Can it Happen Here? review: urgent studies in
rise of authoritarian America
The author writes on the US as an authoritarian state:
‘It has happened before. It will happen again.’
Cass Sunstein’s collection of essays shows
Republican-led decay of US democracy predates Trump – and may be irreversible
after him
Charles
Kaiser
Sun 8 Apr
2018 06.00 BST
The 17
thinkers who have contributed to this new collection of essays come down firmly
on all sides of its central question: is the United States destined to become
an authoritarian state? Multiple points of view are expressed by the book’s
editor, Cass Sunstein, alone.
In his
introduction, Sunstein writes: “My own summary of this book: Absolutely. It has
happened before. It will happen again. To many Americans something like it is
happening now.”
And yet 56
pages later, speaking only for himself, he says the opposite: “In my view, it
really can’t.”
In another
collection, such a contradiction might be a problem. Here, it isn’t. The medley
of viewpoints expressed suggests something much closer to intellectual honesty
than scholarly sloppiness. The truth is, no one can be certain. But whether you
are an optimist, a pessimist or an idealist without illusions (John F Kennedy’s
self-reverential description), this book bombards you with all the reasons that
anyone who treasures democracy needs to be terrified by the current state of
our republic.
It is, of
course, the presence of Donald Trump in the White House that gives so many a
sense of emergency. But like many other recent books, this one argues that the
Trump catastrophe is really just the culmination of 50 years of constitutional
decay, rather than some sudden, unpredictable event.
The Yale
law professor Jack Balkin calls Trump a demagogue out of central casting,
“unruly, uncouth, mendacious, dishonest and cunning”, his presidency a “symptom
of constitutional rot and … dysfunction”. Balkin argues that the rise of
American oligarchy is central to the steady decline of democracy.
He
attributes the growth of oligarchy to changes in how political campaigns are
financed (allowing gigantic amounts of dark money), basic changes in the
structure of mass media which have “encouraged political distrust”, and the
merger of “politics with entertainment”.
“The
central goal of the Republican agenda,” Balkin writes, “… is to deliver
benefits to the donor class”. Republicans have “no scruples about acting in an
entirely shameless manner, as long as the interests of its masters are well
served”. Trump’s populism is just a shameless “Potemkin village”.
Whether or
not fascism is coming to America, it is undeniable that the internet has put
more in place to make it possible than there has ever been before. Its
infrastructure has enabled an almost complete (and barely protested)
disappearance of privacy, and the near-disappearance of the very concept of
truth.
In a
particularly well-focused essay about how Russia is contributing to the rise of
fascism, the former ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power –
Sunstein’s wife – says the current “media environment” gives “propaganda and
falsehoods” unprecedented power.
Power
provides extremely useful history on Russian efforts to interfere with US
elections, which go back at least to 1984, when the KGB secretly campaigned
against Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Just as they did during the 2016 election,
the Russians spread all kinds of false stories, including the idea the CIA was
plotting to give nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa.
Then Power
pinpoints why the Russians were so much less effective back then: “During the
Cold War the vast majority of Americans received their news … via mediated
platforms.” This meant that what they read or saw on television “had to get by
professional gatekeepers”.
As far as
the dissemination of news is concerned, that is the crucial difference between
the pre- and post-internet worlds: the gatekeepers have disappeared.
Add to that
the fact that bots accounted for 3.8m tweets in the final weeks of the 2016
election and that 38m false stories were shared on Facebook in the last three
months of the campaign, and you get some idea of the damage the internet has
inflicted on American democracy.
Fox News
routinely “amplified falsehoods” that discredited Hillary Clinton. All in all
it’s no surprise, as Power points out, that “large numbers of Americans now
view as opinion what were once seen as verifiable facts” – everything from
global warming to the utility of vaccinating children.
Several
contributors focus on the potentially catastrophic reaction Trump could
orchestrate in the wake of a large-scale terrorist attack. The Yale law professor
Bruce Ackerman argues that the prospect of a “draconian response” by Trump
“should jolt serious Democrats and Republicans” into passing a new statutory
framework that would explicitly reject the claim made by Jay Bybee and John Yoo
for the Bush administration “that the commander in chief has the unilateral
power to make never-ending war on the home front”. Unfortunately, with
spineless Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, there is zero chance
of such an initiative now.
In the
category of “it has happened here” already, the Harvard law school dean Martha
Minow recalls the internment of 120,000 Japanese, including 70,000 American
citizens, during the second world war. Despite intense “contemporaneous
dissents” and “scholarly criticism”, the supreme court has never overturned the
decision that made that horrendous episode possible. A Trump spokesperson even
cited it as a worthy precedent for his proposed registry of immigrants from
Muslim countries.
The
University of Chicago law professor David Strauss highlights another instance
when “it did happen in the US”. For roughly 80 years beginning at the end of
the 19th century, “parts of the United States were ruled by an undemocratic,
illiberal, racist regime” and “African Americans were denied the right to vote
and were violently repressed … with the tacit approval of the government”.
Right now
there are really only two things that can restore our faith in the rule of law
and beat back lethal tendencies toward fascism. The first is a successful
conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the alleged
misdeeds of Trump and his dubious minions. The other is a new wave of energy
from the progressive majority in the November elections, which could replace
Trump’s Republican supplicants with Democrats who would actually impose serious
limits on this White House.
As the New
York University law professor Stephen Holmes puts it towards the end of the
book, even if our system doesn’t “guarantee good governance”, a change in the
team in power can still produce “a sense of buoyant expectancy” and “social
energy throughout the community”.
The main
reason for optimism about such new energy did not exist when this book was
printed: the teenaged Americans now fighting to bring sanity to the nation’s
gun laws. These magnificent young people must become the vanguard of a mass
movement to rescue America from the Republican donor class – and to return it,
finally, to its senses.
Charles
Kaiser is the author of 1968 in America – republished this month in a
30th-anniversary edition – The Gay Metropolis and The Cost of Courage.
SEE ALSOI:
What if It Can Happen Here?
I scoffed at Sinclair Lewis, but I’ve had second
thoughts since the Jan. 6 attack.
By William
A. Galston
Jan. 4,
2022 12:49 pm ET
(...) "It is worth
transcribing the beginning of an opinion of William Galston published in the
Wall Street Journal on January 4, under the title "What if It Can Happen
Here?". "Throughout my adult life, I've read books like Philipe
Roth's The Conspiracy against America, or It May Happen here, by Sinclair
Lewis, with a relative interest. The counterfactual arguments were intriguing
—what if an American version of Hitler came to power? —but without any
practical interest. I read Lewis's title without any irony: it could never
happen here. Over the past year, I began to wonder. I'm torn between the fear
of being complacent and the fear of being alarmist. Was the attack on the
Capitol the result of a particular confluence of events or the foreshadowing of
what could come from even worse? Am I suffering from a lack or an excess of
imagination?" Galston, an academic at the Brookings Institution, has some
answers that don't point in the best direction. Your initial
doubts are also ours."
TERESA DE SOUSA / PÚBLICO
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário