The latest “A View from Afar” with Selwyn Manning and I follows the lines drawn in my most recent post here at KP. Because the podcast is basically a dialogue between Selwyn and I on the subject of the day, it goes in some directions not covered in the KP post. For those interested, the show can be found here.
Although I shared some thoughts about the US election on other social media platforms, here are some items that emerged from the wreckage:
Campaigns based on hope do not always defeat campaigns based on fear.
Having dozens of retired high ranking military and diplomatic officials warn against the danger Trump poses to democracy (including people who worked for him) did not matter to many voters. Likewise, having former politicians and hundreds of academics, intellectuals, legal scholars, community leaders and social activists repudiate Trump’s policies of division mattered not an iota to the voting majority.
Nor did Harris’s endorsement by dozens of high profile celebrities make a difference to the MAGA mob. In fact, it enraged them. What did make a difference was one billionaire using the social media platform that he owns to spread anti-Harris disinformation and pro-Trump memes.
Raising +US$ billion in political donations did not produce victory for Harris. Outspending the opponent is not a key to electoral success.
Decisively winning the presidential debate–with 65 million live viewers–proved inconsequential for Harris. Conversely, getting trounced in the debate, where he uttered the comment that “they are eating the digs, they are eating the cats, they are eating the pets of people who live there,” proved no liability for Trump. The debate was just theatre and viewers retained the partisan preconceptions before and after its airing. In other words, debates are overrated as indicators of political mood shifts or campaign success.
Trump’s incoherent, racist and xenophobic rants did not give the MAGA mob any pause when considering their choices. In fact, it appears that the resort to crude depictions of opponents (“stupid KaMAla”) and scapegoats (like Puerto Ricans) strengthened the bond between Trump and his supporters.
Macroeconomic and social indicators such as higher employment and lower crime and undocumented immigrant numbers could not overcome the MAGA narrative that the US was “the garbage can of the world.” Positive macroeconomic data was drowned out by the MAGA drumbeat decrying high inflation and rising retail costs even if those costs are the product of global supply chain disruptions and corporate price-gouging. Nor could Harris, despite her accomplished resume in all three government branches at the local, state and federal levels, overcome the narrative that she was “dumb” and a DEI hire who was promoted for reasons other than merit. It did not help that she refused to stake a clearly different position from Biden on some key policy issues, something that ultimately cost her votes (Harris received 15 million less votes than Biden did in 2020, while Trump remained close to his 2020 vote total in a race marked by significant numbers of eligible non-voters).
Culture war narratives worked for Trump. Attacks on “woke” ideology and relentless negative advertising about the dangers of transgender people struck a nerve not only in red states, but nation-wide (remember that Trump won the popular vote and all seven of the so-called swing or battleground states). The same was true for Congressional races, where the GOP won the Senate and looks to be on the verge of retaining the House. The result is a MAGA mandate, which extends into the Supreme Court as a result of its ruling that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution for “official” acts and which will likely see more Trump appointees replacing some of the current justices over the next four years.
It did not matter to the MAGA mob that Trump threatened retribution against his opponents, real and imagined, using the Federal State as his instrument of revenge. In fact, they want him to do so and, in contrast, support Trump’s promised to pardon all January 6 rioters. It also did not matter that Trump’s second term agenda is more radical, punitive and comprehensive than his first term (Project 2025 and Agenda 47 are extensive in scope and will leave an indelible mark on the federal government). Calling Trump a fascist only whetted the MAGA appetite for his authoritarian approach to politics.
Having 34 felony fraud convictions, including paying hush money to a porn actress out of campaign funds and then covering the payments up using dubious accounting methods did not hurt Trump at all and in fact was seen as an example of Democrats using the legal system against him (“lawfare”). His losses in defamation suits, including an adjudication that he is a sexual predator, meant absolutely zero to more than 70 million voters. For many in the voting majority, voting for the felon was a badge of honour. There were t-shirts made and sold at Trump rallies that read out variations of “I am with the felon.”
Age was not a factor even though Trump displays evident signs of cognitive decline. In contrast, gender and race were negative factors for Harris. It appears that the US has a major problem with selecting female presidents and the re-emergence of overt racism courtesy of Trump’s foray into politics produced a backlash against her mixed-race heritage.
Reproductive rights were not the watershed issue many thought that they would be, including for many female voters. The economy and immigration were the top priorities of female voters. Conversely, MAGA efforts to court “bro” support via social media catering to younger men “Alphas” worked very well, as this usually apathetic voting bloc turned out in record numbers. In a way, this is a double setback for women: as an issue of bodily autonomy and as an issue of gender equality given the attitudes of Trump endorsers like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro etc. Their misogyny has now been reaffirmed as part of a winning political strategy. Individually and collectively, women will bear the consequences of this intergenerational move backwards.
Undocumented immigrants in the US will now become targets for Trump’s mass deportation campaign. This could well force many underground since entire families, including US-born children of undocumented migrants, are targeted for deportation. The logistics involved in doing so may prove impossible to undertake, but it will not be for lack of trying (Stephen Miller will head the effort). This will have a decided negative effect on the low wage economy that underpins the US productive apparatus. Ordering the military to participate in the round-ups and detention of undocumented people and their US-born relatives could well spark a constitutional crisis (because that might violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878).
Ukraine and Western Europe have much to fear. Perhaps Taiwan as well. Palestinians will be forsaken by Trump. With the exception of Iran, authoritarians around the world will be pleased. So will the Netanyahu government in Israel. Liberal democracies new and old will need to adopt hedging strategies depending on what Trump demands of them. Some, like the current NZ government, may simply behave like obsequious supplicants bowing before the Orange Master.
Fear will extend to the federal bureaucracy and regulatory system, which will now be subject to Project 2025/Agenda 47, Trump loyalty tests, Elon Musk’s razor gang approach to public spending and RFK Jr.s public health edicts. In fact, it looks like the Trump second term approach to governance will take a page out of Argentine president Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” reforms, with results that will be similar but far broader in scope. Cost-cutting in and further privatisation of public services will have a profoundly dislocating effect on the social and economic fortunes of millions of people tied in one way or another to federal public services and good provision.
All in all, from where I sit it looks like a bit of a calamity in the making. But then again, I am just another political scientist that got the results all wrong–and there are many of us who did so. So much for the value of an advanced degree from a prestigious university and three+ decades of reading, writing and teaching about politics. I just as well could be a wino in the street when it comes to my US election prognostication skills.
I think that I will sit out on the deck and stare at the sea for a while because that is my saving grace: At least I am living in NZ and not in the US.
A few days ago I responded to a post about Trump being a fascist on one of my friend’s social media page, then made a few comments on the consultancy social media page by way of follow up. Given the subsequent back and forth (including with regular KP reader Diane under her other social media moniker) I figured I might as well share my thoughts here. I realise that it may seem pedantic (it is) and inconsequential (it is not), but the misuse of value added terms is a trigger for me. So, with my political science/comparative politics hat on, let me offer some thoughts on the matter.
First, by way of prelude and backdrop to why I have decided to opine about this particular subject, let me explain something about analytic precision, specifically the notion of conceptual integrity. Conceptual transfer is an analytic tool where a concept is taken out of its original context in order to explain a different phenomenon that replicates the original meaning intact. The integrity of the original meaning is upheld in spite of the transfer. Say, a wheel back when is a wheel today even if its specific features are different. Conversely, conceptual stretching is a situation when a concept is stretched beyond its original meaning in order to describe a different, usually related but not the same, phenomenon. It loses explanatory and analytic integrity as it is stretched to explain something different. For example, when a hawk is called an eagle or an orca is called a killer whale. As an analytic tool the former is methodologically sound and intellectually honest. The latter is not. Conceptual integrity and precision is particularly important when using loaded or charged words, especially in contentious areas like politics.
There are plenty of authoritarians but only few were fascists or neo-fascists. There are Sultanistic regimes like those of the Arab oligarchies. There are theocracies like Iran (which used elections as a legitimating device). There one party regimes like the Belarus, PRC, DPRK, Syria and Cuba, one party dominant/limited contestation regimes like Algeria,Egypt, several of the K-stans, Hungary, Russia, Singapore, Tunisia, Turkey, Nicaragua and Venezuela and Egypt, military-bureaucratic regimes like those of the Sahel, and a variety of personalist and oligarchical leaders and regimes elsewhere. The way in which leadership is contested/selected and exercised, the balance between repression and ideological appeals in regime governing approaches, the mixture of inducements (carrots) and constraints (sticks) when it comes to specific key policy areas (say, in labor, tax, sexual preference and reproductive rights laws). There are many manifestations of the authoritarian phenomenon, so mislabeling some types as others compounds the practical and conceptual problems associated with the conceptual imprecision and confusion.
That is why it is unfortunate that Trump is being labeled a “fascist.” He clearly is a dictator wanna-be but fascism was a political movement specific to 20th century interwar Europe that combined charismatic leaders at the head of a mass mobilisational one party regimes with specific economic projects (state capitalist heavy industrialisation in the case of Nazi Germany) and state-controlled forms of interest group representation (state corporatism, to be specific). Fascist gain power via elections, then end them. Trump may lead the MAGA movement but he has no ideological project other than protectionist economics, diplomatic and military isolationism and nativist prejudice against assorted “others.” He prefers to manipulate rather than eliminate elections as a legitimating device. Barring an outright military takeover at this command, he will not be able to control the three branches of government even if he wants and tries to. He cannot control how interest groups are organised and represented unless he changes US laws governing interest representation and intermediation. Most fundamentally, he is just about himself, using tried and true scapegoating and fear-mongering in an opportunistic push to gain power. It worked once in 2016, so he is at it again, this time with a “better” (Project 2025) plan. That is scary but not fascist per se.
The closest he gets to a proper political category is national populist. As seen in the likes of Juan Peron in Argentina, Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico, these were charismatic leaders of mass mobilised movements as well, but who had different economic projects, different social bases (e.g. German Nazism and Franco’s fascist regime in Spain were middle class-based whereas Italian fascism and Argentine Peronism was urban working class-based and Mexican populism under Cardenas was peasantry-based), and who did not use warmongering to restore their nations to a position of global dominance (as did the European fascists). Trump’s base is low education working and lower middle class rubes encouraged by opportunistic business elites who self-interestedly see short-term benefit from supporting him. In other words, his supporters are the greedy leading the stupid.
It appears that respected people like Generals Milley and Kelly, who served in the Trump administration, are mistaken when they ever to him as a fascist. What they are describing is no more than garden party electoral authoritarians such as that of Viktor Urban or Recep Erdogan. Trump may admire despots like Putin, Kim and Xi, but he is a long way from being able to copy them, and none of them is a fascist in any event. Dictatorial ambition and authoritarian approaches come in many guises beyond the often misused term fascism. In fact, superstructural affinities like rhetorical style, corruption and bullying tendencies aside, Trump is less a fascist than he is a lesser moon in the authoritarian universe.
If I had to label him, I would say that Trump is a populist demagogue who has strong authoritarian ambitions such as purging the federal government of non-loyalists and persecuting his political opponents. Perhaps he will graduate into becoming a full-blown dictator. But what he is not is a fascist, at least not in the proper sense of the word. He is too ignorant to implement a modern variant of fascism in a place like the US, and there are too many institutional and social counters in the US to any move he may make in that direction. What I will admit is that he has neo-Nazis in his inner circle (Stephen Miller) and evil Machiavellians as his consiglieri (Steve Bannon, soon to be released from jail for contempt of Congress). Along with assorted lesser ogres equipped with the Project 2025 playbook, it is possible that they could turn the US political system into something resembling a modern variant of a national populist regime. But there is a ways to go before that happens.
I therefore feel that it is unfortunate and counterproductive to call him a fascist. It is like how he and his minions call Kamala Harris a “communist” or “socialist.” The labels are absurd and betray a profound ignorance of what those terms mean (and the differences between them), but they make for good red meat rallying points for a MAGA base that lacks the education or common sense to see the smear for what it is or the reality that communists and socialists do not get to hold the positions of California Attorney General, US Senator and Vice President (the closest they have come in recent times is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and he is no communist).
If the good generals and Vice President Harris decided to take a page out of his fear-mongering smear playbook by calling him a fascist, that may be understandable given the danger he poses for US democracy. But it is also dishonest (given Milley and Kelly’s educations, I find hard to believe that they do not know what fascism is and is not, but then again, many general grade officers major in military history, international relations and/or security studies rather than comparative political science and so may not be familiar with the proper definitions of the term. As for Harris, she is trained as a lawyer. Enough said).
Anyway, the point of this undoubtably boring exegesis is to get a pet peeve off of my chest, which is the resort to conceptual stretching in order to negatively frame narratives about political phenomena.
In this podcast Selwyn Manning and I talk about what appears to be a particular type of end-game in the long transition to systemic realignment in international affairs, in which the move to a new multipolar order with different characteristics than the previous one is marked by conflict, the inevitable friction that ensures from unregulated competition absent universal norms and boundaries of behaviour, and the unfortunate yet predictable turn to politics of desperation by actors who are personally or politically invested into status quos under siege. The consequences of this turn of events is both uncertain and yet likely negative in the end. We use Trump, Netanyahu, Zelensky, Putin, Maduro and Ortega as examples of desperate leadership, although the trend can be extended to other cases as well.
The bottom line is that little if any good can come from the politics of desperation.
In this episode of “A View from Afar” Selwyn Manning and I discuss the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and its implications for the US elections. The political darkness grows.
In this week’s “A View from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and spoke about the upcoming US elections and what the possibility of another Trump presidency means for the US role in world affairs. We also spoke about the problems Joe Biden has in dominating the presidential race against a demonstrably unbalanced opponent, shifting voter demographics, how US allies and adversaries engage in strategic hedging depending on whether they view Trump as an asset or as a threat, and how the US increasingly looks like an unstable polity, to the point that US foreign interlocutors must factor in its growing unreliability as an international partner. And much more. The link is here.
Much attention has been directed at Joe Biden’s mental lapses and physical frailty. Less attention has been spent on Donald Trump’s cognitive difficulties and physical limitations, with most focus being devoted to his insults and exaggerated claims (as if they were not indicative of his mental state). Biden is 82 and Trump is 77, so one would expect that the passage of time has taken some toll on them, both physically and cognitively. It would seem that the difference, as Mickey Savage of The Standard phrased it, is that Biden is well-intentioned but hapless, whereas Trump is evil and dangerous.
I agree with the characterisation of Trump but not that of Biden, who I believe has far more mental acuity than the orange toned weasel. People forget that Biden has a life-long stutter, which from time to time shows up in his speech. And yes, he occasionally forgets or confuses a name or date, but then again so does the malignant narcissist serial liar. Biden rides bicycles and exercises regularly at the White House and home gyms. Trump rides a golf cart from tee to wherever his ball lands, off the designated paths and onto fairways and greens. He is not exactly a fine physical specimen, despite his corrupt doctor’s claims to the contrary.
Be that as it may, the mental and physical fitness of either of these men is not what matters when to comes to their suitability for office. Instead, as a starter, it is their temperament that matters. Biden is measured, calculated and calibrated in his actions, even if prone to the occasional profanity (as befits a guy from a blue collar background). Trump is impulsive, vindictive and petulant. Biden has 50 years of public service as his background, including terms as a US Congressman and Senator, Vice President and now POTUS. Trump first ran for office in 2016, and that was for the presidency that he won. We know what happened next, which should serve as a warning of things to come–and worse–should he get back into office. In any case it should be clear to impartial observers that Biden is the better qualified candidate in this year’s presidential election, above and beyond the elderly foibles of he and his rival.
Temperment and public service experience are not just what differentiates the two likely presidential candidates. The biggest difference is in the teams that surround them. The importance of the governmental team was driven home to me by a colleague at a Brazilian research institute in the late 1980s after George H. W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan as president. I was lamenting the fact that a Vice President who claimed to have seen or heard nothing about Iran-Contra and other Reagan administration scandals had won the presidential election of 1988, and my colleague said to me “but that is why, unlike here in Brazil where we struggle to find someone who can lead us out of darkness and into the modern world, in the US you can have a monkey as president and the machine will still keep on running without missing a beat.”
By “the machine” he was presumably referring to the US economy and institutional architecture, including the government of the day. It was more than one person and although the presidency is a vital cog in the machine, it is not the only one. Trump stretched the limits of institutional resiliency, to be sure, but it bent without breaking and Trump was thwarted in many of his most inane or perilous initiatives by a mixture of constitutional features (separation of powers, state’s rights, government regulations and civil service protections) and the interventions of cooler heads in his administration (the so-called “adults in the room” who acted as guardrails against his more thoughtless, spiteful or ignorant impulses). All along, in spite of the incompetent, incoherent partisan and polarised response to the Covid pandemic, the machinery of the US rolled on with that combed-over monkey at the wheel.
That is the important thing to consider. Biden has assembled a first class team that has steered the US out of the economic doldrums and into a period of sustained growth. He has expanded Obamacare, bringing in millions of people into affordable health insurance schemes, has capped the price of essential prescription drugs, and has funded a slew of infrastructure projects that have brought employment and modernisation to many localities, including in red (MAGA) states. In fact, US employment is at 50 year lows, and wages have started to catch up to inflation. He has passed student debt relief bills and increased social security benefits for the first time in 35 years. To be sure, there are challenges ahead, including getting some measure of control over the Southern border (which has just seen an all-time record of undocumented migrants, creating friction with the reactionary state government in Texas and fuelling Trump’s xenophobic and racist attacks on recent arrivals), and stabilising energy prices (which if low by international standards are an economic benchmark in the US). But by most objective standards, including its international image in spite of its ill-considered support for Israel in its war on Palestinians, the US is generally better off under Biden than his predecessor. Just ask NATO and the EU as well as US Asian allies (on this and. the broader context of US decline, see https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/opinion/republicans-isolationsim-ukraine-russia-congress.html).
Biden’s team has a coherent programmatic agenda that addresses the damage done by Trump’s reckless and self-serving policies but also more longer term and not exclusively partisan goals when it comes to the US domestic and international position. The US has a malaise, and they want to remedy it. Trump’s team, on the other hand, are all about paybacks for grievances caused by an assortment of non-supplicants, and even then they are divided about who to punish first. The Trump team is incompetent and incoherent at its core because everything depends on the day to day whims of the would be czar.
Biden does not sweat the details of his administration’s initiatives. He leaves that to his cabinet and senior managers who have expertise in the areas covered by their portfolios. These are technocrats and political operators who know the ins and outs of the federal bureaucracy and Congress and therefore know how things work. Even with a divided and dysfunctional GOP majority in the House, they have gotten things done. In other words, if passing legislation and implementing policy is like making sausage (and old aphorism of US politics), then Biden’s team knows how to do so, the institutional way.
In contrast, Trump has vowed to come back into office with a revenge agenda against his opponents. He has announced that we will use the Justice Department as his instrument of retribution. He and his aides have drawn up a list of 400-500 loyalists who will take control of the apex agencies in the federal bureaucracy and who will re-write civil service legislation in order to engage in whole-scale purges of the “Deep State” apparatus. He aims to kill off entire departments (ministries, In NZ terms), especially those that cater to “woke” sentiments such as the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the Civil Rights Commission, etc. One only has to look at the writing of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s leading political advisors who was responsible for his border policy that included family separations and incarceration without charge upon arrival and detention (in spite of many migrants claiming refugee status from violence prone societies like El Salvador, Colombia or Honduras, to say nothing of left authoritarian regimes like those in Venezuela and Nicaragua) to understand the extent of Trump’s dark plans for his next term. His loyalists will swear allegiance to him before the constitution, and his judicial appointments will confirm his authority to undertake the overhaul of the federal government. His Vice President will be a brown-nosing lap dog, and his cabinet will be a collection of misfits and misers keeping what is left of the public trough to themselves and their private sector cronies. There will be no “adults in the room” and institutional counters to put up guardrails around him, and he will introduce fickle criteria to his micromanaging of pet policy projects. The US reputation will resume its nosedive.
And then of course there are the sycophantic opportunists and grifters who always travel in his political circles and who see his return to power as a means to advancing their personal ideological and material agendas.
I will leave aside for the moment the impact these two very different teams will have on things like US-PRC relations, the Ruso-Ukranian War, the Middle East meltdown, rise of techno-sovereignty challenge to the Nation-State, climate change mitigation, and more policy areas ad infinitum. The differentiation line is stark not because of which monkey is driving the machine, but because of who else is along for the ride as navigators and mechanics.
That is why the focus on Biden and Trump’s age and mental acuity is more of a side-show than a critical issue. Temperment is more important, especially when one guy has senior moments of forgetfulness or confusion and the other is an incoherent raving lunatic. Most important of all are the teams that will surround them, and on that score I think that the difference is clear.
Razor sharp clear.
I was going to write about something else to start off the KP year but current events have intruded in the form of the craziness surrounding the selection of US House Speaker and the storming of the Brazilian seats of power (Congress, the Supreme Court and Presidential Palace) by (so-called “Trump of the Tropics”) Jair Bolsonaro supporters who refuse to concede that he lost the October 2022 presidential election to Luis Ignacio da Silva (Lula). I thought I would briefly address the connection between them
When Trump was elected in 2016 I wrote here and in other outlets that one of the problems of his success was that it would encourage imitators at home and abroad. The imitators at home would seek to emulate and deepen his retrograde messages on immigration, race, gender, and other cultural-idelogical issues (such as how to treat the Confederate legacy), whereas external imitators would adopt his nationalist-populist style to tailor their similarly retrograde messages to domestic audiences. The Trump “ripple effect,” I argued, would spread like a grease stain across the global political landscape, including here in NZ. Sure enough, it has.
To continue the analogy, it is now clear that Trump ripped off the scab that covered the festering pustulence of authoritarian bigotry and intolerance that lie under the surface of most democratic societies. He made it “cool” to be a proto- or neofascist. He made it safe to be an ignorant, anti-scientific xenophobic, conspiracy theory believer. He coddles anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers and praises murderous dictators. He normalised pathological lying as a political tactic and he attempted to wield presidential powers as personal weapons with which to settle political scores and pursue personal vendettas. He turned public sector nepotism into a family and friend cash cow. He is, in a word, a pox on humanity.
I say this because the sequels to his presidency are now being seen in the US and elsewhere. In the US the election of a new Republican House Speaker turned into a clown show after MAGA diehards (first known as the “Taliban Twenty,” then recast as the “Fascist Five”–or Six, if you are a pedantic MAGA purist) voted in opposition to Kevin McCarthy, who himself is a 2020 election-denying Trump bootlicker who did everything in his power to cover up and diminish the January 6, 2021 storming and occupation of the US Capitol. The MAGA fanatics, who are also pro-Russian, wanted to outflank McCarthy on the Right, tying personal benefits and unworkable policy demands to their support for his candidacy. (We must remember that the Democrats control both the Senate and the Presidency for the next two years, so some of the MAGA proposals are dead in the water even if they pass in the House).
After 15 rounds of balloting spanning 4 days, they eventual allowed him to win by voting “present,” which lowered McCarthy’s threshold for victory from 218 votes to 216 (Democrats voted unanimously 15 times for Opposition Leader Hakeen Jeffries to be Speaker giving him 212 votes each time). In winning McCarthy became the biggest loser. He is now beholden to this fanatical fringe of MAGA sociopaths, which includes several Jan.6 collaborators, assorted anti-vax loonies, a guy being investigated for child sex trafficking and a former high school dropout-turned-escort and bar owner who got her entry into politics courtesy of being introduced to GOP Senator Tom Cruz at a conservative convention in Las Vegas in the early Trump years (she clearly made an impression on him). This collection of Einsteins now hold the entire House hostage to their demands on the Speaker.
The biggest winner in the House Speaker election was Donald Trump. He backed McCarthy from the onset and once the MAGA morons dug in their heels in later-round balloting it was he who called them and convinced them to switch their votes from other (equally unqualified) candidates to “present.” McCarthy acknowledged his influence once the dust had settled, and it is now McCarthy who will be in the grip of a political vise made up by the Fascist Five inside his party conference and by Trump outside of it. To put it in more organic terms, Trump and his Fascist Five minions have McCarthy by the gonads, assuming that they are still in his possession.
This is a very bad thing. Trump, who was becoming increasingly irrelevant and a spent force in GOP politics as he contends with the imminent possibility of criminal indictments at the state and federal level on a host of charges, including inciting the Jan 6 insurrection and unlawful possession of classified material, has now been gifted a lifeline back into the core of the party. He had already announced his candidacy for the presidential elections in 2024 but was in danger of being eclipsed by younger reactionaries like Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Now he is back front and centre in the primary mix, with Congressional GOP support behind him. He will have to be dealt with, and unless he is indicted, on his terms. (The irony of the GOP mainstream and people like DeSantis needing a Democrat-appointed Attorney General and his subordinates in the Department of Justice to kneecap Trump’s 2024 political ambitions is a bit delicious).
It is possible that the Democrat Party will ultimately benefit from the GOP in-fighting and Trump’s political resurrection, especially if he is indicted and charged and the House GOP spend their time wasting taxpayer dollars on investigations into Hunter Biden’s laptop, Benghazi, the “weaponising” of government agencies against conservatives and fighting “wokeness” and other culture wars in federally-funded projects and agencies. None of this political theatre actually improves the lives of their constituents at a time when the Biden administration and then-Democrat House and Senate majorities passed dozens of items of legislation that actually do have a real positive impact on middle and working class voters (like social security payment increases, physical infrastructure projects, technology industry support measures, capping insulin prices and student debt relief). The more the House Republicans fight over incidentals and fail to deliver tangible benefits to society as a whole, the greater the chances of Democrat victories in 2024.
The Republican House majority need to be seen as doing something concrete that serves the interests of their voting base and it is not clear, with a Democrat majority in the Senate and a Democrat president, that they have the intellectual capacity and political ability to do that. At the moment it is all about scratching the “own the Libs” itch and nothing about actually governing. The MAGA caucus and Trump will ensure that continues through the 2024 elections. Expect Republican House chaos for the next two years, to potential Democrat benefit.
This spills over into the external world. Trump may limit his ambitions to the US or see the presidency as his vehicle towards global reification, but there are those in his circle who have global ambitions that transcend Trump. If anything they see him as a vehicle for their ideological aspirations.
Leading that crowd is Trump ally Steve Bannon. Bannon, a primary instigator/ architect of the Jan 6 insurrection now out on bail after being convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to five months imprisonment for not answering a subpoena to testify about his involvement, has been identified as one of the instigators of the Jan 8 insurrection in Brasilia. In fact, one of his henchmen, Jason Miller (a married former Trump advisor who has the distinction of having put an abortifacient in a girlfriend’s drink after she told him that she was pregnant) was detained in a plane waiting on the Brasilia airport tarmac to take off during the insurrection, having spent the previous week working with Bolsonaro’s brother and chief advisor to establish pro-Bolsonaro resistance camps in Brasilia and other major Brazilian cities.
There are many other proven instances of connections between pro-Bolsonaro seditionists and MAGA leaders like Mike Liddell (the pillow magnate), Trump advisors, CPAC (the conservative political action committee led by Matt Schapp, the married traditional family values champion who has just been accused of groping the genitals of a male staffer during a fund-raising trip), and a motley crew of Christian conservatives, anti-communists and white nationalists. The tactics used by the Brazilian mob copied and expanded on the Jan 6 insurrection, broadening the occupation to include all three seats of power while emulating the symbology of the US event (including sitting at the Speaker’s office desk and vandalising artwork and statuary). They may have been abetted by the pro-Bolsonaro governor of the federal district of Brasilia, who, much like Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense, reportedly ordered the security detachment around the government complex to stand down and use minimum force when faced with crowds trying to force their way into it. (Unlike the Trump glove puppet, he has now been suspended pending an investigation into his actions by the Supreme Court).
Unlike the Jan 6 crowd, the Brazilian insurrectionists made their move on a Sunday when the buildings were unoccupied. That made it easier for security forces to respond when they were eventually summoned because no hostages of any significance could be taken and no crowds of innocent bystanders and tourists were around into which the seditionists could blend into and escape. 1500 were arrested and now wait on charges.
This gets to the heart of the matter. Trump has helped create a global network of rightwing anti-democratic agitators whose main goal is to subvert democracies from within by challenging their legitimacy as a form of governance. He continues to support them (as he did with Bolsonaro, claiming that the Brazilian elections were “rigged”), with Bannon and his cohort serving as the architects for individualised national strategies to pursue that end. Bannon has publicly said that he wants to create a global “nationalist-populist” movement that returns to “traditional” values and social hierarchies. Read into that want you want but in practice it basically stands for white economic and cultural nationalist xenophobic heterosexist patriarchy. (You can find various biographies of him with a simple internet search, the best of which spell out the full extent of his vision).
In NZ anti-government groups on the far Right use Trump/Bannon rhetoric to denounce not only the current government but also the NZ “Deep State.” This was amply seen during the parliament protests, occupation and riot early last year. Platforms like Counterspin and VFF reportedly have funding support from Bannon’s media conglomerate, with people listed as his correspondents misusing press credentials to get close to the Prime Minister in order to harangue her. (The security implications of this are serious and need to be addressed as a priority by those responsible for her protection).
A key tactic in Bannon’s playbook is to take local grievances and turn them and government responses into seemingly existential issues . In NZ pandemic mitigation efforts are framed as government attempts to control–even mind control–the population via quarantines, lockdowns and masking mandates. Efforts to rationalise water purification and distribution are construed as attempts to impose Maori control over water access rights. Initiatives to promote acceptance of transgender rights are seen as usurpations of traditional values while efforts to promote the everyday use of te reo is considered to be an insidious assault on NZ’s European heritage.
For Bannon, as with Trump, the specific issue is not as important as the overall effect. Agitators can slide from issue to issue (as VFF has done now that public health orders and pandemic mitigation mandates have been discontinued), but the objective is to undermine faith in the government (first) and pubic institutions (ultimately). The end goal is subversion of democracy as a political regime and social construct, to be replaced by some imaginary version of libertarian anarchism in which the strong rule over the weak and people behave and organise their lives accordingly.
The key to cauterising the septic spread of the Trump toxin is to confront its physical agents and ideological vectors as the very real subversive threats that they are. The threats are not to just the government of the day, or the police, or the Courts, or bureaucrats in the public service although they re all in the firing line of the more extremist elements in the alt-Right in NZ and elsewhere. The threat is to the democratic organization of society, from the institutional structure of its politics to its social norms and mores to its economic rights and responsibilities. Whatever the libertarian anarchist/nationalist-populist pipe dream may be, it will not bring social order, much less peace, prosperity and stability, and during the transition from the flawed but incrementally perfectible democratic system that we currently have to the imaginary system that the Trump/Bannon perspective cynically offers, there will be destructive chaos.
In fact, it is this “valley of transition” that ultimately gives practical grounds for rejecting the dark utopianism of the nationalist-populist hallucination. Faced with the clear costs of moving abruptly away from the flawed-but-improvable socio-institutional frameworks that currently condition our behaviour and the long-term uncertainties inherent in that move (i.e., will things in fact get better for all if the Trump/Bannon model prevails as a social construct?), the most prudent choice for most people is to work to improve the system from within (which includes pushing the envelope at its margins when it comes to social, economic and political convention).
For the moment that Brazilians have shown that they take the seditious threat seriously by arresting the seditionists and remanding many of them for prompt judicial adjudication while bailing others deemed less involved in the move to attack the government complex. They are also investigating larger networks of security officials and pro-Bolsonaro politicians in order to determine if they have any complicity in the January 8 events. The US has faltered in this regard, with relatively prompt arrest, trial and conviction of various foot soldier insurrectionists but little in the way of prosecution of their intellectual leaders and material sponsors and relatively light sentences for the majority of those convicted so far. NZ has done even worse, working very slowly (if at all) to bring the organisers of the parliamentary protests to justice and reportedly willing to allow at least some of the eventually violent trespassing mob to walk free rather than face the Courts.
That is a terrible precedent to set that will be seen as a victory by the NZ seditionists and will encourage others of similar disposition to try their luck at subversion as well. In that context, it is only a matter of time before someone in Aotearoa gets killed by Trump’s toxic tail.
After a small hiatus due to Covid hitting my household, Selwyn Manning and I resumed our weekly ” A View from Afar” podcast series with an analysis of the 2022 US midterm results and a look at what Trump’s decision to run for president again means for the GOP. You can find the podcast here.
This week on the “A View from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and I discuss the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida property and the impact it and other factors may haven the US midterm elections in November.