American Samizdat: The Hinge of Fate

This November, the United States and the world will turn on it.

The six-volume history that with its final published book, in 1953, undoubtedly secured Churchill that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature; “"for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."

Every day for the first four months of Donald Trump’s administration, I reminded all I could on Twitter that through his continued ownership of the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. — through which he daily earned income from those, foreign and domestic, doing business with the United States government — Trump was violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Remember that quaint principle of honest government we heard so much of at the time? Who speaks of it now?

That was the beginning, on day 1 of his presidency, of Trump’s law breaking, without being held to account, day after day as head of state and government of the United States of America. That was how quickly he began to undermine the rule of law, how immediately he exposed as a hollow shell crisscrossed with cobwebs the long-vaunted, illusory bulwark, like the Maginot Line, of the American Constitutional system against the degrading assaults of kleptocratic autocracy.

Trump had already before the election, disposed of the non-legal but accepted norms of good, honest, democratic government exemplified by candidates releasing to the public their complete tax returns and placing managed income and wealth in blind trusts. In relation to both, he had already, that soon, acculturated the press, media, and vast swaths of the public to abiding his blatant and persistent, contradictory dissembling on these and other matters. Already, the nation had entered into a dumb compact to welcome the wolf through the door, to bend an ear toward sickly sweet insinuations in the ear and smile, seduced.

“To warn against, prepare for, and persevere until.”

Art, culture, information, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people.

Now, with fewer than four months before the 2024 election, having turned Trump back in 2020, the political landscape stretches darkly before us. We are in greater, direr danger than ever, and we will not get another chance. The American people face an existential choice: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending,” Rober Kagan wrote in November of last year. The starkness of that reality, the darkness of that prospect is even greater now.

In his history of The Second World War, in the fourth of six volumes, Winston Churchill describes 1942 as The Hinge of Fate, a year — as the Germans threatened to overwhelm the Russians, Rommel dominated the war in the North African desert, and Singapore fell to the Japanese — in which the Allies could well have lost the war. Yet by year’s end (one must read and learn how), Allied forces had won important victories at Midway and Guadalcanal and turned back the Germans at Stalingrad, repulsing the tide.

As 2024 approaches, it is the United States principally, but the broader democratic world, too, because of it, that pivots now on the hinge of fate.

Men, not Laws

The United States of America proudly hails no more cherished old saw of its historic political achievement than that it is a nation “of laws and not of men.” This learned wisdom of John Adams is echoed throughout the founding documents and founded in the origins of Western civilization: “[I]t is preferable,” said Aristotle in the Politics, “for the law to rule rather than any one of the citizens, and according to this same principle, even if it be better for certain men to govern, they must be appointed as guardians of the laws and in subordination to them.”

Were the sad duty ever to befall the governed that the leader who governs face the sanction of the law, for placing himself above the law, then the sadness would be leavened by prideful cheer that the mechanisms of liberty worked, and the law prevailed. That is until the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Trump v. United States.

“We are all servants of the laws,” opined the paradoxical Cicero, “in order that we may be free.”

This beautiful intellectual construct, however, is a lie.

The tradition maintains that in such service to the law the government’s legitimacy is institutionalized, and that of its leader. Governmental legitimacy, institutionalized in the rule of law, is in turn the condition for the regulation of our political freedom: we remain free because the institutions of government, perceived to be lawful and legitimate, ensure that freedom.

Perceived to be.

For it matters not should perfect justice reign, with the interests of all viewed from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, if the conviction forms that the “deep state” rules, with everything a sham.

Laws did not make the men. Men made the laws. They can unmake them. They can unmake them lawfully, to betray the law. Men can simply decline to enact and enforce the laws or violate their spirit. That the United States, or any liberal democracy, is a nation of laws and not of men is the necessary, ideal fiction by which each seeks to establish its gifts in perpetuity.

For whatever the law may be, still the cops on the street must not pocket the cash or re-peddle the drugs. Their fellows must erect no blue wall of silence. Prosecutors must not choose cases based on enmity or favor—or judges be bribable, or legislators paid to be played. Legislatures must accept the decisions of the courts, courts abide by the will of legislatures, executives agree to be bound in their power by both. US Marshals must serve the warrants and apprehend the fugitives, the military bend to civilian rule. The law rules because in every instance, at every instant, innumerable times a day, a person agrees to act as the law’s instrument, by obeying it and serving it, and by so doing both enacting its rule and affirming its legitimacy.

We are a nation of people in service to law no better than the people chosen to serve it.

The Illegitimate Government, the Legitimate President

The challenge to legitimacy, then, the essential genuineness and validity of a thing—the status in reality of anything as authentic, like a government or a national mythos—is the signifying center of Donald Trump’s sales-spiel life. The life has been lived, in all its gold gaudy brilliance, as the ultimate, debased simulacrum of the real, the hollow pinnacle of which Trump reached at the U.S. presidential zenith of world power.

“People will just believe you,” Billy Bush recalls Trump once saying to him. “You just tell them and they believe you.”

Trump’s apologists, his supporters, victims, marks, and cheering resentaholics against liberalism attempt to normalize this abnormality, tell us he is no worse than others, who are actually worse than he, to whom he is the corrective answer. No tyrant in waiting, after all, ever corrupted a nation without claiming first that he himself offered it salvation from corruption. But delegitimizing the truth is the basis on which Trump built even his political identity. Both as a candidate and as President — the constitutional executive power of the United States, charged as head of state to serve as the embodied symbol of the government’s legitimacy — Trump worked assiduously to undermine government legitimacy so that it had none beyond his own cult of personality.

Before, during, and after his presidency, he regularly declared the electoral process “rigged” and called for the imprisonment of his opponents. He attacks the courts and their judges. He attacks and diminishes the nation’s intelligence agencies and its military. He wages unremitting war against the nation’s Justice Department, including its chief officers and chief investigative agency, the FBI, and special investigative offices. He accuses former presidents of criminal activity against him. He challenges and destabilizes the functional apparatus of government, coloring even its civil servants as a “deep state” acting against him.

But Trump has sought to undermine no pillar of democracy more than that of a free press, which, in characteristic cynical opportunism, he first manipulated to help build his reputation and businesses and then his political career. In so doing, for those under his sway, he has worked to undermine any competing source of presumed truth-telling other than his own voice.

The Faking of Democracy

What is happening in the United States, what awaits Americans at the end of 2024 if its electorate chooses wrong one more time, if its electoral-college system condemns them one more time to the unjust outcome from which it was designed to protect them, is what has been happening around the world almost since the end of the Cold War: not a new age of democratic liberation from tyranny but a slow decline of liberalism imitating an older tyrannical age.

“The truth is men are tired of liberty,” Benito Mussolini said. “We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty.”

Don’t tell that to the people who foolishly trust that their liberty, as invisible to them as the air around them, comes delivered in the redemptive hands of one cartoonishly bombastic man. But that’s what they feel. They are fatigued of trying to know what they cannot see. They don’t believe in it anymore.

For nearly twenty-five years now around the world, democratically elected leaders have abused democratic processes to undo liberal democracy. And repeatedly, in the face of these slow-motion deconstructions of the liberal state, an institutional deer-in-the-headlights procedural paralysis has failed to prevent it. In Europe, this was the unfolding story in Poland (which has now happily taken steps back), Hungary and Slovakia, from the culturally revanchist right and left. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro accomplished it from the populist left as well. After years of ascent, democracy destabilizes throughout Latin America, and from that bastard hybrid of illiberal un-enlightenment we might call rhetorically left Islamism, Recep Erdoğan, in Turkey, has gradually, then dramatically, in turns, undone Turkey’s secular democracy.

In some ways Venezuela is most instructive. In response to failed neoliberal economic reforms, Chavez led or inspired two attempted military coups in 1992, the first of which led to his imprisonment. Less conclusively than with Chavez, Erdoğan, always suspected of theocratic ambitions, was jailed and removed as mayor of Istanbul in 1997 for his public reading of an Islamist poem in which were inserted verses considered to be an incitement to violence against the government. He served four months of a ten-month sentence and was banned from politics, though by 2003 he had been permitted to run for office and won election to the prime ministership. Chavez was permitted to run for president after his two coup attempts and preceded to destroy democracy and the economy.

It requires little reflection to think it a reasonable rule in any democracy that those convicted of attempting to overthrow it be barred forever from holding government office in it.

Throughout history, there has always appeared good cause upon which to know who they are that loom as the illiberal autocrats in the making: and among liberal democracies, there remains the same, continuing historic vulnerability to those autocrats — in democracy’s principled, procedural inability quickly to prevent the autocrat’s rise to power. The multiple ongoing trials of Trump, dragging against the timeline of the approaching elections — with now every one of them by circumstance delayed or dismissed with the aid of complicit justices and the Supreme Court — leaves American democracy staring stock still on the tracks, in a stunned, paralyzed response to the oncoming disaster.

With mixed results, Western democracies attempted to learn that lesson of World War II, about the slowness of liberal democracies to react both to internal and international threats against them.

Now there is only the November election, one election, standing between American democracy and the descent into autocracy.

The history of authoritarian populists teaches that they will always have supporters. There will always be people blinded by narrow self-interest, by fear and base prejudice, by civic ignorance and foolish judgment, and stewed in a medley of resentments. (It’s time “you people got a taste of your own medicine” one of them reached out to tell me the other day.) There will always be collaborators in the political establishment further led by ambition and cowardice. There will always be voices to make the case for the aspirant despot, who will be fashioned rather as a savior.

But the communication of a reason is not the exercise of reason, and the mere existence of advocates does not argue for what is advocated, though many will be fooled to believe it so. The past eight years in the United States have demonstrated with astonishing totality that the U.S. is no exception to the structural and human weaknesses, and the democratic dysfunctions, that have led other nations to ruin. It can fall like any of them—both prey to these endemic vulnerabilities and to a tyrant.

Still another lesson of the new breed of autocrat is that the dictator need not arise through civil war or by coup, like Spain’s Francisco Franco or Chile’s Augusto Pinochet: he may rather be enabled by the poor judgment of kings, presidents, legislatures, and parties, as with Italy and Germany in the 20s and 30s, who make the error of believing they can use the demagogue to their ends. In that light, perhaps the most significant way these contemporary demagogues have shaped the new model for emergent autocracy is in its gradual development over one or two decades, as institutions incrementally succumb to the regular, petty degradations of their integrity. Almost invisibly, sloughing off its scales, the illiberal democracy emerges out of the liberal—and illiberal democracy is fake democracy, democracy in form only.

American Deceptionalism

Now, in the winter of 2023, America’s institutions in the age of Trump have already been long failing. One political party, the Republican, has fallen to the demagogue. Imagine, then, the reign of a Trump who has escaped those dangers. We don’t have to imagine: as always, he’s been telling us all along.

This leaves, then, the foundation of all, the people and the press, the voices of democracy, which together now grapple in what may be a death spiral of ineffectuality. Since the 2016 election, Trump’s support base has fluctuated only a little. Instructively, Maduro, Erdoğan, and Orbán, against vociferous opposition, all maintain majority support. Bolsonaro may yet return in Brazil, as Ortega did in Nicaragua, as the spirit of Fujimori in Peru has lived on even in prison, as Peronist variations still win Argentine elections years later.

Autocracy is a vampire.

The news media, for their part, though many have finally roused, remain still too widely mired in a fatal ménage à trois of commercialism, fanboy passion for the political game, and a dumb, reductive professionalism.

The first commercialism produced all the free, sensational campaign ads that were Trump call-in and rally-video television appearances. The political game coverage conspires with Trump voters to normalize their support of him. It does this by accepting the vote-seeking politician’s ethical parameters of practice, that voter preferences are automatically validated by their voter value: inherently “of the people,” they warrant as voters a politician’s or party’s efforts to make appeal to them. Thus, ever since 2016, conventional journalism has tried “objectively” to affirm the discontents of Trump voters while declining to hold them accountable for their Trump vote. In this way, a segment of the economically distressed or culturally dispirited white working and middle class, newly fashioned as “marginalized,” are treated in the same manner as, on the left, the previously disempowered of the postcolonial world —aggrieved and thereby inherently justified.

But every nation that ever went astray, through fascism, militarism, or any other form of authoritarianism, has always had its list of international wrongs and domestic grievances to motivate the victimized feelings of its angry regression into aggressive revanchism or authoritarian socialism. In the past, these errors, and those populations, have not been immune to the progressive judgment of history. The United States, however, is still expecting its special dispensation. For too many, the discussion still proceeds as if the American nation and millions of its people have not crossed a line.

This brings us to modern, highly professionalized journalism’s understanding of its role. In this understanding, too commonly, journalists confuse appropriate standards for gathering and reporting news with a fundamental prohibition against evaluating the reality that journalists in part construct through the news and information they report. At its worst, journalism that does not distinguish the truth from the lie is not journalism at all: it is stenography. It is a journalism that acts out of an intellectually timid form of positivism, in which reporters shy from the “truth,” which they diminish as subjective, in favor of objective facts only.

But the US Declaration of Independence does not declare that we hold these facts to be self-evident. The rights of free speech and of a free press are not facts. They are truths, beheld through reason. They have held sway in the United States for over two centuries because citizens, including journalists, committed to them, without neutrality between the true and the false, and what they thought right and wrong. It is often said of journalism that it is “the first rough draft of history,” but works of history are not collections of mere facts. They are attempts to reveal the truths buried within the facts, and this requires the intellectual courage to stake a claim to the truth.

In better times, newspapers and magazines can attempt, without apparently vital consequence, the sharp discrimination among news, analysis, and opinion. A consequence of this effort, however, is the developed misunderstanding among many that opinion is “mere” opinion, and truth—mistaken as a lesser subset of itself than the part of it called fact—nothing more than another name for your own opinion. But the Declaration of Independence itself is an opinion, an opinion grounded in fact and developed according to reason, and we used to dare to call its ideas truths. Many Americans even fought for them.

Most, originally, however, did not.

Modern estimates are that up to 20% of the colonial population remained loyalist, with about half not daring to commit itself to action. There were, even then, those who argued against the new idea, of an independent republic, and believe themselves right, including loyalist newspapers. But the Boston Gazette, which gave voice to the rebellion of Samuel Adams, the New York Journal, and other newspapers rallied Colonials to the cause of their freedom from tyranny. Historians, those of the second, third, and further drafts, tell us today how those of the first draft made their impact at a pivotal moment in the history of American democracy. Thomas Paine, who told Colonials in his American Crisis pamphlets that “[t]hese are the times that try men’s souls,” did so in the pages of the Pennsylvania Journal.

Still shot from Merlin, TV.

Almost precisely a century ago, Irish poet W.B. Yeats instructed us that passionate intensity is no guide to true conviction. It is, I will add, reason-enlightened sense and humane sensibility that lead us there. But if it is to prevail, truth needs not only its conviction, but its own passionate intensity, too, in the commitment to act. Two generations before Yeats, American pragmatist philosopher William James, in his “The Sentiment of Rationality,” proposed an illustration of critical choice, later collected in The Will to Believe. James asked us to imagine an Alpine mountaineer trapped high in the snow and ice, where only a daring leap across a chasm can save his life. Fear and doubt, as James describes it, may vie with hope and confidence. Hesitation may lead to a nerveless stumble into oblivion but conviction to the necessary vigor to live another day.

The alternative outcomes, argues James, might actually lie in the alternative attitudes:

“Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself.”

As sure as the sun rises and sets, Donald Trump is an offense to human decency, the locomotive demise of American republican democracy barreling down upon us, with those who support him tragically mistaken and requiring defeat.

We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .

The thing is done, the lie told — the offending body stinks,
and no one will claim it. Disguised as history, the present
maligns the past, ventriloquizes virtue, mocks all meaning,
while the pretenders cry in protest, and dissemble every seeming:

“Who are you to tell me? Who is anyone to know?”

from “Impolitic Manifesto,’ in Waiting for Word.

AJA

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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

SAMIZDAT.

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