“The Administration
of Caesar Disgustus can be broken down into two broad categories; not
between the ideologues and the realists; nor between the
conservatives and the tea-baggers; certainly not between the merely
and the inspiringly incompetent; but between the grifters and the
grafters”.
----from “The
Quotations of Chairman Joe”
Political
commentator David Brooks wrote today in The New York Times
that “I miss people thinking about the world outside the gravity
field of Trumpian unreality, and about the world after Trump—the
world we should be building.” (1) Many of us had the same
reaction to the administrations of the Bushes and, of course, to
Brooks' hero Ronald Reagan. But the aftermath of these national
disasters are anything but encouraging, for each succeeding
administration largely ratified the damage done. This is hardly the
worst of it.
Brooks
himself, in an earlier Op-Ed piece, sounded the alarm. In an essay
he entitled “The Chaos After Trump”, (2) Brooks takes us
down the rabbit hole Italy was drawn into by Silvio Berlusconi:
“Silvio Berlusconi
first came to power for the same reasons Trump and other populists
have been coming to power around the world: Voters were disgusted by
a governing elite that seemed corrupt and out of touch. They felt
swamped by waves of immigrants, frustrated by economic stagnation and
disgusted by the cultural values of the cosmopolitan urbanites.
“In office,
Berlusconi did nothing to address Italy's core problems, but he did
degrade public discourse with his speech, weaken the structures of
government with his corruption and offended basic decency with his
Bunga Bunga sex parties and his general lewdness.
“In short,
Berlusconi, like Trump, did nothing to address the sources of public
anger, but did erase any restraints on the way it could be
expressed.” (3)
In
the aftermath, Italy has seen the rise of the Five Star Movement,
“which was started by a comedian and is now led by a 31-year-old
who had never held a full-time job. Another winner is the League, led
by Mateo Salvini, which declined to effectively distance itself from
one of its former candidates who went on a shooting rampage against
African immigrants. Berlusconi, who vowed to expel 600,000
immigrants is back and is now considered a moderating
influence. The
respectable center-left party, like center-left parties across
Europe, collapsed.” (4)
Brooks
draws several lessons from the Italian experience. First, citing
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's “How Democracies Die”,
Brooks that “democracies
depend not just on formal constitutions but also on informal codes.
You treat your opponents like legitimate adversaries, not
illegitimate enemies. You tell the truth as best you can. You don't
make naked appeals to bigotry.
Berlusconi,
like Trump, undermined those norms. And now Berlusconi's rivals
across the political spectrum have waged a campaign that was rife
with conspiracy theories, misinformation and naked appeals to race.”
(5)
Secondly,
Brooks points to an astonishing loss in people's faith in the
democratic system. Brooks, citing Yascha Mounk's “The
People vs. Democracy”, writes
that “faith in
democratic regimes is declining with every new generation.
Seventy-one per cent of Europeans and North Americans born in the
1930's think it's essential to live in a democracy, but only 29 per
cent of people born in the 1980's think that. In the U.S., nearly a
quarter of millennials think democracy is a bad way to run a country.
Nearly half would like a strongman leader. One in six Americans of
all ages support military rule.(6)
So
what if the man is a fascist, one Italian voter told Jason Horowitz
of The Times. “Salvini
is a good man. I like him because he puts Italians first. And I
guess he's a fascist, too. What can you do?” (7)
Third,
Brooks points to the deterioration of debate cause by social media,
noting that the Five Star movement began as an on-line
“decision-making” platform pretending to use the media to “create
unmitigated democracy but is instead “the
members have no real power. In reality, there is not any real direct
democracy with M5S, but a totally top-down orchestration of the
movement.” (8) Instead
of realizing the promise of free communication and political
democratization we are, instead, “seeing
polarization, alternative information universes and the rise of
autocracy...
“In
Italy, as with Trump and his Facebook campaign, the social media
platform seems decentralizing, bit it actually buttresses
authoritarian ends.
“The
underlying message is clear. As Mounk has argued, the populist wave
is still rising. The younger generations are more radical, on left
and right...Vladimir Putin's admirers are surging. The center is
still hollowing out. Nothing is inevitable in life, but liberal
democracy clearly ain't going to automatically fix itself.” (9)
So
what does life after tRUMP portent? One thing is clear: “Once
the norms of acceptable behavior are violated and once the
institutions of government are weakened, it is very hard to
re-establish them. Instead you get this cycle of ever more extreme
behavior, as politicians compete to be the most radical outsider.
The political center collapses, the normal left/right political
categories cease to apply and you see the rise of strange new
political groups that are crazier than anything you could have
imagined before.” (10).
As
an example let's take a look at the informal code of “telling the
truth as best you can”. First there was Nixon's bold-face lies
concerning Watergate and his personal finances. After the Rebuke of
Nixon there followed a short return to normalcy. Then came the
advent of Ronald Reagan who, emerging from a profession based upon
the suspension of disbelief, began the rapid divorce of the
Republican Party from any known connection with truth. At first,
they were seen as simple 'gaffes'. The old gaffer had misspoke, or
he simply believed
something to be true,
tantamount to its actual existence. Then came the Bushes, Pappy
famously “out of the loop” involving the Iran-Contra scandal. But
with Junior things got out of hand. Lying us into a war, violating
the national as well as international norms concerning torture, graft
and corruption involving 40 billion dollars of unaccounted funds.
All of these serve as precedents factoring into the emergence of
tRUMP and tRUMPism.
But
Caesar Disgustus has taken this venality to an entirely new level,
the likes of which this republic has never witnessed. Oh yes we have
had grifters, we've had people who have personally profited from
public office. Oh yes, we have had grafters, those that have taken
money from ill-begotten sources. But nothing on this scale.
Moreover, we have had venality, and yes, even cruelty. Dick Cheney
leaps immediately to mind. But nothing reaches the levels of
malignancy and mendacity of this administration in its actions or its
shamelessness.
So
what is is to be outside the tRUMPian gravity field? At first glance,
it is not pretty. Not since that Cypriot hermit penned his
drug-induced “Revelations” have the prospects been so
frightening. Apocalypse Now.
“'an
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach
and Imprison.
___________
- Brooks, David “Trump's Magical Fantasy World” The New York Times. Friday May 25, 2018.Page A21
- Brooks, David. “The Chaos After Trump” The New York Times. Tuesday, March 6, 2018. Page A25
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
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