Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Is American democracy going to die?

The brief answer to that question goes like this. It’s the wrong question.

And because it’s the wrong question, it tends to send people into intellectual-shutdown mode, especially those who are the sort of die-hard it-can’t-happen-here types. They just kind of go into paroxysms of angry denial, and so that particular discussion ends up precisely nowhere. Haven’t we had altogether too much evidence of that over the last few years?

A much better way to understand what happens in a situation like the one America’s facing now is to really take in what happens when democracies come apart, in the contemporary age.

Rarely do they “die.” Instead, they turn undead.

The “Death” vs Undeath of Democracies

When we say that a democracy’s going to “die,” what kind of pictures and images does it conjure up in your head? 1984, maybe, or Stalin, or the guillotine, and so forth. In other words, not very contemporary ones, even if, for example, Orwell’s warnings were prescient. Because these images are violent, extreme, and totalizing, they tend to be dismissed easily, too, by the it-can’t-happen-here segment or tribe.

And in a sense, that’s correct.

We don’t often see democracy dying…in this sense…anymore. Rarely do we see a sort of military-cap wearing dictator in full martial regalia leading mass salutes towards the glorification of a Reich anymore, really. It’s not so often that we see someone assuming the title of Emperor or Great Leader or Dear Father or Fuhrer. Perhaps with the exceptions of the most war-torn and beleaguered parts of the world, those in truly shattered states. Even in poor countries, we rarely see this sort of Mad Max scenario play out.

Why is that? Because in this day and age the pretense of democracy matters. It matters a very great deal. It allows nations to keep access to capital markets, aka, sell their debt, and finance necessary public works. It allows nations to join various international organizations, which are necessary for trade, money, labour, and much more. And it allows nations to retain some semblance of diplomacy with the rest of the world, which is crucial, unless you particularly want to become a pariah state.

That’s why we see the pretense of democracy having spread around the globe in the post-war era. The institutions set up then, from the World Bank to the UN, to the International Labor Organization to the World Food Program, and countless numbers more—all these made it desirable for nations to be democracies, because when you’re a democracy, you enjoy access to them, in a sort of preferential way. So being a democracy gives you a certain place in the world order, even if it’s a degenerating one, at this point, as that order comes undone.

So nations go out there and…now…pretend to be democracies. While we all know they’re not. Some struggle to retain a semblance of democracy, some gave up the ghost long ago, and some are sort of lurching, shuffling remnants of once proud democracies.

Those are zombie democracies.

And in just that way, the danger for America isn’t that democracy “dies,” in the extreme sense we often think of—but that it turns undead.

The Age of Zombie Democracy

In our age, that trend—zombie democracy—is easy to spot. You can probably name half-a-dozen without thinking too hard. What are some characteristics of a zombie democracy?

• The incumbent always wins a (laughably) large proportion of the vote.
• Institutions with democratic names exist, like courts and justice and press, but they serve an authoritarian function.
• There are several parties in name, but only one ever wins and retains power.
• Freedom and equality and truth and so forth, democracy’s fundamental values, are honored proudly in speeches and soaring rhetoric, but in reality, life is repressive, fearful, and riven.
• The overarching mission of society is war, cleansing, conflict, or domination, not the genuine democratic values of peace, prosperity, and happiness.
• People’s lives are strictly controlled, and usually monitored and policed carefully, with harsh consequences for infractions of authoritarian values.

I could go on, for example, all that’s usually accompanied by crony capitalism, a class of elites who jet off to London or where have you and live in mansions, as they siphon off the wealth of the nation, etcetera. But you begin to get the point.

Here’s the larger one.

All that’s masked, covered, almost triumphantly, in this weird display: we’re a democracy! We’re the most democratic! We’re more democratic than you, only this is what we choose!

So here I’m drawing a distinction, almost one hiding in plain sight. In older times, dictators were sort of loud and proud of it—Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and so on. Have you ever seen Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator”? That’s sort of a textbook example of this kind of figure, persona, image.

But today, that’s almost passe. You don’t want to be that sort of figure, or that sort of society, because you end up cut off from the modern world in all the ways I’ve described above. And so what we see much more of now are figureheads who are dictators, or close to it, or aspiring to be, and will deny it, over and over again, and instead garb themselves in the noble, pure cloth of democracy.

Hey, it’s as if they’re saying, I’m not Stalin. Look! I’m practically Thomas Jefferson!

The pretense fools no one, really. But it does generate the legitimacy that it’s designed to. Pretending, at least, to be a democracy still does give you access to capital, labor, diplomacy, trade deals, treaties, and much more, because our systems and institutions aren’t really built to distinguish, formally, between democracies and zombie democracies, yet.

And all that’s why, in our world, zombie democracy is one of the largest, newest, and most troubling trends of all. I’m sure you can think of plenty of examples yourself.

And all of that brings us back to America.

Is America Going to Become a Zombie Democracy?

If Trump’s re-elected, does democracy “die”? Now you know the—or at least my—answer.

It’s probably not going to die in the extreme, outlandish sense of suddenly having Charlie Chaplin’s great caricature at its head—a Supreme Tyrant or Great Emperor or what have you. It’s probably not going to celebrate becoming an overtly authoritarian place, or proudly declare itself something inimical to democracy.

Instead, it’s more likely that democracy turns undead.

And that means, as we’ve discussed above, a kind of non-democracy clothed in democratic garb, perhaps more loudly and flamboyantly, in both counts, than ever before.

Does that kind of make sense?

The it-can’t-happen-here crowd is right, but only in the wrong sense. Sure, it’s not as if Trump’s going to step straight into the ghost of Gaddafi’s body and turn up in military fatigues and declare himself Supreme Commander of the Revolution. But that rarely happens, as we’ve discussed, in the contemporary world, and for good reason. What does happen, and it’s happening much more frequently, is that democracies turn into zombies.

The shuffle and lurch and stagger, and pretend, increasingly desperately, to be democracies. They moan and keen and wail banshee howls about the great words of democracy—but they’re just moans and keens and howls and words. Like zombies, such democracies aren’t really there, in a human sense, in a real one. They’re empty shells, mindless vessels, which are sort of…violent and brutal and senseless.

And also pretty hard to destroy. Think of how many zombie democracies there are now, and how long and hard they’ve persisted. How difficult is it to undo becoming a zombie democracy? Harder than we know yet, because we don’t have too many examples of that process of coming-back-to-life-from-being-undead happening so far. Just a bare handful, perhaps less than three, certainly less than five.

If you want gory details, an America that’s a zombie democracy…sort of looks…like what you might picture and worry about. The one European leaders are certainly desperately preparing for. The one Democrats don’t seem nearly alarmed enough about becoming yet. It’s a place run by authoritarian ideas, where thoughts and behavior are carefully controlled, and whatever institutions purport to be democratic are turned regressive, on their heads, just as the Supreme Court’s been. The tenor of daily life changes, and speaking out is frowned upon, and then punished, as freedoms continue to be eviscerated for reasons of moral or genetic or biological or ethnic or just ideological purification. Meanwhile, of course, the siphoning of wealth goes on and accelerates, because of course, now, who or what can stop it?

It’s not a pretty picture. But have you ever seen a good-looking zombie?

The Undeath of Democracies

I think the plight America faces now is badly, and deeply, misunderstood. Yes, the establishment finally…sounds…a lot like us. The alarmists, the ones who warned, and so forth, over the last few years and more. But it’s still not really grasping the picture, fully, here.

Even saying “fascism” or “authoritarianism” is in a sense yesterday’s news now. It doesn’t do justice to what’s on the cards. No, America isn’t going to suddenly become some outlandish caricature of whatever came before in the past. Rather, it’s that it becomes something ultra-modern, a zombie democracy. And that’s a bad thing. Because for all its flaws, mistakes, sins, America is still the place of the promise, the one the world looks to be better than the rest, and better, often, even, than itself, and that’s what’s always given America this broken heart.

Trump clearly admires yesterday’s dictators and tyrants and wants to model a nation after the ones they created. And yet he’s also smart enough to understand the value of sham democracy, which is why he claims the mantle of democracy for himself, at the very same time (the election was stolen, they’re the real fascists, etcetera.) That’s a potent, and deadly, combination of understandings, because it’s how…

A zombie democracy’s born.

Today the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, closed at a new record high of 5,354. The Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, also closed at a record high of 17,187. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was also up, but not to a new record. It closed at 38,807.

That notable economic news got very little attention, likely in part because there is so much else going on.

Most dramatically, House speaker Mike Johnson elevated Ronny Jackson (R-TX) and Scott Perry (R-PA) to the House Intelligence Committee, giving them oversight of the entire U.S. intelligence community and access to the nation’s most sensitive foreign intelligence. The Intelligence community includes intelligence from the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. Space Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the State Department, the Department of Energy (which oversees information about nuclear weapons), the Treasury Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.

It also oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and that oversight is likely a key reason Johnson put Jackson and Perry on the committee.

A former Navy admiral, Jackson was Trump’s White House physician. Trump liked him enough to try unsuccessfully to promote him into the cabinet and within the U.S. Navy, and then to back him successfully for Congress after he retired from the Navy in 2019. In 2022 the U.S. Navy demoted him from admiral to captain after a 2021 report by the inspector general of the Defense Department showed he had “disparaged, belittled, bullied, and humiliated” his staff and abused alcohol on at least two occasions when he was supposed to be providing medical care to government officials.

Perry is more problematic than Jackson. Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that Perry played an important role in the plan to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election. She told podcast host Scott Lamar in October 2023 that Perry was “central to the planning of January 6,” and she has said repeatedly that Perry asked Trump for a pardon before he left office.

Federal authorities from the FBI seized Perry’s cell phone in 2022 as part of their investigation into the effort to seize the presidency; he is the only member of Congress whose cell phone was seized. Like Trump, who has attacked the FBI since then-director James Comey refused to drop the investigation into the connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, Perry has complained bitterly about the FBI’s investigation of him.

Now, Perry will be on the committee that oversees the FBI. In a statement, he said: “I look forward to providing not only a fresh perspective, but conducting actual oversight—not blind obedience to some facets of our Intel Community that all too often abuse their powers, resources, and authority to spy on the American People.”

Former director of the CIA General Michael Hayden wrote: “That’s unbelievable. Both of them. Intelligence Committee? God help us.”

There is other news about the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election: yesterday Wisconsin attorney general Josh Kaul filed felony forgery charges against attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who planned the use of fake electors; former judge James Troupis, who managed Trump’s 2020 campaign in Wisconsin; and Michael Roman, a political operative who allegedly delivered the paperwork for Wisconsin’s fake electors to a congressional staffer to try to get them to Vice President Mike Pence.

On January 6, 2021, after the document was delivered, Troupis texted to Chesebro: “Excellent. Tomorrow let’s talk about SCOTUS strategy going forward. Enjoy the history you have made possible today.”

In Georgia, a court of appeals paused the case against Trump and his co-conspirators from proceeding until it rules on Trump’s appeal to disqualify Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis. It has tentatively set a hearing date for October 4, meaning that voters will not get to learn the outcome of the trial until after the election. If Trump is reelected, the trial will almost certainly not go forward.

The federal criminal case against Trump for retaining classified documents is also stalled. Judge Aileen Cannon not only has put off hearings, she has added a hearing on June 21 to consider whether Special Counsel Jack Smith was properly appointed in the first place. She is revisiting a decision already decided in the affirmative in 2019 by the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals. She has also taken the highly unusual step of inviting three people not involved in the case to argue in that hearing: two will argue that the appointment is invalid, one will argue that it was done properly.

Meanwhile, there were signs over the past few days of the deeply different party principles at the heart of the 2024 election. At an event to reach Black voters in what Julia Terruso and Sean Collins Walsh of the Philadelphia Inquirer described as “one of the whitest and most conservative parts of Philly,” Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL), who is Black, illustrated the grip of a fantasy idyllic past on MAGA Republicans.

Donalds praised the Jim Crow era of American history—which was literally named for a vicious caricature of African Americans that helped to justify the lynching that characterized the period—because “during Jim Crow the Black family was together.” He blamed the Great Society programs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, including civil rights and social welfare programs, for eroding family values.

On the House floor, Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) urged Donalds to “check yourself before you wreck yourself.” Democratic National Committee chair Jamie Harrison was less poetic but more succinct. He wrote: “These fools have lost their damn minds….”

In the Senate, Democrats forced Republicans to vote on advancing a bill to protect access to contraception. Republicans threatened a filibuster, meaning it would take 60 votes to bring the bill forward. And so the measure failed by a vote of 51 in favor to 39 against (Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer of New York voted no so he could bring the measure up again). Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted in favor of the measure. All the other Republicans either voted no or did not vote.

All the Republicans running for reelection this year voted no: John Barrasso (R-WY), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Rick Scott (R-FL), and Roger Wicker (R-MS).

Some of them said they voted no because there was no danger that Republicans would attack contraception, claiming that Democrats were just “fear-mongering.” But in 2022, House Republicans overwhelmingly voted against protecting contraceptive rights, and in an interview last month, Trump said he was looking at restrictions on contraceptives before his campaign walked the statement back. Yesterday, in a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee on “How Abortion Bans Have Created a Health Care Nightmare Across America,” a Republican witness, Dr. Christina Francis, chief executive officer of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) took the position that IUDs and Plan B emergency contraception constitute abortion and should be banned. In the Senate itself, Jodi Ernst (R-IA) has already proposed getting rid of Plan B.

A February 2024 poll showed that 80% of American voters said that protecting access to birth control was “deeply important” to them.

For all their rhetoric about “America First,” MAGA Republicans are out of step with actual Americans. The Trump loyalists now in charge of the Republican National Committee also appear to be remarkably ill-informed about the country itself. Sam Brody, political reporter for the Boston Globe, noted yesterday that on their website promoting the Republican National Convention to be held in July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Republicans used a photograph not of Milwaukee, but of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City.

I’m routinely gobsmacked by how many people — including influential Democrats — tell me that they can’t imagine a victory by Donald Trump in November. I’m even more astounded by their reasoning.

Most of them don’t parse the economy and augur an end to the “vibecession” that’s distorting assessments of the country’s welfare under Joe Biden. They don’t talk about abortion rights and women’s votes.

They say some version of this:

Americans won’t be that reckless with the country’s future and won’t stoop that crudely and cruelly low. When it’s finally time to cast ballots — when the full weight of that decision hits them — they’ll realize that whatever their disappointment in the current president, it’s no match for the disgust that the former one elicits. They’ll recognize, however grudgingly, that Trump is an unserious person, unfit for a serious country.

You could file that perspective under idealism.

I call it amnesia.

It’s a dangerous reprise of the (greater) confidence that Democrats felt about Hillary Clinton back in 2016. And look how that turned out.

I understand that this time is different, in no small part because of Trump’s conviction last week. He’s a bona fide felon now. Back in 2016, it was somewhat easier for Americans itching to cast a protest vote to see the vilest of Trump’s behavior and the most vicious of his remarks as theatrical provocations, as a flamboyant show of defiance that wouldn’t amount to all that much. The line between mischief and malice could be blurry, at least if you didn’t care to look closely.

Eight years later? There’s nothing blurry about Trump. There’s no mistaking or minimizing the Nazi echoes in his talk of immigrants poisoning the blood of the country or his reference to his critics on the left as vermin. There’s no shrugging off his invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade NATO allies who didn’t pay their dues and his pledge to use the presidency to take revenge on his enemies.

In an article in Axios on Wednesday morning, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei quoted Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, saying that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would be at the top of that hit list and that he “should be — and will be — jailed.” In an article in The Times also published on Wednesday morning, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage surveyed like-spirited statements by other Trump backers, writing that the “open desire for using the criminal justice system against Democrats after the verdict surpasses anything seen before in Mr. Trump’s tumultuous years in national politics.”

There’s also no ignoring the amorality of Trump’s associates. After Trump’s guilty verdicts, the popular sports talk radio host Colin Cowherd, who’s not a usual Trump critic, treated his listeners to an inventory of the criminals around Trump: “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer and his company C.F.O. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

What’s more, Trump had four years to prove his presidential mettle. That was when he mused about treating Covid by injecting bleach; behaved so imperiously, ignorantly and erratically that many cabinet members and aides ran for the hills; and topped it all off by rejecting the outcome of the 2020 election and trying to subvert it, including with his role in inciting the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

So, yes, the possibility of Americans signing up for more of that can seem fantastical.

But I’d point out that when he lost in 2020, we were mid-pandemic — that surely hurt him — and Biden was the one who represented change. Now, weirdly, Trump does.

I’d point out that to go by opinion polls, more voters have reservations about Biden’s age (81) than about Trump’s (77 until next week). And those reservations are deep.

I’d point out that while Biden received roughly seven million more votes than Trump did four years ago, about 45,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin were the difference between Biden’s victory in the Electoral College and a tie with Trump. Those states — along with Pennsylvania, Nevada and a few others — could be decided as closely this time around.

Last, I’d point out that many of the voters who will give Biden or Trump his margin of victory aren’t attuned to the scariest and most negative details about Trump that I’ve just laid out. And in a fragmented and chaotic news environment, they may be supping on information entirely different from what the crowd who cannot envision Trump’s election consumes.

These shallowly and sporadically engaged voters might just gasp at the prices of groceries and houses, dismiss the verbal crossfire between Biden and Trump as a more intense version of familiar political warfare and choose Trump. Not acknowledging the very real possibility of that is dangerously complacent, and it fails to recognize how forcefully Biden and his supporters need to make the argument for him. The case against Trump is indisputably damning — but it may not be enough.

Kara Swisher@karaswisher
5h
Moochenfreude

This week, Breitbart interviewed the former Trump official Peter Navarro, one of many criminals in the ex-president’s orbit, from the Miami prison where he is serving four months for contempt of Congress. While life behind bars is difficult, Navarro boasted that his stint has been smoothed by his ties to Donald Trump, which make him something of a made man. The former president, said Navarro, is beloved not just by the guards, but by the “vast majority” of inmates as well. “If I were a Bidenite, things would be a lot tougher here — and yes, they know exactly who I am and respect the fact that I stood up for a principle and didn’t bow to the government,” he said.

One of the more unsettling things about our politics right now is the Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of lawlessness. Even as they proclaim Trump’s innocence, Trump and his allies revel in the frisson of criminality. At his rally in the Bronx last month, for example, Trump invited onto the stage two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, who are currently facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder and weapons possession. (They’ve pleaded not guilty.) During Trump’s recent criminal trial, his courtroom entourage included Chuck Zito, who helped found the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and spent six years in prison on drug conspiracy charges. (The Justice Department has linked his Hells Angels chapter to the Gambino crime family.) Trump, who has his own history of mafia ties, has repeatedly compared himself to Al Capone. MAGA merchants sell T-shirts — and, weirdly, hot sauce — showing Trump as either Vito or Michael Corleone from “The Godfather” movies, with the caption “The Donfather.”

Both liberals and anti-Trump conservatives have sometimes had trouble getting their heads around this phenomenon. Often the go-to move is to point out hypocrisy: so much for law and order! But the disturbing thing about the MAGA movement’s outlaw turn isn’t that it’s failing to live up to its own conservative values. It’s that it’s adopting a sinister set of new, or newly resurrected, ones.
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A fascinating new book by John Ganz, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” offers a useful way to think about the value system undergirding MAGA’s romance with the mob. Ganz’s book excavates a prehistory of Trumpism in the angry, cynical period between the end of the Cold War and the full flush of the Clinton boom. You can see, in the rise of figures like David Duke, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, Trumpism in embryo. (The chapter on Duke, and the cultish loyalty he inspired, is particularly illuminating.) But the most revelatory section — some of which Ganz has adapted in a post for his Unpopular Front newsletter — involves the mystique around the mobster John Gotti and the Buchanan-style paleoconservatives who saw, in the mafia, an admirable patriarchal alternative to the technocratic liberalism they despised.

Both Murray Rothbard, a co-founder of the libertarian Cato Institute, and Sam Francis, a white nationalist who has become posthumously influential among MAGA elites, found in “The Godfather” novel and films a vision of a self-governing social order more admirable than our own.

Francis used the German terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to contrast the values of the Godfather with those of liberal modernity. Gemeinschaft, he wrote, describes a culture based on “kinship, blood relationship, feudal ties, social hierarchy, deference, honor, and friendship,” whereas Gesellschaft refers to a social world that is atomized, calculating and legalistic. “It is a principal thesis of The Godfather that American society is a Gesellschaft at war with the Gemeinschaft inherent in the extended families of organized crime, and it is the claim of the novel and even more intensely of the films that the truly natural, legitimate, normal, and healthy type of society is that of the gangs,” wrote Francis in 1992.

There’s a similar dichotomy between Trump and his enemies: He represents charismatic personal authority as opposed to the bureaucratic dictates of the law. Under his rule, the Republican Party, long uneasy with modernity, has given itself over to Gemeinschaft. The Trump Organization was always run as a family business, and now that Trump has made his dilettante daughter-in-law vice chair of the Republican National Committee, the Republican Party is becoming one as well. To impose a similar regime of personal rule on the country at large, Trump has to destroy the already rickety legitimacy of the existing system. “As in Machiavelli’s thought, the Prince is not only above the law but the source of law and all social and political order, so in the Corleone universe, the Don is ‘responsible’ for his family, a responsibility that authorizes him to do virtually anything except violate the obligations of the family bond,” Francis wrote. That also seems to be how Trump sees himself, minus, of course, the family obligations. What’s frightening is how many Republicans see him the same way.

Societies fetishize Mafiosi to the degree that they lose faith in themselves. Writing about the ideology embedded in the classic crime films of the 1930s, the Marxist social critic Fredric Jameson noted that gangsters “were dramatized as psychopaths, sick loners striking out against a society essentially made up of wholesome people (the archetypal democratic ‘common man’ of New Deal populism).” When, in the 1970s, gangsters instead represented a fantasy of family cohesion, it was a response to a broader climate of social dissolution. It’s a sign that a culture is in the grip of a deep nihilism and despair when moblike figures become romantic heroes, or worse, presidents.

An organisation promoting nudity and a self-confident approach towards the body in Germany has sounded the alarm over the future of naturism in the country.

The German Association for Free Body Culture (DFK), an umbrella organisation for myriad naturist interest groups, has told its members that celebrations in August marking the anniversary of its creation will no longer go ahead owing to a lack of interest.

Membership of the DFK has slumped from 65,000 people 25 years ago to fewer than 34,000 now, with many remaining members said to be losing interest.

Germany is one of the most liberal countries in the world for public nudity. Places are often reserved for naturists in parks and on beaches and there is a high tolerance towards communal mixing among the dressed and undressed.