May 27, 2016

Word: If Trump comes to power

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal.

Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh please, stop with the "Trump is a fascist" hysteria! This is not 1930's Germany and he does not have an army of Brownshirts to do his bidding in Congress....He will face stiff opposition in Congress and the courts.

He is much less likely to take us to war than Hillary. War is the ticket for authoritarians to try to compromise a republic.

Anonymous said...

Yes, agreed, enough. Seems Sam has signed on as a Demo Party shit slinger---we had expected something better from him. John Pilger, journalist of some repute, hasn't lost his perspective. Seeing our dilemma from the outside, he has this sobering analysis to offer:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/SilencingPilger-20160527-0015.html

Strelnikov said...

"Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal....The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak."

That sentence is such a load it could only be written by "New Yorker" magazine. Things wrong with it:

Lenin was not an "authoritarian nationalist Leftist"; he was an internationalist pushing a variant of Marxism. He and his party took over a war-ravaged country, a state by the way, that had a prior revolution but was conned into continuing to fight World War One. For the sin of walking away from the meatgrinder of the Great War, Bolshevik Russia was invaded by Britain and the US, and it's former Allies supported the White movement to overthrow the Bolsheviks. The pre-war government of Russia was a monarchy, not a democracy.

Castro overthrew a dictatorship by insurgency, and has been up against the US ever since. The irony here is that the people who cannot get over the loss of the last government live in the US and have been trying to overthrow the Castro government for decades. They are the Miami Cubans.

The other three examples Gopnik uses are from the Right; Franco was a general/warlord during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) who became the dictator of Spain. He was not elected, and his quasi-Falagist-quasi-personality cult government vanished when he died in the 1970s. Peron was made president of Argentina through a "tipped" election in 1946, re-elected in the early 1950s, had to flee the country in 1955, came back in the early 1970s, then died. Peron made military juntas the way to run governments in Argentina because of the instability he and his party created in the country. As with Franco, Peron was brought into politics through a military coup in 1943; he was minister of labor for more than two years, he was an Argentine Army colonel before that. Putin was appointed to the Russian presidency by Boris Yeltsin at the end of 1999, after his time as a politico in St. Petersberg and Moscow, and his youth as a KGB bureaucrat. Say what you will, but of all of these, Putin is the least traditional dictator-y leader of all of them; he did step "down" into a premiership after his second term. Will he ever leave politics is unknown.

"The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak."

That's the whole point of a democratic republic, knowing that everything can go south badly, which is why you try to not vote in dynasties like the Bushes or the Clintons, that you push for policies that are more democratic, that you try to keep big money out of politics, and you know a demagogue like Trump when you see him.

Anonymous said...

I don't see any particularly 'authoritarian' in Trump at all. He's bombastic and is given to say silly things, mostly for effect I say. But he's no Hitler; for cying out loud, he's a schmuck from Queens. I think Hillary is infinitely more of the dictator type. Like Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini she is consciosly trying to create a cult around her, excuse me, HER. It's all about her. She scares the hell out of me. To me, she's the demagogue, not Trump. I think the liberals make such a big deal of Trump because they are trying to avoid acknowledging the reality that people are really fed up with the policies of the Obama/Clinton cabal. So they make up lies, ridicuous accusations of racism or facism, anything but confronting the issues and the widespread corruption in the Dem leadership.