, readÂ The Guardian piece.

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Trump’s power is shakier than American democracy

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