This essay by Christopher Browning, an historian and the leading scholar on the Holocaust and Germany in the interwar period of the 20th century, in which he compares the rise of an illiberalism at that time to the rise of illiberal democracy in the United States today, provided a clarity to my understanding of the current era in the United States that I really needed. It will serve as the filter through which I can best interpret what is going on in the Trump era, and the role of the Republican Party in the suffication of democracy in America.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/
Trump's role in this process includes not only the demonization of a free press, encapsulated in "the press is the enemy of the people", a familar refrain of Trump by now, along with the claim that any press unfavorable to himself is "fake news", but, if Browning's analysis is correct, we must expect the demonization of the Democratic Party by Trump as well. And, indeed, in his rallies just prior to the Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, that is exactly what we see, as he referred to Democrats as "evil people" for simply speaking out against the confirmation of Kavanaugh.
Leading up to the November midterm elections, Trump will continue to paint the Democrats as 'evil people". He will do this to energize his base to vote and counteract any blue wave. But, in so doing, he will continue his effort to marginalize anybody who opposes him as the enemy of America. The danger of such a stance should be obvious to any thinking American, but as Adam Serwer of The Atlantic points out, for the people who attend Trump rallies, the core of his base, a core that amounts to a cult, the cruelty expressed by Trump is the whole point:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
We can expect Trump to pound home the meme of Democrats being the enemy of the people in order to convince his base they must come out to defend his agenda by protecting the Republican Party. Hence he will essentially enlist this base in the continued suffication of democracy in America so well described by Browning's essay.
Browning's description of how well Mitch McConnell and the Republicans have worked to ensure a dictatorship of the minority in American politics, illustrates just how difficult the days, the decades, ahead will be. I know for myself this forces me into the position of seeing the Republican Party as the enemy of our democratic institutions and our democracy as we have known it in the pre Mitch McConnell led era. From Browning's essay:
"If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings."
So long as Trump continues to paint Democrats as "the enemy" in his pre midterm rallies, and so long as the Republican leadership embraces his effort to demonize the minority party, defenders of democracy in America must point out the insidious suffication of our democracy that such an effort by Trump, and such complicity by the Republicans, represents. For me, personally, Browning's essay has provided the clarity I needed to see what is happening in these early decades of 21st century America. The stakes could not be higher, and the fewer are the citizens of our republic that sleepwalk through our times, the better our chances to resist this rise of authoritarianism and the tyranny of the minority in America.
But, at this moment in our history, what Browning outlines is happening in the Trump/Republican response to the Mueller probe is what we should likely expect will be their illiberal response:
"Faced with the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the US election and collusion with members of his campaign, Trump and his supporters’ first line of defense has been twofold—there was “no collusion” and the claim of Russian meddling is a “hoax.” The second line of defense is again twofold: “collusion is not a crime” and the now-proven Russian meddling had no effect. I suspect that if the Mueller report finds that the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with Russians does indeed meet the legal definition of “criminal conspiracy” and that the enormous extent of Russian meddling makes the claim that it had no effect totally implausible, many Republicans will retreat, either implicitly or explicitly, to the third line of defense: “Better Putin than Hillary.” There seems to be nothing for which the demonization of Hillary Clinton does not serve as sufficient justification, and the notion that a Trump presidency indebted to Putin is far preferable to the nightmare of a Clinton victory will signal the final Republican reorientation to illiberalism at home and subservience to an authoritarian abroad."
