Thank God it's not Fascism

I watched a video the other day of a pundit explaining the difference between the left and the right, it being the "size" of government with the left ostensibly desiring a big government that regulates all aspects of life while the right supports a small government that promotes individual freedom. It was an advertisement that popped up before a YouTube video I wanted to watch, so there's no real stable link to the video, so my apologies if my immediate comments seem too pat. The advertisement itself was an attempt to stake out an ideological difference between the left and the right, or as Damon Linkin has put it elsewhere, "a uniform galvanizing ideology."  I will say right up front that the big government/small government dispute is a false dilemma.  If we think in terms of a particular issue -- "guns" -- it's relatively clear that the left desires greater government intervention and regulation.  If we think in terms of another particular issue -- "abortion" -- it's relatively clear that the right desires greater government intervention and regulation.  Suffice it to say, in these two issues at least, it's not so much a question of the government's size, or whether the government regulates an aspect of life, more a question of which particular aspect the government regulates.

As an aside, I might add it's also a question of who the government regulates, and the answer almost always comes back to the relative poor.  Money, of course, is a great facilitator, and anyone with sufficient money, should they feel the need for a gun or an abortion, could obtain one safely even if they were illegal.  Tim Murphy makes the case eloquently for political and moral hypocrisy when it comes to abortion, so I don't need to dwell on the issue.  The rich are indeed different, and "people of quality," as my grandmother used to refer to the local burgher's, have always felt themselves to be an exception to the rules that govern others.  Just saying this, however, puts me on the left side of the horseshoe, as one of the relative poor, in part because those on the right seem eager to accuse the left of fomenting "class warfare."  Perhaps so, but at the moment it seems mostly just a war of words, or more precisely a war of attitudes between what might be called the cultural left and the cultural right.  It's all those other "differences" that help form the attitudes -- the highly educated vs the modestly educated, the urban vs the rural, the ecumenical vs the religious fundamentalists, and the list could go on.  I'm really sick unto death of the culture wars, but if I had to stake out territory, I'd like to see myself as a Woody Guthrie populist, a left leaner empathetic to the plight of those who live in the fly over states and the drive by towns, but my empathy is wearing thin.  I have a vague suspicion that, if Woody were alive today, he'd be singing about getting drunk on a plane to Cancun.
             
I want to say that the culture wars, the attitudinal posturing on the left and right, is mostly a side show irrelevant to the real show, but I'm not sure I can make that claim unequivocally.  Attitudes toward the hot-button issues do matter to the quality of life.  There are significant reasons why, for example, a black urban female might hold different attitudes toward guns than a white rural male.  A few moments of reflection would reveal the circumstantial differences, and a few pundits have taken the time to notice the racial implications of the current "pro-life" youth movement calling for more stringent regulation of guns.  Almost all of the hot button issues have "racial implications," and we have yet to deal effectively with those "racial implications" in part because "race," in the most trivial way possible, transcends attitude.  You can be as right wing as Ben Carson, but if you're black, at the end of the day you're still black, and for altogether too many people that's the one thing that matters All else sorts from there.

Still, I want to say that the culture wars are mostly a side show irrelevant to the real show, but of late, particularly with the "right" politically ascendant in the on-going battles, it has become the principal show.  Consider, for example, one hot-button issue in the emergent culture wars -- Trump himself.  It's reasonably clear that Trump ran on a platform, if one can use that word, of hot-button culture war issues, most significantly those that touch most significantly on racial anxieties.  As the recent spate of sexual misconduct claims have once again revealed, he has lived a life diametrically opposed to the values espoused by evangelicals, but they continue to support him because he continues to support their side on the hot button issues.  One could go on, but the price of being a cultural icon on the right is the fear and loathing of those on the left.  As the NY Times put it, "Polls and every recent election show that Mr. Trump has galvanized liberal and moderate voters — especially women and those with college degrees — to oppose his party. Yet at the same time, personal loyalty to the president is increasingly the most crucial litmus test for Republicans."  They go on quote Mr. Costello, the representative not running for re-election in Pennsylvania, who noted that "Mr. Trump’s persona did not just fuel liberal activism — it also made it nearly impossible to talk about Republican policy goals.  'He blocks everything out,' Mr. Costello said of the president. 'What fuels the energy isn’t the issues. It’s the personality.'"   The left unwittingly or haplessly plays along because the "cultural" issues seem to determine who wins or loses elections.    

Having said all that, there is a general sort of consensus that the left is winning the culture wars while the right is winning the political wars.  Perhaps so, but both sides remain alarmed at the others "ascendency" while the country wallows in a moral sewer.  The Stormy Daniels affair is a case in point.  Writing for The Week, Damon Linkin asks "Have we learned anything from [the Stormy Daniels affair] that we didn't already know?"  He answers, not really.  Most of Trump's sexual escapades were well known before the election.  There is the possible exception that the "Daniels lawsuit has revealed to the public that Trump's entourage of sycophantic knuckleheads act like what they so manifestly are -- members of a criminal syndicate issuing threats of physical violence and other forms of intimidation in order to safeguard the Boss."  Perhaps so, but even that was known, and "anyway, isn't this a large part of what the President's most loyal supporters (white evangelical Christians) liked about him in the first place?"  Not the sexual escapades, which are an embarrassment and must be prayed away, but that "he promised to serve as their strongman protector willing to play rough and dirty in order to keep them safe from the coercive hand of the liberal state?"  If Trump's thuggish behavior energizes the left, equally it energizes the right, and he sits at a 10 month high in the polls after the Daniels story broke.

In the end, I could give a crap about Stormy Daniels.  In almost all respects, she is proving immune to Trump's shaming not because she is righteous in any way shape or form, not because she is speaking truth to power or any of the other moralizing shibboleths, but because she is the moral equivalent of Trump.  It's perhaps not surprising that a porn star would be as blithely shameless as Trump in pushing her fifteen minutes of fame into what?  a reality TV show and later a run for the Senate?  Who knows?  I would add, "who cares?" but it's almost impossible NOT to watch the lizards slither into and out of the moral sewer that our government has become.  The salacious stupidity of it all is not important in and of itself, but the results are important.  It is, after all is said and done, NOT a reality TV show, but our government, a "real" reality that will affect our lives in any number of ways.  At the risk of being exceptionally crude, if Ms. Daniels were to post a video of her spanking Trump's bare ass or engaging in oral sex with his tiny prick (the non-sex act that almost brought Clinton down) it might add to my loathing of the man, but then not much.  I already loath the man, and it's questionable how much MORE I could loath him, and even then it wouldn't change one iota how I am able and how I choose to live my own life.  The boring stuff happening off to the side will, however, affect me profoundly.  

In my previous post, I wondered about the inherent flaws in our constitutional form of government, and thought perhaps it might simply be that it is "timing out."  There is an "end of days" feel to Trumps presidency, but that might just be my own fear and loathing.  As I have thought about it, however, another aspect of our constitution has occupied my thinking -- the "de-centering," as I put it, of economic and political power.  Each clearly has influence on the other, and I don't really need to detail the ways in which economic power influences political power, or the ways in which political power influences economic power, but under our current constitution they are interdependent, but they are not the same. Trump, who, despite all his wealth, occupies a position of political, not economic power.  Had Trump simply evaporated over-night from the economic scene, one would hardly have noticed, and one might even have a suspicion that he felt the need to run for political office BECAUSE he lacked the reality of economic power.  With that in mind, the current flap between Trump and Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, more or less demonstrates the de-centering.  Jeff Bezos DOES have economic power, in part because he has near monopoly control over on-line retail, and on-line retail now represents a significant segment of the American economy.  It's too big  to fail, so to speak, without affecting the lives of millions.  That said, Business Insider reports that "among all the leaders in tech, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos probably had the most contentious relationship with President-elect Donald Trump during the campaign. The two publicly criticized each other on many occasions, with Trump once warning that Amazon would have 'problems' if he became president."  Although the relationship is contentious, it appears that Bezos is willing to make nice, in part because, as Business Insider again put it, "Amazon has grown so much in recent years that its business interests are tightly linked to government policies, across areas like sales tax, net neutrality, immigration, and shipping, just to name a few. It's one reason Amazon has significantly increased its lobbying expenditures lately."  Trump, of course, is the consummate narcissist who must be at the eye of his own tornado, but it remains questionable how far he can push his personal feud with Bezos without stepping on the toes of other tech and retail leaders whose interests are also "tightly linked to government policies."  For the moment, constitutionally, we are still under the "rule of law."  While his elected office holds considerable power, it is exercised through regulation and the execution of the law, and the universalizing effect of both regulation and the law prevents the sort of individual targeting of the opposition that Trump craves. 

Ostensibly, under our constitution, political power belongs to the "the people," a vague enough concept, and one not necessarily inclusive of all homo sapiens.  Nevertheless political power flows from the will (or the consent) of the people.  The "vote," for example, expresses the will of the people, and yes, there are constitutional distortions built into the "vote" that skew how the vote results in representation.  The Senate itself is a distortion.  As Bill Mayer has clucked, California with its 35 million people gets the same "vote" in the Senate as Wyoming with a little more than a half million people.  In the representative body that perhaps counts most, the people of Wyoming get a huge markup in the power of their vote.  Admitting as much, however, Connor Lamb's victory at the ballot box seems to signal pushback against the current regime, partly because he held firm on core issues like social security and Medicare while co-opting the opposition's stance on the distracting cultural issues like abortion and guns.  I'm not holding my breath, but we'll see what happens during the midterm elections.  Then too, so long as they are protected, of course, first amendment rights also allow for the expression of the will of the people, particularly the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.  We saw it in response to civil rights, we saw it in response to the Vietnam war, and we're seeing it again in the response to the Parkland shooting.  Indeed, if the NRA represents one economic center of power, the Parkland protests represent the will of the people pushing back against that particular center of power and they seem willing to push back at other economic centers of power.  Whether or not the Parkland protests will have any real effect remains a matter of some dispute, but their exercise of collective political power did at least garner the attention of a few major retailers.        

Having said all that, with the centers of political and economic power "de-centered" it is less a question of large government, small government, more a question of what might be called  the vectors of power.  The left at its purest demands government hegemony over the economic centers of power, while the right at its purest demands economic hegemony over the governmental centers of power.  For those on the economic right (to be distinguished from the cultural right) those who own the country should run the country, if not directly, then "by proxy" through political power that is nothing if not subservient to their needs.   In some respects this does mean "limited" government -- that is to say, the role of government is limited to the defense of "property" rights, to include the "inalienable right" to secure greater happiness through more and more "wealth." There is some room for dispute in just what exactly that means, partly because the notion of "property," like happiness, seems rather vague in the pursuit. The recent flap with Facebook cuts to the core of this issue.  What exactly does Facebook own?  Intellectual property rights to a web service, yes, but a web service that collects "personal data."  Who exactly owns that "personal data?"  If that data was surrendered "voluntarily" to Facebook, and Facebook aggregated that data through their "proprietary" algorithms, should Facebook feel free to sell that data to whomever they please, including Russian political hacks?  Should the FTC or the FCC (which?) step in and "regulate" Facebook?  Or perhaps a simpler solution is at hand.  If the people don't like it, shouldn't they, so to speak, "vote" with their unsubscribe clicks and leave Facebook behind?  It's confusing for both the left and right, no?

Having said all that, Damon Linker is correct.  A vector of power is not the same thing as a "galvanizing ideology," at least not in the 20th century sense of the word, an ideology that "could plausibly animate a centralized totalitarian state to co-opt civil society, driving out dissent by employing a combination of surveillance, repression and propaganda." Linker wants to differentiate between "the threat facing liberal politics today" and those that threatened liberal politics in the past -- particularly fascism.   The real sickness of our time, he contends, "is quite different and in some ways the opposite: a rising tide of polarization and chaos in civil society driven by numerous forces, some structural (social media) but others political (right-wing disinformation, Russian meddling), that threatens to empower a form of postmodern, kleptocratic authoritarianism. That’s certainly bad, and potentially antidemocratic. But it’s not fascism." 

I do think he's correct, the real sickness of our time is the rising tide of polarization and chaos in civil society, a chaos fueled by the increasingly strident, increasingly distracting, winner-take-all culture wars.  Social media has played its part, and it has done so by giving free rein to those unscrupulous enough to invent "alternative facts" that prey on people's anxiety and animosities, which, more than anything else, prompts the "like" and the "share."  Indeed, there is a "post-modern" feel to politics today, a world in which all realities are "socially constructed," and no reality, including the reality of science, has any more claim on the "truth" than any other reality.  Perhaps it's instructive than many of the originating avatars of "post-modernism," to include Martin Heideggar and Paul de Man were smitten with fascism, which resolves the resultant chaos in the "great man," in the absolutism of a particular charismatic personality.  Ultimately, one can't help but feel that Trump will prove to be too clownish even for his most ardent supporters.  It's difficult imagining Trump's bare bottom being spanked with his own image by a porn star and thinking "great man."  Trump may have made himself the celebrity of celebrities, but in the end he personally commands only the lurid attention of any other celebrity, with one exception.  Because he is the head of state, his very presence in the office denigrates and degrades the office, and he has gone a long way toward turning government itself into the unreality of reality TV -- a vehicle for the manufacture of celebrity (on which, by the way, the likes of Stormy Daniels is capitalizing).   Because it is so ineffectual, such parade of celebrities behaving badly, the base of power has shifted increasingly to the right, an economic hegemony over the political.  The one act the government has effectuated has been a tax cut that is unambiguously in the interests of those who occupy the economic centers of power.              

So again, I think Linker is correct, but I'm not sure how to respond. Should I say, "oh, thank God, it's not fascism?"  Really?   I would perhaps respond that the on-going culture wars, along with the moral and ethical degradation that seems to follow in the wake of all wars when "winning" co-opts the casus belli, has gone a long way toward empowering the right, the economic hegemony synonymous with a "postmodern, kleptocratic authoritarianism."  Should the economic hegemony be complete, it is not just "potentially antidemocratic," it is inherently antidemocratic, or more to the point inherently anti-constitutional, and a "kleptocratic authoritarianism," no less than a "fascist" or "communist" authoritarianism, will employ a combination of "surveillance, repression and propaganda" to maintain its hegemony.  Of course, it will take place right under our noses and likely with our "consent."  We will breeze through the terms of service and click "accept."  The Facebook flap reveals that Trump and his facilitators are more than willing to use "post modern" means of surveillance to achieve political power?  Hasn't he already signaled his willingness to repress dissent, using violence?  From day one he suggested he would "punch protestors in the face," which render the repressive threats against Stormy Daniels almost comic as gangster movie dialogue, but also plausible.  Hasn't he (credit where credit is due) perfected a form of propaganda where all "news" is "fake news," even his own dictates, but it changes nothing because remains an entertainment,  a shameless oligarch among the oligarchs.  If all news is fake news, then really only one thing matters -- his news, not because it carries moral suasion, not because it represents anything resembling a "truth," not because it will benefit the people, but BECAUSE he is in power.  Really.  Thank God it's not fascism.  Otherwise we'd be in real trouble.  

Inherent Weaknesses

The other day, I read an article on the inherent weakness of personality-based, authoritarian regimes like Putin's Russia.  The difficulty, it suggested, was the inevitability of death and the consequent need for succession.  Because political power is centered on a single individual, the regime really cannot plan for succession without undermining the power structure.   The regime may lumber along successfully until the great leader's demise, at which point it degenerates into a squalid scramble for power among the "second best."  Our constitutional government doesn't particularly have that problem.  Though I doubt that many would agree with the statement that follows, it is disdainful of individuals.  It outlines a process for succession that, on the one hand, formalizes the squabble for power, makes of it a "game," played frequently enough to be familiar and accepted.  I suspect Trump wants, with every fiber of his being, to become a personality-based, authoritarian leader like Putin, but the pesky constitution and the almost perpetual squabble for power that it guarantees will prevent him from fulfilling his heart's desire.  Given the way things are going of late, I suspect it will crush him, and I for one will not shed a tear when it does.

The article did not, however, completely reassure me. I began to wonder what the "inherent weakness" of our constitutional regime might be. I'm not entirely sure, and I would be open to counter-arguments, but it strikes me that our constitution, not unlike other documents of extreme faith, is a product of its time.  Thinking narrowly, for example, of the first amendment and our "freedom of the press," it strikes me that the framers could not have anticipated the emergence of social media.  Although the first amendment was adaptable enough to accommodate the emergence of mass media, specifically broadcast media, it was able to do so in part because mass media, radio and television, were quantitative changes more so than qualitative changes.  Social media, or so it seems to me, represents a qualitative change.  The recent flap over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is a case in point.  To put a human face on it, Lora "unfriended" several people on Facebook recently because they were re-posting mean-spirited political memes, the same sort of targeted meme used to bolster Trump in the recent election.  Here, one might ask, "what is the point of Facebook?"  For Lora, it was simply a tool to remain connected to family and friends, but I suspect that Facebook sees itself as a tool to generate personal data which can be exploited for "product advertising," but as Cambridge Analytica has demonstrated, one such "product" can be n insidious political hack.  Is it "free speech" when a third party uses my personal data to bombard me with memes that are designed to reinforce and intensify my likely prejudices?   The differences between the users view of Facebook and Facebook's view of themselves deserve a book of their own, but one thing seems clear enough.  The vast interconnectivity of "social media" has not done much in the way of "bringing us together" as a human family, but has on the contrary intensified our "factional" divisions and represents a threat to civil discourse.   Perhaps the First Amendment will prove resilient enough to accommodate the likes of Facebook, but that remains to be seen.

Thinking more broadly, however, there is another fissure along what might be called "the economics of national identity."  Consider, for example, the following statement recently published by Aja Romano in Vox:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged this much in recent public statements regarding the Cambridge Analytica data breach — but what needs far more acknowledgment is that Facebook has far outstripped the moniker of “social media.” If we think about the internet as a global system, then Facebook is a global world power, and it’s high time we acknowledge that such global power comes with monumental social responsibility. That requires major global leadership and oversight, as well as increased self-scrutiny and accountability from Facebook itself.

The acknowledgement centers on the impossibility of "just quitting" Facebook, in part because they exercise a sort of monopoly power over an Indira's Web of interconnectivity that far outstrips anything any one user might imagine.   In the case of the Cambridge Analytica data breach, as the issue at hand, a particular app developer offered a personality quiz through Facebook that garnered personal data not only from those who signed up for the quiz, but all their on-line "friends" as well.  The data this generated was then sold to a third party, Cambridge Analytica, who in turn used it in support of the Trump campaign.  A good deal of money was at stake in all of these transactions, and consequently it's not altogether credible when Zuckerberg claims that he will prevent such abuses in the future, writing "I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community."  What is remarkable in this statement, however, is neither the fleeting public accountability nor the lack of credibility in the corporate response, but the first person, the "I," the amount of power vested in a single, somewhat questionable individual.

I bring this forward, not to bemoan the fact that "Facebook has far outstripped the moniker of 'social media'" or to excoriate Mark Zuckerberg, but simply to point out a few things, not least the decentering of economic and political power.  We can more or less acknowledge that each has "influence" on the other, and this "balance of power" is implicit to, if not explicit within, our constitutional system.  Some hint of this can be found in the yet unresolved Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian dispute which asked, in effect, where in the constitutional system should political power be exercised over the economic power?  It depends, of course, on what one sees as the center of "economic power," whether agrarian or manufacturing, et cetera. We could go on arguing this point, and we probably will.  The current flap over trade policy is retrogressive to discussions that permeated much of our earliest national history, but the discussion misses the point.  One assumption behind this question, of course, is that both economic and political power are national.   What does it mean when Romano writes that "Facebook is a global world power?"  Facebook, clearly, is not a world power in the "sovereign" sense that, say, "Russia" or "China" is a sovereign world power.  Nor is it a national world power in the sense that, say, the Hudson Bay Company was a national world power representing a particular sovereign colonial power.  To say that Facebook has "monumental social responsibility" might be true, but forgive me if I don't quite trust Mark Zuckerberg to provide "global leadership and oversight," in part because the governing intentionality of a "private business" is not to fulfill as yet undefined social responsibilities, but to make money.  If Zuckerberg is wallowing in mea culpa, it is not because he feels the burden of global leadership, nor because he is engaging in "self-scrutiny" but because he believes his actions will help Facebook continue to make money. 

I am reasonably convinced that we don't quite understand what it might mean to call Facebook "a global world power, except perhaps that the "balance of power" has tipped toward the economic, and that the centers of economic power exists outside national boundaries in ways that the founders could not have imagined when the ownership of land and the so-called "means of production" created the centers of economic power.  So, I'm suggesting the paranoid right-wingers are in some respects correct. A new world order is emerging and it is eroding national sovereignty, but again, please don't misunderstand me.  I do not think that getting rid of the UN will do one damn thing to reverse the trend, nor do I think that there's a secret cabal of any sort plotting for world dominance, at least not in the comic book version of world dominance.   If Facebook represents a near monopoly, and as such has become a center of real economic power on a global scale, there will be those who threaten to "disrupt" Facebook.  It's in the nature of power to be challenged. Indeed, Emily Parker, writing for CNN, has suggested that the answer to one technology is, of course, a new and better technology. She writes,

In their new book, "The Truth Machine," Michael Casey and Paul Vigna describe how companies like Uber, Airbnb and Facebook have become examples of entrenched monopoly power. Blockchain technologies "aim to do away with these intermediaries altogether, letting people forge their own trust to build social networks and business arrangements on their own terms."                

Such thinking is ultimately utopian.  I might suggest that, just as more guns are not a likely solution to gun violence, another technology is not a likely solution to the disruptions of technology.  I suggest this in part because it wasn't all that long ago that Facebook was touted as a way of "letting people forge their own trust to build social networks," and we have seen where that leads.   If not Mark Zuckerberg playing us for a sucker, it will be someone else, and if I don't quite trust Mark Zuckerberg or his disrupter to provide "global leadership and oversight," who then can I trust?

      

   

Pat Buchanan Puts Out the Good China

Mr. Xi’s emergence as a strongman has driven home the disappointment among American policymakers that China has not become more open and democratic as it has become more wealthy.   NY Times -- Jane Perlez -- 28 Feb

I read the above statement with some incredulousness the other day, partly because American policymakers were likely surprised, partly because of the underlying assumption that blinkered their predictions -- that is to say, the equation of wealth with an open and democratic government, or that wealth in and of itself leads to an open and democratic government.  There is plenty of evidence to suggest that wealth, amassed in few hands, leads to plutocracy.  I am defining plutocracy in the standard way, without embellishment, as a form of oligarchy where the government and society is controlled by a small minority of the wealthy.  Having said that, plutocracy always presents itself as a wolf in sheep's clothing.  The plutocrat will operate within the parameters of his or her own interests, and within a plutocracy, government becomes the protector and enforcer of the interests of the wealthiest few.  Their actions will be justified against and within any number of ideologies, but they are always a "realistic" betrayal of the "idealism" expressed within that ideology.  For the Chinese, it is a betrayal of the "economic equality" of communism.  For us, of course, it is a betrayal of "democracy."

On the latter, before I go on, let me make a couple of side-bar comments.  First, do not equate the plutocrats for the government officials.  While it is possible for the plutocrat to become a government official, and conversely while it is possible for a government official to amass sufficient wealth to become a plutocrat, for the most part our government officials are hired guns.  Even operating on the assumption that our elections are open and fair, it takes a considerable amount of money to mount an effective campaign, and a good deal of that money is provided by the plutocrats.  Second, I am not suggesting a "conspiracy theory" of government.  I am not talking about a conspiratorial cabal where a few men meet in a secret cave hidden under the artic ice to conspire for world domination.    Two very wealthy men may have competing interests, and contribute disproportionately to one party or another within the political system -- i.e. the Koch brothers and George Soros -- though it does "err," so to speak, on the conservative side.  The reason for this is straight forward.  These are men who have amassed wealth within the world such as it is.  While they might seek enhancements of the current order (e.g. tax cuts) they don't necessarily want to overthrow the order that provided them with wealth, along with the power and prestige that comes of wealth.  Headlines like The Week's "How Senate Democrats rolled over for Wall Street" are simply a case in point.

Having said all that, let me make an admission.  I no longer really know what I mean by "democratic."   In a pure sense, we are not and never have been a "democratic" government, and I'm not even sure that a purely democratic government is a good thing -- that is to say, a government built on and reflecting a majority public consensus.   We could, for example, hold a public referendum for those issues that are particularly nettlesome for the American political system -- e.g. guns or abortion or gay rights -- and insist that public policy reflect the general consensus.  There is, however, nothing sacrosanct about public opinion, nor is public consensus necessarily right, either in a moral or a practical sense.  Public consensus is remarkably pervious to various forms of demagoguery, not to mention the suasion of various Russian meme factories, and then there is what the founding fathers called "factionalism."  The authors of the Federalist Papers may have had something else in mind when they wrote of "factions" as a threat to their proposed form of government, though I think the more modern forms of "tribal Protestantism" are a reasonable analogy for the difficulty.  The public consensus might well decide, for example, that we are a Christian nation, moreover a Protestant Christian nation, but  the moment we must enact this consensus we are confronted with many devilish details.  From there, I imagine, it would devolve quickly into disputes over doctrine and dogma, some of which do and some of which don't have much tangible effect on the daily lives of human beings, but all of which seem to turn fractious nevertheless.  Which storefront "Christian" church represents the true church and who would decide?  An unreasonable question, when we all know, with the absolute certainty of faith, that the FLDS church represents the one true form of "Christianity" and Warren Jeffs should decide.  I'm being facetious, but you get the drift.       

While I'm at it, let me make a secondary admission. I no longer know what I mean by an "open" society either. I could distract myself with a lengthy discussion of Bergson and Popper, but we tend to get this wrong as well.  The core concept is the "closed" society, or a society predicated on a "comprehensive" world view.  By this I mean simply a "society" predicated on a given truth that cannot be contravened or questioned.  Societies predicated on religions, for example, are inherently closed societies because all religions have core tenants of faith that cannot be contravened or questioned.  There is a long argument behind all of this, but for the moment, suffice it to say that closed societies tend toward one or another form of political authoritarianism, in part because there must be someone or something to interpret the "given truth" within mutable circumstances, in part because there must be someone or something to enforce adherence to the dictates of the truth, ostracizing or punishing those who exhibit one or another form of apostasy. The first Amendment rights -- the freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and the press -- are the first things to go.  In a certain respect, all societies, insofar as they are recognizable as a "society," are closed societies.  Even in America, one could go through a long list of those ostracized or punished for one or another form of dissent -- in our case, dissent against a presumptive "majority opinion" -- but the protection of first amendment rights has ultimately marked a significant difference, perhaps the significant difference.  It assures the presence of dissent, which in turn opens up, so to speak, the political authority not only to critique, but the possibility of a "new normal" that accommodates the critique.    

Pat Buchanan gets it right when he suggests that the current political climate --  the rise of "Trumpism" -- is "the tribe."  As he puts it, "the common denominator is that the nation comes first, and that political system is best which best protects and preserves the unique character of the nation."  Or again, as he put it "nationalism trumps democratism."   The pun, I think, was intended, but it begs the question, "what exactly is the unique American character" that must be "protected and preserved?"   In Buchanan's world, China seems to have broken the code, not for us, of course, but for themselves.    As he puts it, "China may be a single-party Communist state that restricts freedom of speech, religion and the press, the defining marks of democracy."  Though it seems more than a bit presumptuous to set himself up as the spokesperson for the Chinese people, yet he goes on to say, "Beijing has delivered what makes the Chinese people proud — a superpower nation to rival the mighty United States," and "Chinese citizens appear willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, the price of national greatness no modern Chinese generation had ever known."  There are a number of assumptions within this statement, however, that many Americans might find questionable, not least the glaring assertion that "restricted freedoms" are "the price of national greatness," along with the implied assumption that, in order to achieve greatness, one must accept a political authoritarianism, if not a "one party Communist state," then a one party Republican state.  One wants to ask "isn't our freedom of speech, religion and the press," not just the defining marks of democracy, but also one of the most significant markers of "our unique character as a nation?"

Clearly, however, he means something else by the "unique character" that must be protected and preserved. There is another subtle difference, however, implicit in the moniker "the Chinese people."  It marks not only a people defined by political boundaries, but also a people defined by race in ways that the corresponding moniker "the American people" cannot.  Societies predicated on the "unique character" of race or ethnicity are even more tightly closed societies, because it creates a paradigm for inclusion and exclusion that cannot be contravened or its value questioned.  Although I'm relatively certain that a little scratching at the surface will reveal that the "Chinese people" are not as homogenous as we in the West might assume, the original sin of slavery nevertheless insured that the "American people" would never be racially homogenous.  And, oh by the way, we in the West (meaning the Western US) have had our own historical Chinese problem, the coolies imported to provide labor, adding a specifically Chinese vein to the heterogeneous American bloodline.  It's not difficult to surmise that the "unique character" Buchanan so wants to protect and preserve has nothing whatsoever to do with the constitutional guarantees of the first amendment, rather a whole lot to do with the hegemony of the racially white, religiously Christian state.  

We could ask the American people the question more directly -- that is to say, are the American citizens willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, for the "greatness" promised by Trump and his acolytes?  Which leads me to a question that has bedeviled me since the election, what exactly counts as greatness?  Being a "superpower nation?" which just begs the question at one remove.  What then constitutes a superpower nation?  Military superiority?  Economic superiority?  Probably both would receive a nod, though ultimately I suspect it's about neither, really.  Reviewing a book by Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, Sean Illing summarizes that "rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a "moral decline" in the country as a whole."  Because it is "never quite clear what that means or how Washington is responsible," Illing suspects that "fears about America's 'moral decline' are really just a cover for much deeper fears about race and demographic changes."  Wuthnow wants to add nuance, but he doesn't disagree, noting that "they feel threatened if they perceive Washington's interest being directed more toward urban areas than rural areas, or toward immigrants more than non-immigrants, or toward minority populations instead of the traditional Anglo population."   As many have noted, however, this sense of threat, and the resentments it engenders, leads them to vote against their interests, particularly their economic interests, and  I am reminded of Milton's Satan, who would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.  I suspect, in other words, that many American citizens are willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, not for a sense of national greatness, but to protect and preserve their place within the traditional racial and religious hierarchies.      

Ultimately, there are two great fears associated with democracy -- tyranny of the majority, and the redistribution of wealth.   The current conservative party is dominated by both fears.  On the one hand, to say that many of Trump voters actually voted against their economic interests is to say that many voted against the party that would, through progressive taxation, redistribute the accumulated wealth of the very wealthy in their direction, though that redistribution would also, perhaps disproportionately, benefit "undeserving" minority populations.  They voted against their economic interests, at least in part because they feel threatened by "demographic changes," the very real sense that we are rapidly becoming a "minority majority" country, and the very real fear that those "minorities" will exercise (some would say, "are exercising") the same sorts of "tyranny of the majority" that the Anglo population has traditionally exercised.  They voted for the party that would protect and preserve the "unique character of the nation," aka white Christian privilege. 

On the other hand, of course, not all Trump voters actually voted against their economic interests.  They voted for the party that would protect and preserve true minority rights -- aka their property rights against progressive taxation.  It helps, of course, that the so-called 1% tend to be white and privileged, and they seem perfectly willing, at least in the political arena, to dog whistle the baser instincts of the republican base.  Still, one suspects issues of race and ethnicity are largely irrelevant to them.  While it's merely impressionistic and anecdotal, if one is attentive to advertising stemming from the largest global corporations, they more and more are featuring "diversity," to include clearly inter-racial couples.  They do not particularly fear a "minority majority," so long as they form an amenable "market," but an "economic majority turned political," the 99% that might one day rouse themselves and actually vote for their economic interests.  They walk a very fine line.  They depend upon the baser instincts of the republican base to maintain their political position, but at the same time they do not want to alienate their "markets," which of necessity includes the burgeoning minority populations.  At the end of the day, one suspects they are envious of the Chinese plutocrats, whose political position is secure, who can operate more or less autonomously to secure their economic interests without the pretense of "democracy."  

When Tyler Cowen writes that "no, fascism can't happen here" for Politico, I suspect he's right, in a limited sense:

My argument is pretty simple:  American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy.  It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter other radical groups, to seize control of.  No matter who is elected, the fascists cannot control the bureaucracy, they cannot control all the branches of American government, they cannot control the judiciary, they cannot control semi-independent institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and they cannot control what is sometimes called the "deep state."  The net result is they simply can't control enough of the modern state to steer it is an fascist direction.
                   
The sort of collapse that one saw in 1930s Germany, or that one sees currently in Venezuela, probably won't happen here.  Those who see a white nationalist future for America, with a red cross displacing the swastika, are bound to be disappointed.  No matter how strict the immigration quotas, no matter how repressive the gerrymandering, the pressure of demographics is just too great.  And while our constitutional system is biased toward the rural, we are nevertheless an urban and increasingly urbane nation.  Rural civilization and its discontents, no matter its bucolic appeal, cannot hold complete sway.  The real danger is not fascism, per se, but the increasingly anti-democratic (in both senses of the word) plutocrat.  Cowen cites China as an example to support his argument, telling us "these days, the Chinese central government is more bureaucratized, there is a value-added tax, and the government has been evolving toward the bureaucratic structures found in the developed world, albeit with the nondemocratic backdrop of the Communist Party."  One might suggest that, as China evolves to look more like us, we are devolving toward the nondemocratic political structures found in the emerging world, albeit within the bureaucratic framework of modern Capitalism.  Just saying.