The Second Revolution Won’t be Bloody Unless Trump Loses . . . Again*
“‘The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction,’ Goebbels said as the Nazis rose to power.” The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers.
In her podcast Ultra this week, Rachel Maddow published a bonus episode, her conversation with playwright Tony Kushner about the rise of fascism in the United States. I strongly encourage you to listen to the entire episode. Ultra Season 2: July 1, 2024 Bonus Episode. During her preliminary remarks, she explained:
“Democracy doesn’t guarantee any end result. It’s a process. It’s a system of rights, a system of protections from tyranny.
“And if we don’t fight to protect the process, we will lose it. The anti-democratic right in this country, this year in 2024, is not running against the Democratic Party. They are running against the Democratic process.
“And the people who participate in this process, who make this process work in this country, are human beings who need protection. We need to protect the press. We need to protect the judiciary and the court system. We need to protect the electoral process and all of the people who administer it in ways large and small. We need to protect opposition politicians. And we also need to protect the people who are being scapegoated and who are the subject of corrosive conspiracy theories. Not only because we owe it to them as humans, but because corrosive conspiracy theories corrode democracy. They make you willing to give it up. When the Republican presidential candidate this year says he is going to build camps for millions of people, have you not been all that worried about it because he says he’s only going to put immigrants in those camps? . . .
“We have a cheat sheet from history if we choose to learn it and to let it help us. But, let’s learn it fast because it is time to start building the barricades.”
The extreme right’s love affair with Victor Orbán, Hungary’s “small time dictator,” has given birth to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 25 from which Trump just tried distancing himself as the voting public is becoming aware of its toxic details. “I know nothing about Project 25. I have no idea who is behind it.” Trump Claims To Know Nothing About Far-Right Plan Pushed By His Own Aides. As The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson put it, “Trump is strategically lying about Project 25. He knows most of it polls about like Ebola. He knows his base doesn’t care nerd policy crap. Heritage has done the work and every word in P2025 will be his policy.”
During his speech on July 23, 2022, at the 31st Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán argued that Europeans should not “become peoples of mixed race.” “In the same speech, Orbán also appeared to joke about Nazi gas chambers, saying in the context of a European Union proposal to ration natural gas: ‘the past shows us German know-how on that.’” Hungary’s Victor Orban faces outrage after saying Europeans shouldn’t become ‘mixed race.’ A longtime adviser to Orbán, Zsuzsa Hegedüs, resigned in protest after the “mixed-race” speech, saying his remarks were “worthy of Goebbels” and “indefensible.”
Less than two weeks later, Orbán was an honored guest and speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas. During his CPAC speech, which was interrupted several times with boisterous applause and for which he received a standing ovation, Orbán did not mention his “mixed-race” comments but defended himself, saying “Don’t worry, a Christian politician cannot be racist,” and “ falsely portraying the Nazis as having been anti-Christian.” Orban speaks to an enthusiastic CPAC crowd.
(Orbán appears to have inverted “Christian” and “racist.”)
In addition to attacking immigration, abortion, the LGBTQ community, globalism, liberal elites, progressives, Jews, George Soros, the “eggheads of the European Union” in Brussels, and the media, Orbán argued that Christian nationalism was the only recourse to the West’s survival:
“The horrors of Nazism and Communism happened because some Western states in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values. And today’s progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on Western values and create a new world, a post-Western World. Who is going to stop them if we don’t?” CPAC speech.
Given Orbán’s history and remarks about preserving racial and ethnic purity in Europe, it’s no mystery whom he was identifying as America’s saviors and against whom those white Christian nationalists must fight the culture and other wars. Vox explained:
“Setting aside the plain absurdity of Orbán’s history here — fascist forces received significant support from some churches, including in Hungary, and drew on an anti-Semitic tradition that has its origins in centuries of Christian anti-Semitism — the reference to Christian values spoke to a deeper purpose for his visit.
“It does something that Trump has been expert at doing: elevating the stakes of the struggle against liberals like Biden and Soros to an existential pitch.” Orbán laid out his dark worldview to the American right.
He’s also expert in echoing the words of Hitler: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poison — mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries that we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.” ‘Poisoning the blood’: Trump’s ugliest moments on immigrants.
Ben Rhodes served in the Obama administration for eight years as a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. After his government service, Rhodes left the U.S. to escape what he saw as the chaos of the Trump administration and attempt to understand what was occurring in the United States by examining trends in other countries. In his book After the Fall, Rhodes describes his encounters with “dissidents, activists, oppositionists.” He explained:
“Unburdened by being American themselves, they experienced no difficulty of politeness or discomfort that prevented them from seeing the Trump years for what they were: an American experiment with fascism, albeit a particularly incompetent and corrupt kind. But there was also a similarly obvious reality: The forces that produced a Trump presidency long predated it and would still be there after it was over. Indeed, a new model of nationalist authoritarian politics is a defining reality of our world today.”
Rhodes described meeting a Hungarian named Sandor Lederer in early 2018. He asked Lederer to explain “how his country’s prime minister, Victor Orbán, had transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of a decade.” Rhodes said, “[i]t took him only a few minutes.”
“Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics. Create a vast partisan propaganda machine. Redraw parliamentary districts to enrich your party in power. Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment. Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation. Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros. Cast yourself as the sole legitimate defender of national security. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past. Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses. Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.
“It struck me that Sandor could have been describing America instead of Hungary.”
This week a fully compromised supreme court majority granted the American president absolute immunity for the crimes he commits — and committed — under an Article II “official acts” rubric. Trump’s enablers on the court just gave him the unfettered means to achieve the fascist playbook described in Ben Rhodes’ book — and Trump’s pet Project 25. Even if Trump loses in 2024 — which will undoubtedly erupt into another Big Lie and failed bloody coup — the enabling blueprint now exists for future aspiring despots. As Justice Sotomayor said in her scathing opinion, which ended, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent:”
“Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law. . . .
“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.”
In her dissent, Justice Jackson emphasized the need for the deterrence the threat of criminal prosecution provides people who lack the moral fiber to abide by the law because it happens to be the right thing to do:
“Under the individual accountability model, because everyone is subject to the law, the potential of criminal liability operates as a constraint on the actions and decisions of everyone, including the President. After today, that reality is no more. Consequently, our Nation has lost a substantial check on Presidents who would use their official powers to commit crimes with impunity while in office. . . .
“To the extent that the majority’s new accountability paradigm allows Presidents to evade punishment for their criminal acts while in office, the seeds of absolute power for Presidents have been planted. And, without a doubt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In her July 4, 2024 Letters from An American, Heather Cox Richardson added to the discussion of fascism’s rise in the United States. She explained the formal partnership between the Heritage Foundation’s Project 25 and the Danube Institute, a think tank overseen by a foundation directly funded by the Hungarian government to push its Prime Minister Victor Orbán’s pro-Putin rhetoric to “overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with ‘illiberal democracy’ or ‘Christian democracy.’”
Orbán “wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject ‘adaptable family models’ in favor of ‘the Christian family model.’ He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).”
“No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his far-right political party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists, who attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.
“Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
“The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure. In January 2024, [Kevin] Roberts [of Heritage] told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times that Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the government. ‘[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,’ Roberts said. ‘And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.’
“Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must ‘[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children’; ‘[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people’; ‘[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats’; and ‘[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’
“In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using ‘government power…to restore the American family.’ That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is ‘pornography’ and must be banned.
“The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end ‘is just the beginning.’
“Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that ‘people are policy.’ Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce — about 2 million people work for the U.S. government — and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.
“The plan asserts ‘the existential need’ for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must ‘decentralize and privatize as much as possible’ and leave ‘the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.’
“It attacks ‘America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture,’ for their embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all of those partnerships and alliances.
“Also on July 1, Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. He will be operating for six months in that position under a slogan taken from Trump and adapted to Europe: ‘Make Europe Great Again.’ The day before taking that office, Orbán announced that his political party was forming a new alliance with far-right parties in Austria and the Czech Republic in order to launch a ‘new era of European politics.’
“Tomorrow, Orbán will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin. On July 2, Orbán met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where he urged Zelensky to accept a ‘ceasefire.’ In the U.S., Trump’s team has suggested that, if reelected, Trump will call for an immediate ceasefire and will negotiate with Putin over how much of Ukraine Putin can keep while also rejecting Ukraine for NATO membership and scaling back U.S. commitment to NATO.
“‘I would expect a very quick end to the conflict,’ Kevin Roberts said. Putin says he supports Trump’s plan.
“Roberts’s ‘second American revolution,’ which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution.”
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel, a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway, dropped on November 17, 2020. Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Bookstore and your favorite local bookshop, this novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.