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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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“Law and order” without the rule of law is neither “law” nor “order.” And any news organization that uncritically describes President Trump’s reelection campaign as premised on “law and order” appeals, without placing his concerted efforts to destroy the rule of law in America front and center alongside them, is helping to drain those words of all meaning.
Over the weekend, Trump unleashed a vile and frenzied tweetstorm about ongoing violence in Oregon and Wisconsin. His barrage of Twitter activity, which included deliberate efforts to incite civil conflict and support for vigilante activity and jailing political opponents, combined both those elements — superficial law-and-order appeals with open contempt for the rule of law.
Trump’s just-finished convention also juxtaposed law-and-order appeals alongside undisguised contempt for the rule of law. It employed endless lies and absurdities to portray a nation tipped into chaos by a “radical left” that has supposedly taken Joe Biden captive, combined with the extensive, unlawful use of government resources to serve Trump’s reelection hopes.
These two things — Trump’s law-and-order messaging as a reelection candidate, and his destruction of the rule of law as president — are often treated as two distinct things. But they are actually part of the same story.
A U.S. military officer, who has amassed nearly 3 million followers on TikTok, posted an insensitive joke on Monday about the Holocaust—then admonished any offended followers. “Reason 1 million why I will never be verified,” 2nd Lt. Nathan Freihofer said in the TikTok video, before asking what is a “Jewish person’s favorite Pokemon character.”
After laughing and saying, “Ash,” Freihofer added: “If you get offended, get the fuck out because it’s a joke. Don’t be a pussy.” According to Task and Purpose, which first posted the video on Twitter, his TikTok comments may run afoul of the Army’s “Think, Type, Post” social media policy that states officers should only post messages demonstrating dignity and respect for themselves and others.
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Until this election, I’ve never felt as if everything was on the line, that if my preferred candidate lost, something devastating and irrevocable would occur.
In the past, when I met people who felt this way, their mindset puzzled me. How could my conservative friends seriously have believed that four years of a Hillary Clinton administration could somehow end America as we know it? How could my liberal friends really have thought that Mitt Romney’s presidency could do the same? This impulse always seemed like a naivety that prized an artificially short-term view over the longer arc of American history.
Believing in liberal democracy means accepting a very particular bargain: that your team will lose some, win others, and that by and large, the world won’t end either way.
Sure, you might not love what happens to your marginal tax rate. You might favor stricter or looser environmental regulations. You might like or dislike certain judges appointed to the federal bench. But you also get to make a course correction two or four years later. Nothing can be fundamentally broken from one election to another.
And the truth is that adopting a sky-is-falling view undermines the every-day workings of politics. When you view your policy opponents as the devil, you refuse to engage in the compromises necessary for liberal democracy to function. Instead, you buy into a mindset that you must stop at nothing, adopt any tactic, and make common cause with any ally, no matter how noxious, in order to defeat evil.
Liberal democracy depends on a give-and-take across parties. But when you see the other side as inimically opposed to each one of your values, how can you possibly trade horses with them?
It’s not entirely the voters’ fault that they tend to see every election as monumental: We’re a country that brands anything as “historic”—from the Super Bowl to Labor Day car sales. Most of the time, though, presidential elections aren’t “historic” in the sense of defining events for years to come. They’re just referendums on a particular set of policies that, give or take, will nudge the polity in one direction or another.
I know all of that. I believe all of that.
And yet, this time, I can’t shake the feeling that the election has us on a looming precipice that’s pretty important. Historic, even.
I have a sense that if Donald Trump wins, the American project as we know it may not fully recover. The Republic will limp along, some pale echo of former glory, but it won’t ever fulfill the promise of offering “the last best hope of earth.”
So why is it that this time seems different?
Sept. 1 [2019] marks the 80th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II in Europe, and world leaders will gather to mark the event. But what led Germans to embrace Nazi rule more than six years earlier, which would lead them into the war? University of Illinois history professor Peter Fritzsche has explored that at length and does so again in his upcoming book “Hitler’s First Hundred Days.” Fritzsche spoke with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.
The 100 days in your title date from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s appointment as the German chancellor in 1933, the result of a political deal. What do you find in those 100 days that is so surprising? ...
The lessons: Political actors must defend their opponents on questions of process and procedure. Extreme partisanship signalizes the illegitimacy of the constitutional system. If opponents are demonized as “others” and not recognized as citizens living in a complex and diverse society, new in-group solidarities will trample society in favor of a newly and more narrowly defined community that prioritizes what they want to hear over democratic process.
After 1933, Germany became far less diverse, religiously, politically, intellectually; the Nobel Prizes it used to win are now won by the United States, with its large emigre population. 1933 always stands as a choice.
What is surprising is the speed by which a very partisan and divided society, fragmented between left and right, between Social Democrats, Communists and National Socialists (Nazis), between Catholics and Protestants, seemingly transformed itself – by terror from above and “conversion” from below – into a seemingly unified society recognized widely as a “people’s community.”
Along the way, most Germans accepted basic premises of the Nazi worldview: the distinction between friend and foe, the view that Germans had almost been destroyed as a people at the end of World War I, the corollary that they would have to fight internal and then external enemies in order to ensure their survival, and the identification of the Jew as a non-German alien and even enemy.
Compared with day one, Jan. 30, 1933, Germany was not recognizable on day 100, at least to outsiders. To sympathizers, German history had healed itself in 100 days.
And how do you explain the transformation?
The highly partisan positions of German nationalists made a defense of the republic, civic institutions and common decency unthinkable because even the National Socialists were regarded as far preferable to the moderate Social Democrats. The political divide invalidated any defense of civil society in almost any form. There was also not more resistance from anti-Nazis because the apparent evidence of widespread pro-Nazi acclamation seemed overwhelming.
Moreover, the Nazis represented themselves as a “third force,” neither left nor right, neither simply nationalist or only socialist, a force that would renew the nation and restore its future.
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