Trump Dictatorship

 

A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.

There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. So why is everyone behaving like normal?

By Robert Kagan

Disappearing Into Our Phones

 

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“When you look at your phone,” she told me, “it’s as though you disappear.”

When it comes to having an unhealthy relationship with technology, I’m in good company. Most of us find that smartphones have made our lives better, but we struggle to use them in healthy ways. Nearly 60 percent of American adults told Gallup last year that they use their phones too often. American adults spend an average of four and a half hours on their phones each day, the research firm Insider Intelligence reported this summer. Almost all of us keep our smartphones within arm’s reach during waking hours, Gallup found, and most of us do so when we sleep.

-Chris Moody in The Atlantic

Joseph Ellis - American Dialogue - The Founders and Us - Notes

Joseph Ellis is my favorite American historian.

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further the past will remain horrible for exactly so long as we refuse to assess it honestly. . . . Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955

Which is why I am proud to be a student of American history in this time of politicizing our history by trying to distort and erase the truth. P. 49 

Adams was a realist.  Jefferson was a dreamer/hypocrite.

The dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in 2014 gave iconic status on the Mall to the liberal narrative of American history as an ongoing conversation within the trinity of Jefferson, Lincoln, and King about what "all men are created equal" means then and now.  P. 57

Hence, Professor Richardson's current book is a case in point. 

This country was not founded on the Declaration of Independence.  Ellis points out that it was nothing more than rhetorical flourish.  Jefferson did not personally believe what it ultimately came to stand for and mean.  Jefferson was a total racist and hypocrite.  

Adams points out that the deepest human drive is the irrational need to be noticed and loved.  Why does he consider this need irrational?  P. 94

The new aristocracy would be based on money,  not family inheritance.  P. 94

The U.S. doesn't have the European  old-style to offset wealth as the primary measure of elite status.   I can only imagine how disgusted and disappointed he would be with Trump.  P. 95

He foresaw the country was headed toward a "moneyed aristocracy." P. 95

This new money aristocracy would be pathetic for the not have the emotional attachment of European elites, yet Trumpers love their messiah yet it's a one-way affection.p. 95

His work Davila  highlights his comments on these matters.

Mocked as "His Rotundity.  P. 96

The US was not immune to what happened in Europe throughout as the development oc embedded plutocracy: a political oligarchy.    P. 96

Adams was a student of history to see where this country was headed, and he was right to do so.

The Past Makes the Present Coherent

 In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further the past will remain horrible for exactly so long as we refuse to assess it honestly. . . . Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955

Which is why I am proud to be a student of American history in this time of politicizing our history by trying to distort and erase the truth.

The Survival of Democracy in the Balance

 

Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics. To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist. But making that case requires identifying two distinct threats.

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The first is Donald Trump, who is already at the center of our national conversation. The second is the ongoing assault on voting rights, which rarely commands the airwaves.

Let’s start with the good news: It has become untenable to treat Trump as a normal presidential candidate, thanks to his own evermore radical rhetoric, starting with his pledges to use the Justice Department as a tool for revenge against political enemies. The result is a partial but welcome shift in journalistic coverage recognizing Trump’s journey into what the New York Times called “more fascist-sounding territory.” The Economist, no avatar of left-wing politics, received wide attention for declaring that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.”

It’s true that most Republican politicians shy away from calling out the former president’s planned assaults on our constitutional democracy, but at least the issue is being joined outside the GOP’s cocoon.

We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law.

This led to an explosion of state abuses, including discriminatory voter-identification laws, targeted purges of electoral rolls, gerrymanders that undercut minority representation and changes in early-voting rules that often advantaged some groups over others.

Because such moves fall short of the wholesale disenfranchisement of Black voters during the Jim Crow era — it ended with the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965 — defenders of today’s restrictions insist they are not discriminating against anyone. But making it harder for some people to vote — often in the name of preventing the falsely imagined “voter fraud” that is at the heart of Trump’s election denial — is no less an attack on democracy.

And the attack continues.

In his decision in Shelby, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. claimed that even without a strong Section 4, the Voting Rights Act bans discrimination under Section 2, which “is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”

Permanent? Not if the 2-1 decision last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit is allowed to stand.

The court’s majority arrogantly tossed aside what Congress explicitly said it was doing when it passed the law, claiming miraculous powers to read the “text and structure” of the act as preventing private parties, including civil rights groups, from bringing cases under Section 2. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, the ruling’s claim that only the Justice Department had this authority ignored “Congress’s intentions, Supreme Court precedent and decades of practice.”

This is no minor bit of judicial activism. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, wrote in the Election Law Blog that the ruling would eliminate the bulk of the cases aimed at protecting voting rights because “the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources.” Bye bye, Voting Rights Act. Indeed, there were immediate signs (in a key Louisiana case, for example) that the 8th Circuit ruling would be used to overturn earlier voting rights actions.

Preventing Trump from overthrowing liberal democracy is certainly a necessary step, but it’s not sufficient. Renewing the fight for a new Voting Rights Act and the access-enhancing reforms in the Freedom to Vote Act is essential. But it’s also time to address one of the major flaws of our Constitution: It does not contain an explicit, affirmative guarantee of every citizen’s right to vote. Enacting a constitutional amendment that would do so, Hasen argues, would bring our voting wars to an inclusive conclusion.

“Why do we let the state put barriers in front of people when they exercise their right to vote?” Hasen asked in an interview. The director of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, Hasen details his proposed amendment and the case for it in a forthcoming book, “A Real Right to Vote.” A carefully framed amendment, he argues, could simultaneously protect voter access and assure election integrity. He’d link automatic voter registration with a nationwide, universal, nondiscriminatory form of voter identification.

Polarization makes amending the Constitution nearly impossible these days, one reason Hasen addresses fears on both the left and the right. But whatever chances Hasen’s amendment has, it calls on Americans to address the most important question facing our democracy: Are we truly committed to being a democracy? We’ll decide that at the ballot box next November, but we’ll have a lot more work to do even if we get the initial answer right.

National Book Award Winner from the NYT

At the National Book Awards last night, the nonfiction chair Ada Ferrer explained what she and her fellow judges had been looking for as they narrowed the field from hundreds of submissions to five finalists and finally one winner (Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America”): They wanted books that somehow made a difference, in any of the many ways that books can do that, and that were well written, in any of the many ways that books can meet that definition.

 I laugh at people who seem to stare at their cell phones all day. I respond with hostility to people who try to shove their phones in my face.