Why fascism wasn't a deal breaker

As the 2024 presidential campaign was winding down, Tucker Carlson gave a speech at a Turning Point rally for Trump in which he compared the opposition to a disobedient teenage girl.

There has to be a point at which dad comes home….and he's pissed. 

Dad is pissed. He's not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they're his children…. 

And when dad gets home, you know what he says, "You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl, and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it's not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it's not. I'm not gonna lie. It's gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You're getting a vigorous spanking because you've been a bad girl. And it has to be this way."

The crowd loved it. And when Trump came on stage, they chanted, "Daddy's home!"

As Talia Lavin noted at the time, it was a "florid illustration of the way patriarchal family dynamics and punishment stand at the center of contemporary right-wing morality." She goes on to suggest that Carlson's words "had a special resonance for a particular breed of authoritarian conservative: members of the evangelical right," in which "tens of millions of Americans have experienced, firsthand, the consequences of disobeying Daddy."

In the 1970s James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, gave credence to all of that with his book, "Dare to Discipline." As part of this so-called "biblical parenting," Dobson recommended regular corporal punishment of disobedient children from the ages of 18 months to 10 years old, with a spanking “of sufficient magnitude to cause tears.”

For Dobson, the purpose of all of this was to break a child's will, which he defined as a "passion for independence" and a "deeply ingrained desire to have his or her way." The end goal is to force the willful child into obedience, which is achieved either through violence, or the threat of violence. 

Of course, "biblical parenting" mirrors the right wing view of God and how he interacts with his children. That one goes back a very long time. For example, in 1741 Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon titled "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It employs intense, vivid, and frightening imagery to depict the torments of Hell to create a sense of fear and urgency, emphasizing the wrath of an angry God who demands obedience.

Listen to any evangelist today and they'll repeat the same message: "You are a sinner and God is angry. If you don't obey him, he'll send you to hell for eternal punishment." If it sounds like abusive authoritarianism, that's because it is.

Is it any wonder that right wing evangelicals are uncomfortable with a democracy that promises independence to people in the name of freedom and equality? Or that they are much more comfortable with an authoritarian leader who foments fear and promises to punish those who are disobedient? As Katherine Stewart put it:

The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

It should come as no surprise then, that fascism wasn't a deal breaker. To the contrary, it's what they've been looking for. 

Preparing for the zone to be flooded with shit

Historically, a president-elect starts announcing their cabinet nominees by the end of November. But Donald Trump has already announced most of his nominees and plans to finish by next week. Steve Bannon and Sen. Tuberville exposed the game plan recently.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville tells Steve Bannon that Republican senators have a plan in place to confirm Trump's key nominations (including Gaetz and Hegseth) before Trump is sworn in pic.twitter.com/nB15SvDZIa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 20, 2024

The new congress will be sworn in on January 3rd and MAGA senators plan to start their confirmation hearings right away - more than two weeks before Trump's inauguration. 

What's the rush? Bannon answers that question in the clip up above when he talks about "flooding the zone." He explained what that meant back in 2018 when he told Michael Lewis that "the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” 

But the shit isn't going to stop with the nomination/confirmation process. About a year ago Stephen Miller talked to Charlie Kirk about how Trump's plan to deport 10-15 million immigrants was going to work. Here's how the conversation ended:

You go in so many different directions that they can't fight you. You do the deportations, you're simultaneously shutting down the FBI headquarters, you're firing bureaucrats, you go nine different places at once methodically...you have to spread the media thin.

So that's the plan. But rushing through enormous projects like this with the level of incompetence we're seeing in Trump's nominees is a recipe for chaos at best and disaster at worst. 

With this plan to "flood the zone with shit," I'm thinking that it might be best to pick an area of concern and focus my response rather than try to cover everything. For now, I'm most interested in following the implementation of their mass deportation efforts. 

First of all, I'm interested in where they'll start. Paul Krugman pointed out that the whole process will likely be ripe for corruption.

[D]eportations will also become a way to reward friends and punish enemies. Whatever he says, Trump won't be able to round up 15 million people and put them in camps right away. What we'll see instead, at least initially, are scattershot raids on businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants. So which businesses will be targeted, and which will be left alone, perhaps for years? If you think choices of who gets raided and who doesn't will be unrelated to political connections and probably financial payoffs, I have a degree from Trump University you may want to buy.

There's also the fact that one of the states with this largest number of undocumented immigrants - 1.6 million according to Pew Research - is Texas. Writing for the Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera recently noted that "If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater. "

The Lone Star state likes to brag about the so-called "Texas Miracle" that has brought 10 million new people to the state since 2000. The development around that kind of migration has meant a huge boon to the construction industry, while relies heavily on undocumented labor. That's why leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott had engaged in "border theater," but have done little to make it difficult for immigrants to work there. 

Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

Screaming about all of the dangers posed by "illegals" has been good fodder for politicians like Trump and Abbott on the campaign trail. But when the rubber of mass deportation actually meets the road, the choice will be to (1) devastate the Texas economy, or (2) skip over a state that has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants. 

You can bet that I'll be watching to see which one they chose.

The danger of demonizing education

In the aftermath of this election, we're hearing a lot of pundits and politicians suggest that the reason Harris lost is because Democrats abandoned the "working class." It is important that we call that argument out because it's not only wrong, it's dangerous.

These days the standard definition of "working class" is those who don't have a college degree, and the argument that Democrats have abandoned them is almost always paired with the idea that the party has increasingly aligned itself with "elites" who have college degrees. Back in the 1950s, that might have made sense, when about 5% of the population graduated from college. But here's what has happened since then.

Almost 40% of the population now has a college degree, with the number of women recently surpassing the number of men. We see a similar trajectory with African Americans, who started at almost zero in 1950 and now are at about 20% with a college degree. 

For decades, part of the so-called "American Dream" involved parents who sacrificed in order to send their kids to college in hopes they could have a better life. That dream came true for many of us, but now the whole framework has been dumped on it's head. A woman who got a college education in order to become a public school teacher is now an "elitist," while a guy worth $330 billion is some kind of populist leader.

The movement away from an assumption that everyone needs a college education is a positive development. We should all be free to follow the path that is best for us. But in many ways, the script has been flipped to demonize the educated - especially those who are experts in their field (ie, Anthony Fauci). 

For both MAGA and some on the left, the message is that we should abandon expertise and rely on so-called "common sense." That might work when it comes to a seating arrangement for Thanksgiving dinner, but it's an absolute catastrophe when it comes to things like public health, economic policy, or diplomacy. Demonizing experts also makes it difficult to differentiate between the truth and a lie - opening the door to fascism.

All of this is why Trump/Vance have promised to undermine education. For example, Vance gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 that was literally titled, "The Universities are the Enemy." More recently, he suggested that the U.S. should follow the lead of Hungary's Viktor Orban, who seized control of that country's universities and turned them over to his allies. Meanwhile, Trump promised a "massive higher education overhaul," suggesting that he would tax, fine, and sue private universities in order to confiscate their endowments and create "The American Academy," Orban-style.

But that's not all. They've also promised to eliminate the federal Department of Education. That would accomplish four main goals:

1. Eliminate funds for schools with high rates of students living in poverty,
2. Eliminate funds for students with special education needs, 
3. Eliminate federal enforcement of laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion and disability status, and
4. Eliminate federal student loan programs.

Thomas Jefferson is often quoted as saying, "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people." Given the complexities facing a representative democracy in the 21st Century, that has never been more true, or more threatened, than it is today.

 

Trump's MADA: Make America Delusional Again

Since 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy for president, I've been on a journey towards increasing pessimism. 

I remember in the early days when I'd read what his supporters were writing/saying and my internal optimist would tell me that, when reality set in, they'd learn at least a bit about the error of their ways. It never happened. 

I also watched as Trump's sexism, racism, cruelty, and narcissism were put right out there in the open - constantly thinking that his latest outrage (ie, "grab 'em by the p*ssy) would finally lead to his demise. It never happened. 

We just watched Trump close out his 2024 campaign by promising to take revenge against the "enemies within," parrot Hitler by referring to immigrants as "vermin" who are "poisoning the blood" of our country, and promising to be a dictator on day one. As an added bonus, he talked about Arnold Palmer's penis and pretended to perform fellatio on a microphone. I assumed that he'd lose support. It didn't happen.

So now we're preparing for Trump's return to the White House with his determination to wreck the economy via mass deportation and tariffs. If, as everyone suggests, his re-election was all about "the price of eggs is too high," we're tempted to believe that soaring inflation and a recession (or depression) will surely turn his supporters against him. Right?

Not so fast. The first check on that is to remind ourselves that the Covid pandemic surged during Trump's presidency and we experienced the worst recession of our lifetimes. Not only did we all feel the economic pain, millions of people died because he totally bungled this country's response. What did his supporters do? They blamed China, Fauci, and science. Then they went on to blame Biden as he successfully cleaned up Trump's mess. 

To understand how that happens, it is helpful to remember what Julian Sanchez wrote about epistemic closure on the right. He noted that when he injected that phrase into our political discourse, a lot of people thought he was simply talking about an echo chamber or closed mindedness. But it's more complex than that.

So an “echo chamber” just means you never hear any contrary information. The idea of “epistemic closure” was that you WOULD hear new and contrary information, but you have mechanisms in your belief system that reject anything that might force you to update your beliefs…

I bring this up now, because the Trump ecosystem has developed a pretty sophisticated set of epistemic closure mechanisms that work to reject new information that might otherwise pose a problem.

The closure mechanisms Trump set up to inoculate his followers include his references to things like the deep state, fake news, and the swamp. When fact-checkers expose Trump’s lies, it is just fake news. When former administration officials decry the president, they are part of the deep state. 

Trump's narcissistic personality disorder has led him to develop a delusional system for dealing with the realitiy of his failures. As I noted shortly after he took office in 2017, it can be summarized as "lie, distract, and blame." We need look no further than his Big Lie after the 2020 election as an example. He lied about voter fraud, distracted with references to the great replacement theory, and blamed Democrats. 

The problem that we all face now is that a large portion of the electorate has bought into Trump's personality disorder. They have adopted his set of epistemic closer mechanisms to shut off the reality of his failures. To put an exclamation point on that, let's remember than one of Trump's most effective strategies during the 2024 campaign was to ask people whether they're better off today than they were 4 years ago when refrigerated trucks were being used as morgues and lines for food banks were miles long. Astoundingly, too many voters said "no." That is delusion created by epistemic closure. 

What we're going to have to grapple with is that, when Trump tanks the economy this time around, he will once again roll out his lie, distract, and blame strategy. Since I don't suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, it's hard for me to forecast what that will look like. But I have no doubt that it will happen. My concern is that his supporters will believe him and rather than holding him accountable, they'll unleash more hate on those the president choses to blame. 

With all my heart I hope I'm wrong. But for almost 10 years now I've been learning the hard way that the one time Trump told the truth was when he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters wouldn't abandon him.

None of this is meant to suggest capitulation to the very real danger Trump poses. It's just that we have to start by understanding what we're dealing with.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is right about Tulsi Gabbard

Since Donald trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard to be head of our intelligence services, many people have spoken up about how she consistently parrots Putin's talking points - which poses the question about whether or not the next president is turning over our intelligence services to a Russian asset. It is hard to overstate what a danger that poses to this country and our allies.

But Gabbard has attempted to sell herself as anti-war - which is a lie. Representative Ocasio-Cortez recently pointed that out when she told Joy Reid that "A Tulsi Gabbard nomination is a pro-war nomination globally. Point blank, period." 

Let's unpack that a bit.

Folks have been reminding us that, in 2017, Gabbard travelled to Syria to meet privately with Bashar al-Assad, after he had gassed his own citizens as part of the civil war in that country. But we need to dig a little deeper.

The civil war in Syria began when citizens of the country rebelled against the dictatorship of Assad as part of the Arab Spring in 2011. More than any other Arab country, Assad responded with horrific violence against the rebels. But by 2015, he was losing territory. That's when Putin intervened and started a bombing campaign in Syria.

Putin attempted to justify his actions by saying that he was fighting terrorists in Syria. But that was a lie. He was bombing civilians in an attempt to shore up the dictatorship of Assad. Long before Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, they were bombing hospitals, schools, and markets in Syria. The atrocities were so severe that the UN took the unprecedented step of releasing a report charging Russia with war crimes.

What was Gabbard's response? As the bombing began, she suggested that the U.S. should be joining Russia in bombing Syrian civilians -  utilizing Putin's propaganda to suggest that the civil war in that country was all about terrorism.

Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

Then in 2016, Gabbard was one of only three lawmakers — and the only Democrat — to vote against a non-binding resolution calling out the Assad regime for war crimes and stating that the United States should support the establishment of an international tribunal to bring war criminals to justice.

Gabbard's affection for brutal dictators doesn't stop with Syria's Assad.

In 2015, two years after he orchestrated the worst mass killing of protesters in modern history, a smiling Gabbard appeared next to a grinning Sisi on a visit to Cairo, after which she praised him for showing “great courage and leadership” in the fight against “extreme Islamist ideology.”

In summary, when oppressed people stand up to protest against tyranny, Gabbard supports violence and civil war as the tool for dictators to maintain their power.

It's worth noting that the first time Russia invaded Ukraine it was in 2014 after the Maiden revolution got rid of Putin's stooge, Viktor Yanukovych. When that didn't bring the country to heel, he launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. On the very same day, Gabbard sent out a tweet blaming the invasion on Biden and NATO. In other words, Putin's actions were justified. Is it any wonder then, why Russian state television calls her their "girlfriend?" 

Sorting through the noise to try and understand what just happened

After sitting in my discomfort for a few days, I'm ready to try to understand WTH happened in this election. There are an awful lot of bad takes out there attempting to find fault with VP Harris, President Biden, or Democrats in general. But they're all impossible to square with the fact that, no matter their shortcomings, a little more than half of voters supported a delusional, narcissistic bully who has been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and tried to overturn an election.

So here's the take that makes the most sense to me: 

About a month ago I wrote that, when it came to the presidential election, it was all about the lies and the way Trump/Vance used them to create an alternative reality. As it turns out, the lies worked. One of the best ways to document that came from a Reuters/Ipsos poll that was conducted just prior to the election.

What we see is that the more voters believed Trump's lies about crime, the economy, and immigration, the more likely they were to vote for him. Those who believed the truth swung heavily in Harris's direction. 

We're also getting a lot of bad takes on who those lies appealed to. Philip Bump did a good job of debunking all of that nonsense. The first thing to note is that Trump received about the same number of votes that he did in 2020 (it's just that Harris got fewer than Biden). So if we look at the demographics of Trump voters, "his voting base [in 2024] was older, wealthier and about equally White to what it was in 2020."

For example, we're hearing a lot of talk about how Trump won over Hispanics and African Americans in 2024. But here's what that actually looked like:

To all of those who are suggesting that this election was all about populism and support from working class folks, the truth is that Trump's big gains were actually among the wealthy.

What this kind of information tells us is that we not only need to combat the lies from right wing media, we're also being fed a lot of junk information from mainstream media and pundits. So chose your sources wisely.

Over the last few days I've been noting who I will pay attention to and who I'm going to ignore. On the former category, I've been significantly impressed with Rebecca Solnit. Here are a few gems from her latest column at The Guardian. 

I’m wary about anger – as George Orwell once observed, it’s easily redirected, like the flame of a blowlamp, and it has been in this election as people whose own lives were thwarted economically and otherwise got on board with the scapegoating of immigrants. So it’s something to be careful with. Even so, “rage is a form of prayer too,” as Reverend Dr. Renita J. Weems declared after this terrible US election.

I suspect she means that behind that rage is care, and this is something I have found secular activists often forget – you are angry the children are being bombed or the forest is being cleared because you care about them, so it’s not the feelings about the forces of destruction that is primary. It’s the love, and not losing sight of that is crucial...

Not being them and not being like them is the first job, not just as negatives but as an embrace of the ideals of love, kindness, open-mindedness, the ability to engage with uncertainty and ambiguity, inclusiveness...

There are other kinds of resistance that mean making your own life and your own mind an independent republic in which the pursuit of truth, human rights, kindness and empathy, the preservation of history and memory...This does not overthrow the regime, but it does mean being someone who has not been conquered by it, and it invites others who have not been or who can throw off the shackles to join you...

We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving. Let Julian Aguon have the last word: “No offering is too small. No stone unneeded … All of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”

Solnit's words remind me of a song Garth Brooks wrote after the Oklahoma bombing titled "The Change." It's going to be my anthem for a while.

I've also been extremely impressed with the analysis provided by historian Heather Cox Richardson. She was interviewed by Jon Stewart a couple of days ago on his podcast. It is a little over an hour long and I know most people won't take the time to listen to the whole thing. But she's absolutely brilliant (Stewart...not so much). So I definitely recommend paying attention to her - no one does a better job of describing what just happened. 

Doug Muder has always demonstrated a deep understanding of this political era and recently wrote a post titled, "My Way-Too-Soon Election Response" over at his blog The Weekly Sift.

Going forward, I'll be paying a lot of attention to Timothy Snyder, who literally wrote the book on fascism. His most recent column at the New Yorker is titled, "What Does it Mean that Donald Trump Is a Fascist."

To maintain my sanity in the midst of the chaos that is about to come, those are just a few of the people I'll be listening to. 

On a final (somewhat related) note, I'd just like to share this little nugget to help explain why Christian nationalists are so amenable to the alternate reality created by Trump's lies. 

The discomfort I'm sitting in today

I'm still reeling emotionally and doubt that it's a good time to write any analysis about what happened on Tuesday. There are an awful lot of bad takes pointing fingers - which is understandable, but ultimately not productive. Here's a twitter thread from Brad Bauman that I found helpful:

A lot of times we confuse fast with smart. Quick and simple answers at a moment when everyone is trying to make meaning of what’s happening and looking for something to do. We end up doing things that aren’t productive or counter productive when we move that quick.

Sometimes, the right answer is to sit in our pain; sit in our discomfort and feel it, rather than rush to answers or movement.

There will be a resistance, and all of us will be a part of it, individually and collectively.

Let’s take a moment and allow ourselves to process, to feel, to think about what truths arise and then let’s act.

As I "sit in my discomfort and feel it," Rebecca Solnit captured my reaction perfectly.

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. 

I literally cried as I read that. Here's how John Harwood put it:

If you’re accustomed, as I am, to believing that a critical mass of Americans embraces the values of freedom, pluralism, and common sense, the choice voters made defies comprehension. The arc of history in 2024 bent not toward justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. liked to say, but away from it.

Regular readers will know that I've always maintained that President Obama's speech at the 50th anniversary of the Selma march was the most important he's ever given. In it, he defined his view of America and the ideals we've embraced/fought for. VP Harris echoed that vision during her speech in Washington D.C. last week.

I’ve seen [the promise of America] in Americans, different in many respects, but united in our pursuit of freedom, our belief in fairness and decency and our faith in a better future...

Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant. Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing proved to the world that a government of, by, and for the people is strong and can endure. And those who came before us, the Patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us seed our fundamental freedoms.

They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.

These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised, a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.

So America, let us reach for that future. Let us fight for this beautiful country we love.

And in 7 days, we have the power, each of you has the power to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.

What's been shattered is my belief in that America. More than anything else, I'm grieving that loss today.