PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2020
WILL TRUMP RESIGN BEFORE
THE ELECTION OR WILL HE BE REELECTED BY RIGGING the SYSTEM, OR AT LEAST THE
VOTES, OR WILL HE DECLARE A NATIONAL EMERGENCY AND MARTIAL LAW? FIVE BOOKS. Compiled by Dick Bennett
Palast: He will run and
win by ballot corruption, mainly from the now far right Republican Party, as
modeled by Governor Kemp of Georgia and others.
Levitsky and Ziblatt: He
will run and win because US democratic rules and norms have been corrupted
mainly by this Republican Party, but if necessary Trump will declare an
emergency and martial law.
Applebaum (according to Keller):
Trump’s wealthy supporters and his public relations experts-- “the pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of
television programs… who can sell his image to the public”--will ensure his victory.
Aldridge: Part I relates that soon after WWII the ultra-conservatives, ultra-right-wing
neoconservatives, the neocons—all
who rejected democracy—began their 70 years of struggle to establish
authoritarian government partly via martial law Trump could be our dictator by martial law.
Hett: The analogy to Hitler’s takeover of the
Weimar Republic suggests a Trump takeover as consequence of all the causes
given in the preceding 2 books.
Trump will run and win, unless. . . .: each book includes a
section on how Trump’s victory could be prevented. On voting: Bernie Sanders argues in a recent
letter, we must do everything we can to
create the largest voter turnout in history. As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue: There
will be massive corruption, but the Republicans can’t rig a massive turnout
that produces a massive rejection of Trump.
Our predicament is as complicated as
these writings suggest.
To the question, will he resign? Greg Palast in How Trump Stole 2020 suggests he will not, because Trump
believes he will not be defeated at the polls because he will perform as Palast’s title says: he will copy nationally what Georgia’s Gov.
Kemp accomplished with extraordinarily successful deviousness: he will deny enough
Democrats, mainly Blacks, the vote, “via purge, disqualifications, and the mass
rejection of provisional, absentee, and paper ballot.” (296). Palast is a superlative scholar of the
vulnerableness of our electoral system, as his book shows page after page,
backed up by his earlier book Billionaires
and Ballot Bandits. In both books
he suggests remedies.
Another new book, How Democracies
Die by Levitsky and Ziblatt, makes an even more complex and dismal
case that the collapse of our democracy is likely because its two
foundations—democratic rules and norms—are being undermined by the two Parties,
but mainly from the Republican Party.
The Constitutional (written) rules and the political and social
conventions (unwritten rules) that guarded the Constitution no longer protect
our politics. That is, we cannot take
for granted mutual toleration or forbearance; the two competing parties no
longer accept one another as legitimate rivals, or the idea that politicians
should exercise restraint. To the question,
will Trump resign, the authors might cite their story of the Philippines’
Marcos, who, when his second term ended, successfully refused to step down
“after declaring martial law” (76), neither rules nor norms strong enough to
prevent his dictatorship.
A 3rd book, according to the following review,
fingers Trump’s enablers.
Published July 19, 2020Updated July 20, 2020TWILIGHT
OF DEMOCRACY: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism By
Anne Applebaum. Reviewed by Bill Keller.
Even
before the coronavirus began to test our social order, the world was
experiencing another plague, a pandemic
of authoritarianism. Over the past decade it has infected democracies
around the globe, including our own. Among the first responders were writers
offering dystopian fiction and apocalyptic nonfiction, all questioning the
durability of democracy under stress.
“The Death of Democracy,” Benjamin Carter Hett’s reconsideration of Weimar Germany,
explored how partisan intransigence enabled the rise of Hitler, a lesson
clearly intended as a timely warning. In their all-too-credible alarum, “How Democracies Die,” the
Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt drew on a
global roster of recently failed democracies to identify symptoms of would-be
autocrats. (Donald Trump checks all the boxes.) In “Surviving Autocracy,” the
journalist Masha Gessen, having sharpened a scalpel on Vladimir Putin,
dissected Trumpism and concluded that curing it will take more than an
election.
Anne
Applebaum’s contribution to this discussion, “Twilight of Democracy: The
Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism,” is concerned less with the aspiring
autocrats and their compliant mobs than with the mentality of the courtiers who make a tyrant possible: “the
writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of
television programs and creators of memes who can sell his image to the
public.”
Are these enablers true believers or just cynical opportunists? Do they
believe the lies they tell and the conspiracies they invent or are they simply
greedy for wealth and power? The answers she reaches are frankly equivocal,
which in our era of dueling absolutes is commendable if sometimes a little
frustrating.
Applebaum, an American journalist who lives mostly in Poland, has earned accolades (including
a Pulitzer Prize) for prodigiously researched popular histories of the Cold
War, the Gulag and Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine. “Twilight of Democracy”
is less substantial, a magazine essay expanded into a book that is part
rumination, part memoir.
A 4TH book, Bob Aldridge, The Goodness Field: A Guidebook for
Proactive Nonviolence.( 2020)
offers a summary of post-WWII US
transformations into a new way of life to protect US “vital interests” (access
to the world’s resources):
Part I Understanding
Our Opponent: Egothink
Chapter 2, The
Culture of Entertainment and Pax Americana.: the ultra-conservatives,
ultra-right-wing neoconservatives, neocons.
Section 1, Culture of Entertainment: consumption as a way of life, TV,, social
media
Section 2, “Pax Americana—Structuring for World Hegemony” (33-): Truman
Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO, global bases, CIA, NSA
Chapter 3, Rise
of the Neocons.
Chapter 4,
Deconstructing Democracy, pp. 84-93, quick history of US martial law.
Begins with the Reichstag fire Feb. 27, 1933 and martial law, Nazi Party and
Hitler fixed in power (69). Chap. 4
divided into 2 parts:: 1) the 3 major consolidations in the Executive Branch
and 2) martial law.
Chapter 5,
Divide and Deceive: the deluded populace, bound in martial law, provide no
significant resistance.
Parts II and
III Nonviolent Resistance
The four books trace main ideas and practices—Palast: our voting, L and Z : our political culture,
Applebaum: the president’s supporters, and Aldridge: the rise of the neocon/military
culture and declaration of martial law--to expose the increasing fracturing of
our democratic political foundations.
A 5th
book analyzes the collapse of another democracy whose Constitution was modeled at
least in part upon that of the US. The
Death of Democracy:
Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin
Carter Hett explains why
democracy fell apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s. His book’s title denotes two converging plots,
which are best understood by WWI.
Weimar Republic’s
under the moderate, multi-Party Social Democratic Party coalition reached “high
civilization,” an “enlightened, creative, ultramodern [constitutional] democracy,”
“unrivalled” in “science and scholarship,” spectacular in literature,
music, film. Simultaneously its conservative
government under President Paul von Hindenburg, his officials, and the army “held
the keys to power.” They “moved [and
polarized] the Republic politically to the right.” They
could have stopped Hitler, but chose to “use him.” In little more than a decade the Weimar Republic had become a brutal
totalitarianism, “the most evil regime in human history” (7-12).
Adolph Hitler
was “the most historically important individual of the twentieth century”— skilled
demagog, “clever political strategist.” But
even his extraordinary “talents cannot fully explain Hitler’s success.” There was the chaos created by the war, which
made the workings of democracy—its compromising, its frequent turnover of
administrations-- seem contemptible and “soulless”; to which the Nazis
responded by rejecting “a rational, factual world” via “conspiracy theories” to
explain also Germany’s defeat (Communists, capitalist, Jews),. What was needed was a providential leader and rule
by emergency powers and executive orders.
“There was nothing the Nazis did in the years
after 1933 that was not prefigured in their rise to power.” Keen observers saw what was coming:
dictatorship, martial law, abolition of parliament, crushing of liberties,
terror, war. What they did not foresee
was the public’s acceptance. (13-14).
