Over and over again, I have talked about this spectacular era of American corruption as being unprecedented in American history. Make no mistake, there have been previous eras of spectacular corruption, but there has never been anything like this moment. It is simply staggering.
The Supreme Court of the United States faces a grave crisis of legitimacy because Clarence Thomas is the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in American history.
The indicted chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee is accused of taking gold bars from Egypt to influence American foreign policy. Chuck Schumer said he was a “dedicated public servant.”
Everywhere there is corruption. It is estimated that the COVID relief package signed into law by Donald Trump was the greatest grift in history with upwards of $1 trillion being stolen. Truly, this is the age of taking. The angry 20s in Weimar America is a taker’s paradise.
The crisis of corruption is deep and covers every known strain from political, media, business, sexual, moral, and economic. Whatever particular variant is eroding the American way of life, the common denominator is that all serve as a marker of collapse, decay and rot within the systems, institutions and organizations that are vital towards the sustainment of American society.
These markers chart the rise of a specific type of threat to democracy, pluralism, and the concept of a constitutional republic in which the rule of law is supreme. The threat America is facing is political collapse that will trigger societal collapse.
What would take its place is something insidious and already growling at our shared liberty. What is rising is something that promises to protect freedom from democracy. It should terrify you. It has a name. Fascism.
Fascism is a lie that builds on an accumulation of lies until it has the capacity to distort reality and truth in the plain light of day. It is a fever and a contagious cancer that ultimately crushes individualism, freedom and human dignity. It is the greatest evil ever yet conjured by the mind of man and its annihilation in the middle years of the 20th century was long confused for its eradication. The truth is that the evil idea that subordinates the human beneath the power of the state in the name of restoring order from chaos was like an ember buried in the ashes that never extinguished. It has burned in America before and it is burning again. I have written of it with some frequency:
Understanding the appeal of this virulence is essential for our national survival in 2023. Why does its siren song pull in the lonely, alienated, disaffected and aggrieved? Why does it always turn violent? Why is racial animus and antagonism at its core? Something terrible has reawakened and it is on the march all over the world. In part, it is a response to an emotion — fear and a sense of chaos overwhelming everything that was once steady and predictable. It is a backlash to progress and an assertion of unlived nostalgia for a world that never existed, except for in the delusions of people who would rather imagine the past than face the future. Society’s detritus has always rallied towards the fascist lie because it exculpates the failures of a person and assigns blame to a conspiracy of a large group of “lesser thans,” or as they were referred to in German as “untermensch.”
Fascism did not rise in the 1920s and 1930s because it was strong. It rose because democracy was weak, impotent, chaotic and corrupt.
Fascism is rising in 2020s America because our democracy has grown weak, corrupted and rotten. A decaying society is vulnerable to a great danger: a strongman with a promise that they alone can fix everything. Sound familiar?
There is a scene recounted in Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile of General Mark Milley that deserves wider societal discussion. Milley’s words are a statement of the obvious. They would have carried no poignancy, urgency, broader meaning, warning, or anything beyond an almost universally agreed upon American standard that stood unchallengeable and unchallenged on the day Barack Obama left the presidency. In fact, it is hard to think of something more alien and un-American than any contrary idea than the one around which our nation is organized.
Milley delivered a speech at the opening of the National Army Museum at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia a few days after Trump’s firing of Mark Esper as Secretary of Defense. He said the following:
The motto of the United States Army for over 200 years, since 14 June 1775 … has been ‘This we will defend,’ and the ‘this’ refers to the Constitution and to protect the liberty of the American people. You see, we are unique among armies. We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, a tyrant or dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe, or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution … We will never turn our back on our duty to protect and defend the idea that is America, the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Six months after Adolf Hitler took power, the last remnants of German democracy were snuffed out. It is a little remembered fact that when Hitler was consolidating power the army was among the first institutions to discard the oath to the nation, and replace it with one to Hitler, despite being among the institutions most resistant to the man before his rise. Within a very short period of time, this phrase was ubiquitous in Germany, “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (one people, one realm, one leader). Bear in mind that the Nazis high watermark as an electoral percentage occurred in the 1930 election when they didn’t control government. With a smaller percentage, they took power in 1933, and it was the last election.
At the Reichstag, there is a memorial commemorating the 12 years of darkness. It is simple, yet jarring and profound. Each elected member of the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic has a small nameplate. It is one of the few places where Adolf Hitler’s name can be found written out on a memorial in Germany. There is a sea of parliamentary names, and then they stop shortly after Hitler’s name first appears. Then there are just blank plates for 12 years before democracy is restored in the late 1940s.
Do you know about Project 2025, the highly detailed MAGA/Trump plan to fully dismantle the American government within six months of Trump returning to office? They have abandoned the typical American 100-day legislative metric for something far more ambitious, and the timeframe isn’t accidental or coincidental. It has great meaning for every white supremacist and extremist who is more than welcome inside Trump’s minority faction of malevolence.
This moment requires moral clarity, moral toughness and courage. There can be nothing that comes before the defense of American democracy and the rule of law in the United States of America. There is nothing that can come before the US Constitution. Its preservation is a sacred responsibility and trust that has been passed down for generations over nearly 250 years.
The country is more important than Dianne Feinstein’s senatorial prerogatives or ego. Politics is not a fair business. The track lanes aren’t even and equidistant. One lane is uphill and the other down.
It is easier to hate than love.
It is easier to lie than tell the truth
It is easier to have no standards than high standards.
It is easier to abandon the line than hold the line.
It is easier to take than create.
It is easier to scream than listen.
It is easier to know than learn.
Yet, the easy path is foreclosed to the modern Democratic Party, which remains the last great moral political force in American life, despite all of its flaws. It must rise and be transcendent in this moment. It must incorporate the full greatness of the American spirit and creed from the legacy of America’s greatest Republican president Lincoln to its greatest Democratic president FDR. The Democratic Party is the repository of the dreams and ambitions of the founders from Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin through Lincoln, King and John Lewis. It must embrace optimism over pessimism, hope over despair and courage over fear. There is no room for a Bob Menendez within it. There is something that has gone off the rails in American life about the concept of standards.
First, Robert Menendez has a right to the presumption of innocence, a fair trial and due process. Every American who is a criminal defendant has those rights.
His presence in the US Senate is like a pancreatic cancer. It is simply lethal for the anti-Trump coalition and cause. Idealism is the antidote to extremism. Cynicism fuels it.
This is what Chuck Schumer said about Robert Menendez:
Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey. He has a right to due process and a fair trial.
There is no excuse for this.
This is the best moment Trump has had since this moment:
Of course, what is happening in the US House is all tied to this. It is all very much part of, and connected to, everything that has happened over a continuum that has lasted for seven years in an unfolding period of history that is advancing quickly towards its next turn.
When I was a young man and beginning my career in the 1990s there was a book by the author Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History and the Last Man,” that posited history had reached its end. Of course, that was never true, and never will or can be. History never stops or ends. It just turns like a river. What lies ahead, beyond the bend is still unseen, if not fully unknown. By now we know something terrible is waiting, but we don’t seem quite ready to imagine it, or think about it on this NFL Sunday in late September 2023.
We have reached a dire moment that cannot be disconnected from the warning George Washington gave our descendants, as he passed the torch to a new generation. He walked away from the chance for absolute power in an act of astonishing humility. He warned future generations about the danger of political parties that would put their power above the national interest and corrupt foreign influence.
Washington, DC, is awash in foreign money and influence campaigns. The corrupt and barbaric Saudi regime is in a league of its own, and the search for evidence of corruption in the American media doesn’t have to look much beyond the virtual blackout imposed by corporate media over covering the subject because of financial entanglements.
The Democratic Party must be America’s reform and renewal party. It must create a big tent large enough to hold a vast pro-democracy coalition together.
Here is what must be done with Robert Menendez. This is a proverbial example, but tinged with the sensibilities of our shared home state. He should be rolled up in a carpet and thrown overboard. No one should fret though at the splash. He looks like a swimmer to me.
Equal justice is a two word phrase. It does not discuss ethnic, gender, or other characteristics so Menendez gets a fair trial by his peers as the first step. Under the justice part, if guilty according to those peers, he pays the same penalty would any other person convicted of that crime. Being a Senator, being Latin, being male, or being married does not affect that aspect. Rule of law means rule OF law for all. Pretty straightforward. Same for Anyone else.
While I agree with this take overall, I think you need 1. to check your privilege; and 2. To think more about the brutal cowboy capitalism behind what has caused what you describe here:
“Fascism is rising in 2020s America because our democracy has grown weak, corrupted and rotten. A decaying society is vulnerable to a great danger: a strongman with a promise that they alone can fix everything. Sound familiar?”
1. What you experience as moral decay, others far less privileged experience very differently. I won’t try to capture all of it here, but, depending on the community, demographics, etc., that experience includes extreme economic deprivation -- and the resulting extreme sense of insecurity, the stripping away of personal and political agency, unending police brutality, homelessness and/or housing insecurity, a reaming-out and privatizing of the once phenomenal “public goods/commons” -- including education at all levels, our vastly unequal health care “system,” and virtually all public-facing public services. I could go on but I said I wouldn’t.
And do you know what caused all of this: our brutal cowboy capitalism which was for a time, following FDR and WWII, finally pulled kicking a screaming into some sort of real relationship to the welfare of the people and not just the shareholders, but then unleashed by the very GOP led by Ronald Reaganthat is still revered by even the most avid “Never-Trump” former republicans. Forty years of brutal “Trickle-down” economics driven by the “imperative” of Globalization, eviscerated enough of the “Grand bargain” between workers (and their unions) and the underserved that had been literally fought for for generations. The white working class finanlly experienced the indifference and stripping away of dignity that had become part of ancient history in this country.
Our capitalism was unleashed and freed to freest itself on the extraordinary bounties of wealth that it is possible to accumulate when you are freed from any obligation to society.
And so, yes, what we privileged people call “morals” began to erode across the board in middle/working class. Resentment grew and a reach a boiling point by the time of the 2008 meltdown where millions lost the only economic safety-net left to them: the equity in their homes. The desperation and then turned to outrage as the bankers were bailed-out but not the people. All of this made for what you describe above: a Union torn apart at the seams by forty-plus years of bi-partisan public policy focused almost exclusively on enabling a capitalist feeding frenzy.
Moral decay is not a free-floating phenomenon. It is tied to real circumstances. In history, most of those circumstances involve elites on an avaricious rampage that savages the lives of ordinary people. Our “Democracy” was designed to be better than that. After a Civil War and economic reform era, two world wars and a renewed civil/womens’ rights movement, we were on a decent track towards being better when it was all redirected back onto the exploitative fast track. ANd here we are, left fighting the morally depraved Trump and his legions of resentful, revengeful followers.
Biden and the Dem Party gets much of this and the huge investments in “Heartland” projects, jobs, and a sustainable future are the basis of a way forward through this mess. It is far past time for so-call “normie” republicans to renounce their false Reaganite Idol and join with “democrats”everywhere in this country to bring us back onto the tracks that lead to a more equitable and prosperous future that “centers”the wellbeing of all.