Autocrats, dictators, and our Dynastic age. . . .

It seems to me that one of the most troubling aspects of political culture is the remarkable tendency for autocrats and dictators to garner large amounts of public support regardless of how corrupt, or even murderous, they are. Even in my own lifetime I am sure I can think of a couple of dozen such autocrats who, no matter what they did to their nation or their own people, retain high levels of popular support. The big autocratic names in this kind of popular support are, of course, names like Hitler, Stalin, The Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos, the Perons, the Al-Assad family, Hastings Banda, Robert Mugabe, etc. Other than Al-Assad and Mugabe, I can think of a number of others who are still in power today like Duterte in the Philippines, Putin, Nazarbeyev in Kazakhstan, Karimov in Uzbekistan, etc. Social psychologists and political scientists have done lots of good work on this phenomenon, but making rational sense of something like this seldom helps us make emotional sense of it. It still, as the English say, beggers description. I want it all to make sense but no matter how much I know or understand about people and politics, I just can't quite wrap my head around it.

The Americans are in the midst of this phenomenon right now and it is just as bizarre and weird to me as it always is. Anyone with rational sense understands that Trump is an unhinged narcissist who, other than having little grasp on most other issues facing the US, simply doesn't have the temperament or basic skills for any job in which he has to be accountable, diplomatic, and consensus building. But all of that makes no difference to the fact that he is, in fact, president, he continues to be solidly popular with his base, and despite what we would like to think, it is very very difficult to remove a president from office (that is why it has never been done). Given Trump's narcissism, it is very unlikely that he will be, like Nixon, compelled to resign. And even if he is impeached by the House of Reps, it is very unlikely that the Senate will ever have 67 members that will be willing to actually force him from office. Thus it seems likely to me that we are looking at three and half more years of this. And given the popularity of autocrats and the fervency of Trump's base, I don't exclude the possibility that Trump could be reelected. We shouldn't overlook the dispiriting effect that four years could have on those who oppose Trump. And I think that this is one of the primary issues concerning the ability of autocrats to stay in power; after a while they just wear down the opposition and people lose faith in the possibility of change.

Political systems deteriorate over time because institutions atrophy, political classes become too professionalized or worse, dynastic. The deterioration of political culture results, or happens concurrently, with the breakdown of civil society. Democracy can only work or, more properly progress, with a thriving civil society. This is why Harper was so detrimental to Canadian democracy; he actively tried to shut down civil discourse and sabotage civil society. People like Harper and Trump do this by portraying any opposition media as an enemy of the people and the nation, they criticize judges or independent bodies that are meant to make government accountable, they defund education institutions and legal bodies that are meant to empower people, and (perhaps most importantly) they create an imaginary "liberal" elite, all the while promoting and strengthening the real, economic elite who pull society's strings.

I don't know where we go from here, and I am sure many Americans feel adrift on a threatening and stormy sea. The struggles for democracy, equality, justice, and civil society, are long historical struggles. As individuals, we can live nice long lives and still must realize that we are only bit players in this historical drama. The ebb and flow of tyranny and freedom is hard to measure. It makes me think of that analogy that they use in Good Will Hunting concerning the lifeline between two ships. Sometimes the swells of the ocean cause the person on the lifeline to lose sight of both ship, so you can't see where you have been or where you are going. Well, I think it is safe to say that we are between swells and waiting for the weather to clear at least a little.

When John Dean accuses you of a "Cover-up," you've got a real Problem. . .

Few people have as intimate a knowledge of political cover-ups as counselor to Richard Nixon John Dean. If you haven't already seen it, watch as Dean describes the Trump presidency in full-on "cover-up" mode. There is little question in my mind now that Trump has already committed multiple impeachable offences, and that is without even touching collusion with the Russians, something that John Dean seems to think is becoming ever more clear. The only question now is whether the Republicans will choose Party over Country and the Rule of Law. Unfortunately, the answer to that is painfully obvious. Frankly, as cynical as I am, even I didn't think that a democracy like the US (imperfect by any standard but still just about holding on) could unravel this quickly.

The depth of the political crisis in the US can be seen in the effort to push through the so-called "Trump-care" bill. At the moment it looks like it will fail to pass the House, and even if they do get the seven votes or so that they need to swing it, it looks like it is dead on arrival in the Senate. But here's the thing, if Trump-care fails it will not be because Republican lawmakers have rejected it because it will take literally millions of people off of Medicaid, Medicare, and their insurance, but because the most conservative Republicans in the House (the tragically misnamed "Freedom Caucus") think that it gives TO MUCH to the poor, the sick, and the elderly. This is how bad the US political system has become; the party in power is rejecting a conservative, Trump-sponsored bill because it tries to take care of society's most vulnerable. (And, keep in mind, that these Congress Members who are upset because the Republican establishment is trying to care for people, all call themselves devout Christians!)

The real question that is haunting us today is not "will Trump be impeached?" or "will Trump cause a war?" or even "is Trump mentally unstable?" The real question is - how long can a society last hat is actively promoting detached, callousness toward its own vulnerable citizens?

Trump is giving Rich, Corrupt, White men a Bad Name. . .

I find it very interesting that hundreds of Congressional hours (as well as the efforts of a special prosecutor) over a period of more than 20 years, were devoted to the Republican effort to discredit and indict the Clintons. And after all that effort the only thing anyone was able to find either of them guilty of was lying about having sex. Now, I don't think that the Clintons were entirely honest, but given the Republican's visceral hatred of them as well as the ideological drive of the Republican Party, I am certain that if there was any clear evidence of a crime, several indictments would have come down, even if those indictments had not led to guilty verdicts.

The thing that is most remarkable about recent events in Washington is that more suspicion and chaos surrounds Donald Trump's presidency after only a few weeks in office than surrounded the Clinton's over their whole political careers. The reason I think the comparison with the Clintons is interesting is not because I have any desire to defend them, but because the rightwing continues to be so vociferous in their attack on them for things that, when compared with Trump, make them look like a sweet retired church couple. Unlike the Clintons who often had a hostile congress to face, Trump has a bunch of sycophants who are desperate to either do his bidding or shelter him from prosecution so that they can use him to enact their despicable agenda.

Even before he came to office, Trump (unlike either of the Clintons) had a long history of legal misdeeds as well as bankruptcies used to shield him from his economic corruption. But the US is a deeply corrupt nation (both economically and politically), and I have little doubt that if Trump weren't so blatantly and offensively racist, misogynist, and just plain nasty, his present predicament would be considerably less dire. The rich (mostly white men) of Congress and the media are willing to overlook all sorts of malfeasance by their peers, as long as everyone plays nice.

But given how much bad-blood Trump has built up over the years, his malfeasance (much of which would otherwise fly under the radar) makes continual waves in the public sphere. The trail of Russian money and connections to Trump is actually shocking and beyond suspicious. And what makes it all more suspicious is the fact that Trump's dogged refusal to release his tax returns (which, if he had no Russian ties, would clear up much of his present problem) makes him look more than a little dodgy. Now, if you couple the known fact that the Russians were meddling in last year's elections, (something which they have been actively doing, like the US, for decades all over the globe) with the already known and suspected ties that a number of Trump's minions have had with Russia, it is really difficult not to draw conclusions about Trump's corruption. Now, I really think that people should keep in mind that if any type of collusion existed between the Trump campaign and the Russians, this is a scandal that would make Watergate look like a case of mistaken shoplifting of a Snickers Bar. Watergate was a relatively simple petty crime, breaking into an opponent's office to find clues about the political campaign. Here we are talking about collusion with a foreign, hostile and undemocratic power, to undermine a whole election. And in some senses we already know that collusion existed given that Trump had the gall to publicly call on the Russians to intervene by hacking computers in the US. Many people seem to forget that Trump's public request for Russia to hack emails in the US was a de facto criminal act on Trump's part.

I don't know what will happen over the next months and years. For all I know, the US system is so corrupt that Trump will continue to be able to hide behind the shield of government and limp from one scandal to another all the while enriching himself to the tune of tens of millions of dollars (which he has already made by charging the US government for him vacationing every weekend at his own country club). Perhaps the evidence will become too overwhelming even for his Republican lapdogs and Trump will face a real investigation and maybe even impeachment or prison (though that seems profoundly unlikely to me). But whatever happens, what the Trump debacle should remind all of us is that there is one standard for the rich, and one for all the rest of us and that wealthy white men can do almost anything and get away with it time after time.

As a small postscript, more signs of Trump's corruption have emerged in the past few days. This bizarre scandal is brought to you hear by the always interesting Rachael Maddow, and could be one of the big reasons that Trump is so afraid of any investigations. Having the president involved in this kind of thing has really reduced the US to a Banana Republic.

The Smoke and Mirrors of the Right. . . .

If you view this video of Michael Moore appearing on CNN, you can see some of the confusion concerning what the Trump phenomenon really means. In this video Moore refers to Trump and his cadre as "economic nationalists." But then moments later he insists that they are trying to "deconstruct" or dismantle the government, and then he says that they are "anarchists." Now, it doesn't take a degree in political science to understand that these two positions are mutually exclusive, and I am sure that if Mr. Moore stopped and thought about it for a moment, he would realize the absurdity of the statement. However, it is easy to get caught up in the polemics of anti-Trump, and I thoroughly understand where Moore is coming from

However, what Moore's statement demonstrates is a general confusion concerning contemporary rightwing politics. It is confusing because the rightwing, as many commentators are beginning to observe (even many who are traditionally on the right), seem not to be a coherent ideology anymore, if it ever was. In Canada we saw this confusion begin to make its very public debut during the Harper years. The Harper government was continually flying off in every direction. One day they were using a pseudo-libertarian narrative and the next they were consolidating their power in secretive and nefarious ways. They continually talked about fiscal conservatism and ran deficit after deficit. They told voters that they were going to bring more prosperity to the nation but they made no serious investments in infrastructure, alternative energy, or the growth of new economic opportunities. They pretended to be interested in Canadian economic interests but they were eager to sell the whole country to foreign interests.


The confusion of rightwing ideology is not really that complicated. It derives in large part from the abject failure of the Neo-Liberal economic model that they have been pursuing for the last forty years or so. As it becomes clear that it is no longer credible to suggest that giving everything to the rich and corporations is somehow magically going to result in generalized prosperity, the right doesn't know where to turn. They need a diversion, a smokescreen that will allow them to continue to pursue their goals of wealth for wealthy. Thus the right begins to attempt to portray themselves as economic nationalists on the one had, and they begin to use traditional fear of immigrants and racialized groups on the other.

But of course, this veneer is far to thin to fool anyone who is paying attention. There is nothing "economically nationalistic" about Trump. Economic nationalists don't create lines of clothing that are all made overseas. Trump and his associates have always been devoted followers of Neo-Liberal economics. The entire narrative of "make America great again" is nothing but a political lie intended to garner the support of those who have suffered from 40 years of policies that they have, in fact, been supporting. Trump will, of course, make various gestures that suggest that he is standing up for American workers, but it will all be a smokescreen for the further sell-off of the US economy to big banks and foreign interests. In the meantime they will follow their real interests of weakening the government and selling off the economy to the highest bidder. And the way that they will attempt to maintain their populist following will be to continually whip up fear and anxiety concerning immigrants, refugees, racialized people, and foreign groups and nations.

In other words, when commentators like Andrew Coyne (a long supporter of the right in Canada) say that they right has lost it coherent ideological stance, at one level he is simply wrong. The right is after the same things it has always been after: more wealth for the rich, less wealth for the rest, and keeping average people ignorant, poor, and precarious so that they can't fight back. The only thing that is confused or confusing about the new-right is that they are scrambling for a way to reframe their same old goals, and while they are doing that it can seem contradictory and disorganized.

The irony in all of this is, of course, that Liberals in Canada, and the Democrats in the US, have been doing fine for a long time pursuing the exact same economic agenda as the right, but doing it while pretending to be concerned with the average people. The problem for the right is that the Liberals and the Democrats (and this goes for many other centrist parties in Europe) have paid at least a minimal lip-service to the interests of the working-class and so have not (up until now) suffered from the same apparent public contradiction. In other words, what has made the right so ferociously anti-centrist in the past couple of decades is not that the centrists aren't pursuing a Neo-Liberal agenda, rather its because the centrists have not destroyed the prosperity and power of the working and middles classes fast enough! In other words, in most Western democracies for the past forty years we have had a main rightwing party and a main ultra-rightwing party.

All you need in Countries like the US, Canada, Britain, and France, is enough people who are fooled by the smokescreens of a fake economic nationalism and a very real racist agenda, and the new-right will take us where they have always wanted; a place where a small group of rich people have almost all the wealth, the rest have nothing, and they blame racialized people for all their problems.

Michael Moore would do well to stop buying the fake economic nationalism of the Trump Administration and start talking about the real agenda.

Trump: from Cry-Baby populist to Paragon of the Establishment . .. .

Populist movements in Western democracies generally don't last long. Instead they usually morph quickly into their own version of the establishment. I think that the reason for the short lived populist aspect of a political movement is reasonably simple. Populist movements are expressions of anger, discontent, and fear rather than expressions of principle. When there is a welling up of fear and discontent, the conmen and shysters come out of the woodwork to take advantage of it because conmen look for easy marks, and when it comes to politics in particular, angry fearful people are easy prey. When these emotions take hold of people, they don't think straight. Instead, they look for people who sooth them, who provide easy answers to complex problems and make them feel like everything is going to be ok. Thus the followers of populist conmen are fervent in their belief and passionate in their commitment to their saviour. As a result of this combination of fervency and fear and anger motivated passion, populist leaders can basically do anything they want and their support will stay relatively steady for some time, as long as they keep spouting their simple, soothing message. In this regard, Trump's now infamous observation that it wouldn't hurt his popularity if went out on 5th Ave. and shot someone, is ominously revealing. The most diehard followers of a populist leader have zero interest in facts, and shockingly little interest in the actions of their leaders. This is because such followers are being feed the political equivalent of soma which puts them in a sort of trance, And as long as their leader proclaims the right trigger phrases, espousing simple ideas about how everything is going to be fixed and all the "bad stuff" and "bad hombres" will expunged, nothing else really matters.

Ironically, this is where populist movements tend to come unstuck. When a populist leader gets swept up in the adulation, even if their intentions were initially good (which they seldom are), they realize that they don't have to do any of the things that their followers want, or they only have to make minimal, often cosmetic efforts to maintain the drug-like trance in which they have put their followers. The problem is, of course, since most populist leaders are primarily interested in enriching themselves and their social/ideological allies at the highest level, they quickly become the establishment that they swept to power to oppose. Thus things don't really change, at least not for the better, and often for the worse. And when this happens, the soma trance wears off just enough people for the populist movement to lose its momentum and things become unstuck. One of the problems, of course, is that populist movements often leave in their wake a rightwing political establishment that can last for years.

This is precisely the scenario that played out in Canada. The populist movement known as the "Reform Party" swept into Ottawa with all sorts of populist promises, feeding off socially conservative ideas and white-privilege fears. The "Reformers" said that they wouldn't take the rich Parliamentary pensions, that they would allow all sorts of free votes in the House of Commons, they insisted that their leader would live in the luxurious housing due an opposition leader or a Prime Minster, and that they would enact legislation based upon its social popularity not based upon some niche interest group. All those commitments lasted about five minutes once the Reform leaders found themselves in the luxurious and complex world of actual legislative politics. But as the Reform movement burned, from the ashes was born an establishment party that enhanced and magnified the very things that people who supported the movement had rebelled against in the first place. So we were left with a party that was less interested in transparency than any government in history, ruled for a very small percentage of the population, was comically dishonest, lined their pockets and the pockets of friends like never before, and was more intrusively sinister than ever in people's personal lives.


 The reason that a political movement that started out of anger and claimed to be interested in more responsive and open government could quickly turn into its opposite is because of what we have come to know as "cry-baby conservatism."
Playing the victim is a integral part of modern day conservative parties and movements. Leaders like Harper and Trump continually harp on this idea that the establishment and the media is all against them and that they have to be mean and secretive and dictatorial because otherwise their opponents will win. And the cry-baby conservatives use this simple political strategy to consolidate their power and create a political machine that is often actively acting in ways that are contrary to their stated beliefs and those of their followers. Thus conservative followers in Canada barely noticed the irony when Conservative government cabinet members railed against the elites while at the same time riding in limousines to work. Similarly in the US we have a billionaire president with billionaire cabinet members who cry out against the establishment and have already instituted laws that will make them richer and the average person significantly poorer.

What is clear is that as the Trump movement progresses, the idea of "draining the swamp" and changing the political establishment will feature less and less in the Trumpian narrative. More and more of the Trump followers will accept the idea that the Trump government has to create their own establishment, their own "swamp" if you will, in order to overcome all those "liberal" and media forces that are arrayed against them. Thus people will accept much greater corruption and criminality, than they witnessed in those they initially sought to replace. As I said at the beginning, this is because the followers of leaders like Trump, are not motivated by a principled stance for better, more responsible, democratic, and transparent government. Rather, they are whipped up by anger and fear of a changing world.

Of course, as the populist aspect of the Trump phenomenon wanes, many will come out of the political trance and realize that they have been had and this may result in a significant shift in a different political direction. Either way, the populist movement will be dead. The only question is, will it leave in its wake a political establishment that is able to hold on to power for a while or will it, with its criminality and corruption, undermine the delusional state that brought it to power in the first place, thus causing a kind of counter rebellion?

The White House Inc. (a division of Trump Enterprises) . . .

I think that one of the most fascinating aspects of the Trump presidency thus far is the general confusion that is generated by the blurring of lines between the private and the public (or one might say "strictly" political) aspects of the Trump White House. I think that many mainstream politicos (in both parties) assumed to some degree that once Trump took the oath of office, his tendency to blur those lines, which had been one of the most marked aspects of Trump the campaigner, would abate someone and that the Americans would still have a so-called "commander in chief." Not only has this abatement not occurred but the lines between the personal aspects of Trump and his family (and his minions) has become almost inextricable from the office of the president.

This blurring of lines has been on full display in the last few days, particularly in the fallout from the decision by Nordstrom, an up-market retail chain, to stop selling Ivanka Trump's line of clothing and accessories. This decision incensed the president, and what incenses the president must necessarily anger his minions too. Thus on Thursday morning, presidential advisor and spokes-demon Kellyanne Conway, appeared on Fox News and as she spoke with reporters about the Nordstrom decision she took a moment to explicitly and shamelessly plug Ivanka's clothing line, telling Americans to "Go buy Ivanka's stuff." Well, this little plug is a clear violation of the US Code of Federal Regulations (Specifically 2365.702) which states that "An employee shall not use his public office for private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service of enterprise." Ms. Conway's endorsement, one might even say promotion, of Ivanka Trump's products is such a gross violation of a fairly simple CFR code that it seems almost comical if it weren't so terribly sordid.

The lines of personal and political blurred further when Donald Trump himself used Twitter to disparage Nordstrom for its business decision. Trump had Tweeted on Wednesday morning, telling us that his "daughter Ivanka has been treated unfairly" by Nordstrom, and that she is "a great person." This Tweet is arguably also a violation of the same CFR code, though a more ambiguous one. What is most startling, however, is the degree to which this has already become the new normal. The idea of a President using personal time and presidential power to publicly argue about a business decision that financially impacts his daughter is totally amazing. And the silence on the part of congressional Republicans is deafening in this regard. If President Obama had issued such a Tweet concerning a family member of his, the impeachment hearing would have already begun.

But specific ethics code violations and impeachment issues aside, this blurring of the lines of the political and the personal at the very top of the US government should be deeply troubling to anyone. Of course, politicians (particularly executive one) are able to routinely enrich their friends and associates through public appointments. This phenomenon is so rife that even in the most tightly controlled democracies it seems almost impossible to stop. And after politicians leave elected office they commonly enrich themselves through things like paid speaking engagements etc. However, with the Trump administration the US has now entered the realm of the "banana republic" or modern autocratic nations like Russia in which wildly unqualified political donors are rewarded with federal cabinet positions, the President's children have found their way into the highest level international meetings, the President continues to have his hand in business processes directly affected by government decisions, the President is attempting to delegitimize other branches of government, and he and his minions are actually using their positions to directly promote the financial interests of the Trump family. And and troubling as these facts are, they don't even touch upon the way that the Trump administration has made lying a matter of course. And we are not talking about traditional political "spin" here, we are talking about simple, readily verifiable, falsehoods. The cult of personality that has so defined the autocracies and dictatorships of the past century has truly come to roust in Washington.

And if the US (and the rest of us) survives the Trump era intact, it seems clear that democracy has been severely (if not mortally) wounded in the process. Once the line between personal and public interests has become so blurred is very hard to see clearly again.

White Privilege and Moral Indignation. . .

I am disappointed about recent political/social events. Ok, disappointment is far too week a word. Perhaps existential dread is a better word for my prevailing emotion. But then I think to myself, if I feel so overwhelmed by these events, what must racialized and marginalized people be feeling? I am a well-educated, white man. In social terms, it doesn't come more privileged than that. If I feel a sense of dread, I can't imagine the anger and disappointment of those who don't enjoy such privilege.

I grew up in the US in the 60s and 70s so I am certainly no stranger to open and overt racism. I heard the "N" word hurled at kids and adults and I understood, even as a child, its import and implications. But my youthful experiences in the US were mostly in Santa Monica, California and a mostly white neighborhood of Denver Colorado, and as racist epicentres go these were hardly crawling with racist sentiment, (at least not overly). When I came to Canada I actually saw more open racism among my peers, aimed almost exclusively at indigenous people and those whose "heritage" was Indian or Pakistani. But despite all of this, I assumed (I suppose like most privileged, white liberals) that we were on the road to a society where racism was vanishing. Now, I've always understood how painful the process was, and with what snail-like slowness it was proceeding. But I assumed, perhaps naively, that we were on the way down that path.

Suddenly the ground of that naive certainty has been pulled out from people like me. Again, this is probably itself a form of white privilege. While I blithely assumed things were genuinely changing, those who suffered the effects of real racism knew the score; they knew that blatant and structural racism continued in many cases unabated.

But I have never been particularly sanguine about progress or the goodness of human beings. So, at some level, I am not that surprised to see a resurgence of white supremacy, nor am I surprised at the cavalier attitude of many people at what amounts to a supremacist takeover of the White House. But what I suppose I am disappointed at is the way that structural racism has so insidiously seeped into people's consciousness, to the degree that self-professed liberals often hide their racism behind security concerns or, even more insidiously, behind moral indignation concerning black activism.

A case in point is the moral indignation that white liberals hurl at Black Lives Matter in general and at the Toronto chapter co-founder of that organization Yusra Khogali in particular. Now, I am very consciously not going to rehash white people's criticism of BLM or Khogali because that would be to fall into the very white privilege that I so despise. What amazes me is the ease with which white liberals make these criticisms, even to the point that a prominent white blogger on the Huffington post openly called for Khogali to resign in a recent post.

Here's the thing - it has always been a central element of racism and white privilege that white people feel that they can tell racialized or oppressed groups how they should protest, be politically active, or who they should chose as their leaders. But telling racialized people what to do is the very problem that racialized activists are reacting against, it is the very thing they are protesting. For white liberals to tell BLM who they should choose as a leader is a grand confirmation of racism and white privilege! As a white person you may not like who BLM (or any such activist organization) chooses as their leader, and my response is, tough luck, get over it! For centuries white people have brutalized and enslaved racialized people, raped them, imprisoned them, and lynched them. In the US this process continues almost unabated. The system of slavery and lynching has been replaced with a national prison system that is as brutal and de-humanizing as slavery ever was. In the face of this kind of violence and brutalization (here and abroad), moral-indignation at the actions of BLM and Khogali is the height of white privilege. Such indignation is like someone subjecting their neighbors to daily verbal and physical abuse and then being righteously upset if the neighbors or their kids egg the abuser's house.

Struggling against oppression has always been a messy, sometimes violent, business. That's because oppression is itself a messy and violent business, and the desire of liberal white people to keep it nice and tidy is a massive element of their privilege. It's easy to call for calm forgiveness and gentle inclusiveness when you're on the winning side of history. My answer to white people who have a sense of moral indignation at BLM is, get your own house in order and remember you have little or no sense what a daily ubiquitous experience of racial oppression feels like.

If Yusra Khogali hates me, I don't blame her. White people have given her plenty or reasons to hate us. Even if I disagree with BLM strategies, I'm not going to white-splain some notion of "appropriate" political action. When white Americans elect a white supremacist government, it amazes me to hear white people tell racialized groups to "calm down" and play nice.

History is long, and so is the Struggle. . .

I believe it was Georg Friedrich Hegel who first opined that "we learn from history that we don't learn from history." And I admit that it certainly looks that way sometimes. But the arc of our learning is, unfortunately, extremely gradual and it often seems, for us who live such short lives, to be going nowhere. The brevity of our time here makes it difficult for us to see ourselves as part of a historical process; we are like animals living our short lives in the middle of an evolutionary process. When we work to make society more just and fair, less bigoted and less violent, we seldom get to see the fruits of our labour. If historical change happen more quickly, I am certain that many people would be significantly more inspired to be activists. But we slog away nonetheless, and though we have difficult and disheartening setbacks, the indispensable justice seekers from each generation lace up their boots and start again where their parents left off.

Of course, we may, in the long run, be doomed to failure as a race. Nuclear war and environmental disaster could cut short our efforts to make a more just and peaceful society. But we have come so far, it seems like a terrible shame, and perhaps a betrayal of those who came before us, to give up now. Things seem particularly dark at the moment, I think, because on some issues we seem to have been making no progress or even going backward for some time. But again, if we are to maintain our spirit, we have to try to place ourselves into an historical arc and remember that though our lives are short the effort is long.

It is also important to recall that despite the efforts of the Neanderthalish  rightwing, things have gotten better. I have a particular interest in the Georgian period of English literature, especially the so-called "Romantics." I continually read accounts by English writers like Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Thomas Spence, Coleridge, Thomas Hood, and especially Shelley, and I am amazed how they strived for democracy, justice, fairness, and progress, despite the near total dictatorship of the church and state that could exercise arbitrary and violent power with almost total immunity. Shelley used to carry loaded pistols, not against the threat of thievery but because of the dangers he felt from government agents who followed him incessantly. And given his progressive (one might even say revolutionary) views, it was only his status as the son of a minor aristocrat that kept him safe from murder or imprisonment by the state. But the things that Shelley advocated (like universal suffrage, religious tolerance, women's rights) are taken today by most as essential to a modern society. He had no reasonable prospect for the success of these efforts but he was eternally optimistic nonetheless. Shelley had been de facto driven from England and was living in Italy when he was drowned in a boating accident. The poem that he was working on when he died was entitled The Triumph of Life is melancholic yet still brims with spirit and fortitude.

At the time of Shelley's death, most people around him lived in unbelievably filthy, difficult, ignorant, oppressed conditions. But even with little access to good food, clean water, education or healthcare, the people fought back and made gradual progress. Today millions of people still live in terrible conditions, but the struggle continues. It can, and it must, go on. And though we suffer indignities and difficulties, though we are fighting against unbridled ignorance even in a time of infinite information, the past that the rightwing so adores is gone and there is no way to bring it back.

I leave you with a rendition of Shelley's Masque of Anarchy, an ode to those who struggled and died in the Peterloo massacre. Remember the past and fight for the future!

We Will Not Normalize Authoritarianism. . .

I think that one of the most important things to remember, particularly for our American cousins, in these troubled times, is that Donald Trump is only in the White House because of an antiquated electoral system. The very simple fact is that a not insignificant majority (by US electoral standards) of those who voted, rejected Trump - and that happened despite the fact that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was herself fairly unpopular even with many in her own party. If the US presidential elections had taken place by the rules of almost every other republic in the world, Trump would not be president. This is important to remember, if only for the issue of our morale.

Remembering this electoral anomaly should encourage us because in tells us that despite Trump's success in taking over the Presidency, racism and misogyny are not necessarily undergoing a renaissance. Despite the new profile of racist discourse, the numbers of the 2016 presidential election should remind us that people are actually rejecting racism, homophobia, and misogyny. It is, I admit, a very slow process, but despite the return of these evils in the mainstream political discourse, I think change is taking place gradually, particularly with the younger generations.

The fact is that Trump didn't gain widespread support of the American population and he received a significantly smaller percentage of support than the last Republican president, George W. Bush. What got Trump elected was a growing disappointment with the Democratic Party, particularly in a small group of states that have suffered economic hardships in the wake of globalization, hardships that the Democrats have almost uniformly failed to address. Given this fact, there is a lot of talk that people have to "empathize" with the cohort of voters who voted for Trump because they felt "left behind." I think this is largely nonsense; not because empathy isn't important, but because those who have criticized the Democrats for the past 25 years for selling out to neo-liberalism, have been arguing all along that people were getting left behind in the new, globalizing capitalism. Furthermore, empathizing with the more deplorable elements in the Trump camp will get us nowhere. The racists and the misogynists have been voting for the Republicans for generations (particularly since the Democratic Party jettisoned its Southern racist elements during the 1960s). This is not going to change for the foreseeable future.

The real danger of the Trump presidency is not that there are suddenly a bunch of new racists and misogynists around. The danger is the normalization of these views. The Germans have a great word - Gleichschaltung - which is usually translated as Nazification. In English intellectual circles we often use the phrase "anticipatory socialization." These two ideas address the notion that change occurs through the socializing or normalizing of certain behaviors. In other words if nasty, violent racists see that their opinions are shared by political leaders, this gives them space to voice their opinions because they seem them as becoming "normal." You don't get rid of racism by convincing racists that they are wrong, you get rid of it by making it socially unacceptable to be openly racist so that successive generations see such opinions as abnormal and objectionable. In other words, you don't rationalize people out of racist beliefs, you socialize them out of them. The Trump administration, on the other hand, presents the very clear and present danger of socializing people into racism. Furthermore, it presents the danger of Gleichschaltung, of normalizing authoritarianism in the political system itself. The only way to avoid the dangers that this rightwing socialization presents is if the public as well as elected officials continually resist the normalization of the authoritarianism that the Trump regime is constructing. Already we are way ahead of our historical peers in the 1930s. Though people politically resisted fascism in the 30s, they did so in traditional political terms; these resisters were initially largely unaware of where fascism was really heading. But the discourse of resistance this time is armed with the knowledge of the past, we know what the outcome of this rightwing movement can be and a large portion of the population is coming to this fight with implied slogan of "not again." If forewarned is forearmed, we are in a fairly good position to resist being socialized once again into fascism.

Trump enjoys about the same level of popularity that Hitler did when he was elected. As long as the people of the US and other Western states don't allow themselves to be manipulated by fear of "the other," we stand a very good chance of not letting authoritarianism become once again normalized. This goes for us in Canada too. It is no small coincidence that a white, rightwing, fascist went on a shooting spree in a Montreal Mosque a day after the Trump immigration bans, and in the wake of the white supremacist rhetoric of Kellie Leitch. This is what happens when rightwing racists see their hate being normalized. It is not a large step from this to kristallnacht. Conditions demand vigilance.

In the meantime, let Keith Olbermann remind us that lots of Americans know what is going on and are actively resisting.

A Hurricane is Coming. . .

I haven't blogged since Trump lost the vote but won the election. Like many people, I have been disheartened. But I have been disheartened before, and I had very little faith in humanity to begin with. But at this point it all seems so absurd, so surreal, that blogging seems to me almost silly. I know intellectually that it is important to continue the fight, to maintain the struggle, particularly in the face of these terrible developments. But I am having trouble getting the gumption to keep thinking about it or even considering doing anything. I suppose it is because I feel like we are in a historical eddy, the kind of backwash that occurs every few generations, driven by fear of a changing world, in which the worst kinds of human emotions come to the fore and the barbaric philistines try to take us back in history using hate and anger to inspire their troops. The pessimist in me suggests that there is really not much we can do. I look back to Nixon as an example. Nixon was a horrible, profoundly corrupt and damaged human being. But for all the anti-war, and anti-Nixon efforts on the part of activists, what brought Nixon down was his own misdeeds, an informant, and two investigative reporters. And I suspect that the only way that Trump will fall is basically in the same manner. Frankly, it is difficult to imagine that someone with Trump's childlike lack of impulse control, someone with such a selfish and corrupt nature, can maintain himself in the position of president for very long without something going drastically wrong. And someone with Trump's self-centred manner is really not the type to inspire loyalty, so the rise of informants is pretty easy to imagine.

But, obviously there is something much bigger at stake here than Trump. All over the world, people are succumbing to their worst instincts and turning toward the dark side, so to speak. And if we are going to avoid an apocalypse and save civilization from people like Putin, Erdogan, Durerte, Paul Ryan, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Modi and others, we are going to have to work hard because, make no mistake, these people are determined to destroy everything with hate and violence. I have no idea what form this effort to save civilization must take, but the work has got to be done. It is work that depends on the up-coming millennial generation which, I very much hope, are beginning to learn the importance of the things my generation was foolish enough to take for granted.

There is no purity in politics. At any moment in history, even the very best societies are full of terrible shortcomings. But we hold on to what is good and we fight against the bad. It is the way it has always been done. The US was a nation born out of terrible crimes against humanity, slavery and genocide. And it has continued that blood-letting and ruthlessness throughout its history. But it is also a nation that has brought us remarkable people and ideas. And all the other nations of the world have their own dark-spots as well as inspirational individuals and notions. Of course, we are now facing potential extinction as a result of the new generation of dictators and rightwingers, people who have nuclear weapons and seem to have no intention of stopping climate change.

But, on the good side, the rise of these ruthless and horrible men and women, is a sure sign that they and their followers are deathly frightened. They know that society, and particularly the upcoming generation is more liberal than ever before, and over the past ten years or so the neo-liberal model of economic control has begun to falter and implode. Even in traditionally conservative and orthodox realms such and economics, people are saying that capitalism needs to be reformed or it will be a threat to its own existence. We are, undoubtably, in a dark moment. But dictators, autocrats, haters, and those who look backwards have a remarkable way of destroying themselves. When they have a free hand, they can't help but to reveal their true intentions and desires. And when they do that it is like the antagonist in a story who has gotten too comfortable and thus slips up by revealing who they really are, and when this revelation occurs all is lost for them.

None of us want the crisis at which we are arriving. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it is the only way that many people are going to see that what Trump and his ilk really want is a ruthlessly dehumanized society where most people have nothing and the select few enjoy unbelievable wealth and decadent prosperity. My dad used to say that history has a remarkable way of turning around and bitting the powerful in the ass just when they think that they are home free. You can be active with the activists or sleeping with the sleepers, but either way, the fight isn't over, it's just beginning anew.