Trump, The Republican Party and Pervasive Contempt for Democracy
By
David Gottfried
Congressional Republicans are now phalanxes of fascists who tell us that the Trump rioters of January were peaceful tourists. Since right-wing talk radio told the Southern fried dolts that Covid is a liberal myth, the junior varsity storm troopers in states like Missouri and Arkansas declined to get vaccinated. Although Congress should proceed to investigate the attempted coup de tat of January 6, should determine why the Governor of Maryland was denied permission to send the Maryland national guard to the Capital to defend it from the marauding Hitlerian brown shirts, and should determine if Trump had planned to assume dictatorial control (Just What did Rudy Guiliani mean when he told the rioters to conduct “trial by combat”?), the investigation may have been aborted before it began as the GOP does not want to investigate anything --- except perhaps Hillary’s and Hunter Biden’s e mails.
If only they could all suffer what Mike Pence suffered when hooligans howled, “Hang Mike Pence.” They should remember what John F. Kennedy said at his inaugural address: Those who try to ride the back of the tiger sometimes find themselves in the tiger’s stomach.
The screeching politicians and talk radio drama queens suggest that America is sicker than it ever was. However, I am not so sure. I think democracy in this country was always revered in the abstract while reviled in real life. The difference is that today the cancer of our political life is not as well camouflaged as it was in those romanticized pre-Trump days.
For example, “Only I can fix it,” a recently released book about Trump, does an excellent job of cataloguing Trump’s crimes. However, it errs when it suggests Trump’s calumny was unprecedented. I suggest that in many ways he was just more of the same in America’s long and lamentable history of political charlatans and liars.
1) The lies of American Presidents and the shredding of democratic norms
Donald Trump was a consummate liar extraordinaire. But so are most of the Imperial Presidents of America.
We all know that Trump lied about Covid to get reelected. He continuously understated the severity of the crisis because truthful news, he believed, would depress the public and depress his vote totals in November. His lies regarding Covid were legion: In a private conversation that Bob Woodward taped in January 2020, Trump said A) Covid was extremely contagious, and B) much, much worse than the flu. In January 2020, Trump concluded that we were in for everything but smooth sailing. Meanwhile, in public he discounted the risk of covid because happy news was politically favorable news.
A) Trump’s lies were horrible, and caused the deaths of many thousands of Americans, but Trump was behaving like many of America’s Presidential monarchs. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied to the American people, throughout his presidency, regarding Vietnam. In the beginning of 1965, when we had far fewer than 50,000 men in Vietnam, he was advised, by top generals, that success in Vietnam would require sustained troop levels of 600,000 to 800,000 men for several years and that after the insurrection was suppressed, we needed a residual force in Vietnam for an additional 20 years to prevent a recurrence of communist revolution. However, throughout his presidency he said that the Communists had been beaten, that we could see the light at the end of the tunnel (which is what the French had said in 1954, on the eve of General Giap’s annihilation of the French at Dien Bien Phu) and that we were well on our way to winning because the South Vietnamese loved us because we were their white Christian saviors.
B) Shortly after the second George Bush invaded Iraq (He had to invade Iraq as this is what Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted, and boy George was too busy looking pretty for the camera, chopping wood on the ranch in his best cowboy drag blue jeans, to study the relevant issues), the anti-American insurgency made itself felt. He dealt with the insurgency by denying that it existed as this sort of news was not politically favorable. When the Baghdad chief of the CIA told him that the situation in the capital was increasingly ominous, he growled that the man was a “defeatist” and a “pessimist” and essentially buried the man’s career.
C) When George Bush’s father encountered a sputtering economy, he essentially denied that anything was amiss as an acknowledgment of trouble might sour the nation’s mood and cost him the election.
D) I am not going to mention Watergate. I think Nixon was knocked down for Watergate because, at the time, it was not feasible to talk about his infinitely bigger crime, the one he committed in November 1968 when he sabotaged the Paris Peace talks to prolong the Vietnam War, make the Democrats look bad and win the election.
In October 1968, Hubert Humphrey, the Dem. Candidate for President, was rising in the polls and erasing Nixon’s lead. On October 30, the Harris poll showed Humphrey ahead 43 to 40. Nixon then told the South Vietnamese that he would be more stalwart in defending them than the Democrats and that they should sabotage the Paris Peace Talks, between the various Vietnamese parties and the Americans, to enable him to win (At the time, a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, was president and so bad news would, presumably, make the Democrats look bad). The South Vietnamese followed Nixon’s instruction and busted up the Paris Peace talks. A peace agreement, which had seemed to be within grasp, was lost. On Saturday, the headlines said that the Paris talks had been aborted. Tracking polls showed that from the Saturday before the election, until election day, about 2 and one half million Americans shifted their allegiance from Humphrey to Nixon. On election day, Nixon won with a margin of seven-tenths of one percent, or about 700,000 votes
The war went on for another four years. In January 1973, shortly after Nixon had won reelection, the United States agreed to leave Vietnam on terms that were very similar to the terms set forth in October 1968.
Very simply, Richard Nixon destroyed peace talks so the Democrats would look bad and he could get elected. And during the four years of our continued fighting in Vietnam, about another 25,000 Americans died.
Our Presidents can be counted on to speak the truth as reliably as Captain Kangaroo can be expected to edify his toddlers with the news of the day.
2) Democracy is nonexistent because Democrats turn vital issues into non issues and debate with one hand, and nine of the fingers of the remaining hand, tied behind their backs.
A) When they debated crime in the 1960’s, and terrorism after 9/11, Democrats didn’t mention their winning argument and let themselves get targeted as a party that was soft on criminals and carnage.
Democrats believe that the constitution should be adhered to, and this includes the 4th Amendment which requires that a search warrant be obtained before the police search one’s home. Many people are uneasy with this limitation on searches and seizures, believe that if a criminal is contemplating murder we shouldn’t worry about legal niceties and civil liberties, and conservative politicians suggest that liberal constraints on searches are responsible for people dying in droves.
However, neither the conservative media, nor the phony liberal media, nor the Democrats who truly behave as if they want to lose, have the HONESTY to note that the law has always permitted the police to dispense with search warrants if the situation is one which the policeman considers an emergency and there is no time to get a search warrant.
B) The entire congressional debate regarding the Contras, in the 1980’s, was a charade as the U.S. continued to fund the contras after Congress voted to stop the funding.
Congress, in the 1980’s, voted to prevent Reagan from supporting the contras. By doing this, the benighted American people thought we have a functioning democracy. The American people thought that liberal democrats used their muscle in Congress to alter American foreign policy. This impression favored Reagan as it enabled him to suggest that dovish Democrats had excessive influence over foreign affairs.
In any event, even though Congress voted to stop funding the contras, the funding continued because our government had a way of funding them no matter what Congress did.
Very simply, certain states are practically vassals of the United States. Because Israel is friendless, it must do America’s dirty work – which in turn makes Israel even more friendless. Accordingly, when Congress blocked funding of the contras, Reagan ordered Israel to kick back funds to the contras. Various Arab states are also vassals of the United States; since their governments are so unpopular at home, they need the US to retain power. Accordingly, some Arab states gave money to the contras. Very simply, the contras had plenty of money to torture and maim the socialist and clerical opposition, and all the flowery speeches of Senator Kennedy et. al. were just impotent bloviating in the wind. Also, the contents of the CIA’s budget are largely secret, and the administration may have also funded the contras through the CIA.
3) Most so-called progressives in Congress are just as rich as conservatives and perhaps find the economic agenda of conservatives more to their liking. Since we have essentially two conservative parties which takes turns in running the nation, there is no genuine democratic debate or alternative
A) How Daniel Patrick Moynihan won a homerun for the Republican party while pretending to be a Democrat.
This man was fraud transformed into flesh and blood. He was the United States Senator from New York from 1976 until 2000, when he advised his constituents to support Hillary Clinton.
The New York papers generally said he was swell as he was somewhat professorial, albeit in a tweet jacketty stereotypically egg-headed and impotent fashion. The media also got him plenty of liberal votes by writing a lot of frothy shit about his alleged concern for the downtrodden. Yeah, he did grow up near the New York Waterfront and supposedly endured poverty. But John Connolly and Adolf Hitler also grew up poor, but they weren’t exactly shining liberals.
In the beginning of the Clinton administration, Bill and Hillary stressed that they wanted to give more Americans better health care and affordable health care. Moynihan was instrumental in nixing aid for health care and delivering the death knell to Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
As the Clintons were talking about the plight of the uninsured, Moynihan appeared on either Meet the Press or Face the Nation (This was in January or February of 1993, at the very outset of Clinton’s presidency) and said that the most pressing domestic issue was welfare and that it was imperative to remove lazy bums from the welfare rolls. Moynihan said that this was much more important than health care reform and that he would not do anything regarding health care until welfare was brought to heel. At the beginning of 1993, the democrats were in the driver’s seat as they had the Presidency and Congress (Although they had Congress by a razor thin margin.) In 1993, liberal change was possible. And because liberal change was possible, Moynihan made sure progressive change was dead on arrival. Sure, plenty of republicans also savaged the Clinton health care reforms, but their opposition wasn’t needed. When a supposedly diehard Democrat such as Moynihan trashed health care reform, not a single republican columnist had to say anything.
FAST FORWARD TO 1996: The republicans lead the charge in savaging welfare. Of course, this is what Moynihan had wanted to do all along, as he opposed health care reform in 1993 on the grounds that first we had to trash welfare. However, in 1996, the Republicans clearly had the votes to decimate welfare. Therefore, Moynihan knew that he could wax poetic (more accurately hysterical) about suffering poor children and the need to retain welfare and thereby keep his liberal supporters on the plantation while happily realizing that welfare would soon be decimated.
The Upshot: What Moynihan said that he believed in had little or no correspondence to what he actually believed in. His words were a fraud. Ergo, democracy, whose medium of exchange is words, is a fraud.
B) Chuck Schumer: Although I am a New Yorker, and although I am a New York Jew, when I think of Chuck Schumer I find myself admiring midwestern agrarian radicals who, when they thought of New York, did not see fiery labor leaders or revolutionaries like Emma Goldmann, but rather the malevolent magnates of tyrannical, monopolistic capitalism.
Chuck Schumer had said that he is opposed to those loopholes which permit hedge fund managers to pay a ludicrously small fraction of their salary as taxes. However, through his clever and contumacious wielding of parliamentary maneuvers that would make Lyndon Johnson smile, he revivifies the very loopholes he avows to destroy. Although he is a man who has talked the talked for decades, whose Brooklyn accent, Bernie Sanders Raspyness and nasty nasality is as bad as mine, his voice seamlessly harmonizes with the heirs to Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Morgan in their elite precincts on Park and Fifth Avenues.
C) In the first few years of W’s administration, roughly 2001 to 2004, Democrats rightfully attacked Bush proposals to invest social security assets in the stock market. However, Democrats, and Republicans, left something out: The proposal to invest social security monies in the stock market got its first push from the preceding administration, i.e., the shit came from Billary. However, slick willy and hilly did it in a deceptive manner so they could maintain their aura of liberal purity.
When a politician wants to advance something that he wants to keep his distance from, he directs third parties to float the idea to the media and his agents speak to reporters on “deep background.” Ergo, the Democrats were right to condemn Bush for proposing that we invest social security’s reserves in Wall Street, but they should have blamed themselves even more as their President fostered the idea in a secretive and duplicitous manner.
4) How language facilitates lying
A) A “small business” does not mean what you think it means
Federal Statutes and Regulations Provide that a Small Business is a company with fewer than 200 to 500 employees, depending upon the industry.
When a politician wants to appear pro-business, but in a humane, man-of-the-people vein, he claims that he wants to help small businesses.
He may get teary and sentimental as he talks about his love for Mom-and-Pop luncheonettes, getting an ice cream soda from the local druggist, and he is apt to take us on a magic carpet ride to the American collective unconscious of main street, where a cornucopia of random memories all take us to the same place: Home. Having evoked home and mom and apple pie, some fools start swooning, believing that because the politician supports small businesses, he will bring back a romanticized past that only exists in old movies.
However, because of the way “small business” is defined by Federal law, he is aiding businesses that no one outside of the law would consider small.
B) The Romanticized Middle Class
No one babbles on with as many bromides about the middle class as Chuck Schumer. Although Cheesy Chucky is a con artist extraordinaire. he is not a man without love or ideals or faith. His faith is certainly not his religion (He subscribes to the sort of vacuous Judaism of so many assimilated and soulless American Jews. He is Jewish in his love of Jewish foods and his ability to utter three Jewish words, shvatza, shlemeil and oy vey. He veritably walked off the pages of Philip Roth’s Novella “Goodbye Columbus.”) His Ideals have nothing to do with political issues. As a consummate political sheister, issues are not something that he cares about; they are a way to get supporters and a means of getting your supporters to hate other politicos
But he forever delivers hosannas to the so-called Middle class.
Of course, he is not unique. Much of the dreary democratic dogma of America consists of paying homage to the middle class, the notion that almost all of us are part of the middle class, and that the middle class is essentially good and benign,
However, the American obsession with the glories of the omnipresent middle class is precisely what is keeping our politics positively asinine.
Economists will tell us that a man who makes 40,000 a year and a man who makes 240,000 a year are both members of the middle class.
Political Scientists (Read: Political myth makers) tell us that because the man with 40 K and the man with 240 K are both members of the middle class, they both have common needs and similar political objectives.
That makes as much sense as telling a tubercular Jew in the garment center that he had a lot in common with the protestant princes of privilege in fancy shmancy Darien, Connecticut.
For starters, someone who makes 240 K a year probably has a home, and he is benefiting from the interest payment deduction that is afforded homeowners.
By contrast, someone who makes 40 K a year normally does not own a home and instead of benefiting from an interest payment exemption on his taxes, he is paying money to a landlord who is benefiting from a slew of exemptions given to the real estate industry.
Very simply, people who make 40 K a year are working stiffs and people who are making 24O K a year are happily making millions of people stiff with rigor mortis from coronaries, cancer, and suicides. But alas our brain dead and intellectually enervating political discourse dulls all discernment by constantly telling us that we are all part of the middle class, or all in this together, etc.
The next time a talking head on television says that we are all in this together, find out where he lives and go to his home in the middle of the night. Tell him: I have rodents in my apartment, it’s freezing, and I have cancer. Since we are, as you said, all in this together, why don’t you kindly let me sleep in the largest bedroom in your preening mansion, which breezily demeans everyone who lives in more modest homes.
5) How the Saints of the Democratic Party, namely FDR and Harry Truman, sided with white racists against black people:
A) To help impoverished farmers, Democrats gave farmers money to not grow crops. This kept prices from dropping too low and was somewhat effective at reining in the severity of the Agricultural Depression.
However, it also made 1 to 2 million sharecroppers, black and white, homeless. The bulk of these payments went to politically connected mint julip drinking Southern aristocrats with massive plantations. The filthy rich plantation owners pocketed the government money, stopped growing crops and evicted the poor white and black sharecroppers who then migrated to Northern cities. The plantation owners got cash and the Democratic Party was ensured a continued solidly Democratic South.
B) Of course, FDR did give us social security. However, in a nod to Southern patricians, Roosevelt exempted domestics and agricultural laborers from any social security benefits, or minimum wage benefits or the right to unionize. Almost all blacks in the South were either agricultural laborers or domestics. These workers had no social security insurance for old age, for disability, for survivors of dead workers or for unemployment insurance. When Robert Kennedy went to the Mississippi Delta in 1967, he saw black children with bloated bellies, with sores and scabs all over their skin because of malnutrition and disease, and he saw conditions which were more commonly seen only in the most dire slums of the third world.
The preceding instances in which our Democracy proved that it was anything but democratic have been discussed in a stream of consciousness fashion, i.e., I discussed only those items which quickly came to mind, and this is only a small fraction of the incidents, and mechanisms of disinformation, that neuter democratic power.