Republicans Traditionalist Revival Owes Much to Putin’s Ideas of Russian Fascism…Part 1.
How an extremist idea of family values is warping views of what democracy should be in America…
The decision to overturn Roe by a highly partisan and conservative majority on SCOTUS on 24th June and “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” enacted what President Biden called “the realization of (an) extreme ideology” that was “a tragic error by the Supreme Court.”
Whatever one thinks about the decision, Justice Thomas, in his opinion, potentially opened the way for the restriction of further privacy rights (* but see note below) that shield access to contraception, private sexual conduct and same-sex marriage, and this sets a worrying precedent that will only embolden and bolster the calls of many right-wing conservatives and extremists who, following the lead taken by Putin’s Russia, want a return to a more ‘traditionalist’ society where they believe their ‘power’ and position in American society will be more secure.
In this partisan, right-wing majority SCOTUS today’s Trumpian Republican Party have the perfect tool to solidify the move towards a more extreme, fascist vision of what the U.S. can be without the need to resort to the ballot box. This coming term will shine a light on how far the Supreme Court may be willing to go with issues relating to voting rights and race set to be heard.
With both race and voting rights being such integrals part of a healthy, functioning democracy, the direction taken by SCOTUS may prove to vital in any future questions on what constitutes racial discrimination and what does not.
Writing an Op-Ed in WaPo Ruth Marcus does not sound confident of the justices doing ‘the right thing.’ She says, “…these justices are offended by the notion of allowing any consideration of race, whether the motive is malign or benevolent,” implying that any affirmative action on the basis of race should take a backseat. As Justice Roberts said in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” but such a negative outcome could give cover to a highly racist perspective under the guise of nondiscrimination on the basis of race.
Despite the fact that the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, gives equal protection under the law regardless of race, Congress, at that time, still enacted special programmes to help newly freed slaves.
Today, such considerations, even in an atmosphere of pernicious and continuing discrimination by many people, companies and organisations in the U.S., are unlikely to sway this current bench.
It is reasonable to assume that SCOTUS will continue to see its’ own actions and views and being fully righteous and pushing ahead with an agenda that may well serve to increase political, cultural and racial divisions and decrease confidence in its’ own competency.
Writing in The Atlantic after Roe was overturned, Adam Serwer summed this view up when he said, “…the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country.”
We shall see…
Republican ideas of traditionalism hide a very undemocratic ideal…
On the 31st October, just days before the 2020 election, American nihilist Steve Bannon sat with a group of associates in his DC townhouse and explained what would happen once the election results started to come in a few days later. Bannon predicted that, “Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” Were Biden to overtake Trump’s lead later in the vote count, competing claims between Trump and the media would cause uncertainty and discord. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media, crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting shit out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’” Moreover, Bannon claimed, the sitting president would then gut judicial oversight of himself by firing FBI Director Christopher Wray. “After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again. … He’s gonna say ‘Fuck you. How about that?’ Because … he’s done his last election. Oh, he’s going to be off the chain — he’s gonna be crazy.”
Benjamin Teitelbaum, author and recorder of the above comments, then openly asks a couple of pertinent questions about Bannon’s motivation for saying such; “Was Bannon only prophesying when he spoke about Trump’s possible actions on election night, or was he presenting his vision for the future? Was the undoing of the U.S. democratic system something Bannon feared or craved?”
“Paradoxically,” Teitelbaum says, the answer to both is probably “yes!”
Jason Willock, writing an Op-Ed in WaPo recently said something that I hadn’t before considered.
I give much thought and time — some might say, too much time — to the state of democracies around the globe, but Mr Willock’s article gave me pause to think again.
The threat to democracy — in this case, American democracy — is not from a usurper system, he suggests, but may in fact come from within democratic ideology itself.
Based on a study by Danish academic Suthan Krishnarajan, he said the popular notion of the defence of democracy is a ‘them and us’ battle between those who are democratic and those who are not. But Krishnarajan threads the needle of political polarisation by illustrating that “citizens who self-consciously support democracy can simultaneously support undemocratic actions on a large scale when it suits their political interests — and not recognize the contradiction.”
Willock then points out that 6th January insurrection was animated by a “desire to protect democracy from fraud.” The fact that that desire was based on lies and misconceptions is neither here nor there; many of those storming the capital may have been doing so from the genuine belief that their democracy was under threat.
Thus, those of us who feel the need to defend democracy from those we feel would tear it down, may well be looking across the political table at those who exhibit anti-democratic actions and ideas, straight into the eyes of people who are thinking the exact same thing about us.
And that idea was thought provoking…
How do you fight against someone, or somebodies, who are fighting for the same thing that you are fighting for, but fighting with a different set of beliefs in what is actually going wrong?
Crucially, Krishnarajan (found) in his analysis, (that) respondents didn’t see themselves as sacrificing their own democratic values in taking action, (by) virtue of their own reasoning that it “relieves them of (their own) unwanted conclusions about the state of democracy by altering how they understand democracy in a given situation.”
To clarify; to the partisan mind — which is to say, most of our minds — violations of democratic norms are simply less salient when directed against a disfavored group, whoever that group may be. In the case of the insurrectionists, the disfavoured group was Congress.
So says Willock, the fight in America is not between “democracy and non-democracy, but between two opposing visions of popular sovereignty.”
The problem being that the concept of democracy never came with a given set of rules or guidelines. Whilst the broad brushstrokes of what a democracy is (or what American democracy is…or for that matter, should be) is in large part agreed, but the minutiae, the fine detail is not, and the higher the stakes of the battle between visions of what those fine details should look like, the more temptation there is to break democratic norms to achieve the democratic detail we seek. And all in the name of democracy.
My head spins…
Thus, the storming of the Capitol can, in theory at least, be rationalised under the notion that, it was in some form, the protection of American democracy.
The strength of the democratic ideal in America cannot be overstated, says Willock, as witnessed the absence of any ideological alternative such as communism or even fascism.
And perhaps that is true…
But then he finishes by blandly offering the hope that Americans should seek to find other political virtues in the hope that it brings the democratic schools of thought back into sequence. And then offers no idea of what these alternative ‘virtues’ might be…
However, here I disagree. I don’t think it is the American people who need to seek to find these other ‘political virtues;’ it is the political elites that need to do this.
It is the elites who lack the political virtue, because it from their mouths that the different versions of democracy originate.
The source of the polarisation is top-down. It is the political elites who hammer the wedge of polarisation into the minds and lives of their supporters, be they Republican or Democratic. Sure it is passed on and magnified again by those further down the line, namely us — you and me — but the ideas do not begin with a voter; they begin with the politician, the spokesperson, the TV commentator, the activist, or even the political disruptor.
The different visions of democracy and what democracy might be, isn’t so much filtered down from above, as it is pelted down in a deluge of ‘us and them’ — which is, by the way, is the very essence of fascist politics (1) (and is distinct from the ‘us and them’ mentioned above in respect to Krishnarajan’s article) — by those who seek power and influence through the action of pushing their particular version of polarisation and whatever vision of ‘democracy’ fits their argument, onto those who can be coerced or attracted to stand under their divisive verbal gusher of political differentiation.
Well, excuse my French…but hot damn!
All that said, Trump, increasingly under fire and in legal jeopardy on many fronts now, is taking his rhetoric far beyond the political and appears to be openly embracing the option for political violence as part of the QAnon conspiracy, issuing threats against authorities, calling the FBI a terrorist network, and stoking the option for violence should things turn even worse for him in the courts. He has moved the line far south of the arguments over what democracy is or isn’t, and into the arena of civilian violence, possibly even skirting calls for some sort of limited civil war or further insurrections.
The problem inherent in Willock’s argument is that it presumes the protagonists on both sides of the argument actually care equally about the democracy they are seeking to defend, and will, at least attempt, to seek out those elusive political virtues he talks about.
However, I don’t believe this is the case.
For Trump, nothing ever was about politics, or even about democracy. And as much as they may say otherwise, I don’t believe the defence of democracy is at the heart of much that today’s Trumpian Republicans do or say. I firmly believe it is all about the attainment of power and the personal wealth and notoriety that can bring in the U.S.
Thus, the different versions of democracy these ‘politicians’ present is merely a function of the strategy they can employ to attain that power, to achieve that level of wealth, to gain that notoriety, and nothing more.
Much like Putin, who calls the Russian Federation a democracy, but is in reality little more than a showpiece, a shop front to give the appearance of democratic legitimacy to his brutal dictatorship. He cares nothing for true democracy or what it stands for; in fact one could safely say he deplores it.
Trump’s Republicans — as distinguished from the ‘true Republicans,’ the ones with some virtue and backbone, all be they a diminishing fraction of the whole — use democracy to further their ends. Period. If they truly believed in democracy and in the U.S. Constitution then they would fight for voting rights and not try to restrict them in the name of democracy.
It’s that simple really.
They are opportunists who see the Trump ticket as a short cut to getting what they want. Look how many of them have changed their ‘politics’ — and I use that term loosely with respect to a large number of them — completely; some have almost turned their ‘politics’ on its’ head to board the Trump train? Mitch McConnell is one who leaps to mind…but he is by no means the last…in spite of the recent vile attacks on him by Trump.
Trump isn’t offering any political evangelism here; there is no miraculous democratic baptism going on; there is no political conversion or revelation to be had; there is solely the attainment of power and the trappings of success that go with that.
For Trump though, I believe it was and always has been far more personal. It was about being The Man. Being the Big Boss and saying, ‘look at me! I am the President.’ It was about ego certification! And it was about being the bully. It was about rubbing people’s faces in it; about rubbing Barack Obama’s face in it.
I think that 2011 White House correspondence dinner (above) so damaged Trump’s fragile ego that getting back at Obama in any way he could was as much a motivation for Trump as almost anything else.
For Trump, I think everything was always personal and he used politics as a tool to further his personal ambitions. The political infusion, insomuch as there was any, came from characters in his retinue like Bannon, who while almost certainly much better versed in political theory, and the mechanics of populism and traditionalism than Trump, all saw an opportunity to use the tools each provided to achieve a common end.
Each had, and still has their own agenda, even today, but areas of crossover aligned so frequently that trying to separate the various threads of political deconstruction from those of unique, personal ambition has become, at times, all but impossible.
And that’s where the justice department comes in maybe…
But where and how did it all begin? Why does Trump’s rhetoric, much of his political strategy match up so closely with Putin’s? Is it all a ‘happy’ accident or part of a well considered strategy?
To try to answer this we need to go back to Bannon, and the paradox Teitelbaun posed with Bannon’s putative answers to the questions above. The answer can be explained in part by looking into Bannon’s past. Whilst he might today describe himself as a ‘populist’ or, more obliquely and inaccurately, a ‘conservative,’ the roots of much of his thinking, and many of actions are rooted in the teachings of French occultist and philosopher Rene Guenon (1886–1951) who founded an obscure form of politics that based its’ teachings on an unholy concoction of religion and spiritualism that became known as ‘Traditionalism.’
Bannon, in short, is not a man who would not be seeking other political virtues in the defence of American democracy as Willock suggests, because, like many of his political contempories in the ‘Republican Party,’ he is an anti-democrat dressed up in the guise of a defender of democracy simply because it fits his agenda to be so.
Plato said in The Republic when talking of the corrupt, “They themselves care only for making money, and are as indifferent as the pauper to the cultivation of virtue.”
And so it appears to be with Trump’s Republicans.
In Part 2 tomorrow I’ll delve further into the traditionalist revival in the U.S. and compare it with Putin’s Russian fascism.
Thanks for reading.
Notes
* Some legal scholars have argued that in the majority decision to overturn Roe it was stated that the ‘right to privacy’ is not protected under the Constitution, but that this is actually wrong on several counts. Firstly, the Ninth Amendment states that “the absence of an enumerated right does not mean it doesn’t exist.” Also the “Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments abolishing slavery, were designed in large part to eliminate the legacy of forced reproduction and sexual slavery suffered by black women.” Furthermore under Article 6, which stipulates that any treaties to which the U.S. is a party “shall be the supreme Law of the Land,” and since the U.S. has signed and ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 17 of that treaty explicitly protects the right to privacy: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” Gendered language notwithstanding, Article 2 of that treaty makes clear that this right, and all rights, are meant to apply irrespective of sex. The convention also enumerates other important bodily integrity rights, including the right to liberty and security in Article 9, the freedom from servitude and compulsory labor in Article 8, and a general right to be free of sex discrimination in Article 2. Please see here for the full discussion on this.
- How Fascism Works: The politics of us and them; Jason Stanley, 2018.
