Now that the impeachment trial of Donald Trump scheduled for early next year is expected to result in acquittal, the most ‘progressive’ media (MSNBC) fears that the man who thrusts his chin out like Mussolini could not only be re-elected, but may be anticipating an illegal third term. Trump has often warned that his base could resort to arms if he is not re-elected, prompting the Senate’s Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, to announce that he will coordinate the impeachment with the White House’s lawyers.
Over the course of the last ten years I have speculated on my website, Otherjones, about the possibility of the United States becoming a fascist dictatorship. Those articles can be read in order and here are my latest thoughts:
The role of television has been inadequately exposed: political analysts invariably imagine the worst, however when a candidate is as far from the norm as was Trump, predictions turn into vaudeville (a 1920’s term for grotesque comedy), as happened in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Against all expectations, Trump won, thanks to the Electoral College overriding the results of the ballot box, and now it is too late for those same pundits to credibly warn of disaster.
Having sacralized the two-hundred and fifty year old Constitution, it cannot denounce the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right not only to ‘keep’ but to ‘bear’ arms, meaning that Americans can legally carry a gun around, to use whenever they see fit, Democrats are powerless to limit the influence of the National Rifle Association in Congress. This has led to the proliferation of armed groups officially devoted to hunting or target practice, but ready to defend a president devoted to ‘taking the country back’ to colonial times, when White rule was unquestioned. (The President’s recent intervention to prevent an American soldier from being disciplined for taking a selfie mocking a dead opponent has generated white supremacist signals in the ranks, while generals worry what order he will issue next.)
In 2016, television anchors laughed at Trump’s behavior, but fear may be coming too late: Trump is unlikely to emulate Nixon, walking into the sunset with a minimum of honor after resigning to avoid impeachment. Since he was elected, I have given equal weight to the probability of him absconding to a friendly country ruled by an authoritarian, as to him leading (safely from behind) a second American revolution that would give every American a gun with which to combat climate change. Never for a moment did I imagine lawyers ‘on both sides’ interpreting a 5G present according to the wisdom of our ‘founders’, who rode on horseback.
Ultimately, however, the crisis of American ‘democracy’ is linked to the failure of the Democratic Party to carry forward FDR’s New Deal. The New York Review currently describes the relative independence of Russian television as a way of criticizing President Putin, as if it hadn’t taken more than seventy-five years for Americans to get a relatively accurate picture of really existing socialism from their own media! Although it allows socialist Bernie Sanders and ‘capitalist to the core’ democratic socialist Elizabeth Warren to challenge the party-backed centrists for the first time, neither has enough clout to prevent the 2020 election from channeling 1933, when Germany’s milquetoast socialists allowed Hitler to take power through a ‘democratic’ process.
Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
