Gonzo constitutionalism on the right, norm erosion on the left

The question I am left with is whether there is any indication that Dems will do anything different this time. Biden’s squirreliness about the prospects of court packing angered all the right people, but then I’m supposed to believe that the talk about a bipartisan cabinet is just for show.

When FDR threatened to pack the court, that was done for a purpose, clear legislative purpose.

These days, these clowns, what would be their purpose? To be able to place their relatives on bigger company boards for a longer period of time?

,,, norm erosion is not how democracies die but how they are born.

Hear, hear!

(Well, to be fair, it can be how they die as well; but the fact that it is how they are born is the one which is in crying need of recognition.)

The question I am left with is whether there is any indication that Dems will do anything different this time

Well, you may not have long to wait to find out. In the meantime, if you’re not confident now, nothing anybody says to you now will give you that confidence.

Just because something is a norm doesn’t mean that it is good. … In the same way that norms may be bad or good, so may violating norms may be bad or good

Hear, hear!

Also, rules, laws, and constitutional provisions may be bad or good, and violating them may be bad or good.

When FDR threatened to pack the court, that was done for a purpose, clear legislative purpose.

These days, these clowns, what would be their purpose?

The 2020 Democratic Party platform can be found here:
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/

Based on my reading of the above (and also your “Tyranny of the Minority” article to which it links) it seems like you’re pretty “down” on counter-majoritarian institutions as a whole. But surely such institutions aren’t always bad; sometimes the majority is a bunch of asshats and thwarting their will is a good thing by any measure.

So how do you avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Institutions, norms, rules, laws, and constitutional provisions should be evaluated the same way you evaluate anything. Think of something about which you have a definite evaluative judgement; go through in your own mind the way you evaluate it; that’s how you evaluate something. You can evaluate in the same manner any proposal to eliminate, or to change without eliminating, or to retain without any change, any institution, norm, rule, law, or constitutional provision.

In the mid nineteenth century, a membership of nine for the Supreme Court of the United States was not an established norm; in the mid twentieth century, it was an established norm, but that fact by itself did not change the way it should be evaluated. The way to evaluate the idea of a fixed membership of nine in the mid twentieth century was the same as the way to evaluate it in the mid nineteenth century, and it’s the same way now. (Evaluations depend on the facts, and the facts now are different from the facts in the mid twentieth century, which were different from the facts in the mid nineteenth century, so the outcomes of the evaluation might be different, but the way to conduct it is the same.)

J-D:

For sure, that’s a sensible response. But it seems to me that Corey’s position is more radical than that. Consider:

“There’s a considerable irony in the fact that this is now the three-legged stool of American conservatism. However dubious their democratic credentials, the Electoral College, the Senate, and the judiciary are impeccably constitutional institutions. In the American mind, the Constitution is associated with all things good and democratic, but a central purpose of the document is to check majoritarian government, giving a small group of elites the power to thwart the will of the democratic majority. That is precisely what the Republicans now are doing.”

That really reads like an indictment of couter-majoritarianism in principle rather than all-things-considered.

I think the right way to do counter-majoritarianism is:
1. Bill of rights – perscribing which rights inalienable rights individuals have and placing limits on their temporary infringement (as necessary in emergency situations).
2. Slow things down. By having some elected or appointed officials having longer, but not unlimited terms.
3. (Perhaps most effective) – encourage multiple parties (no first past the post system) and have independent agencies with controlling boards having representatives from every substantial party so no individual party or group of parties can control these organisations.
4. For some posts use acceptability elections (my preferred approach for instance to elect a figurehead President if it must be done – e.g. Australia) which will encourage consensus candidates and select against polarising candidates. My preferred form is to have three options for each candidate yes, no or indifferent. No votes count as -1. Indifferent as 0. If people don’t and just say yes to one of course the result would be the same as a first past the post, but my guess is that you would have more independent candidates and people would make an effort. Of course there has to be a reasonably high hurdle to jump to get on the ballot.

One more point re your exchange with BruceJ. You state that historically, racism has been “a norm of American politics”. That is true if “norm” is what happens, but less so if by “norm” one means what most people consider good and right, consider to be a norm. I suspect that most Americans not only reject the idea that racism is a norm, but would even agree that not being racist is the norm. Few would argue that racism is good and right and a norm to be followed – even most racists claim to not be racist, because they understand that racism is seen as against the norm.

So the question of what is norm is a bit more complex, and also more malleable, than you make it to be. And for antiracists, it makes a difference whether to argue that antiracism is the norm that should be enforced, or whether to argue that racism is the norm that needs to be abolished. Arguably, the first position is by far the stronger.

I’m also not sure that eliminating the filibuster is obviously “norm erosion”, unless norms can be fairly short lived, in that the fully routine use of the filibuster is itself pretty recently – it becomes super common in 2007-8, growing from there. It only become fairly common in the 90s. It tended to grow in times of modest Democratic control of the Senate, when Republicans could use it to block legislation, but not only then. Eliminating it would move use closer to the historical norm, and even closer to what things were like in the 90s than what they are like now. If we move back to a process that is more like what existed for the majority of the history of the practice, and more like what existed in recent memory, is that “norm erosion”? Maybe, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me.
(This is independent of whether it’s a good idea. As noted, norms themselves can be good or bad. but, it can sometimes be useful to know if a purported norm is actually one or not, and if so, how long it’s been around, and why.)

Re counter-majoritarianism. I don’t know how you GG use the term but I think there is an important distinction to make. It is one thing to check the majority by counter-majoritarian institutions. For example many constitutions can only be amended by a super-majority (just usually less “super” than in the US case, for example two thirds of Parliament in the German case), on the reasoning that the constitution should reflect a broad political consensus and not just the narrow political majority of the day. In other words, there are veto points that limit the power of the majority.

It is another thing to tweak political institutions so that government can effectively be controlled by a minority and push through an agenda that the majority explicitly rejects, as in the case of the Trump presidency, that represents a minority of 46% of voters while a plurality of 48% voted for Clinton. That is not counter-majoritarian, that is minoritarian government, it is simply undemocratic.

Btw: Congratulations to the Bolivian people for showing the world how a democratic election can also be run, properly and peacefully and legitimately despite an ongoing political crisis.

Corey 21, this has been studied for a very long time. The fact is that the Nazis came to power by entirely constitutional means, and consolidated power with a mixture of legalistic/constitutional and extralegal/(some would say)revolutionary means. And authoritarian governments more closer to us (e. g. currently Turkey, Russia, Hungary) similarly make use of both legalistic and extra-legal/norm-breaking means. It is worth pointing out that all these authoritarian rulers are going to great lengths to uphold the appearance of constitutional legitimacy, as did the Nazis. The Nazis were amazingly adept at this game, managing to effectively suspend the constitution with the Enabling Act as you correctly point out while pretending to follow comstitutional procedures. Not only the majority of Germans but most international observers as well considered the Enabling Act legitimate. Of course in hindsight we can deny that legitimacy. But by what objective criteria?

The GOP is going to extraordinary lengths in order to try to prevent people from voting or prevent their votes from being counted, and they often manage to get court approval for these shenanigans, due to the fact that they are in effective control of the courts. If a GOP-controlled Supreme Court (state or federal) rules an obvious breach of democracy or human rights constitutional, I think that is the same mechanism at work as in many authoritarian regimes. Most Americans believe that every citizen should be able to vote and all votes should be counted, and that elections should be fair and that the majority should win (e. g. https://www.vox.com/21526600/poll-trump-biden-youth-turnout-vote-by-mail-democracy). The GOP may try to hide behind the constitution but they are openly attacking democracy in a way that I think is unprecedented, and does constitute norm-breaking.

Regarding violence, while there is no comparison to the 1930s, Trump did encourage violence and several people have been murdered by racists and fascists. Most observers do consider that a breaking of established norms, perhaps you disagree.

I’m not going to flog this particular horse to death, because, at this stage, if you are still seriously arguing that Trump is The New Hitlerâ„¢ then there is no reasoning with you, but one of the innumerable differences between Trump’s Republican Party and Hitler’s Nazi Party (and Mussolini’s Fascist Party etc.) was that the Nazis and Fascists were the ‘New Kids on the Block’. In other words they are outsiders trying to ‘break in’ to the existing structure, usually with the help of massive (non-state) violence. And they were led by young, angry men, who bitterly resented the Establishment and simply demanded that they be allowed to lead (cf the fact that European fascists and Nazis invariably came to power after WW1: the view, common at the time, that this was a war when old men had led young men to their deaths, is highly significant here).

The American Republican Party on the other hand, is going on 200 years old, and is led by complacent, tired, wealthy old men. They are the Establishment.

The only way round this problem for those insisting that the United States, one of the oldest and most stable of all the Western Republics/democracies, now stands quivering on the verge of tyranny/civil war, is to claim that Trump is a radical, fundamentally different force in Western politics, that Trumpism has practically no antecedents (apart from Hitler etc.) and that Trump has radically and fundamentally transformed the Republican Party into something radically new.

Which is….obviously not true. There is little that Trump has done that Romney would not have done, most of Romney’s supporters are also Trump’s, and the amount of violence that Trump has unleashed (and the vast majority of this is state violence not non-state…a huge difference between Trump and the Nazis) pales into insignificance when compared to what Bush Sr. did in similar circumstances, let alone LBJ/Nixon.

Far from terrifying the Establishment, Trump is openly ridiculed by it on late night TV (and, increasingly, daytime TV), and his inchoate and half-assed ‘revolt’ against Republican shibboleths has long since petered out: Trump now governs as a standard Republican, no ifs, ands or buts. You just need to ask yourself: what policy pronouncements has Trump made recently that Romney would not have made? The answer is that there are none. Romney might have managed Covid a bit better. That’s it.

In any case, as has been tirelessly pointed out, there is simply no equivalent in the US Constitution for a ‘total’ Enabling Act of the kind that Hitler used. As Corey also points out, to describe the Nazi coup as ‘constitutional’ is a very big stretch: Hitler had murdered no small number of his political opponents by the time of a ‘vote’ which met no one’s idea of ‘free and fair’.

tl;dr The Republicans do not and will never rebel against the Establishment. They arethe Establishment. Those who deny this are essentially arguing that the Republicans will overthrow themselves.

Murc at 23:

I hope you’re right; I’m saddened that I’m not convinced the Democratic Party will prove this to be true:

“Political coalitions will tolerate PARTS of their agenda being stymied; but what they won’t tolerate is achieving durable, popular majorities and being told that the central premises of their coalition will not be allowed to be implemented. That they won’t be allowed to govern.”

Matt @ 18: Filibuster goes back a good deal further, which I suspect you already know, but some of your readers may not. It was an important tool of the Southern Democrats fighting civil rights legislation, and part of the reasons LBJ’s various successful efforts (as Senator and as President) to enact such legislation are (or were) remarkable. But I suppose the salient examples change with age. I am not sure how the regularity of use of a norm works in assessing it, although plainly it must matter.

Today’s GOP stool consists of the the Plutocrats, the Theocrats, and the Yahoos. Bush the Lesser won by being a Chimera of the three; Trump is a Plutocrat who bought off the Theocrats and made himself King of the Yahoos.

There is a lot of bandying about on this thread of the phrase white supremacy without provision of a definition.

A simple search reveals that the word ‘white’ appeared in this discussion a total of three times before this comment. The first of these instances was in the phrase ‘the White House’, the second in the phrase ‘the white patriarchal supremacists’, and the third in the phrase ‘white supremacy’.

Total number of uses of the phrase ‘white supremacy’, or related phrases: two.
Total number of times the phrase was bandied: nil.

This loose and creative use of language to advanced preferred causes independent of facts and reason is symptomatic of the current post modernist social justice movement.

Using a term without first explicitly providing a definition is not usually loose, not usually creative, not usually independent of facts, and not usually independent of reason. In most uses of language, loose and strict, creative and uncreative, independent of facts and founded on fact, independent of reason and founded on reason, terms are used without first being explicitly defined. There are sometimes good reasons to provide explicit definitions of terms before using them, but such cases are exceptional, not the rule.

Sometimes there are problems with the loose use of language, but sometimes the loose use of language is exactly what’s called for. Sometimes there are problems with the creative use of language, but sometimes the creative use of language is exactly what’s called for. The fact that language has been used loosely is not enough by itself to show that somebody has done something wrong; the fact that language has been used creatively is not enough by itself to show that somebody has done something wrong.

There is nothing wrong with advancing the causes of justice. Everybody should advance the causes of justice, both by their use of language and in other ways.

It represents a significant erosion of the norms of discourse.

It is not a norm of discourse that terms should be explicitly defined before being used; it is not a norm of discourse that language should not be used loosely; it is not a norm of discourse that language should not be used creatively; and if these were norms then they would be bad norms and it would be a good thing if they were eroded.

@33 ‘Having complained about the loose use of “white nationalism”….

Actually s/he complained about the ‘misuse’ of the phrase ‘white supremacy’, a phrase which can be very easily defined by the apparently bizarre and abnormal activity of ‘looking up the phrase in a dictionary’. It literally has no ‘hidden’ or ‘non-standard’ definition.

As J-D points out this phrase was used literally once in this entire thread, by Corey, here: ‘The premise of your first claim is that white supremacy is somehow not a norm of American politics.’

And this is of course non-arguably true. I don’t want to get into the 1619 debate here, but one of the key points that that thing showed was that, to at least some of the colonists, the key point of their ‘revolution’ was to safeguard slavery, and the Northern states were prepared to go along with this (or at least turn a blind eye do it). And then after the failure of reconstruction you had a century of apartheid (as its never called) in the South, with the North ‘going along with this’, when it was actively encouraging it.

It was only in the late ’60s that Jim Crow was (slowly) dismantled.

So for the vast majority of its history, the United States’ existence was predicated on the continuance of white rule, white supremacy, apartheid. And essentially all politicians of all political ‘stripes’ went along with this, when they weren’t actively defending it.

So the ‘norm’ of American domestic politics is South African style apartheid, and progress was only made when people stopped conforming to this ‘norm’.

It’s deeply depressing when people express the hope that after Biden’s (presumed) win, that ‘things will go back to normal’.

American normality isn’t normal.

‘Chrisare throws in a reference to the “post modernist social justice movement”’

Apart from the fact that this is arguably a contradiction in terms, no term in contemporary discourse has been misused more than ‘postmodernist’ (not even ‘fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ or ‘tyrant’). ‘Postmodernist’ really does just mean ‘something I don’t like’ with no additional meaning, when used by conservatives.

Despite the likelihood of being censored again, I have to say: Hidari is very wrong. The problem with citing 1619 is that no one can avoid the problem there is no evidence anyone engaged in the revolution to save slavery. If there was any truth to this claim, the revolution would have broken out in the South but it didn’t. Loyalism was strongest in the South, the opposite of what this claim entails. Further, the support for British imperialism is deeply reactionary which betrays the bad faith argumentation here, a fake left critique for fundamentally reactionary politics today.

It is of course highly defensible to argue the framing of the federal constitution to replace the articles of confederation is to the American revolution as the Directory (or better yet Sieyes’ constitution?) is to the French revolution. But that would involve acknowledging both that there was a revolution and that illusions about what bourgeois democracy is and what it can do simply ideology, not honest history.

Bourgeois democracy has always favored the “people” when the rich needed them as soldiers. The slave owners of the South, like Jefferson, very much wanted the help of the average white man to defend the system. This was true in ancient republics too. A bourgeois democracy is about us versus them, which means conquering land and redistributing it to US citizens is bourgeois democracy functioning as bourgeois democracy. Peddling myths about how there was a democratic revolution then is peddling myths about how democratic now just needs a little tinkering.

Also, since the documentary Thirteen has explained that Reconstruction was itself the reimposition of slavery under cover of law* there is no sense to caveats about the “defeat” of Reconstruction.

*I believe this is rather right wing, that the prison labor system was the first attempt at death camps, emerged to kill off blacks as a mode of terror in the long counterrevolutionary guerrilla warfare against Reconstruction. Identifying it with slavery to claim genetic white supremacy (as explained, it’s in the DNA,) was always the goal and the Civil War was basically more abuse of black people by racist whites like Lincoln. Even John Brown is to be hated, as a vile white savior. (Not just The Good Lord Bird but Harriet and Emperor have very little use for Brown.)

Actually s/he complained about the ‘misuse’ of the phrase ‘white supremacy’, a phrase which can be very easily defined by the apparently bizarre and abnormal activity of ‘looking up the phrase in a dictionary’. It literally has no ‘hidden’ or ‘non-standard’ definition.

The motte definition of “white supremacy” is Mirriam-Webster: “the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races”.

The observation that white supremacy, under this definition, has been influential in American history, is not controversial. (Controversial: claiming that the American revolution was fought to protect slavery, as claimed by the 1619 Project, before the, ah, clarification was issued.)

A bailey, if not “hidden”, definition of “white supremacy” from the Challenging White Supremacy (CWS) workshop organizers, comments that White Supremacy Culture includes “Perfectionism….Sense of Urgency….Quantity Over Quality….Worship of the Written Word…”

This outlook is influential; it, or something much like it, is part of the training of all New York school employees, as George Packer notes:

De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

Or as SF School Board member A. M. Collins
says,

“merit” is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing

Or from the NYT:

The meaning of the words has expanded, too. Ten years ago, white supremacy frequently described the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, the neo-Nazi politician from Louisiana. Now it cuts a swath through the culture, describing an array of subjects: the mortgage lending policies of banks; a university’s reliance on SAT scores as a factor for admissions decisions; programs that teach poor people better nutrition; and a police department’s enforcement policies.

So Mirriam-Webster is behind the times on the evolving and ever-expanding meaning of “white supremacy”; an update is anticipated.

To echo Murc:

I think, I hope, that if Biden is elected with a majority in the Senate, he will hold his fire until the Court commits an atrocity, which is unfortunately not an unlikely event. Should that occur, appropriate steps could be taken with general approval.

Actually s/he complained about the ‘misuse’ of the phrase ‘white supremacy’, a phrase which can be very easily defined by the apparently bizarre and abnormal activity of ‘looking up the phrase in a dictionary’. It literally has no ‘hidden’ or ‘non-standard’ definition.

The motte definition of “white supremacy” is Mirriam-Webster: “the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races”.

The observation that white supremacy, under this definition, has been influential in American history, is not controversial.

Isn’t that definition adequate to the way the term was used in this discussion by BruceJ and Corey Robin? and doesn’t it follow that the objection by chrisare to the way the term was used in this discussion was meritless?

Corey Robin has in the OP set the frame of this debate in the wording “neither fascism nor authoritarianism” .

Vox’ Dylan Matthews asked 8 “fascism experts” to give their view on Trump (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fascism-signs-donald-trump). While they all agreed that Trump does not fit the definition of a fascist, several expressed great concern over Trump’s obvious authoritarian tendency:

Robert Paxton, Columbia University, a respected historian of fascism

I stand by what I have already written about Trump and fascism, but there is one change: I am struck now with Trump’s growing willingness to employ physical violence.
Before, Trump was already willing to tolerate some roughing-up of hecklers at rallies, and his encouragement of the “lock her up!” refrain was clearly transgressive (in America we are supposed to wait for the decision of a jury of citizens before locking someone up). But now, after Charlottesville, we have the Proud Boys and the aggression against the governor of Michigan. So Trump gets closer to having his own SA [the Nazi paramilitary group], a sobering thought as the election approaches.

Matthew Feldman, director, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right

Although my position has not changed on Trump — less fascist than kleptocrat, more egoist than radical-right ideologue — that does little to mitigate the danger.
Four months ago, I warned that Trump was descending into naked authoritarianism. Low-information commentators seek to reassure rather than dig deeply, telling readers to look on the bright side. That the US is an exceptional country. It is not.
Democratic regression and political polarization are not unique to the US. Having more guns than people is. So are militias, usually formed of lower- and middle-class white Americans harboring anti-government sentiments. The threat posed by these anti-government extremists — though not necessarily terrorists — was thrown into relief when at least 13 members of Michigan’s Wolverine Militia were arrested for planning to kidnap, “judge,” and potentially execute for treason the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
The term “fascist” regarding Trump continues to mislead rather than inform. But that cannot inure us to what Alexander Reid Ross has called the “fascist creep.”

Roger Griffin, emeritus professor in modern history, Oxford Brookes University

By not calling him fascist, and concentrating on the way he perverts democracy, we see Trump in a different context. We don’t see him as Hitler or Mussolini. We see him in a different rogues’ gallery. And the rogues’ gallery is made up of a whole load of dictators throughout history, including Putin and Erdogan and Orbán and Assad today, who have abused constitutionalism and democracy to rationalize their abuse of power and their crimes against humanity.

Sheri Berman, professor of political science, Barnard College, Columbia University

Trump bears similarities to other strongmen, a category in which fascists like Hitler and Mussolini belong, as do Orbán, Erdogan, Putin, and their ilk. That Trump maintains his support by engaging in explicitly divisive appeals designed to pit groups against each other — particularly but not exclusively ethnic groups — also, of course, bears some similarity to what fascists did.
And, of course, Trump is undermining various norms and institutions of democracy. But this doesn’t make him a fascist, which means much more than these things.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of Italian and history, New York University

Trump certainly uses fascist tactics, from holding rallies to refresh the leader-follower bond to creating a “tribe” (MAGA hats, rituals like chanting “lock them up,” etc.) to unleashing a volume of propaganda without precedent by an American president. Yet the political cultures that form him and his close supporters are not fascist, but reflect a broader authoritarian history. (…)
Trump’s role models include leaders like Erdogan and Putin who are not exactly fascists, but something more: authoritarians, or strongman rulers who also use virility as a tool of domination.
I also favor authoritarian over fascist as a description for Trump because the former captures how autocratic power works today. In the 21st century, fascist takeovers have been replaced by rulers who come to power through elections and then, over time, extinguish freedom. [This account is consistent with my argument at 15 and 22]

Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy, Yale University

When I think about fascism, I think about it as applied to different things. There’s a fascist regime. We do not have a fascist regime. Then there’s the question of, “Is Trumpism a fascist social and political movement?” I think you could legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement — which is not to say that Trump is a fascist. Trumpism involves a cult of the leader, and Trump embodies that. I certainly think he’s using fascist political tactics. I think there’s no question about that. He is calling for national restoration in the face of humiliations brought on by immigrants, liberals, liberal minorities, and leftists. He’s certainly playing the fascist playbook.
My definition is of fascist politics, not of a fascist regime. I think most of the other [fascism scholars] are just talking about something else. They’re talking about regimes. Toni Morrison in 1995 said the United States has long favored fascist solutions to national problems. Toni Morrison is talking about “fascist solutions.” She’s not talking about fascist regimes. She’s saying the United States has long favored fascist solutions in a democratic state, which I completely agree with: targeting minorities, mass incarceration, colonialism, seizing indigenous land. All these things are things that impacted Hitler. My work is based in the United States — it’s based in the movements that affected European fascism: the KKK, Jim Crow, the anti-miscegenation law, slavery, Indigenous genocide, the 1924 Immigration Act and similar US immigration laws that Hitler lauds in Mein Kampf.
If you’re only worried about fascist regimes, you’re never going to catch fascist social and political movements. The goal is to catch fascist social and political movements, and fascist ideology, before it becomes a regime.

One can question whether or not fascism is a useful frame of reference for present day political tendencies; I think it is, but certainly not in the sense that history just repeats itself. Whoever argues that Trump isn’t a fascist because he doesn’t wear the same moustache as Hitler can’t be taken seriously. One has to take the political and ideological similarities as well as the differences seriously. In an earlier thread (https://crookedtimber.org/2020/07/04/the-economic-consequences-of-the-pandemic/#comment-802462), I pointed out the following “ideological characteristics common to most fascist movements both in the 20th and 21st century, including Trumpism”:

– “Make the nation great again”
– The enemy within threatens the nation and we will fight them.
The enemy within are racial, religious and sexual minorities, socialists, unions, the social justice movement, liberal cosmopolitans.
– Critical journalists/intellectuals are the enemy of the people.
– The nation is victim of an internationalist/globalist conspiracy, led by a liberal elite.
– A propaganda strategy consisting of large scale gaslighting, subverting public discourse by constant lying, creating an alternative reality in the minds of supporters and immunizing them against empirical reality and critical interrogation.

Stanley’s distinction between ideology, movement, and regime is important. One should also, I would argue, distinguish between what Trump would like to do (e. g. putting opposition politicians in prison) and what he has the effective power to do. Trump is unpopular and he lacks a parliamentary majority. His agency is limited, in large part because US civil society has responded to his rise with protests, activism, mobilization. This is reassuring but no reason to minimize the threat he clearly, I think, poses to democracy, let alone to downplay the damage he has already done (https://crookedtimber.org/2020/06/29/trumpism-after-trump/#comment-802161).

and I really didn’t want to comment on this… this… ”issue” – as I know that you guys don’t like me and that you probably will not post this comment BUT when Hidary wrote:
It’s deeply depressing when people express the hope that after Biden’s (presumed) win, that ‘things will go back to normal’.

I was told by my mom that I have to remind you guys that I never had a better time in my life than in the eight years Obama was President –
BE-cause in these eight years –
somehow? –
if I showed up with my ”mixed-race” boyfriend – my fellow Americans said:
”Ah – somebody like Obama – what a nice guy”!

AND then – when my fellow American elected this very Nasty and Racist Science Denier – my fellow Americans –
sometimes –
were very nasty to ME and my ”mixed-race” boyfriend. (and sometimes even in CA)

AND that’s why I really, REALLY want that ‘things will go back to normal’ -(aka ”the Times of Obama) – meaning that ”American normality is normal” –
AGAIN!

And do – some of you guys – understand that?
Or even –
Hidari?