Much of the recent commentary about the US has focused on the growing threat to democracy and rule of law caused by the rise of far-right white Christian nationalists and the continued leadership of the Republican Party by Donald Trump.
Candidate Trump, accurately denounced in 2016 by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham as a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot”, continues to dominate the Republican Party despite falsely claiming he won the 2020 Presidential election and despite inciting a mob to invade the US Capitol on January 6th last year to overthrow the vote of the American people.
Astoundingly, 74 million Americans voted to re-elect Trump two years ago despite his incompetent record as president, his attacks on fundamental American values, and his 30,000 lies while in office. Worse still, it looks as if Trump could be the Republican nominee for president in 2024, with a good chance of defeating the Democratic nominee.
How did the US come to this? How did John Winthrop’s City upon a Hill sink to the level where millions of ordinary Americans believe the Big Lie that Biden stole the election and that Hillary Clinton and Democrats are running a juvenile sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a DC pizzeria?
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Many explanations have been advanced for the willingness of millions of Americans to be duped on a large scale. These include resistance to enforced Covid lockdowns and resentment of the diminished circumstances of low-skilled white Americans who have seen good wages and pensions eroded by globalisation and offshoring. This makes them ripe for a menu of lies, anger and fear served up by clever, cynical Republican operatives like Karl Rove, Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and Roger Stone.
White racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation that ended the Jim Crow discrimination against Black people was eagerly exploited by Republicans
Such propaganda is now enhanced by the echo chamber of social media where algorithms, designed to increase eyeballs and sell more advertising, reinforce lies and false conspiracy theories. This, plus the daily falsehoods perpetuated on hate radio and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV, mean that millions of Americans live in a land of imagined assault by Black people, immigrant gangs and the dark state.
Luke Mogelson’s The Storm is Here is a lively, well-written and authoritative account of how the US got to this sorry state, verging on civil war. Mogelson, a staff writer with The New Yorker who has covered wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and Iraq, embedded himself for a year with Trump’s white Christian nationalist allies, providing a vivid and disturbing eyewitness account of what motivates ordinary people to believe in “alternative” facts, to join violent militias, and to foment Civil War.
From months spent with these heavily-armed Americans, Mogelson says that “they all seemed to be practising the same kind of magical thinking that had become a staple of Trump’s presidency — the belief that if you insisted something was true with adequate conviction and persistence, you could will its reality.”
Mogelson documents how Trump and the Republican Party manipulated white nationalists to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and again in 2021 to attempt to hold on to power despite losing the election to Biden. Mogelson, reminding us that racism is not new in American politics, documents previous nativist racist movements. Far from being that mythical City on a Hill, the US grew to be an economic power through the two original sins of dispossessing/eradicating native Americans and the slavery of forcibly imported Africans and their descendants.
White racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation that ended the Jim Crow discrimination against Black people was eagerly exploited by Republicans. Mogelson says that after Johnson, “Nixon won the presidency, and the Southern Strategy — ceding the Black vote to Democrats while exploiting racial polarisation to consolidate the white vote,” created a blueprint for Republican victories in subsequent elections.”
Former president Obama (who was himself vilified by right-wing racists) has argued that Trump “is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican party”. In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party perfected the new normal of lying about opponents and inciting their followers by weaponising “identity issues,” focusing on the three Gs of “Guns, Gays and God”.
Republicans, financed and directed by billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have deployed “celebrity” candidates (Reagan and Trump) to help secure majority votes from voters for policies that harm those voters’ economic interests, such as the $2 trillion tax giveaway by Trump to the ultra-rich, and perennial attacks on key social safety measures like Social Security and Medicare. Reagan’s motto that “government is not the solution, it is the problem,” is still quoted by people depending for survival on government social security checks and Medicaid.
Mogelson says what is most alarming is the Republican lawmakers’ stupefying cave-in to Trump’s wish to overturn the election in spite of the fact that they were threatened by the violent mob on January 6th
Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, pushed the Great Replacement theory, the belief that white Christians in the US and Europe were being supplanted by populations incompatible with Western culture and identity.
Mogelson’s book is not all doom and gloom; he notes how independent judges stood for the truth this year and threw out the 80 lawsuits by Trump’s lawyers claiming widespread voter fraud without any evidence, despite Trump’s appointment of many conservative judges during his presidency, no doubt hoping to emulate the subjugation of judges in Poland and Hungary. Even the Supreme Court, packed with Trump conservatives, considered it a step too far to overthrow a free election.
What about January 6th? Was it an attempted insurrection or what the Republican National Committee ludicrously described as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”?
Mogelson shows that most of the people who violently stormed the Capitol did indeed hope to forestall the peaceful transition of power. Some intended to harm lawmakers as confirmed by the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. The author documents Trump’s incitement of rebellion, claiming that “a crooked and vicious foe” was on the verge of installing an illegitimate and corrupt regime; that this was tantamount to “an act of war”; and that Republicans should be “up in arms” and “fight to the death.” On the morning of January 6th, Trump shouted at the protesters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more”. Mogelson also says, “Trump could have calmed the crowd or revved it up. He chose the latter”.
Mogelson, who had successfully infiltrated the various militias, provides a searing and chilling account of the mob violence directed at police officers, 180 of whom were wounded, one died and four later committed suicide.
Mogelson says what is most alarming is the Republican lawmakers’ stupefying cave-in to Trump’s wish to overturn the election in spite of the fact that they were threatened by the violent mob on January 6th: “One hundred forty-seven — still a substantial majority of the Republican caucus — sided with the Proud Boys, the Groypers, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, QAnon, the man in the camp Auschwitz sweatshirt, the sieg-heiling woman who stole Nancy Pelosi’s laptop to sell to the Russians, and the mob that brutalised and tried to kill the police officers protecting them.”
Vice-president Mike Pence’s finest moment was refusing to bend to Trump’s threats on January 6th to prevent the overthrow of a free and fair election. Pence said, “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins.”
Mogelson says: “The second claim is demonstrably false; the first looks increasingly doubtful.” Indeed, it was a sad day when the two Republican leaders who had been critical of Trump immediately after the insurrection, Senator Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, voted against the Congressional investigation of the attack.
The extent to which the liars and conspiracy spinners can capture the souls of so many with blatant falsehoods is really shocking. In retrospect, January 6th seems to have been a pathetic enactment of political fantasy that in mid-stride turned into brutal reality without shattering the spell of the Fox-fired fantasy that propelled it. One wonders what schemes the cynical money men behind the Republican Party might be dreaming up now that they’ve seen what their lies can provoke. What rough beast will they want to send into Washington next time?
There are, nevertheless, grounds for guarded optimism. This book went to print before president Biden succeeded in securing support from some moderate (remember them) Republicans for the first major gun safety law in 30 years. Second, Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes lower healthcare costs and the most significant initiative on Climate Change in the US, accelerating the transition to non-polluting renewable energy. Third, Republicans did not cave to Putin, with Congress remaining united in support of Ukraine.
In addition, following the US supreme court’s decision to overthrow Roe v Wade, enabling states to jail anyone who mails an abortion pill to end a pregnancy, a majority of registered voters (56 per cent) say the issue of abortion will be important in their November midterm vote.
Those Americans who say they don’t want to be partisan clearly have to make a choice this November and in 2024. Do they support the rule of law, science, and women’s rights as advocated by president Biden and the Democratic Party? Or do they support the lies, greed, and lawlessness of what has become Trump’s Republican Party?
Perhaps Ulysses S Grant said it best many years ago: “The dividing line will not be between Masons and Dixons, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
Ted Smyth is chair of the advisory board of the Clinton Institute for American Studies
Three recommended related reads:
Dark Money by Jane Mayer (Scribe UK, 2016)
Jane Mayer’s book, subtitled “How a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US”, does much to explain how wealth is increasingly concentrated in the US at the expense of American democracy. Not only does Mayer provide brilliant portraits of the Kochs and Scaifes who are the Republican party’s puppet masters, but she details the long road to Citizens United, a 2010 US supreme court decision overturning a century of restrictions banning corporations and unions from spending all they wanted to elect candidates. As Mayer writes, “To reach the verdict, the court accepted the argument that corporations had the same rights to free speech as citizens.” Just last month, Barre Seid donated 100 per cent of the shares of his company Tripp Lite to a Republican-leaning non-profit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for €1.64 billion ($1.65 billion), with Mr Seid and the non-profit avoiding all taxes.
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Penguin, 2019)
Harvard professors Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, having spent twenty years studying the breakdown of democracy in Europe and Latin America, believe that the US, far from being exceptional, is not immune to democracy’s collapse and that the election of Trump was a significant step towards the erosion of democracy. The authors, citing Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary, demonstrate that many autocrats have come to power by having been first elected before proceeding to undermine democratic guardrails. While Trump narrowly lost in 2020, his re-election would surely hasten the erosion of democracy.
Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich (Scribe UK, November 2022)
Timothy Snyder’s seminal 2017 book, On Tyranny, argued that the independent judiciary and media are an essential bulwark against tyrants. David Enrich, a New York Times editor whose previous works include an exposé of Deutsche Bank, has written a new book which provides alarming evidence that the Jones Day law firm were a key player in securing the Republican nomination for Trump, and subsequently advising him in packing the Federal judiciary including the Supreme Court with judges determined to destroy the “administrative state”. One company associate who has now resigned from the firm, says Jones Day also lent “its prestige and credibility to the project of an administration bent on undermining our democracy and our rule of law and for taking legal action that “was designed to suppress the vote”. The law firm, needless to say, has been richly rewarded by conservatives supportive of Trump, including billionaires such as the Koch brothers, and the NRA.
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