Friday, December 13, 2024

Today's News: "So how does one prepare for a dictatorship?"

Is everyone just whistling past the American graveyard right now?
I'm seeing a lot of coverage of Trump's incompetent, unqualified toady nominees for this or that or the other -- "The Trump cabinet: A merger of Fox & friends and The Sopranos". And I'm seeing coverage about how Trump expects everyone to "bend the knee" and I'm seeing comment on Trump's crazy ideas for ridiculous tarrifs and mass deportations and closing the border and sending troops into American cities and pardoning all the J6 people and rewriting the 2020 election and jailing anybody who resists or ever did resist Trump.
But shouldn't our media be putting this all together?  
Yes, each awful nomination gets some push-back from American media, and the blizzard of "executive orders" released on Jan 21 will be poured over individually and likely challenged in court. But its the whole picture that is really terrifying. 
This isn't going to be politics as usual. 
When you put it all together, Trump's administration is going to be a dictatorship. 
I have called it it "Trump 2: The Revenge Tour" and that is exactly what it will be.  
And dictators never leave voluntarily. 
And they don't allow opposition parties to win elections either. 

Here's what is happening now:
Some already realize what Resistance will mean.
Some still don't get it.
And who can stop this now? Nobody, apparently. Though some mayors and governors may try.
Even the people who voted for Trump really have no idea what they voted for. 
When they looked at Trump, they saw The Golden Calf, reflecting what they wanted for themselves, rather than the reality of Trump as a dictator. 
They may still think he won't do what he already said he would do -- their Buyer's Remorse will be epic, but it will mean nothing to Trump.
And Trump will also want to revise history, to claim he won in 2020, Biden is a crook, America was broken, vaccines are dangerous, Ukraine is corrupt, etc. etc.
Dean Obeidallah / The Dean's Report
History is screaming at us to take Trump literally
The time to prepare is now!
...Trump—like Hitler did—will attempt to enact as policy every single thing he has vowed to do during the campaign. And while Trump in his first term was dangerous, this version of Trump is even more dangerous. He is angry and bitter. Trump believes he was wronged by Democrats who sought to hold him accountable for his crimes. He and his followers even believe Democrats were behind the attempts on his life. And in his second term, Trump knowns--courtesy of the corrupt GOP Supreme Court—that he has broad immunity for “official actions.”
There is also something else. As you can see from Trump’s nominations for his cabinet, he doesn’t care about competence, he solely cares about loyalty. For example, he is fighting hard for Pete Hegseth to be Secret
ary of Defense despite the fact he is objectively speaking unqualified, was credibly accused of rape, was drunk at past jobs and is a vile anti-Muslim bigot.
What matters to Trump is that he needs a blindly loyal Hegseth to order the military to do whatever Trump wants to do. As a reminder during the campaign, Trump said the military should be used to silence “the enemy within”-- which are simply his critics. Trump will 100% do this. Trump may even use the military to remain in power after his term ends.
Trump has repeatedly vowed to shutdown media outlets that he views as being unfair to him—from CBS to NBC News. He will attempt to do that as well as shutdown comedy shows that mock him--as he explored doing to “Saturday Night Live” in his first term.
And the list goes on from prosecuting Barack Obama, New York AG Tish James, Adam Schiff and others to mass deportations which he vowed would be “bloody.” Everything Trump promised to do, he will try.
All of this is why we must be prepared for what is coming. As Snyder wrote, “be calm when the unthinkable arrives” because fascists hope fear will paralyzes us. The key to doing that is by building strong alliances now before Trump enters office. And from there it will take courage. Snyder’s final line of his book sums that up so well: “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”
We hope it doesn’t come to that. But history tells us that alone we will be crushed. Together, we have a fighting chance to win.
Well, maybe...God, I hope so.
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4 comments:

Cap said...

How does one prepare for a dictatorship? Easy. One cuts taxes on the rich, allows corporate mergers to create monopolies and near-monopolies, and rewards massive bank failures by printing money to bail them out. This allows unprecedented accumulation of wealth among a few people, which gives them extraordinary power.

In short, one does what parties of all political stripes have been doing since Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney introduced neo-liberalism. None of this should be a surprise, it was predicted at the time. The main difference between the parties is how hard they're willing to step on the gas.

6:34 am
Cathie from Canada said...

Cap, we've both lived through all of these regimes, I think . But this time, I do believe it is different - even Reagan had a commitment to democracy, as did the people around him; Trump does not and this time he is choosing henchmen for their loyalty only, not for their ability. They will all take oaths "to the Constitution" but they will do anything necessary to be rich and safe and there will be nothing to stop them. I fully expect American federal elections will be mostly cancelled in 2026 and 2028 while Democrats will be falling out of buildings, and I just hope Canada can survive somehow.

11:30 am
Cap said...

Sorry, Cathie, but Reagan's commitment to democracy amounted to little more than Trump's. As you'll recall, Reagan's administration violated the explicit orders of Congress barring aid to the right-wing Nicaraguan death squads known as the Contras. Instead of following the democratic will of the people expressed through their elected representatives, Reagan's minions sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to fund the Contras. Two fall-guys, loyal henchmen North and Poindexter, were jailed. Reagan's dementia was too far gone by the time Congress got around to prosecutions, so he came away scot-free. But not following congressional orders was what got Trump his first impeachment.

As profs Gilens and Page wrote in their 2014 study that found the US to be an oligarchy, "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose... We believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened." The US, in other words, is similar to Russia, Hungary and many other countries with elections but little commitment to democracy.

To be sure, I think Trump will make things worse, but, as his first term showed, he's too stupid, senile and unfocused to run a dictatorship. If he really wanted to do it though, jailing Musk or Bezos would be the way to get the other oligarchs to fall in line, just as Putin did to Gusinsky and Khodorkovsky and Xi did to aluminum baron Zhang Zhixiong.

3:23 pm
Anonymous said...

The Trump era is doomed to failure with in squabbling and incompetence.
I give it 6 months before the rot starts and the US government becomes incapable of daily decisions!
Then the possibility arises of.....

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/14/south-korean-parliament-votes-to-impeach-president

TB

7:03 pm

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