Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Loyalty Über Alles
​

IN LATE MAY, TWO WEEKS AFTER House Republicans sacked Cheney, Graham made it clear that all values or ideas under discussion within the party would be subordinated to Trump.

The Reagan Foundation and Institute was launching a speaker series titled “A Time For Choosing.” Republican leaders had been invited to answer the question “What should the Republican Party stand for?”

Graham rejected the question as asked-and-answered. “The Republicans have already chosen,” he declared. “If the primary were held tomorrow, President Trump would win . . . going away.” The more important question, Graham countered, was about personal loyalty, not ideas. “Would you support President Trump if he’s our nominee? Every Republican needs to be asked that question,” he said.

Meanwhile, Graham peddled a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 election. He claimed that a “‘Deep State’ science department” had “played a prominent role in the defeat of President Trump” by suppressing evidence that a Chinese lab leak had caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a lot like the corrupt Russia investigation, Graham suggested. “They shut down an inquiry that I think could have changed the election,” he told Brian Kilmeade. If Graham couldn’t prove that Trump had been cheated after ballots were cast, he would argue that Trump had been cheated indirectly, before people voted.

On June 18, Graham spoke in Florida at a conference of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. He proudly asserted that on his first visit to Trump in the White House, he had told the president, “I think God has put you here.” Graham also told the crowd that there had been “a lot of shenanigans” in the 2020 election. A month later, on Fox News, he repeated that Trump “owns the Republican party. . . . This is the party of Donald Trump. If you think otherwise, you’re in for a rude awakening.”

By the fall of 2021, Graham was ready to go after McConnell. Trump was angry at McConnell for cooperating with Democrats on raising the national debt ceiling. Graham entered the fight on Trump’s side and advised McConnell that he had better appease Trump, or else. “If you’re going to lead this party in the House [or] the Senate, you have to have a working relationship with Donald Trump,” said Graham. He made it clear that if McConnell failed to satisfy Trump, Graham would vote to oust McConnell as the party’s Senate leader.

This threat made a mockery of Graham’s original rationale for supporting Trump. In 2015 and 2016, he had tried to keep Trump out of power. Only after Trump won the 2016 election had Graham fully submitted to him. At that time, Graham reasoned that he should serve the new president for two reasons: because Trump had a mandate from the people and because Trump held the nation’s most powerful office.

Now Trump had lost his mandate and his office. McConnell, conversely, had been overwhelmingly re-elected to the Senate and to his post as Republican leader. If Graham truly revered democracy, he would expect Trump to make peace with McConnell.

Instead, Graham demanded that McConnell make peace with Trump. Now that the principle of respecting democracy no longer justified submission to Trump, Graham discarded the principle. He didn’t revere the will of the people. He revered the will of Trump.

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Graham told his Republican colleagues that by staying in Trump’s orbit, he was tempering the former president’s behavior. He told the same story to reporters who asked about his friendship with Trump. But Trump showed no signs of being tempered. Instead of backing away from his attacks on the rule of law, he became more aggressive.

On January 29, 2022, at a rally in Texas, Trump offered to pardon people convicted of crimes on January 6th. “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6th fairly,” he said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”

The next day, Trump defended his attempt to have Pence, in Trump’s words, “change the Presidential Election results.” In a written statement, Trump said the vice president had the right to do this unilaterally. Trump condemned a bill that would “take that right away,” and he lamented that Pence “didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”

When Graham was asked about Trump’s preemptive offer of pardons, he called it “inappropriate.” But he still didn’t blame Trump for inciting the people whose crimes the former president was openly defending.

A week after Trump’s comments about pardons and overturning the election, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution of censure. It wasn’t a censure of Trump. It was a censure of Cheney and another House Republican, Adam Kinzinger, for working with Democrats on a committee to investigate January 6th. The resolution declared that the RNC would “immediately cease any and all support” of Cheney and Kinzinger.

The RNC agreed with Trump that people who were under investigation for their roles on January 6th, or in various plots to overturn the election, were the true victims. They were “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” according to the resolution.

McConnell spoke out against the resolution, but Graham defended it. Graham said the RNC was standing up, rightly, for “the people who went to the rally.” He agreed that they were just “exercising their constitutional rights.”

During the summer of 2022, a series of hearings held by the House January 6th Committee exposed Trump’s conspiracies to overturn the 2020 election. He had tried to coerce the Justice Department to declare the election corrupt. He had pressured state officials to “find”—Trump had used that exact word—enough votes to overturn the results. He had told his militant supporters to march on the Capitol, knowing that many of them were armed. Then, for hours, he had watched the attack on TV, rebuffing entreaties to tell the mob to go home.

None of this moved Graham. On June 9, as the hearings opened, he said the committee was just “trying to blame President Trump” and “change the outcome of the midterms.” There was no good reason to air the evidence, Graham suggested, since January 6th was “something every American’s made up their mind about.”


Weeks later, after dozens of witnesses had testified about Trump’s crimes, Graham dismissed the committee as a “sham, one-sided Star Chamber tribunal.” Nearly all the witnesses were Republicans, but Graham pretended that the hearings were a partisan hit job. “This investigation would make the Soviet Union cringe,” he scoffed. “Everybody on the committee has one goal: They want to get Trump.”

On June 17—a day after witnesses described Trump’s persistent attempts to coerce Pence to overturn the election—Graham spoke in Nashville at another conference of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. “You know what I liked about Trump? Everybody was afraid of him, including me,” Graham told the crowd. “Don’t you miss that? Don’t you miss an America that people respected and were a little bit afraid of?”

Three hours later, Trump showed up to tell the Nashville audience what he would do if he regained power. “January 6th defendants are having their lives totally destroyed,” he said. “If I become president someday—if I decide to do it—I will be looking at them very, very seriously for pardons.”

Republicans didn’t have to put up with this. There were many other politicians the party could nominate for president instead of Trump. The most obvious was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But Graham—who had said in 2016 that the nominee should be anyone but Trump—now insisted that only Trump would do. “This is Trump’s party,” said Graham. “I like Ron DeSantis, but I know what I’m getting with Trump: the good, and the bad, and everything in between.”

The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Return of the Orange God-King

TRUMP’S DECLARATION OF WAR on RINOs—Republicans in name only—set the stage for the next two years. He could no longer control the party through presidential power. But he still had a weapon: fear.

specialto.thebulwark.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 4

Endgame
​

IN AUGUST, SIX WEEKS AFTER the January 6th Committee detailed Trump’s complicity in the attack on the Capitol, Graham again invoked the threat of violence on Trump’s behalf.

When Trump left the White House in January 2021, two weeks after his coup attempt, he took hundreds of classified documents—apparently in violation of the law—to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. For a year and a half, despite multiple requests to return the documents, he failed to surrender many of them. So on August 8, 2022, while Trump was away, the FBI searched the estate to recover the documents.

When Trump found out about the search, he erupted. He asserted, falsely, that the estate was “under siege, raided, and occupied” by agents who might have planted the documents.

Graham joined Trump in smearing the FBI. The search was part of an “endless effort to destroy Donald Trump,” the senator suggested.


Then Graham went further. “If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information,” he predicted, “there’ll be riots in the streets.” The reason, he explained, was that Trump’s supporters would be furious, because Hillary Clinton hadn’t been prosecuted for having classified files on a server in her basement when she was the secretary of state.

Three minutes later—in case anyone thought he was joking or speaking figuratively—Graham repeated his warning. “If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information,” he said, “there literally will be riots in the street.”

Again, Graham wasn’t endorsing riots. But for the second time in two years, he was raising the prospect of violence to discourage legal action against Trump.

In effect, Graham was exploiting the threat of bloodshed—which was all too plausible after January 6th—and he was laundering that threat into a high-minded rationale about keeping the peace. Without any explicit or implicit coordination, Graham had formed a symbiotic relationship with Trump’s militant supporters. They supplied the prospect of violence. And he used that prospect to intimidate public officials who sought to hold Trump accountable to the law.

---

As the 2022 midterms neared, Graham dialed up the rage. “I want every liberal to be miserable come election night,” he told Fox News viewers. He said a victory for Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for senator in Georgia, would be especially sweet “because they hate him so much.”

In 2015, Graham had rebuked Trump for vilifying illegal immigrants as invaders. “Beating on immigrants is, like, the oldest game in the book,” the senator had complained. “In Donald Trump’s world, you know, the illegal immigrant’s going to rape your wife and steal your job.”

But that was then. Now Graham played the same game. He told Fox viewers, “Our way of life is under attack. Your family’s under attack. We’re being invaded by illegal immigrants.”

After the polls closed on November 8, 2022, Graham misled Fox viewers about the results, and he suggested that if Republicans lost, the vote counts were fishy. On November 9, he claimed that the race for governor of Arizona was “over”—Republican Kari Lake would win comfortably—and that based on the returns from Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the GOP’s nominee for the Senate, would definitely take that seat. “There is no mathematical way Laxalt loses,” Graham declared in a Republican conference call on November 10. “If he does, then it’s a lie.”

But it wasn’t a lie. Laxalt and Lake were defeated, and Republicans came up short in their bid to retake the Senate. Trump and Graham responded by blaming McConnelland trying to oust him from GOP leadership. They failed.

On November 15, Trump announced that he would run to reclaim the presidency. He said the United States should adopt a policy inspired by China’s dictator, Xi Jinping: immediate, one-day trials—followed by execution—of anyone charged with selling drugs. Trump also pledged to send the National Guard into American cities to “restore public safety,” “even if they don’t want the help.”

Graham loved the speech. “If President Trump continues this tone and delivers this message on a consistent basis,” the senator tweeted, “he will be hard to beat.”

On December 3, Trump called for the “termination” of constitutional constraints on the seizure of power. He claimed that Twitter and other Big Tech companies had conspired with Democrats to defeat him in 2020, and therefore he should be immediately reinstated as president or the election should be redone. “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote.

When reporters asked Graham about Trump’s statement, he conceded that it was “inappropriate.” But he also said the former president had a point. “What happened at Twitter was wrong,” Graham argued. He complained that Trump’s enemies were always trying “to bend the rules to get Trump.”

When Graham was asked whether Trump’s statement disqualified him from the presidency, he replied: “I don’t think so.”

In fact, Graham insisted that Trump—the man who had just called for suspending the Constitution—was the only person fit to lead the nation. And the reason, according to Graham, was that no one else could inspire the same fear.

On January 28, 2023, Trump came to South Carolina to unveil his campaign leadership team in the state. Graham stood proudly beside him. In his speech, Trump repeated that “massive cheating” had cost him the 2020 election. He also defended the insurrection, complaining that “law enforcement” had “put American patriots in jail.”

Trump had learned from his time as president. What he had learned was that civil servants—government employees dedicated to the United States, not to him—had gotten in his way. In a second term, he would purge them. “We’re going to find the Deep State actors who have burrowed into government, fire them, and escort them from federal buildings,” he declared, bringing to mind images of the expelled Vindman brothers. “And it’ll go very quickly.”

When Trump finished speaking, Graham shook his hand and congratulated him. Two days later, Graham went on Fox News to call for the former president’s restoration. Hebragged that Trump had “scared the crap out of Mexico” and, by threatening to leave NATO, had frightened Europe into paying more for its defense.

Other Republican presidential candidates might run on the same policies, but only one man could “bring order out of chaos,” said Graham. “There are no Trump policies without the man, Donald Trump.”

As the 2024 race geared up, Trump returned to the campaign trail with a stark message: If he were to regain power, he would resume the despotic ambitions of his first term. And he would go further.

There would be no apology for his coup attempt. In speeches and social mediastatements, he declared that the January 6th insurrectionists were the country’s truepatriots. He demanded the release of many who had been convicted or charged andjailed. He collaborated with them to produce a song, which he proudly promoted (“It’s Donald Trump and the J6 prisoners,” he told Hannity) and played at a campaign rally. He said the members of the House January 6th Committee should be prosecuted fortreason.

Trump claimed dictatorial powers. He ruled out any attempt to hold him legally accountable for January 6th, asserting that “as President, I have Complete and Total Immunity.” He dismissed legal constraints on the president’s authority to send the National Guard into cities. “The next time, I’m not waiting” for state or local approval, he said. As to the classified documents he had taken to Mar-a-Lago when he left office, he insisted that he couldn’t be prosecuted because “as president, I have the right to declassify documents, and the process is automatic if I take them with me.”

To his followers, Trump promised vengeance and one-man rule. In a speech to CPAC on March 4, he told them: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Three weeks later, at a rally in Waco, Texas, he alluded again to domestic enemies: “I am your retribution. We will take care of them.” He pledged to “cast out the Communists and Marxists,” and heoutlined a “plan to dismantle the Deep State.” It would begin with “restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” he said. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”

In foreign policy, Trump called for pure extortion. He said he would extract “preferential treatment” for American products by threatening to withdraw U.S. troops from allied countries. He also suggested that the United States should use military deployments and security aid to gain an ownership stake in these countries. “In business, you put up money, seed money,” he explained. “You end up owning the country.”

In 2015, Graham had viewed such threats—the lawlessness, the despotism, the demands for war crimes—as a menace to the republic. But now he saw only the advantages of having a strongman in power.

On April 5, at a press conference in South Carolina, a reporter asked Graham why Trump should be president again, especially after January 6th. Graham pointed again to the fear Trump inspired. “I had a front-row seat to his presidency,” said Graham. “Nobody could have done what he did. I was there. China was afraid of him.” Mexico was afraid, too, because “they saw what he did to China,” the senator added.

With Trump back in the White House, the world would cower. “I’m tired of being afraid of Iran,” said Graham. “I would like Iran to be afraid of us.”

Sometimes I wonder whether the Graham of 2015 is still there, hidden inside the Graham of 2023. Does he know, somewhere in his mind, that he lost his way? Is it possible to reach through his layers of self-deception and connect, even briefly, with the man he used to be?

I never got a chance to try, because he declined to be interviewed for this story. But one of Graham’s former colleagues did get that chance.

On March 20, Graham sat down with former Sen. Al Franken on the Daily Show. Franken asked Graham whether Trump had lost the 2020 election. Graham conceded that he had. Franken pointed out that Trump had corruptly pardoned Flynn, Stone, and Manafort. He reminded Graham that Trump had been told repeatedly by advisers, prior to January 6th, that he had lost the election. He asked Graham how he could support the restoration of a president “who allowed us to go through this violent insurrection.”

Graham didn’t defend the lies, the pardons, or the insurrection. He sidestepped those points. He argued that Trump had done what Graham wanted “on the things that I care the most about: national security.” And he posed his own query to Franken, premised on the crimes and abuses liberals attributed to Trump.

“Here’s the question for you and maybe others,” said Graham. “Trump’s trying to come back. I think he’s got a better than good chance of winning the primary and a 50-50 chance of being president again. And you’ve got to ask yourself . . . how can that be?”

After seven years of defending and abetting Trump—seven years of transforming the Republican party into a vehicle for one man’s power—Graham thought that was a question for somebody else.

The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Return of the Orange God-King

TRUMP’S DECLARATION OF WAR on RINOs—Republicans in name only—set the stage for the next two years. He could no longer control the party through presidential power. But he still had a weapon: fear.

specialto.thebulwark.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Epilogue: Lessons​

Part 1

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.

Here are some of the lessons I learned.

1. Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
2. Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
3. Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
4. Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
5. Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
6. Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
7. Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
8. Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
9. Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
10. Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
11. Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
12. Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
13. Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
14. Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
15. Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
16. A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
17. Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
18. Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
19. It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
20. It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.

Epilogue to The Corruption of Lindsey Graham

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies...

specialto.thebulwark.com

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

Should Graham be charged with aiding and abetting Trump's insurgency?

 

[Sixties Fan]

Should Graham be charged with aiding and abetting Trump's insurgency?

So many of them should, as some of them were doing 1/6.

Maybe with time, depending on evidence. Too slow, unlike other countries which fired their Presidents or people in Congress. But they do not have the anti democracy gang we have been having here. That is the difference.

 

[Hutch Starskey]

I believe what he did was impeachable BUT impeachment is a huge undertaking and not something you try and squeeze into a couple weeks.

Made a whole lot easier when there is tons of easy evidence.

 

[Hutch Starskey]

Intelligent people don’t read propaganda. Which is all you post.

One could only reach such a conclusion after having read it.

 

[Mac1958]

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.

Authoritarianism can only exist if the system around it, allows for it. And our political/electoral "system" (ha) does exactly that. In fact, it INCENTIVIZES and REWARDS it. Our "system" (ha) is naturally going to bring out the worst impulses in its participants.

So, it's up to us: We find a way to fix the "system" (ha), or we keep bending over for it. To remove the worst incentives, we can make changes like:

• Short term limits
• Publicly-funded elections
• Bipartisan redistricting commissions
• Ranked choice voting
• Nonpartisan primaries

Institute those changes alone, even though they aren't perfect, and you change incentives and behaviors virtually overnight. It would surely take a while, but either we get started on this or we don't.

Forward Party

The Forward Party is fighting for the American people with practical, common-sense solutions. Join us on the most critical mission of our era - building the foundation for a representative and stable democracy. Not left. Not right. FORWARD.

www.forwardparty.com

 

[Hutch Starskey]

Part 2

Don’t Even Pretend To Be a Fair Juror​

​

REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS had no interest in hearing about Trump’s latest misconduct. Before the Ukraine investigation could even begin, they dismissed it.

On September 25, the day after Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would open an inquiry to collect evidence and determine whether impeachment was warranted, Graham rejected the idea and denounced the inquiry as illegitimate. “The only reason Democrats are trying to impeach the president,” he scoffed, “is because they don’t believe they can beat him at the ballot box.”

Graham pursued the strategy he had recommended to Trump: deny and attack. “I have zero problems” with the Trump-Zelensky phone call, he declared on September 29, three days after his conversation outside the steakhouse. Instead, Graham targeted the public servants who had exposed Trump’s extortion. “I want to know who told the whistleblower about the phone call,” he demanded.

In 2018, Graham had blamed the Russia investigation on anti-Trump conspirators in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Now he blamed the Ukraine investigation on the “intel community,” especially the CIA. “When you find out who the whistleblower is, I’m confident you’re going to find out it’s somebody from the Deep State,” he predicted on Fox News. “It would blow them out of the water if, in fact, the whistleblower was connected to a Democratic candidate and came from the CIA world that’s been trying to destroy the Trump presidency [since] before he got elected.”

The new evidence against the president could be ignored or discounted, in Graham’s view, because the Ukraine investigation was part of the plot against Trump. It was “just a continuation of an effort to destroy the Trump presidency,” he told reporters on November 1. “It seems to never end.” On November 14, he urged Senate Republicans to tell Democrats: “You had your shot with Mueller. Nothing happened. Let it go.”

Graham called the Ukraine inquiry “a lynching in every sense.” “The whole thing is illegitimate,” he said. He assured Trump’s supporters, “I have the president’s back, because I think this is a setup.” Privately, he indicated that he believed Trump had blocked the aid to pressure Zelensky to open a Biden investigation. But in public, Graham insisted, “There is no evidence at all the president engaged in a quid pro quo.”

Weeks before the House began its hearings, Graham pronounced the impeachment case “dead on arrival in the Senate.” He refused to read transcripts of witness testimony, watch the hearings, or hear witnesses in a Senate trial. “I have made up my mind,” he announced on December 14. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror.”

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[A printable PDF of this project is available here and a Kindle edition is here.]

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Graham still claimed to believe in democracy. But democracy, as he now interpreted it, meant that no president could be removed during his term. To begin with, Graham argued that removal would override the will of the voters who had elected the president to serve a full four years. It would be “destroying a mandate from the people,” he said. In addition, conviction in the Senate could bar Trump from holding office in the future—a prohibition that, according to Graham, would “nullify the upcoming presidential election,” in which Trump was seeking another term.

Only the people, voting every four years, could choose the president, Graham insisted. Any other intervention would “take the voters’ choice away.”

Protected by this semi-autocratic theory of democracy, the president could do as he pleased. During the Russia investigation, Graham had struggled to excuse Trump’s obstruction of the fact-finding process. But in the Ukraine investigation, Graham didn’t bother to invent excuses. He openly encouraged Trump to bar aides from testifying and to withhold documents requested by Congress. “If I were the president, I wouldn’t cooperate with these guys at all,” he said.

Graham also expanded his defense of collusion. He did this to justify Trump’s requests to the Ukrainian government, which—while nominally disguised as appeals to expose corruption—were clearly aimed at helping Trump politically. The requests had come from Trump and his personal agents, not from the Department of Justice. And the requested act was a televised announcement—specifically, it was planned for CNN—not a careful examination of what Biden had or hadn’t done.

For three years, Graham had been sleepwalking toward authoritarianism by following a lawyerly reflex: Every time Trump abused his power, Graham broadened his interpretation of presidential authority to cover the offense. That was what Graham did now. He argued, in effect, that the president was entitled not only to obstruct the House investigation, but also to conspire with and coerce Ukraine.

At a news conference on January 24, 2020, a reporter asked Graham: “What legitimate foreign-policy interest could be served by having the president of Ukraine go on CNN and announce an investigation into one of [Trump’s] political rivals?” Graham replied that Trump had every right to “insist that the Ukrainians cooperate with us on an investigation.”

Two days later, the Times reported that John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, had witnessed—and had documented in a book manuscript—a meeting in which Trump opposed releasing the aid to Ukraine until Zelensky’s government helped Trump and his allies investigate Biden and other Democrats. Several

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Republican senators wanted Bolton to testify at the impeachment trial. But Graham worked behind the scenes to make sure he was never heard.

Even if everything Bolton had reported was true, said Graham, it wouldn’t matter. The senator maintained that even if Trump had explicitly told aides to “put a freeze on the aid because I want to look at the Bidens,” that was okay. “The president would have been wrong not to ask the Ukrainians to help,” said Graham.

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On February 4, as Republican senators prepared to formally reject the articles of impeachment, Graham gloated that they had “kicked Schumer’s butt.” “The biggest winner of all, by far, is President Trump,” he crowed. “He comes out of this thing stronger.”

The next day, Trump was acquitted on a party-line vote. Then came the retaliation. On February 7, Trump began to purge officials who had told the truth about his scheme.

By now, Graham was a practiced apologist for the president’s reprisals. In 2017, he had defended Trump’s firing of Comey. In 2018, he had defended Trump’s firing of Sessions. And in January 2020, he had defended Trump’s removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who had been targeted by Trump’s agents in that country as an obstacle to their plot against Biden. When Graham was asked about the ouster of Yovanovitch, he shrugged that Trump “can fire anybody he wants to.”

So on February 7, when the White House expelled Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer who had testified about Trump’s phone call and other elements of the Ukraine scheme, Graham again stood with the president.

The expulsion was flagrantly vengeful: Vindman and his brother—who had also worked for the NSC but, unlike Vindman, hadn’t testified—were marched out of their offices by security guards. But Graham implied that Vindman deserved it. “People in his chain of command have been suspicious of him regarding his political point of view,” the senator insinuated. “When a military officer engages in political bias, they need to be held accountable.”

Graham wasn’t done. He called on the Senate to investigate Trump’s enemies and track down the whistleblower who had revealed the president’s extortion attempt. “We’re not going to let it go,” Graham vowed. “Who is the whistleblower?” he demanded.

Corruption of Lindsey Graham: The First Impeachment

To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. But his supporters saw a pattern of persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the...

specialto.thebulwark.com

An especially despicable chapter in the Graham saga. Eminently repugnant bahavior.

 

[Hutch Starskey]

Part 3

Summer of Rage​

​

IN MAY, POLICE OFFICERS IN MINNEAPOLIS killed a black man, George Floyd, in the course of arresting him for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill. The killing—for which one officer was later convicted of murder—was captured on video and broadcast everywhere. Protests and riots erupted in many cities, and Trump responded by threatening to send in troops. “Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done,” he tweeted. “And that includes using the unlimited power of our Military.”

Graham endorsed the president’s threat. “I fully support the use of federal forces, if necessary, to restore order,” he wrote. Three weeks later, as some people tore downstatues in protest over police violence and other grievances, Graham condemned these troublemakers as domestic enemies. “We’re at war with them, politically. They want to destroy America as we know it,” Graham told Fox News viewers. “To the listeners out there: You may not believe you’re in a war. But you are, politically. And you need to take sides, and you need to help this president.”

In Washington, Trump and Graham wielded power without remorse. In September, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Republicans—having already installed two Supreme Court justices during Trump’s term—vowed to ram through a third.

Grabbing the third court seat was, like the pardons, constitutionally permitted. But it was an egregious betrayal. In 2016, Graham and his Republican colleagues had refused to let President Obama fill a vacant Supreme Court seat on the grounds that it was an election year. In 2018, Graham had pledged to apply the same rule to Trump. “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election,” Graham promised at the time.

Now Graham abandoned that promise. “The rules have changed,” he declared. Speaking for his Republican colleagues, he vowed, “None of us are going to blink.”

As Election Day approached, Graham made the rounds on conservative radio and TV, raising money by hawking himself as a Trump diehard and scourge of liberals. “They hate my friggin’ guts,” he boasted on Sean Hannity’s radio show on September 17. “Let’s kick their ass.” A week later, on Mark Levin’s show, he bragged, “The liberals hate me for Kavanaugh. They hate me for Trump. . . . I need people listening to your radio show, if you can afford five or ten bucks, go to LindseyGraham.com.”

Meanwhile, Trump prepared his followers for battle. He claimed that massive election fraud was underway, and he refused to say that he would surrender power if he lost the official vote count. “The Democrats are trying to rig this election, because that’s the only way they’re going to win,” he alleged on September 12. When reporters asked whether he would “accept the results of the election” and commit to a “peaceful transferral of power,” he refused to answer. “There won’t be a transfer,” he said. “There’ll be a continuation.”

On October 7, during the vice presidential debate, moderator Susan Page noted Trump’s ominous statements. She asked Mike Pence: “If Vice President Biden is declared the winner and President Trump refuses to accept a peaceful transfer of power . . . what would you personally do?”

Graham ridiculed the question. Page’s query “about a peaceful transfer of power was the dumbest question in the history of #VPDebates,” he tweeted. “Only in Washington is this an issue.”

Even after multiple threats by Trump to defy the election results, Graham kept feeding the fires of rage. On October 31, at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, the senator bragged that liberals “hate my guts.” He pledged to stand with Trump, and he celebrated the president as America’s bully. “Donald Trump has got everybody you want to be scared, scared,” Graham told the crowd, naming Mexico and China in particular. He joked that he had warned foreign leaders about Trump: “He’s a little crazy. I’d watch what I do, If I were y’all.”

But it wasn’t Mexico or China that Trump was about to attack. It was the United States.

Corruption of Lindsey Graham: The First Impeachment

To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. But his supporters saw a pattern of persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the...

specialto.thebulwark.com

Abysmal.

 

[Hutch Starskey]

Part 2

Overturning the Vote​

​

GRAHAM DIDN’T JUST DISPUTE the election’s outcome. He tried to overturn it. On November 13, he phoned Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, and asked whether Raffensperger could discard all mail ballots from counties in which relatively high numbers of voter signatures were thought to be dubious. Raffensperger interpreted this as a corrupt suggestion; Graham later insisted he was just asking questions.

Meanwhile, Graham openly pressured Georgia officials to override the state’s results. A week after the call to Raffensperger, Graham claimed on Fox & Friends that fishy signatures should have voided 39,000 ballots in Georgia, “more than enough” to put Trump ahead. “We’re going to fight back in Georgia. We’re going to fight back everywhere,” he vowed.

On December 7, after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp refused to overturn Georgia’s results, Graham responded with a public threat: “if you’re not fighting for Trump now when he needs you the most as a Republican leader in Georgia, people are not going to fight for you when you ask them to get re-elected.”

At no point did Graham endorse violence or explicitly ask state officials to do anything illegal. Despite his incendiary rhetoric and his misleading claims of fraud, he made it clear that he would accept court rulings and would support the peaceful transfer of power. American democracy survived the weeks after the 2020 election in part because Graham and other senior Republicans didn’t cross that line.

But that low standard, paradoxically, allowed Graham and his colleagues to rationalize their complicity in spreading propaganda about election theft. They pretended that their personal scruples—each of them, individually, would stop short of violence or open defiance of the Supreme Court—kept them faithful to democracy and the rule of law.

They were officially against arson, even as they soaked the house in gasoline.

Later, in books and articles about this period, Graham would depict himself as a voice of reason, working behind the scenes to calm the president’s anger. But even in private, he didn’t push Trump to concede. In fact, he encouraged Trump to “keep fighting” in the courts.

At the same time, on TV, Graham fed Trump’s supporters many of the falsehoods and apocalyptic fantasies that would ultimately drive them to insurrection. He didn’t use the word “rigged,” but he repeatedly told Fox News viewers that the electoral system was so stacked against them and so riddled with fraud that Republicans couldn’t prevail. “If we don’t fight back in 2020, we’re never going to win again presidentially,” he charged.

On November 9, Graham told Sean Hannity’s four million viewers that Democratic victories in elections were systematically corrupt. “We need to fight back,” he demanded. “We win because of our ideas. We lose elections because they cheat us.” On December 7, he told Hannity’s audience that Democrats in Georgia had to be stopped before they “steal another election.” On December 9, he suggested that the presidential vote tallies couldn’t be trusted because Trump had “won 19 of 20 bellwether counties that predict 100 percent who’s going to be president.” “How could it be,” Graham asked, that Republicans “grow our numbers in the House, hold the Senate, and Trump loses?”

Even after the Supreme Court dismissed the Texas lawsuit on December 11, and even after the Electoral College confirmed Biden’s victory on December 14, Graham refusedto say the election was over.

As Trump, Graham, and other Republicans worked to sow unrest, the country’s elders worried. In a 60 Minutes interview on November 15, former President Barack Obama cautioned Americans: “There are strongmen and dictators around the world who think [they] can do anything to stay in power.”

Four days after that interview, Graham ridiculed such comparisons. He assured Fox News viewers that Trump was nothing like a dictator. In the left’s hysterical vocabulary, Graham jeered, “A dictator is a conservative fighting for their cause, standing up for their rights.”

On January 6, 2021, thousands of Americans, heeding the president’s call to rise upagainst a stolen election, descended on the Capitol to fight for his cause.

What You Wish For​

​

THE ATTACK ON THE CAPITOL shook Graham. For four years, he had rationalized and collaborated in everything Trump did: obstructing justice, seizing emergency powers, purging whistleblowers, refusing to accept electoral defeat. But the violence Graham saw that day dismayed him. So did Trump’s failure to call off the mob. The president, in Graham’s mind, had finally gone too far.

According to Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in This Will Not Pass, Graham phoned White House Counsel Pat Cipollone during the attack. He told Cipollone that if Trump didn’t step up to condemn the violence, “We’ll be asking you for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.” Under that amendment, Vice President Pence and the cabinet could formally deem Trump “unable to discharge” his duties, thereby replacing him with Pence. Essentially, Graham was telling Cipollone that Trump, in his present state, was unfit to govern the country.

That night, after the mob dispersed, Graham rose in the Senate to call for unity. He finally said what he had failed to say for two months: that the stories of massive voter fraud had been debunked, that Trump’s election challenges had failed in the courts, that the judiciary was the final arbiter, and that Biden was the legitimate president-elect.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way,” said Graham. But it was time, he concluded, to certify the vote of the Electoral College. To his colleagues who were still trying to block the certification, he responded: “Count me out. Enough is enough.”


It seemed that Graham was finally breaking with Trump. But that impression was mistaken. In fact, he was plotting Trump’s return to power.

---

Graham had been thinking about a Trump restoration since the first days after the election. “I would encourage President Trump, if, after all this, he does fall short . . . to consider running again,” the senator told Brian Kilmeade in a radio interview on November 9. “Grover Cleveland won the popular vote, lost the electoral vote in his first term. . . . Grover Cleveland came back. Donald Trump should think about it.”

In a phone call on November 18, Graham advised Trump: “You’re going to be a force in American politics for a long time. And the best way to maintain that power is to wind this thing down in a fashion that gives you a second act, right?” A month later, he toldthe president that for 2024, “You’ve locked down the Republican party nomination if you want it.”

January 6th complicated this plan. Instead of swallowing his grievances and leaving office, Trump had incited violence against Congress. When Graham, hours after the attack, said he hated to see Trump’s term “end this way,” he wasn’t renouncing Trump. He was lamenting the damage that awful day had done to Trump’s reputation and his chances of a political comeback.

At a press conference on the afternoon of January 7, Graham condemned the violence. He also lauded Pence for resisting a pressure campaign, in the days before January 6th, to refuse to count electoral votes. Graham described this pressure campaign in the passive voice so he wouldn’t have to mention that Trump was its perpetrator.

Before the attack, Graham had privately advised Pence that the scheme was unconstitutional. Now the senator made his opposition public. “The things he was asked to do in the name of loyalty were over the top, unconstitutional, illegal,” said Graham.

When a reporter pointed out that the pressure had come from Trump, Graham argued that Trump’s motives were understandable. “The president’s frustrated,” said Graham. “He thought he was cheated. Nobody’s ever going to convince him that he wasn’t.”

This was a remarkable statement.


Graham wasn’t just saying that Trump had been misled. He was saying that Trump was impervious to correction. Like a rapist who refuses to believe that a woman has said “No,” Trump could never accept, regardless of the evidence, that the voters had rejected him. And Trump hadn’t just stewed about his unfounded grievance. He had, as Graham conceded, acted on that grievance by defying the Constitution in an attempt to stay in power.

Graham was describing an incurable authoritarian. But the senator didn’t recoil, as he might have five years earlier. He was now so accustomed to defending Trump that even a coup attempt—by a man who, as Graham acknowledged, would never recognize that the coup attempt was wrong—couldn’t shake the senator’s loyalty. In Graham’s lawyerly mind, Trump’s impenetrable certitude wasn’t an autocratic pathology. It was an excuse.

A reporter asked Graham whether the president was “mentally unwell.” Graham said no, and he blamed Trump’s illegal ideas and false claims about the election on “very bad advisers.” But Graham knew that the root problem was Trump. He knew that Trump had chosen those advisers precisely because they told him what he wanted to hear. The senator would later admit that Trump “would have believed Martians fixed the election if we had told him, because he wanted to believe it.”

Graham wasn’t even confident that Trump would leave office peacefully. At his press conference, he struggled with that question:


Graham didn’t mention at the press conference that he had privately threatened to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. But given Trump’s behavior on January 6th, he held out the possibility of using that provision. “I don’t support an effort to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment now,” he said. But “if something else happens, all options would be on the table.”

In the months after the insurrection, Graham and many other Republicans would try to whitewash what Trump had done and what they had said, both on January 6th and in the weeks leading up to it. But the video of the January 7 press conference stands as a record of what Graham actually believed.

• He believed that Trump had tried to remain in power, against the people’s will, through illegal and unconstitutional acts.
• He believed that Trump would never concede, and therefore Trump would never renounce his coup attempt or accept the Biden administration’s legitimacy.
• He believed that Trump might incite further violence and might not agree to leave office.

And yet, despite all of this, Graham intended to restore Trump to power.

The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Insurrection Day

Graham had lost faith in the viability of a Trump-free Republican party. And he had convinced himself that Democratic-led government would be ruinous. Therefore, Republicans had to win the next election. And to win, they had to placate Trump.

specialto.thebulwark.com

At what point does Graham cease simply being complicit and start acting as a co conspirator?

 

[Sixties Fan]

A Ron DeSantis-backed law tightening restrictions on books in school libraries and classrooms is having a major impact in one Florida county. Orange County Public Schools have at least temporarily rejected a staggeringly long list of books as media specialists seek to remove any books that censorship-happy parents might decide to challenge once the school year starts.

The law in question requires that books where sexual content is a concern are to be removed from shelves while they are inspected. Books are not supposed to be banned for sexual content, according to the letter of the law, unless they are “without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” But that’s obviously not how it’s playing out, and it’s clear that the way things are going is the way the Republicans who put the policy in place intended.

The books on the temporarily rejected list include “A Room With a View,” “Madame Bovary,” “Paradise Lost,” “Into the Wild,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Catch-22,” “Brave New World,” and more. They include books that have been part of the official school curriculum.


There is hope for works that are temporarily on the rejected list while educators consider them: William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was initially rejected, then approved for grades 10 through 12 only, a status it shares with three other Shakespeare plays, the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Guidance from the state told educators to “err on the side of caution” on making decisions about books, and that’s what Orange County Public Schools are doing—erring on the side of caution in an environment in which right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education have flagged literally thousands of books as “concerning.” Orange County’s own guidance to the media specialists reviewing the books warned, “You are tasked with protecting your colleagues, yourself, and OCPS to ensure content being made available to students is in compliance with Florida Statutes.”


(full article online)

Florida law has schools scared to teach Shakespeare

A Ron DeSantis-backed law tightening restrictions on books in school libraries and classrooms is having a major impact in one Florida county. Orange County Public Schools have at least temporarily ...

www.dailykos.com

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

DeSantis is a fascist.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

House Republicans Unveil Most Restrictive Elections Bill in Decades

On Monday, House Republicans unveiled the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, a sweeping “election integrity” bill, which would recommend policy changes nationwide and overhaul elections in Washington, D.C. House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who is the bill’s primary sponsor, introduced the ACE Act as “the most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in over 20 years.” It includes almost 50 standalone bills and is focused on multiple Republican priorities, such as tightening election rules, encouraging voter purges and loosening campaign finance regulations. Although the ACE Act largely offers recommendations for states to adopt, it would enact sweeping changes to election policy in Washington, D.C. as part of Congress’ authority over the nation’s capital. The changes to Washington, D.C. elections are intended to become a model for other states to emulate. The bill would: Require a photo ID to vote, both in-person and by mail, Ban same-day voter registration and require annual list maintenance cleanup, Prohibit community ballot collection and restrict drop boxes, Bar universal mail-in voting, Mandate signature verification for all mail-in ballots, Direct the district to only count mail-in ballots that are received before the polls close on Election Day and Require audits after every election. While the ACE Act is almost certain to die in the Democratic-majority Senate, this bill showcases the harmful wishlist of election provisions that Republicans are already pursuing across the country.

Democracy Docket

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

The ACE Act is the Republican's own document proving that the voters should vote against the GOP.

 

[Mac1958]

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.

Here are some of the lessons I learned.

1. Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
2. Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
3. Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
4. Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
5. Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
6. Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
7. Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
8. Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
9. Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
10. Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
11. Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
12. Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
13. Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
14. Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
15. Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
16. A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
17. Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
18. Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
19. It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
20. It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.

Interesting stuff. A couple of thoughts pop to mind:

It's difficult to see the big picture when you're in the middle of something like this, but I've seen authoritarianism rear its ugly head from both ends of the spectrum in the last several years. I had a zillion squabbles with the Left here over their socio-cultural weaponization of PC & Identity Politics, which I guess is now known as "woke". And now, as always in our hyper-partisan environment, the Right is going FAR too far in response. Pure caveman. And I have to wonder if this is who they have always been.

Second, if we look at the two people at the top of the GQP presidential list right now, they are different kinds of authoritarians. Seems to me that Trump is merely a transactional authoritarian, pulling that lever when it helps him personally within a given situation, which is always, always his top priority. He's not ideological; he's just profoundly needy.

De Santis, on the other hand, looks to be a true, aggressive, punitive authoritarian. Rather than Trump's reactive authoritarianism, De Santis is proactive. His absolutely ridiculous fight with Disney is the most glaring example, coming up with any way possible to punish them. And there have been other examples, of course, in his war against "woke".

Fuckin' ugly.

 

[Sixties Fan]

A new normal? Florida Man running for Congress calls for 'extinguishing' the left

Oh, man, red state Republicans really don’t like Democrats, do they? What could have possibly sparked these DEFCON 1 levels of outrage? Is it the billions in tax dollars blue states funnel to red states through the big, bad federal gubmint? Was it...

www.dailykos.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

But as we look to the week ahead, I’m putting Trump aside and putting on my law professor hat as someone who studies democratic institutions and is concerned with their future. Because Ron DeSantis, with his campaign sagging and his back against the wall, still shows frightening signs of authoritarian tendencies, and we must pay attention, even as the Trump prosecutions continue.

Even if DeSantis’s campaign dissolves and he’s forced to pull out of the presidential races, he’s not going away. He’s still Florida’s governor. And despite his coy statement this week that he’s not a No. 2 kind of guy, it’s hard to imagine someone this ambitious turning down the No. 2 spot on the ticket, especially with a running mate who would be 78 years old when he took office.

Ron DeSantis is not someone who believes in the Republic or in Democracy. He believes in Ron DeSantis and his ascent to power. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has this extraordinary new essay on DeSantis’s efforts to undercut public education and turn it into a tool of authoritarianism. She writes, “Authoritarians are happy to engineer the intellectual, social, and financial impoverishment of the educational sector to get rid of anyone who stands in the way of their dreams of national and ideological purity.” We’ve discussed this aspect of DeSantis’s “accomplishments” in Florida here on Civil Discourse as well, in May, when he signed a law designed to strip academic freedom out of higher education in the state.

Lucid
From Fascism to Hungary and the U.S., Authoritarians Target Universities
"Florida could start looking a lot like Hungary," noted New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in Feb., writing about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's quest to restructure higher education in line with his far-right views. Although many GOP politicians have made…
Read more


DeSantis has also signed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country and tried to silence conversations about race and LGBTQ issues. He’s used undocumented migrants for political theater, transporting them across the country even when they aren’t in Florida to try and score political points. He’s retaliated against critics, like he tried to do with Disney when the company objected to his “Don’t Say Gay” law. DeSantis behaves like a classic would-be strongman, hoping to turn back the clock on much of the progress our country has made.

Something new, and deeply disturbing, caught my attention last week. It started as a local story, and it bears close watching, because the historical parallels are far too obvious and dangerous. Last summer, DeSantis announced that he was reactivating Florida’s “State Guard,” which has been inactive for the last 75 years. He complained that Florida’s National Guard was understaffed and the state needed a force of volunteers to respond to hurricanes and other public emergencies.

Fair enough. But as it turns out, volunteers who signed up for the State Guard found that the program was something other than the civilian disaster training they had anticipated. Reporting in the New York Times calls the training “heavily militarized.” Participants had to train in “marching drills and military-style training sessions on weapons and hand-to-hand combat.” Many people who complained were removed from the program or quit.



A retired naval officer who helped recruit the first batch of volunteers objected to what he perceived as the change in the program’s orientation from the initial goal of training a disaster relief force. He told the Times that when he voiced his concerns on the first day of training, he “was abruptly escorted out.”

Is it a private army? The governor’s office said that one of the Guard’s missions would be “to ensure Florida remains fully fortified to respond to not only natural disasters, but also to protect its people and borders from illegal aliens and civil unrest.” And here’s what DeSantis said to reporters last year: “If you turned on NBC, it was ‘DeSantis is raising an army, and he’s going to raze the planet.’ But, you know, the response from people was ‘Oh, hell, he’s raising an army? I want to join! Let’s do it.’” State officials running the program defended it, saying that the military training made it a good fit with existing National Guard resources.

DeSantis issued a press release on June 30, celebrating the graduation of the first members of the State Guard: “Even though the federal government has underfunded our National Guard, we are ensuring that we have the manpower needed to respond during emergencies…When the need is greatest in their communities, these Guard members will be ready to answer the call.” He encouraged more people to apply, using the language below. The last “requirement,” “ready to be a part of history,” is perhaps just rank melodrama, but it feels ominous in context. Thanks but no thanks. Florida and America do not need a private Ron DeSantis army.



In a 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, President George W. Bush described the critical features of successful democracies. He explained that in successful democracies, “governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite.” President Barack Obama sounded similar themes in his farewell address in 2017. He charged every citizen to work to strengthen our own democracy: “All of us, regardless of party, should throw ourselves into the task of rebuilding our democratic institutions.” As President Obama explained, strengthening our democracy “depends on our participation; on each of us accepting the responsibility of citizenship, regardless of which way the pendulum of power swings.”

Safeguarding healthy civic institutions that allow for public participation in political debate is at the foundation of our system. DeSantis’s authoritarian style of leadership rejects that basic premise, seeking to stifle open conversations, let alone active dissent. Access to a militia-style force would be a dangerous development. Imagine if Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, created a force like this to help immigrants arrive in sanctuary cities and support Black Lives Matter protesters. Fox News would cover it 24/7. This developing story merits the same scrutiny, until the public understands exactly what is happening here.

For so long Trump has been the most pressing threat to democracy. He remains that. But we have to appreciate that the existential threat this country faces will not disappear when Trump does. We need to educate ourselves, our communities and be ready. America was largely not ready for Trump and what he represented. This time, let’s make sure we are.”

I write about this tonight, I suspect, in a somewhat confessional way. I’ve realized that I’ve been trying to convince myself that if Trump is defeated in 2024, we can throw a big bash, celebrate, and get on with our lives. But—and despite the people who will call this alarmist, just as they did in the early days of the Trump administration when many of us tried to raise the alarm that what we were seeing was not normal—we do not have the luxury of living in an era where we can just sit back and relax. Some eras are difficult. Much as the Greatest Generation took on the fight against authoritarianism in Europe, we have to continue our work here. I’ve become increasingly resigned to that view, and I’m willing to accept the challenge because I believe that even though our form of government is not perfect, it is exceptional, and it has the power to be more so.

The American dream is not complete, but we are not stuck where we are today. One of its most important components is that it’s aspirational and that it continues to expand, that we can always envision more that we can do, more people who can be folded into the promise. We live in a time when there are people who want to limit who gets included and advocate for a narrowing vision of America. I have no intention of letting them get away with it. So, friends, let’s get ready for what’s ahead.

The Week Ahead

July 16, 2023

joycevance.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.



(full article online)

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

www.nytimes.com