This piece is appearing in several newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
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It could be America’s greatest contribution to human civilization: the idea that the rulers are answerable to the people and must wield their power according to the rules.
(The American creed that “no one is above the law” contrasted starkly with the absolute monarchs of previous centuries, and with the ways of dictatorships that have darkened the pages of modern history.)
Which leads me to wonder: Have the 40+% of Americans who give President Trump their unwavering support somehow not noticed all the signs that this President hankers after dictatorial power? Or are Trump’s dictatorial tendencies somehow attractive to them?
The signs of Trump’s aspirations to dictatorial powers have been abundant and unmistakable.
We have witnessed Trump twisting the law in two ways anomalous among American presidents but commonly seen from dictators: 1) refusing to be held accountable by the rule of law while also 2) repeatedly wielding – or threatening– the powers of law enforcement against those he perceives as threats to his power (“Lock her up!”; investigate the FBI investigators; investigate the Bidens).
(And no President in our lifetime – and probably ever -- has had his actions so regularly struck down by the Courts, because of Trump’s lack of “care that the laws be faithfully executed.”)
Many observed, when Trump made his threatening statement about the press being “Enemies of the People,” that he was using the language of dictators. (Never has there been an American President who so continuously punishes those who speak out against him --as dictators always do).
His attacking the press has been one more expression of this President’s dictator-like refusal to accept that his power as President of the United States is but one locus of power in a larger constitutional order in which “freedom of the press” plays an indispensable role.
Trump’s disrespect of other legitimate sources of power has also been demonstrated by his dictator-like usurpation of powers the Constitution assigns to Congress:
To usurp Congress’s sole power to institute tariffs, Trump made up an obvious lie about Canada being a threat to our national security; and Trump unconstitutionally usurped Congress’s power of the purse when, after Congress refused to fund his wall, he seized the monies that Congress had appropriated for other purposes.A dictator might be described as someone who is not accountable to anyone – regardless of how he acts – but makes everyone accountable to him.
When Trump fired the Director of the FBI for refusing to drop an investigation into conduct involving Trump and his immediate team, Trump showed his determination to be accountable to no one.
And when more than a bi-partisan group of more than 1000 former Justice Department officials declared that the Mueller Report shows that Trump committed “multiple felonies” of “obstruction of justice” regarding the investigation by American law enforcement of presidential misconduct, they alerted us to Trump’s dictator-like insistence that that his conduct be beyond anyone’s scrutiny and judgment.
And likewise, more recently, with Trump’s unprecedentedly complete defiance of legitimate impeachment powers -- explicitly granted to Congress by the Constitution to hold a President accountable – this President publicly put himself above the law.
Now, with the impeachment “trial,” Trump’s drive for unchecked power has culminated in this President’s success in making the Republicans in the Senate accountable to him –doing his bidding to avoid risking his punitive wrath – at the very time when, contrarywise, their constitutional duty was to hold the President accountable for conduct threatening the constitutional order.
The two contradictory actions the Republican Senators took in that proceeding – their voting to block the kind of presentation of evidence that’s included in every trial, and their voting to acquit the President – make no sense except that both actions protect the defendant in that trial.
The first vote made them Trump’s accomplices in a cover-up, defying all precedent to prevent the American people from seeing fully what the people’sPresident has been doing with the powers with which the people invested him; The other vote protected this President – virtually the most impeachable President imaginable – from any consequences for his wrong-doing.We’ve seen political parties put their obedience to a leader ahead of everything else (ahead, for example, even of honoring both their oath of office and their oath as jurors in an impeachment “trial”). But we’ve never seen that kind of subservience in America. Only in dictatorships.
(Trump has shown his fondness for the path of dictatorship also
in his much-noted favoritism for the world’s dictators (Putin especially, but there are others), in contrast with Trump’s contemptuous and condescending treatment of the leaders of free societies – the decent and democratic nations who have been, until Trump, America’s best allies and friends; and in his repeatedly joking about making himself President-for-life and serving beyond the two terms permitted by the Constitution.)All of which leads to the question: what does it mean that such a large number of American citizens lend their support to this President whose dictatorial tendencies are on such full display?
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Some offerings:
Having spent the previous forty years investigating the forces that have shaped the human world over the millennia, I have felt compelled since 2004 to turn my full-time attention to understanding and calling out the destructive force that has taken over the political right in America over the past generation.
Here are a few articles, written in the past several years, that expressed something important to me about how our situation is to be understood and about the experience of living in times of such darkness and danger — times of a downward slide of American democracy and of a rise in the power of a political force that consistently works to make our world more broken.
“Cry the Benighted Country” – on the way the balance of power between the forces of “good” and “evil” (or life-serving vs. life-degrading, or constructive vs. destructive, or wholeness vs. brokenness) can shift in a society, and how over the past generation we have witnessed an adverse shift in America. “When Evil Rises Among a People” – on the painful and frightening experience of watching people who had seemed good and decent get transformed into something that serves “Evil.” (It starts with a stunning scene from Cabaret.) (And one piece to which I’m quite attached, representing a much-needed break from dealing with all the darkness of these times, is “The Sacred Space of Lovers.”)A compendium of op/eds that I’ve written weekly to challenge the conservatives, among whom I live, can be found here. And a compendium of op/eds I’ve written to challenge Liberal America to see this battle for what it is -- and to fight it as it needs to be fought -- can be found here.
In 2019, in an effort to convey the Big Picture of the dynamics driving the story of our species -- generally, and that also illuminates specifically the meaning of the current American “Trump Crisis” -- I published a series of three op/eds under the banner “WHAT SHAPES OUR WORLD.” The three pieces – each dedicated to one big idea – were:
Evolution: A Most Elegant and Illuminating IdeaHow the Rise of Civilization Brought the Reign of PowerGood Battling Evil