The A, B, C's of Dictatorship

Harvard prof and Foreign Policy columnist, Steven Walt, has a thoughtful essay, "10 Ways to Tell if Your President is a Dictator."

My fears about Trump’s foreign policy have always been two-fold: that he might pursue a more sensible grand strategy but do it incompetently, thereby weakening America’s international position, or that he will eventually get co-opted by the foreign-policy establishment and repeat the Blob’s most familiar mistakes. Based on some of his early appointments — like Islamaphobe Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security advisor — we might even get the worst of both worlds: unrealistic goals pursued ineptly.

But if you live in the United States, what you should really worry about is the threat that Trump may pose to America’s constitutional order. His lengthy business career suggests he is a vindictive man who will go to extreme lengths to punish his opponents and will break a promise in a heartbeat and without remorse. ...Nor does he regret any of the revolting things he did or said during the campaign, because, as he told the Wall Street Journal afterward, “I won.” For Trump, it seems, the ends really do justify the means.

Walt continues to list 10 warning signs ordinary Americans should watch out for after Trump takes over on January 20th. It's a long but worthwhile read. Follow the link above.

I've been pondering whether Trump might inadvertently do what the moribund Democrats have persistently failed to achieve? Could Trump mobilize the American left? How would it happen? Would it be left versus right? Might America fracture on generational lines - angry old white folks on one side, everyone else on the other?

Trump may unintentionally bring down the very power structure he now thinks he owns, creating the conditions by which he and his order are run out on a rail of unrest. He wouldn't have to check off many of professor Walt's 10 boxes to empower and energize a resistance determined to toss out their mostly corrupt government, Republican and Democrat.

The Struggle Ahead for a Decent Future for our Youth

It's sometimes hard to read a Henry Giroux essay without coming away feeling like you've been dragged into a dark alley and bludgeoned.  In his latest essay, this American intellectual explores what we've allowed ourselves to become, how we've been complicit in our own orchestrated economic, social and political degradation.  Brace yourself.

"The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages."

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Following Hannah Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States. Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children and children are taught to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures designed to cripple their ability to be imaginative.

Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual cretinism evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and denounce almost any form of reason. The citizen now becomes a consumer; the politician, a slave to corporate money and power; and the burgeoning army of anti-public intellectuals in the mainstream media present themselves as unapologetic enemies of anything that suggests compassion, a respect for the commons and democracy itself.

Education is no longer a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is no longer a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible citizenship. Neoliberalism's disdain for the social is no longer a quote made famous by Margaret Thatcher. The public sphere is now replaced by private interests, and unbridled individualism rails against any viable notion of solidarity that might inform the vibrancy of struggle, change, and an expansion of an enlightened and democratic body politic.

...Under market fundamentalism, there is a separation of market values, behavior and practices from ethical considerations and social costs giving rise to a growing theater of cruelty and abuse throughout North America. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly commercialized. Or, they have been replaced by corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins and producing a vast commercial and celebrity culture "that tends to function so as to erase everything that matters." Since the 1980s, the scale of human suffering, immiseration and hardship has intensified, accompanied by a theater of cruelty in which violence, especially the daily spectacle of Black men being brutalized or killed by the police, feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The tentacles of barbarism appear to be reaching into every aspect of daily life. Domestic terrorism has come home and it increasingly targets the young.

Given these conditions, an overwhelming catalogue of evidence has come into view that indicates that nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have implicitly declared war on their children, offering a disturbing index of societies in the midst of a deep moral and political catastrophe. Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the dictates of a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present; they are "the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole." It is little wonder that "these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future" and Zero expectations. Or to use Guy Standing's term, "the precariat," which he defines as "a growing proportion of our total society" forced to "accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living."

...The war on youth emerged when the social contract, however compromised and feeble, came crashing to the ground around the time Margaret Thatcher "married" Ronald Reagan. Both were hard-line advocates of a market fundamentalism, and announced respectively that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem, not the solution to citizens' woes. Within a short time, democracy and the political process were hijacked by corporations and the call for austerity policies became cheap copy for weakening the welfare state, public values and public goods. The results of this emerging neoliberal regime included a widening gap between the rich and the poor, a growing culture of cruelty and the dismantling of social provisions. One result has been that the promise of youth has given way to an age of market-induced angst, and a view of many young people as a threat to short-term investments, privatization, untrammeled self-interest and quick profits.

Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy. Besides a growing inability to translate private troubles into social issues, what is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of the public good, the notion of connecting learning to social change and developing modes of civic courage infused by the principles of social justice. Under the regime of a ruthless economic Darwinism, we are witnessing the crumbling of social bonds and the triumph of individual desires over social rights, nowhere more exemplified than in the gated communities, gated intellectuals and gated values that have become symptomatic of a society that has lost all claims to democracy or for that matter any modestly progressive vision for the future.

Giroux continues with a discourse on the "soft" and "hard" war being waged by neoliberals on North American youth.

In Canada, one child in six lives in poverty, but for Aboriginal and immigrant children that figure rises to 25 percent or more, respectively. By all accounts, the rate of incarceration for Aboriginal youth - already eight times higher than for non-Aboriginal youth - will continue to skyrocket as a result of the Harper government's so-called Safe Streets and Community Act, which emulates the failed policies of the US system by, among other things, strengthening requirements to detain and sentence more youth to custody in juvenile detention centers. Surely one conclusion that can be drawn from the inquest into the tragic suicide of 19-year-old Ashley Smith, who spent five years of her life in and out of detention facilities, is that incarceration for young people can be equivalent to a death sentence.

...Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is obvious in the state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech and most constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. Lawlessness now wraps itself in government dictates. In Canada, it is evident in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's support for Bill C-51, an anti-terrorist bill that further limits civil rights through a pedagogy of fear and racist demonization. It is also apparent in the United Sates in such policies as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the Military Commissions Act and a host of other legal illegalities. These would include the right of the president "to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists."

...Current protests among young people in the United States, Canada and elsewhere in the world make clear that demonstrations are not - indeed, cannot be - only a short-term project for reform. Young people need to enlist all generations to develop a truly global political movement that is accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of digital technologies, the development of new public spheres, the production of new modes of education and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new civic values, democratic public spheres, new modes of identification and collective hope can be nurtured and developed. A formative culture must be put in place pedagogically and institutionally in a variety of spheres extending from churches and public and higher education to all those cultural apparatuses engaged in the production of collective knowledge, desire, identities and democratic values.

The struggles here are myriad and urgent and point to the call for a living wage, food security, accessible education, jobs programs (especially for the young), the democratization of power, economic equality and a massive shift in funds away from the machinery of war and big banks. Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of unfettered "free-market" capitalism. In addition, too many progressives and people on the left are stuck in the discourse of foreclosure and cynicism and need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a "sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things."

...The issue of who gets to define the future, share in the nation's wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, steward and protect the globe's resources and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible citizens is no longer a rhetorical issue. This challenge offers up new categories for defining how matters of representation, education, economic justice and politics are to be defined and fought over. This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities such as Chicago, Athens, Quebec, Paris, Madrid and other sites of massive inequality throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that make communities the center of a robust, radical democracy. I realize this sounds a bit utopian, but we have few choices if we are going to struggle for a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat the present. We may live in dark times, but as Slavoj Žižek rightly insists, "The only realist option is to do what appears impossible within this system. This is how the impossible becomes possible."

Is the Militarization of Cops the Last Straw?

The line between law enforcement and the military is, sadly, blurring.  Today's cops are being equipped with combat weapons and gear, even armoured military vehicles.  They're being trained to operate in military formations - squads and platoons - and they're skilled in some aspects of counter-insurgency.

The bottom line is that this evidences a fracturing of the relationship between governments and their people.  For the public, this may be the last straw as a recent article by Johanna Mendelson Forman of the American University's School of International Service from The Globalist contends:

The appearance of armed personnel carriers, Humvees and other military equipment reveal to Americans – and the world – that U.S. cities are indeed the new war zones.

A key part of the problem is the pervasive access to heavy weaponry by local law enforcement after 9/11. Instead of focusing on community policing – getting closer to the people – law enforcement has actually distanced itself and “tooled up.”

It is scant comfort that local law enforcement agencies sell this as their approach to “homeland security.” Their weaponization – and indeed the militarization of civilian security, as their actions to “defend” themselves against protestors show – is a bridge too far.

...The brutal and violent use of excessive force to arrest Eric Garner, an unarmed citizen, in New York City was inhumane. The illegal chokehold that ultimately killed Garner despite his screams, “I cannot breathe,” reflect two trends that policy analysts have known for a long time.

First, U.S. cities are the newest zone of conflict. And second, this new type of urban warfare mentality has gone hand in hand with a greater tolerance by the U.S. legal system when it comes to holding police accountable for their actions.

Unless we are completely blind, we Americans must urgently realize one painful global reality: What we now see – and practice – at home is precisely the impunity which we Americans so frequently deride in places like Mexico.

There, we know that preservation of the rule of law is often the exception in cases of police corruption or complicity in murder.

But now the shoe is on the other foot: The failure of grand juries to indict policemen in both Ferguson, Missouri, and now in New York City all point to a dangerous conclusion: We Americans are now treating our policing activities as acts of war, and thus hold any offending acts committed in the pursuit of that broader goal to different standards than the civilian ones used to prosecute criminal acts.

Unfortunately, the urban wars of 2014 are not armed conflict as we know it. Instead, they are manifestations of ideological divides like the racism of the police in Missouri or in New York.

These actions are but a mirror that reflects the deeper divides that are rearing their heads all across the country. Whether it is a matter of color or class, all these actions, from Iguala to Ferguson to New York, send a powerful message of exclusion and hopelessness.

And, lest we want to blind ourselves, we must recognize that it is precisely this type of sentiment that lays the groundwork of unrest and instability in any political system.

,,,The result is a potentially dynamic international movement of citizens who have had enough of the status quo and are taking to the streets to make their voices heard.

The demonstrations yesterday in New York City and Washington, DC over the failure to indict police for acts of violence will only grow stronger – unless citizens regain a sense of legitimacy in our criminal justice system.

Of course this sort of thing could never happen in politically stable Canada, eh? That doesn't seem to be how the Canadian Forces see it.  They've even developed an urban warfare camouflage designed to best blend in with the urban setting in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.  I wonder if they'll add patches with the logos of Enbridge or Kinder Morgan?  Our friend, Lorne, from Politics and its Discontents has supplied a link to a very useful article from The Walrus.  It's a thought-provoking essay, especially in this era of the most secretive, authoritarian government in Canadian history.

Here is an article from AlterNet that also ponders how much more authoritarianism Americans can tolerate and the country's emerging, pro-authoritarian culture.

Nobody Has Your Back Any Longer

If you have any faith in government you're suffering from an affliction, a potentially dangerous malaise.

Writing in this month's Vanity Fair,  Todd Purdom addresses the enormous changes underway, some of them quite possibly
civilization ending, none of which our leaders seem to take seriously.  Purdom writes of his United States but most of his observations also ring true for federal and provincial politics here in Canada.

As Barack Obama prepares to take the oath of office for his second term as president, his country and the planet as a whole are experiencing a transformation every bit as revolutionary as the one that shook the world of Renaissance kings and Popes. The scale of that transformation is in some ways deceptive—it’s relentless and yet also quiet, at times almost invisible. But there hasn’t been anything like it in 500 years.

When Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his second term, in 1985, the Human Genome Project was still years away, but the era of genetic engineering would soon be upon us, bringing capabilities we may not want but cannot forestall. Cell phones in the Reagan era were bigger than bananas (if not breadboxes)—it’s impossible to watch the movie Wall Street today without laughing—and the Internet was in an embryonic state, known to few and used by fewer. The rise of the Internet has been the biggest leap forward in communications since Gutenberg; it has changed the nature of information, made privacy obsolete, put vast new power in the hands of corporations and government agencies, and become a weapon of war that anyone can deploy. Money ricochets around the world like so many charged electrons, making a mockery of national borders and undermining the very idea of the nation-state. (China owns two-thirds as much of the U.S. debt as the Federal Reserve itself does.) At home and abroad the availability of sophisticated weaponry has the same destabilizing effect. The migration of peoples from one place to another sparks conflict and violence but also establishes new realities on the ground. When Reagan took office, the United States was 83 percent white; last year, for the first time, more than half of American children under one year of age belonged to a minority group. Meanwhile, the world is run by a new, multi-national global elite that is educated and affluent and owes loyalty mainly to itself, rather than to any cause or country. The Financial Times is its constitution. The “Ambassador” lounges at airports are its embassies.
 
Today we know almost everything, but can’t seem to act on the knowledge or even take it seriously. As George Orwell famously observed, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Geospatial satellites can tell us—literally—where we are at any moment, but they can’t ensure that we move in a sensible direction. Fixed cameras can capture the melting of glaciers through time-lapse photography, but they can’t quell the doubts of climate-change deniers. We have hard data on the deleterious effects of decades of income inequality—and on the benefits of immigration—but can’t agree on policies that might ease the former or productively manage the latter. When the Congressional Research Service produces a report that shows zero correlation between low income-tax rates for the wealthy, on the one hand, and improved performance of the national economy, on the other—thus undermining one of the central G.O.P. arguments two months before the election—the reaction of Senate Republicans is to force the withdrawal of the report. “The Truth” is seen simply as one more topic for debate—a development that is itself a destabilizing force to contend with.


Virtually every issue in the election just ended has its roots in the revolutionary transformation of our times. If anyone knows this, it’s Barack Obama, the first post-global president in American history. His Kenyan-Kansan heritage and his childhood years in Indonesia make him Exhibit A of this changing world, to the fevered horror of his detractors. But he doesn’t talk about it much, and his re-election campaign consisted largely of small-ball themes and time-tested attack tactics against his Republican opponent. It took the devastation of Hurricane Sandy to put global warming back on the politicians’ radar, if only for a moment. Bill Clinton, that tireless citizen of the world, likes to call this epoch “the most interdependent time in human history.” But even he, for all his skill at making the complex accessible, hasn’t really managed to move the discussion into the political mainstream. Our politics has yet to find sensible ways to talk about our revolutionary times, much less grapple with them.

No one can know how historians centuries hence will view the period that runs from roughly the end of the Cold War up through the next couple of decades. It will be surprising if they do not see it as a turning point. Large forces have been unleashed that are beyond easy control, or perhaps any control. Obama has been mocked for his occasional grandiloquence on the most daunting issues of the day, most famously when he clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008 and predicted that future generations would be able to say that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Even if we defy Orwell and prove capable of acknowledging what’s in front of our noses, there’s no way to riddle out the far-future consequences. Gutenberg did not foresee that his movable type—first employed to print a Bible, after all—would lead to an epidemic of freethinking and ultimately to religious wars and political upheavals throughout Europe.

In Ottawa we have a prime minister who suppresses truth as effortlessly as he breathes.  If reality interferes with his pursuits it is reality that must yield.  I wish it could all be undone by a change of government, yet I don't believe it for a second.   Corporatism has prevailed.   Al Gore writes that the forces of corporatism have hacked American democracy, waylaid it to their own purposes.

What evidence is there of a corporatist coup in Canada?   It is manifest in many things such as the lowering of our social defences, the rise of inequality, the decline of our health and educational institutions.  It is blatant in our government's reckless embrace of environmental catastrophe called the Northern Gateway and in the quickstep measures to accelerate the export of massive quantities of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels on the planet.  It is inescapable from the decay of essential infrastructure across the breadth of the country.  It is laid bare in the government's relentless assault on organized labour and collective bargaining.   It is tangible in the demise of a free press, the watchdog of government, and its replacement by a powerful and concentrated corporate media cartel, the lapdog of a collaborative government.  It is spotlighted by the supremacy of globalization and the commensurate decline of our once robust middle class.  The commercial sector no longer serves the country.   Those positions are now sharply reversed.

So long as our political classes won't even acknowledge the intrusion of corporatism into our Parliament and the quiet manner in which it derails democracy, it's bound to get progressively worse.  I don't expect a Conservative to acknowledge it but there's absolutely no excuse for any Liberal or New Democrat to duck the subject.   Hell they're the opposition.  This is precisely what they are supposed to do.  It's what we pay them to do.  It's their solemn duty to our people and our nation.

If they won't act it will be up to us or, far more likely, our children to stand against these anti-democratic forces and throw them over.   Either that or become a nation of indentured servants.

Update -  A timely examination of the role and legitimacy of civil disobedience comes from Sierra Club Canada executive director, John Bennett.