232 - The Devastating Decline of Trust and Civility: World Order Falls Apart
Our Existential Crisis
Poisonous civil discourse and a corrosive lack of fundamental integrity are metastasizing across the globe. Sheikh Hasina's autocratic Bangladesh abrogated free choice by hounding and imprisoning the opposition before this week's election. Senegal's president makes sure that his courts perpetually persecute his main plausible and popular opponent. Burundi's military president advocates stoning gays. Nicaragua's dictatorial duo jails Jesuit prelates for decrying attacks on free expression. Venezuela's dictator threatens to invade neighboring Guyana. Ecuador's stability is menaced by twenty-two cocaine-driven gangs. Putin's lies and prevarications are obvious. And at home, in what was once a bastion of tolerance and relative political harmony, an orange-faced bully has so contaminated our national politics that despots and would-be potentates the world over feel released from societal constraints, shutting down free speech and free assembly and killing or imprisoning those who dare to criticize.
This zero-sum mentality is dangerous everywhere, especially in a home of liberal values and live-and-let-live such as these United States. Trump is coarse and has naturally coarsened political discourse. But his claim that he is anointed by God to save the American people from those others whom he decries as "vermin," and polluters of the "the blood of our country," echoing the dark days of Hitler's vituperations, is palpably dangerous here, but also emboldens emulators abroad. The fact that the birthplace of democracy permits, and publicizes Trump's anti-democratic rantings gives pseudo-populist acolytes in Asia and Africa -- and even in parts of Western Europe -- encouragement to make their own compromises with honesty and fair-dealing.
Referring specifically to immigrants (and other "vermin") Trump parroted phrasing that could have been Hitler's: “They are poisoning our country. They are poisoning the blood of our country. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. They’re terrorists. Absolutely that’s poisoning our country. That’s poisoning the blood of our country. And that’s what’s happening.”
He claims that he has never read any of Hitler's writings, but in 1990 Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer that, “from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” Germany has rules against spouting such hate speech and arrested far right "Heil Hitler" extremists as recently as last week.
Only in Brazil, which had its own partisan rabid raid on legislative chambers a year ago, have the courts protected the nation from Trump-like depredations. A judge who presides over the Superior Electoral Court and is a justice on the Supreme Federal Court, Brazil's highest, managed to prosecute and to remove the right of former president Jair Bolsonaro, a bare-faced Trump acolyte, to contest future elections. Brazil had a relatively recent period of authoritarian rule by soldiers, from 1964 to 1985. Brazilians fear another putsch and another era when their freedoms are again erased. Hence, the continued struggle -- led by judges of the Supreme Court and the Electoral Court -- to prosecute Bolsonaro for fomenting the exact kinds of acts for which Trump now claims immunity. Brazil is taking no chances that something akin to the chaos that Trump has unleashed in the U.S. could come back to haunt its own government and people.
Brazilians are more aware of the dangers of Trump-like pretensions of grandiosity than we are; for us, the unspeakable could arise well before we are ready -- before we are fully prepared to cope with someone who wants to play dictator on day 1, and for ever after. Indeed, "play" is too mild. Trump and his immediate entourage have already circulated plans to dismantle our enshrined checks and balances, many of our bureaucratic and judicial safeguards, and to rely on brute force -- Pakistani style-- running roughshod over the liberties that Americans enjoy -- and would seriously miss -- when an elected Trump would follow Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban's trashing of human rights and political freedoms.
These threats to destroy our essential rights and freedoms -- and collaterally to leave Ukraine in the lurch and start a war with China -- are palpable particularly since Trump has arranged a pliant Supreme Court bench (unlike Brazil's paradoxical defenders of the separation of powers) and engineered a supine Republican stranglehold consisting of the owlish Speaker of the House of Representatives and those responsible his rise. The Democrats will probably take back the House in November, but simultaneously lose control of the Senate (which also contains Republicans fearful of Trump's rhetoric and his ability act with evil intent).
The entire Trump peril could be contained, if not avoided, if Republicans had spines. Even those criticizing him (bar Chris Christie) on the campaign trail back away from saying how completely unacceptable his hot speech is -- how un-American is his publicly announced intent to shred our democracy by taking advantage of the founding fathers' assumption that American leaders and politicians would always behave in a gentlemanly fashion and never lie openly. What have we come to as a nation and as an exponent of the presidential two-party system (instead of a parliamentary one with multiple parties and proportional representation)?
Christie summed it all up last night, decrying "the hate and the division and the selfishness of what our party has become under...Trump."
As suggested at the beginning of this column, depriving Americans of their birthrights (Trump's clear intent) would be strike one against the social compact that has always propelled America to global leadership. In part, that is the essence of soft power. But the second strike would be against the international system that since World War II has enshrined respect for the rule of law, for a world order and a conduct among nations that is rules based, and for the kind of intrinsic integrity that has long elevated Washington's practices above those of other nations.
The United States, directly because of Trump and his Republican backers, already has new and never before encountered difficulties halting even little countries like the United Arab Emirates from meddling harmfully in the Sudan or in Ethiopia. Thanks to Trump, our word is no longer believed, and countries like Bangladesh or the Democratic Republic of Congo can hold questionable national elections without caring whether or not they are censured by Washington.
Equally egregiously, South Africa can accuse Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice and escape obloquy from someone as harried and otherwise busy as Secretary of State Antony Blinken. A retired Canadian Supreme Court justice and Holocaust survivor asks how a country that sheltered an indicted war criminal like Sudanese former president Omar al-Bashir when he traveled to South Africa despite an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest could begin to critique Israel's actions in Gaza? "Hamas’s explicit and unapologetic goal is to eliminate Jews," she wrote in Toronto's Globe & Mail. "The elimination of Jews is genocide. That is why Hamas murdered, raped, beheaded, kidnapped and tortured Jews on Oct. 7, 2023: to eliminate them, because they were Jews. It is a legal absurdity to suggest that a country that is defending itself from genocide is thereby guilty of genocide."
President Biden and his foreign policy team have to contend with Republican Congressional political opportunists, and without the backing of all Americans (as most previous presidents would have enjoyed) in the foreign policy arena. That is why, unlike in Brazil, even Biden's smart and esteemed leadership in global affairs keeps getting stymied or derailed. Trump's utterances compound the difficulty and will continue to do so until at least November.
Interesting, correct, and well expressed. Frank
Devastating decline of trust is indeed our existential crisis. I am focusing at home and on Trump. We must recognize the seriousness of the threat and do whatever we can to mobilize and get out the vote. I recommend supporting such organizations as Rust Belt Rising and the States Project.
Ron Bancroft