Dictator perpetuo

 First. Sorry for the long absence. No excuses. I'm just a bad blogger.

Second, I'll try and do better.

Third...this is not really a new post. 

It's just the latest in a long string of posts that began back in 2007 - Jesus wept, that's sixteen years ago! - with this discussion of how I kept seeing echoes of the Late Roman Republic in the then-U.S.:

"A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company."

 My prediction for the coming years was...dark:

"Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.

And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark."

From my vantage point here, though, I don't think I was fucking dark enough.

Because I didn't anticipate this magoo:

That a massive plurality of the American public would vote for, and a series of relict institutions - that the Framers crafted to continue to ensure the political mastery of fellow rich guys long after their deaths - would empower, a sleazy nitwit real estate grifter?

Yeah, well...who the fuck would have wanted to anticipate that?

And yet. 

Here we are.

And here's where we're going:

Fucking pay attention to this. 

It's important, and it's not a coincidence or a just a casual aside or a mistake or some random Elmo outgassing. The pissy little Afrikaaner rich kid isn't just bloviating. He's a reliable peek into the wingnut MAGAt id fever-swamps, and this is 1) what they want, and 2) what they think they have with Tubby.

They see him hanging their enemies - and that's me, by the way - from his long red tie the way Sulla's troops hacked and hung their way through Sulla's enemies.

So it's a good moment to talk about ol' Sulla.

Bret Devereaux did a terrific look at the old bastard. I direct you to him; it's all worth the read but here's his nut graf:

"The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter."

And here's mine: Trump has already become our Sulla because he's gotten away with jumping the guardrails. 

The guardrails are already smashed. The attempt to seize power has moved one entire party to become Sulla-ites; they would choose a Caesar rather than accept defeat, so the arrival of Caesar is now only a matter of time and individual, because the GOP is willing to take power through illiberal means rather than accept any sort of United States that doesn't conform to their already-reactionary vision.

We the "liberals", the not-Sulla plurality, are still trying to pretend that these fucking MAGAts are "our fellow citizens" who just have some teensy policy differences with the rest of us, rather than a blood-hungry mob who will kill to seize power rather than consider the horrifying possibility of the existence of a ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

The only hope of avoiding that would have been that in January 2021 the entire US public and the political leaders of all varieties to have 1) turned decisively and violently - in legal terms - against Tubby's attempt at Doing a Sulla, and 2) after impeaching him prosecuting him, convicting him, and jailing him and everyone who helped him try and overturn a popular election loss.

It would have been the equivalent of the Senate and the People of Rome rising against Sulla in 83 BCE when he forced the Senate to appoint him dictator in defiance of the mos maiorum and the traditional forms of dictatorship that had worked for Rome during the Early and Middle Republic.

Would that have worked for the Romans?

Given that Sulla's troopers were out in the Field of Mars butchering thousands of people as he gently suggested that the Roman governance might be well entrusted to him?

Probably not.

But it'd have at least driven home what a chancy throw trying to Do a Sulla was.

Now?

The only way past this mess is for the Republicans to do the same; not just refuse to support but to massively, violently reject Sulla Trump and all and everything he stands for. 

Hmmmm. Let's see. How's that going, again?

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

The clouds return

 

 Today the United States Senate voted that Donald Trump did not do what he very visibly and obviously did between late October 2020 and early January 2021; betray his oath of office as President to faithfully execute the law and support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

To me this has the feel of the point in watching one of those historical dramatizations where the characters have come to a decision you know is going to end badly. The conspirators have chosen to go ahead with the plot that you know will end in betrayals, prosecutions, hangings, and beheadings. The commander has made a decision you know is based on bad intelligence, or is because of his hubris or pure stubbornness, that will result in the deaths of thousands of his own troops.

It was years ago that I wrote a whole series of posts comparing my nation today with the Rome of classical times, noting that we seem insistent on repeating many of the same foolish mistakes the Romans of that period did, and with much the same likely result - the end of functional democracy and the establishment of permanent minority rule.

I've been pretty merciless in castigating American "conservatives" (who are, by the way, in no sense "conservative" but are radical reactionaries) for being the driving force behind this and, as this vote shows, they still are.

(What this also proves, in a way I didn't begin to anticipate before the past year, is the extent to which the GOP has become the American Party of KimIlSungism-KimJongIlism. Turns out that we aren't even dignified with the bad examples of Rome. We're fucking North Korea with Pizza Huts and Chevy dealerships.)

So.

Now what?

When I talked about how impossible it is to "talk" to Republicans now it turns out that it's not because they're some sort of rigid ideologues. As far as I can tell the current Republican orthodoxy consists of a bizarre farrago of culture-war nonsense ("cancel culture", "wokeism", anti-"nanny state"-ism, and "personal freedom" that seems to largely consist of violent rejection of common sense like reducing stupid firearm-related behavior and public health precautions during a pandemic) with pure delusion about finance (stuff like "trickle-down economics", the Laffer Curve, taxation-as-theft...that sort of thing).

But the real break-point appears to be that the GOP is now the Party of Kim Trump Q, a personality cult, overrun with bizarre conspiracies and paranoia, devoted to owning the libs even if the cost is its own misery and impoverishment.

There's no hope there.

But what about the rest of the US political world?

The Democratic Party - the only remaining party that the US has allowed itself - has been a willing accomplice in our neo-Roman imperial foolishness. It has either acquiesced, or encouraged, the increasing inequity of wealth in our return to the Gilded Age.

It has been willing to go along with the hollowing out of the American economy, shoving millions of people into precarious "gig" jobs and helped "business" to close out by downsizing, automating, and offshoring the sort of living-wage/good-benefit/stable-pension jobs that helped create the white middle class after WW2. 

It has blinked at, or encouraged, foolish imperial wars.

It has been unwilling or unable to challenge our headlong plunge towards the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum.

But - given today's proof that the entire GOP has gone full juche and the utter desolation of actual sane political ideas in the American Right - if there IS to be a hope of avoiding a collapse-of-the-Republic-fate it will have to come from what passes for the "Left" in US politics.

Can it? And, if so, how?

So that's what we're going to talk about after this.

But you'll have to give me a moment or two. Right now I'm too depressed at what today says about the State of our Union.

End of Time in Service in the Time of Trump

Today should be the last Veteran's Day of the Trump Era. We should be getting our exit physicals, making the rounds of the VA shop and the other ETS stations that GIs have to cycle through before hitting the street as civilians again. 

We should be the shortest of short-timers.

Instead we stand, appalled, as the gang of grifters, con-men, criminals, and wannabe fascist assholes try to steal an election like the caudillo's goons in some sort of third-rate banana republic and barely a voice is raised to tell them to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and act like citizens in a democratic republic that is also the global super power.

Four years ago on this day I was furious:

"A large minority of my fellow citizens has chosen to put over me as my nation's Chief Executive a man that I would have done my best to chapter out of my Army had he come through my training unit when I was under the hat; a compulsive liar, a man who shirked his own service then boasted that prancing around in some sort of silly military school uniform was "just like serving", a bully and a con man and a thief.

This man, and his party, will over the next four years attempt to destroy the America I grew up in. They will attempt to reverse, repeal, and destroy the liberal and progressive and egalitarian and regulatory acts that have changed the face of this nation since 1929."

If anything that man and that party have turned out to be worse than I ever imagined. They were all that AND the First World equivalent of a gang of thieves running a small-time con on some sorry dirt-road Third World shitshow of a country, and I don't know if that's more embarrassing or humiliating, or both.

But I know this; I didn't plan to spend twenty-two years as part of the Guardia Nacional for some tinpot banana dictator.

Nope.

I knew that war was a racket. I knew I was just another imperial legionary, pushing the empire's writ on those people in those places the empire wanted things.

The one thing I never pictured myself as, though, is some sort of shithole-country uniformed thug, like the gangsters in the Fuerza de Defensa I knew in Panama back in the Eighties.

And yet, here we are.

I hope everyone else who wore the tree suit or the crackerjacks or the flightsuit is as furious about this as I am. Like I said; I don't give a shit how much you love your God or your guns or your tax cuts. Some things transcend our petty preferences, and the Great Promise of the United States - equal justice under law - is one and the most important one of them.

What's going on now in this country makes a mockery and a hollow sham of every citizen's vote and every serviceperson's oath. It is a slap in the face of our promise to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

If stealing - or trying to steal - an election is not being an enemy of the Constitution, I don't know what is.

So spare me today the homilies about veterans and service, and instead go spend some time shouting at Republicans to STFU and be actual small-r republicans instead of fucking banana republicans.

Because there is nothing I can say or do today suits the times better than what I wrote the year after my 2016 rant. 

The current state of the nation makes a joke of the idea that it is currently capable of "honoring" anything or anyone. The best we can do is stand ashamed of what we are doing to the work of those who have served in - and especially out - of uniform to preserve the promise of this nation, so I will conclude now as I did then:

"For those of you who have come here seeking grave words hymning this day, weighted with honor and glory of the service I and mine have done and do, I have none."

 

How long can this go on?

George Packer has a thoughtful essay up at the Atlantic that discusses how fraught the political problems of the United States have become, and why.

Bottom line; "movement conservatism" in the US has become completely zero-sum and utterly irredentist. It, and the roughly 35-40% of the American public who support it, no longer see opposition to their beliefs as legitimate or transactional, but as dangerously illegal treason. If you look for a link between the sort of rhetoric (and policy) issuing from the Oval Office, the legislative agenda of the current majority in Congress, and the actions of the GOP in the various states they control you can see the connection; to modern movement conservatism there IS no legitimacy outside the "conservative" agenda. Opposition isn't simply politics, but betrayal of everything that the nation stands for - conservatism. That Trump emerged from this fever-swamp is no surprise, and neither is the reality that despite being obviously the least competent Chief Executive since Buchanan his popularity with the GOP voters is stratospheric.

It's no surprise that the base is in love. The base is consumed with...

"paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes."

The obvious problem here is that there is as currently constituted no rational alternative for someone who is hesitant to embrace the changes and challenges of a multipolar, multiethnic nation in an increasingly interconnected world. If people who see themselves as "traditionalists" don't see a way to organize around a reasonable opposition to things they fear they will be forced into choosing the unreasonable and irrational.

There will always be racists and lunatics who will embrace Naziism or bizarre nonsense like QAnon. The tragedy of US politics is that there is now nothing else for the non-racist and non-looney conservatives. It's Trump...or nothing. The reality of first-past-the-post voting is that if the Rockefeller Republicans were to organize and run someone against Trump in 2020 all it would do is hand electoral victory to the Democratic candidate.

This is not supportable. Not in the long term, and not really in the middle- or short-term, either. No nation can endure with almost two-fifths of its population 1) enmeshed in what amounts to a lunatic cult, and 2) unwilling to cede power and willing to accept any machinations to hold it.

Popular democracies and republics depend on the willingness of all parties to accept the legitimacy of their opponents. When in a republican system you have this:

"After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules (in order to emasculate the incoming Democratic executive): “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

you will very soon no longer have a republic.

The U.S. has already, in many ways, become an open oligarchy. The U.S. is, in many ways, not the democratic republic it pretends to be. The U.S. has and is already acting in many ways like any other Great Power, disregarding the good of its own populace and the welfare of those in the places outside its borders it acts, in order to maintain and expand that power.

But what if even the pretense of republican ideals breaks down? What if a plurality of the American public decides that power is better than comity, and that victory for their faction is preferable to the will of the majority? What if that faction prefers to become an open autocracy rather than compromise with their domestic enemies?

What will happen then?

Where have you gone, Mark Hatfield..?

Back in October I wrote a post about the Trump "wing" of the Republican Party. In it I said:

"I think that regardless of whether the media comes down hard on the Trumpeters after November that this hard core of Jacksonians will not dissipate, and the United States will be, in effect, dealing with the same situation that broke the nation in 1860; there will be a large, indigestible, irredentist minority that will never, NEVER accept the legitimacy of their opponents. No non-Jacksonian/Trumpeter will be allowed to govern. Obstruction will be the order, not just of the day but of the week, the year, the decade.

Eventually the American public will look for a “savior”, and a Man on Horseback seems all the more likely to be that "savior"."

At that time I, like many other Americans, simply assumed that, regardless of party affiliation, Trump himself was such an appallingly loathsome example of a human being that not even the loopiest wingnuts would be able to bring themselves to vote for him, and I was worried about more, and worse, of what we'd seen during the Clinton and Obama years.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Boy fuckin' howdy was that joke on us...

Since then the administration of His Fraudulency has shown us everything we knew about the Tangerine Toddler: his viciousness, his stupidity (or, at least, his lack of knowledge and information, which is almost as troubling), his insensate rage, his childlike impulsiveness, and his overall love of brutal authoritarianism. His cabinet and his inner circle is full of horrors, ranging from Christopathic Amway grifters to greedy robosigning banksters to open neo-Nazis. He is, so far as anyone can tell, either playing patty-cake or simply in the pocket of the Kremlin.

His initial flood of executive orders range from simple nonsense to brutal stupidity, and his frantic tweetstorms paint a picture of a man who would be unprepared to run a child's birthday party, let alone the most heavily-armed industrial republic on Earth.

And then there's this:

That's His Fraudulency's "approval rating" on February 6, 2017.

Yes, overall it looks ugly, but look at the Republican column.

Ninety percent positive.

Ninety percent.

Think about that for a moment.

So I posted a discussion of the Flynn Fiasco at my geopolitical blog MilPub and got immediate pushback on my assertion that the single biggest political crisis we're facing is a monolithic GOP all-in on Trumpism, which is to say fearmongering about Mexican rapists and Iraqi jahadis, whackadoodle conspiracy theories, and a mad intent to create a New Gilded Age.

Not so! the respondent cried. Both Side Do It! The Corrupt Duopoly! Two Sides of the Same Coin! Imperial presidency! Drone war! Washington Rules!

My rebuttal was while, yes, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party was part of the problem, the Our Revolution wing (i.e. the Sanders movement) was proof that the Left has a faction fighting against the sort of imperial presidency and money power that brought us Iraq and Citizens United and the surveillance state.

And DeVos, and Flynn, and moronic Muslim bans, and deporting Mexican teenagers.

But, I asked, where are our allies on the Right?

Where are the genuinely "principled conservatives" who also hate crony capitalism, imperial cabinet wars, unrestricted plutocracy, and the sort of idiocy we're seeing now from the Trumpeters?

Right now those of us on the outside are looking at these Trumpeters and seeing gibbering, hateful, ignorant loons. Neo-nazis and conspiracy theorists that make the Bushies look like MENSA. But when you look at the arc of the GOP this is the culmination of the project that starts with Goldwater; the Bircherization of the GOP. Proudly resistant to any ideas outside their dogma, dismissive of disagreements, rigid, angry, and vituperative...the perfect distillation of hate radio and Breitbart.

Almost half of the U.S. electorate want this, though. Or , at least, has been conditioned and shouted at and lied to to want it.

Almost half the nation is FOX News, and, as driftglass says, no nation can exist half-FOX and half-free; it must become all one or all the other.

Is there any hope left that the GOP can be anything else? It was once; my pop (and I, as a young man) were Rockefeller Republicans. But Reagan and Gingrich and Limbaugh and Palin...years and years of nonsense and lies and fakery and magical thinking...drove us both out.

I guess my fear is that there is no return.

So I'm asking; what sort of Republicans would that take? How could that happen? Are there any left out there? Is there a chance that the GOP can be more than hysterical fear of Muslims, gays, free health care, and gun control?

Because, frankly, if not...I don't see anything other way than deeper into this fucking Trumpenmire.