This country is failing, in action and in imagination, over and over again already.
From the piece by Tom Scocca posted 30 Oct 2018:
This country is failing, in action and in imagination, over and over again already. Our public conversation misses the fundamental point. The warnings and the rebuttals to the warnings have revolved around the drastic, epochal historical questions: Is this what it was like with the Nazis? Are we becoming the Third Reich? Is that where we’re headed?
What that line of debate overlooks is that going only halfway Nazi would be more than bad enough. Going a quarter of the way Nazi would be. What’s dangerous about authoritarian demagoguery, or ethno-nationalism with fascist overtones, or whatever you might call this brutish and corrupt government, isn’t merely teleological—that eventually, it could arrive at the most terrible endpoint, where the president grows a tiny mustache and they change the flag and the people who go into the camps are not just bureaucratic nonpersons but actually dead. The danger is also that right now, already, what’s happening is degrading and violent and evil. And it is getting worse.
Maybe it’s a function of American exceptionalism and belief in progress that we struggle to imagine anything but the extremes: a land of liberty and self-determination (regrettably a little off track at the moment), or a totalitarian death machine. Look around at the other possibilities. Try Turkey... Or try the Philippines...
Believe the president when he says the press is the enemy. And understand, in return, that Trump is the enemy. Saying Trump is the enemy doesn’t mean you’re campaigning for the Democratic Party. For a journalist, Trump is the enemy because he is a liar and a crook and a thug, and he sits in a position of the highest power.
When he praises the congressional candidate for body-slamming the reporter, your response to that doesn’t function as some bank-shot feat of electioneering in a political race that you have to be delicate about. It’s a defense of the basic right to live in a free society where politics isn’t reduced to violence, and where powerful people are accountable.
Outside governance and electoral politics, the press understands that you don’t have to respectfully give liars and crooks space to operate. You pound them, because your job is to tell the truth about things, and the truth about lies and crimes is news. If Trump were a slumlord, holding 10,000 tenants in misery by running his properties the way he runs the presidency, no one would challenge the right of a newspaper to crusade against him, to hammer every story about his corruption and abuse until his business failed.
Instead, because he’s in charge of the mightiest country in the world, the press treats his lies and abuses as the basic terms everyone else has to live under. He yells about the caravan, and the caravan has to be treated as a serious news story. He declares the Fourteenth Amendment void, and the smarmy Axios reporter smiles along—and then, as the story moves out into the rest of the press, the status of his power to nullify the Fourteenth Amendment becomes “unclear.” His lie that no other country grants birthright citizenship gets published verbatim, as news, and only after that does it begin to get desperately, retroactively fact-checked.
He’s not Hitler. He has no interest in conquering the world and subordinating it to his vision of the total political state, except to the extent that his only real idea about a total political state is one where rich people take all the money and trash everything with impunity. He is too lazy to run a government, except as an ongoing performance of nonsensical public gestures, for the grifters and schemers and fanatics around and below him to try (or not try) to turn into policies. In place of the Wehrmacht and its battle planners, he has a vast, bloated global deployment of troops and drones and mercenaries, carrying out history’s most expensive slow-motion defeat, with no oversight or purpose.
That broken war machine and its broken wars were not anything he came up with. It’s all too big for him to think about, so he lets the generals and the CIA run it, and promises them all more money and less oversight, while he tries to convince someone to squeeze the most interesting parts of it all down to a parade he can watch. The ethnic cleansing is the same thing: He’s a bigot but could never summon the mental effort to make a system of it. The steakhead ICE cops and the white-supremacist ideologues can work out the details.
One response to all this is to say that these bad things have always been with us, that Trump is the inheritor of historically racist institutions, unchecked nihilist capitalism, a monstrous military-industrial complex, and a political system bent to serve the greed of plutocrats. None of this is incorrect. And unquestionably it’s true that he is a figurehead for a party and a movement that were around long before his political career began, and that they rally beside him and go along with him because he’s going where they’ve always meant to go.
But that is why it is so important to recognize, at the same time, that he and they are moving. Getting the same things, but more of them, does not mean getting more of the same. It is worse now than it was last year, and last year was worse than the year before.
