304 - How Fascists Gain Control (2)

and how Brazil acts against them

            Despite critical developments in Gaza and Ukraine, plus Sudan, this Newsletter column continues my analysis in #303, as the title indicates. I did not expect originally to make the dissection of Trumpism a two-part discussion, but so many other commentators, and the serious press, has now weighed in on the matter of his creepy fascism that a further examination of Trump's authoritarian tendencies and inciteful appeals to voters is warranted. Moreover, I want to bring attention to what Brazil is doing and has done to curb wild anti-democratic, destabilizing, rhetoric in its own political milieu.  Its judges are concerned to prevent Trump's hatreds and violence from spreading south to their also polarized nation.

            Gen. Mark Milley, Trump's one-time armed forces chief, made it clear earlier and now again last week that Trump was "fascist to the core."  Milley, like many other American military and civilian leaders who worked closely with Trump when he was in the White House, affirms that Trump has seriously authoritarian desires and an overriding drive to become a Putin-like strong man.  Trump (amazingly) suffers from low self-esteem needing repetitive affirmations of his capability and worth, he overcompensates with narcissistic strivings and wild, hurtful, divisive, and scapegoating rantings. But that doesn’t excuse his dangerous and deranged speech.

            Paul Eaton, another American general, says that fascism takes hold "only because the voters enabled it to take hold."  And that is our clear and present danger just weeks before perhaps the most defining American election since 1860.

            Professor Robert Paxton, a Columbia University expert on Vichy France (and more), helpfully defines fascism as political behavior "marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood."  Fascism, he says, is the conscious battle against and abandonment of "democratic liberties." Other academics across the U.S. remind us that fascism includes the "militarization" of politics, appeals to intense if often invented nationalism, and -- exactly what is at Trump's center now -- the vicious kinds of harsh labelling of identities and groups purposefully to arouse an aggrieved and easily moved assembly of followers.

            Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale, an authority on Russia, Ukraine, and terror, reminds us that fascism salutes a strong leadership in ways that more and more resemble cultish worship. Fascists  build upon the "Big Lie," on dehumanizing opponents (they are all "vermin"), on nativism, on racial resentment, and on alleged fears of all kinds.  Dangers that hardly exist become manifest. Retribution becomes a compelling motivation.

            The glorification of violence is central to mass arousal.  Everything pernicious in Trump that I wrote about in #303 on Thursday reminds us in its antagonism and its lies (Haitians eating animals and the rest) of speeches made with intensifying fervor in the 1930s by Hitler and Stalin. Hitler engineered the Holocaust and Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians. And now Trump refers to "those people," and promises massive deportations and a thorough-going house-cleanings of "enemies."

            Trump, if elected, promises to abuse all of our national settled norms of political behavior. What we have seen during the campaign is a mere preliminary roiling of the turbulent waters.  And true fascism, as I wrote on Thursday, begins not with a bang but with insinuations and the creeping normalizations of actions never before tolerated. Settled practices are slowly discarded.  Before people notice, their freedoms and their expectations of proper behavior, vanish. Civility be damned.

            Brazil, which hardly benefits from our American constitutional traditions, and which relatively recently endured two decades (1964-1985) of heavy-handed military rule that followed the authoritarianism of a much elected quasi-democrat (President Getulio Vargas 1930-1945 and 1951-1954), currently has a powerful Supreme Court that is trying (often in peremptory manner that would not be legal in the U.S.) to prevent fascist apologists and activists from destroying Brazil's current democracy.

            Led by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, but backed by the other justices and Chief Justice Robert Barroso, the Court granted itself powers of investigation as well judicial decision- making. "We are dealing with dangerous people," Barroso says. The Court arrested former President Jair Bolsonaro (who lost to President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in 2022) after he tried from afar to organize a military coup to reverse his electoral loss. The Court was determined to secure the peaceful transfer of power to Lula, despite massive Jan. 6-type rumblings and machinations.   The Court has since convicted 220 backers of Bolsonaro who stormed Brasilia, the Brazilian capital city, in 2023, copying the Trump-inspired attack on our capitol in 2021.

            The Court has successfully curtailed the spread of "fake news" by social media and the regular press. It also has a special unit that ferrets out those Brazilians who spread ideas that are inimical to democracy or are outright falsifications.  The special unit is charged with preserving Brazil's democratic institutions from slander and attack.

            During the 2022 election, Moraes ordered online sites to remove posts that threatened the integrity of the vote, including some from Bolsonaro, then still president.

            The Court has charged or imprisoned those Brazilians who criticized the Court's anti-Bolsonaro actions. It has compelled news organizations to drop articles that were pro-Bolsonaro or critical of the Court's actions. It forced Elon Musk to delete accounts on X that Moraes deemed dangerous to Brazil's democracy. Since 2020, Moraes has compelled dozens of social platforms to cancel at least 240 "offensive" accounts containing hundreds of thousands of posts. Justice Dias Toffoli says that if it weren't for the Court's actions, "democracy in Brazil would have collapsed." Chief Justice Barroso says that a young democracy like Brazil needs to protect itself from "hate speech."

            Little of what the Brazilian Supreme Court has done "to save democracy" would be permitted in our own legal system.  Nor should most be.  But the arguments of the justices are powerful; they have been and are determined to repulse any actions or forms of speech that might tend to undermine democracy or cause riots. They have been assiduous, none less intensely than Moraes, in keeping fascism from returning to Brazil.

            Our own rule of law framework, our rightly permissive and expansive view of free speech, our Supreme Court's views on presidential immunity, and the ponderousness of our judicial decision making has so far done too little to inhibit the spread of hate and inflammatory speech in political life. What could provide sufficient reasons for a suit for slander or defamation. or prosecution for criminal libel, almost anywhere else has proved insufficient or politically and juridically impossible.

            Thus, we end up with a dangerous candidate for high office who abuses the First Amendment with impunity and gets away with huge amounts of dangerously inflammatory speech. If Attorney General Merrick Garland had but a little slice of Morae-like determination in his bones, we would all feel safer and more secure during and enduring our electoral crisis.  Instead, anything goes, and a bitterly polarized American electorate is confronted with dishonesty, falsifications, endless rants espousing retribution, and the arrival on these democratic shores of incipient fascism.

PS:  Peter Baker's article in yesterday's New York Times provides a revealing account of Trump as serial fraudster, serial cheat, convicted felon, and far more. Please read it. Also in Sunday's Times is a scathing report of Trump's scatological remarks last week at a Catholic function. Maureen Dowd's column calls him  "proudly amoral," with echoes of McCarthyism and Stalinism.

And, if anyone doubts that Trump's tariff intentions will greatly harm the U.S. economy, dooming us to recession, please read Paul Krugman's long, careful, analysis in Saturday's Times.

Another P.S. is my holding Sen. Mitch McConnell responsible for spinelessly allowing Trump to get as far as he has. McConnell detests Trump privately but has not said so publicly and has certainly not mobilized leading Republicans to reject Trump's presidential candidacy. Who among the Republicans will say “Have you no shame, sir?”