The Debate Debacle: Democracy's Despair...Biden should step down and the Party hold a free and open primary & convention.

A nation unhappy with much more than this dismal pairing: they are the symptoms of the failures of globalized, corporate-directed "liberal" democracy - Neoliberalism - and the lives it has upended.

From the coverage in The Guardian newspaper, Moira Donegan: “The debate was a disastrous opening performance by Biden. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/UPI/Rex/ Shutterstock

July 4, 2024 Update:

I will be appearing tomorrow, Friday July 5th at noon to discuss the crisis in the Democratic Party and our Democracy on Montgomery County Attorney Hal Ginsberg’s YouTube program “Halitics”: Halitics

We’ll discussing this essay and the still unresolved crisis made even more threatening to Democracy by the recent Supreme Court ruling on Presidential immunity for crimes committed during “official duties,” a ruling which probably would have kept Richard Nixon in the White House despite the crimes revealed by the Watergate hearings. Project 25 under the Heritage Foundation Roof will give Trump’s second term an ominous direction and his list of revenge targets continues to expand to include the House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 coup attempt. The president of the Heritage Foundation has said on YouTube that a Second American Revolution is underway and that there will be no violence if the left “allows it to be.” Nice of him - that’s Kevin D. Roberts - to set the terms for we “onlookers” to the Right’s takeover.

Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:

Part One: Where We Are, Where I stand:

I did not have an optimistic, “really looking forward to it” feeling about the first presidential debate structured by CNN this Thursday, June 27th. Sure, it was on my Sierra Club “Engagement” calendar for more than a month, since it was announced in May, on the calendar along with the dates of the two coming conventions.

The truth is, readers, even though I listened to the whole exchange, I couldn’t fully watch after the first ten minutes, after Biden’s disjointed rambling concluded with “…we finally beat Medicare.” I had my head buried in my hands for much of the remaining disaster.

Since then, I’ve been reading the post-mortems at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, taking advantage of the later two’s $1 per week election year specials. My NY Times subscription is a gift one from a cousin. And of course I checked in with The Atlantic, Jacobin, and the American Prospect and decided I shouldn’t be in a rush to confirm what was my strong initial reaction: that President Biden cannot recover from this performance, which was not due to just “a bad debate night” but rather that eternal “Arrow of Time” moving forward with its message of human aging, now so apparent in someone who is 81 years old.

My readers should know, if they don’t already, that I’ve never been a Joe Biden fan. He’s never captured my attention or admiration even though there is a long overlap in our political lifetimes, mine beginning with the anti-Vietnam War’s strike-protest in the spring of 1970 at Lafayette College, and working for George McGovern in 1972, the first presidential election in which I could vote. I’ve been on the party’s left flank ever since. I’m no insider, never have been, the closest I’ve gotten is that I was a Ted Kennedy delegate who gave a speech from the floor at the NJ state Democratic Party Convention in 1980 - so even then, I was opposing a sitting president - when necessary.

I’ve long made my case against Biden on his lack of speaking and persuading abilities, and his projection of weakness on various public stages, my feeling that as the head “broker” among the many passionate “movements” that make up the Democratic party, he believes the final “legislative” product pretty much speaks for itself, and that he doesn’t have to explain the ideological/philosophical differences between himself, and say, for prominent example, Joe Manchin, to get to the Inflation Control Act of 2022. That’s despite the fact Manchin long couched his opposition to key new federal programs on child care, paid leave and clean energy subsidies for the most conservative of rationales: weakening the independence of citizens via federal “dependency.” Manchin’s objections, and the concessions he pried out of Biden cried out for a major policy speech from the Bully Pulpit, but we got none, perhaps out of fear of losing Manchin’s vote on the key compromise, even though in the end Manchin had won much of what he and the fossil fuel industry were asking for.

And for many months, if not years, those economists closest to Biden cannot understand why with such good employment numbers so many citizens feel they are not doing well - because in fact they are still at the mercy of the cost structure of our modern economy for too many essentials of a decent life, and the almost unchallenged corporate power in both parties to prevent any disruption of that ability to raise prices at will.

For me, there was a pattern here which carried over to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. Even though US intelligence, and therefore Biden had months of foreknowledge of the massive Russian build up on the border, there was no decisive message, public or private of dire consequences for invading. In my mind, even before the invasion, with so much US-NATO lead time, the situation called for the toughest of the allies - the US, Britain, Poland, France and maybe the Baltics - to send troops - even token battalion level forces, into Ukraine as a clear warning that if Russia invaded we would see it as a defacto violation of the pledges we only hinted at - cruelly teased (or was it “lured?) Ukraine with - about someday joining NATO. What did Biden do? He publicly expressed the wish that Putin wouldn’t take too big a chunk of Ukrainian territory to add to the Donbas and Crimea regions which his initially disguised forces grabbed in 2014. Like hoping - as so many US greens did -that Manchin wouldn’t take too big a slice out of the proposed IRA’s climate provisions.

And of course then there is the Biden “dance” with Prime Minister Netanyahu after the October 7th Hamas assault into Southwestern Israel. First a big hug, then a caution, and then more arms and “we’re always with you” fading away with the many Biden red lines over the slaughter of civilians, famous aid workers and the destructions of hospitals, schools, mosques - all with rationales that eroded in the public mind ten thousand Palestinians deaths at a time, month by month, with world opinion outraged, turning against Israel and towards sympathy with the Palestinian people if not the Hamas cause. But the aid never really stopped, and it has been Israel which got the advanced U.S. F-35 fighters, not Ukraine, who needed them the most. And so who pushed who around in the Gaza catastrophe: you know the answer very well, and now the man who is destroying democracy in Israel along with its religious Right there - is coming to visit Congress. That should go a long way to re-ignite the campus turmoil of our spring.

Enough on the policy front, which the Biden supporters still hope “Trumps” all other considerations. But for a very long time in political science, and in psychological takes on matters of public life, there has been a debate about how the “average” voter makes up their mind, and the answer usually doesn’t rest on matters of policy. We are a long way from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and reason and truth, wrapped in the hoped for “republican virtue” of our founders. Now in the electronic “Public Square” those virtues have no safe podium from which to defend themselves from the growing irrationality and perhaps worse…So that in part, perhaps good part, the “gut”reaction rests on what the candidate projects: decisiveness, strength, confidence…a burden that even more so comes along with being the President of a great and powerful nation, some will say still the “exceptional” nation - but one which many fear is losing respect. Power and confidence, even built upon a mountain of lies and bluster, have pushed “classical rhetoric” under water, and drowned it long ago. It’s repetition which lies at the heart of propaganda, gifted in good part by not only the Totalitarian Regimes which Hannah Arendt wrote about shortly after WWII, which left Europe in rubble, but also capitalism’s commercial bombardment of all aspects of our daily life, even onto old age via harassing phone call after phone offering a better Medicare Part C or Drug option. Trying to get the latest news in the “public square” leaves me captive to all the commercials which are repeated ad nauseum, the broadway singing commercials for a “little pill” being the most obnoxious and depressing on the fate of our civilization.

And that’s been the gut reaction all along to Joe Biden in my region of conservative Western Maryland, which goes for Trump 3:1 and has an all Republican Annapolis State House delegation in Maryland politics. The CBS-YouGov poll released early Sunday, June 30th, confirmed that the view of the Republican Right was now shared across 72% of all voters that Biden did not have what it takes to continue to serve as President. As cited in William Galston’s Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, July 2, the “poll… found that 72% of registered voters now believe Mr. Biden doesn’t have the “mental and cognitive health to serve as president,” up substantially from the network’s previous poll. An identical share said Mr. Biden shouldn’t seek re-election, including a remarkable 46% of his own party.” (Galston is a Senior Fellow at the mainstream Brookings think tank, not so ironically working to head its program named “Governance Studies”).

Going further to get the feel beyond my own gut reactions and thought processes (reason and emotion again) I tuned in to Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program Sunday morning on CNN. It was worth the effort. The two early debaters he featured were Edward Luce, the top Financial Times representative in Washington, DC and David Frum, the ex-Republican who has moved to the Center Right from the Bush Right and is associated with the Atlantic magazine. They both had something significant to say, and worth remembering for the future course of events. Luce was lucid: Trump will win if Biden stays in, the debate performance can’t be ratinalized away, too many - 51 million - saw for themselves Biden’s aging troubles, making his historic in-articulateness even worse. The solution is for him to step down and encourage an open Democratic Convention in August, with competion to begin as soon as it can be organized - so in essense hold the primary which wasn’t held this year, before the convention. There is still time, but barely. Thus the only way for the party, come a good or chaotic process - a risk, in other words - to salvage their standing with the public and head off the looming tyrant. (More on the forces behind the tyrant in Part II.)

Frum was intensely serious in his response: an open Democratic convention will be an internal civil war amongst its irreconcilable factions, a public civil war in the party likely to start off with the disappointed supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be forced to give up any “inherited mantle” claim and compete openly with all the other challengers. I agree that Frum’s worries are a possible outcome, but I am willing to take the risk because I see a continuation of Biden’s candidacy - and an unearned Kamala Harris succession - each leading to a Trump victory based on where the race stands now and the full impact of that debate.

To be clear: I have no favorites in such an open competition - I’ll be watching for policy and public performance (the “persona” if you would prefer an alternative term) like everyone else - and it’s a true pressure cooker for the competitors - the type of pressure cooker public event Biden could not handle on Thursday evening, June 27th in the Atlanta studios of CNN. And going further, the type of long press conference held on Tuesday afternoon, July 2nd, by Karine Jean-Pierre, the articulate, poised Biden Press Secretary - was the type of event Biden needed to do himself to reassure his backers and the nation - if Thursday night was just that one bad night - which it wasn’t. But it was not Biden holding that afternoon press conference, it was the Official Voice of his Adminstration.

(I’ll spare readers a full report and quotes from those I’ve read calling for Biden to step down, and just mention that it was the NY Times Editorial Board, reporters Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein (since Feb.), Nicholas Kristof, Michelle Goldberg and David French in favor of a formal stepping down… Over at The American Prospect, it’s head editor Robert Kuttner himself, along with the Harold Meyerson whom I’ve long read and respected. Over at Jacobin, it was Branko Marcetic, in the lead story, and he is the author of “Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden” (Jan. 2020).

Part II: Beyond the Debate Debacle, and about “Democracy’s Despair.”

I thought a new writer (to me at least), captured much of the nation’s despair about their unhappy choices in this election, MAGA extremists and Democratic Party Biden diehards excepted. Over and over I heard, or read, that the unhappy choices were between a compulsive liar/psychopath who in the debate “spewed lies from a firehose” (I think the firehose analogy was Michelle Goldberg’s gift over at the NY Times; any how, it was often repeated, whatever the origin) and a man whose sentences vaporized mid-way towards making a distant point, leaving the audience with an awful pause before “clinching” with an absurd phrase. For once, Trump told the truth at the 10-11 minute mark of the debate: “I don’t know what he just said and I don’t think he does either.” Cruel - but an inescapable conclusion. As cruel as a Roman gladiatorial contest with one fully armed and armored champion against a Christian martyr “sacrifice” who wants to “give him a hug.” Better Biden shot looks- arrows of hatred - at the budding tyrant - which he has done in other settings as in his Valley Forge Veterans Day speech in late 2023 - than his bewildered, jaw drooping look which the split screen at CNN eerily captured. That’s why I couldn’t always watch, had to look away. The old phrase “like a deer in the headlights” captures it pretty well, though maybe it’s passe now.

The only real sympathy I can muster besides the mortality Biden is facing, is that in a civilized democracy, Trump poses a very formidable challenge as to how to counter his stage agility, what one observer (Vlad Vexler, a Russian in England and a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Cambridge) called his communication “genius,”

content aside of course. It’s all style now.

The new writer, to me at least, is Lili Loofbourow of the Washington Post, their TV Critic. Here’s her very interesting bio, so different from my degree in American Studies, and “informal” minor in European Intellectual History, and a decade in environmental policy wars - and I do mean wars - in NJ.

Oakland, Calif. Education: University of Southern California, BS in psychobiology; USC, BA in English; USC, BA in music; University of Alabama, MFA in creative writing’ Lili Loofbourow is the television critic for The Washington Post. She previously worked at Slate, where she wrote about news, politics, comedy, gender and internet culture. Before that, she was the Week's staff culture critic. She was a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and has written for venues including the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the Guardian, PMLA, the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Cut. Loofbourow is based in Oakland, Calif. Honors and Awards: Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, 2018; Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, 2015; Best American Essays, 2019 Languages spoken in addition to English: Spanish

Here are her last two paragraphs from this article, which appeared on Friday, June 28th: entitled “At this presidential debate, we all lost” - are worth the broader public’s attention: Here at Media Critic's take

…the American people got some of the most brutal television in political history. Brutal to listen to, brutal to watch. A dispiriting spectacle comprising two different strains of unfitness. That one poses a far greater threat than the other is not a comfort…

There’s no real hope that either candidate can unify the country. But on that funereal silent debate stage, with no audience, no fact checking and scant moderation from CNN’s Jake Tapper an Dana Bash, their joint appearance made a far more frightening case for the risks facing the country than either managed to make alone.”

What is going on in American politics with the rise and domination of Donald Trump since 2015? Even when he lost in 2020, he dominates the news cycles and the media’s obsession with the details of his many trials alienate me no end; what is unfolding is a symptom of troubles throughout the Western democracies. These troubles were only hinted at as the winners of the Cold War celebrated the “End of History” - meaning that there would be no more great ideological struggles and that liberal, capitalist democracies had “won.” The West forgot its own history after WWI, where the breakup of four old Empires (the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian and German) led to intense, unhappy ethnic frictions within the new and rather artificial boundaries, a militant new secular faith - Communism - and the humiliation of a Kaiser-less Germany which would lead to an even worse round II of World War in 1939, prefigued in so many ways by the Civil War in Spain from 1934-1939.

The signs that the Western democracies were in deep trouble became apparent with the turmoil and then stalemates in their legislative bodies between the great wars, 1919-1939, and indeed, in the contemporary United States Congress in 2010 with the announcement that the Republican Right would not support any proposal by the first black President, no matter how cautious and upper-middle class sounding, and looking - he was in fact. The stark reality that the “Mother of Parliaments,” Great Britain, has devolved into an international political laughing stock via Brexit and Tory rule clowns is surely a symptom and a symbol of our Western troubles.

But what lies at the heart of those troubles? Here’s a good hint, no more than that, a start to explanation, from a German historian whose two works on Europe just before and between the two World Wars caught my attention years ago. It’s Phillip Blom and the two works are worth spelling out in titles and dates of publication because they point at some of the possible root causes of our troubles. In 2008, the year of the Great Recession, it was “The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914” - with its emphasis on the dizzying pace of economic and technological change, and the rip tides of currents they set off in politics and culture, intensifying the gap between urban moderism and rural conservatism. Should I add the words “secular and religious” at the beginning and end of the disjunctures? Probably, because those tensions have continued into contemporary American politics. And then, also ironically, in 2015, the year of Trump’s rise, it was “Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938.”

“Today,” in May of 2024, Blom has written an essay in the Catalonian sponsored and based journal Idees: “The Collapse of the liberal project? A stocktaking and Outlook.”

It’s about as comprehensive as a scholar can get over a huge range of topics, of “causality” in just an essay, and I have to leave much out in my summary, especially his extensive handling of the ecological crisis with its ramifications rippling through the rich and poor lands alike. I’ve therefore chosen just two paragraphs out of a number of leading candidates to give you a flavor of his work, and to give a “shoe horn” effect to my own observations to follow.

The triumph of the liberal project produced many losers, starting with the states of the former Soviet Union, whose sense of historic defeat was compounded by the fact that the introduction of free market principles, rather than leading to better living conditions, often led to anarchy and despotism at the behest of a few oligarchs. This brings into play a political motivation that is probably one of the most powerful of all: humiliation. A political history of humiliation has yet to be written…

Populism is also a reaction to the entirely justified perception of economic stagnation, cultural paternalism and lack of political participation. This multiple humiliation becomes political capital and paves the way to power for the populists. It is politics for “normal” people who, feeling threatened, despised and ignored, accept the images of the enemy offered to them in order to become political subjects again. Their anger is easily directed at the symbols of their alienation and humiliation – at migrants, alternative identities or “the elites”, when what they seek is the radical disruption of a system that seems unshakeable. From Brexit Britain to Narenda Modhi’s India and Javier Milei in Argentina, the same answer keeps coming up in the polls: we just want a change….

The above analysis is far from complete, and the role of social media in particular is worthy of consideration. Nevertheless, a picture emerges that is at once familiar and surprising: the liberal project is currently failing, not because of its opponents or its weaknesses, but precisely because of its strengths. Winning makes you stupid.

The short-lived triumph of liberalism blinded many of its protagonists to what winning does to the winners – and what losing does to the losers. The strengthening of personal freedoms, the juridification of social processes, the liberalisation of markets, the privatisation of state infrastructure, the globalisation of the economy, social progress, and the strengthening of individual freedom of choice and freedom of expression were central to the liberal project in its neoliberal interpretation. In fact, not only were these elements implemented in the democracies of the global North, so unrivalled was their power that they developed an irresistible momentum of their own. Their social virulence provokes a desire to abolish the current system as unreformable, a conclusion shared by right-wing populists and climate activists alike.

If there is any one feature about this triumph of global capitalism in the troubled Western democracies (and also in the rise of counter models in China and the Asian Tigers, including Japan) it is the pace of change which was so emphasized in the first book of Blom’s I mentioned: “The Vertigo Years…1900-1914".” In the United States, crucial to the rise of Trump has been the “mobilization” of the immigration issue at our Southern Border, the root cause of which is rarely discussed in the solutions: the failed states of Mexico, Central and South America who never found a liberal democratic model of land reform or the ability to employ sufficient numbers of their people in manufacturing, where China and other Pacific nations have siphoned off more than their share of basic manufacturing jobs from these countries, and from Spain and Italy and Western Europe as well. For a good summary of the US policy failures “South of the Border,” I recommend Greg Grandin’s 2006 “Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.” When was the last time you heard a major Democratic cite the foreign policy Right, especially the Republican Religious Right, for setting the stage for the mass murders and blocked domestic reforms in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala?

Internally in the US, the stability and order supplied by the old Eastern and Mid-Western manufacturing cities, with their religious oriented and tight knit white ethnic neighborhoods (and let us not forget their role in keeping the racial ghettoes simmering) are “Gone with the Smokestacks” (and have been since the mid-to-late 1970’s) to be replaced by jobs in high tech, government and the vast private service sector…in the volunteer Armed Forces, intensified secularization - the decline of religion, has gone along with the decline of unions…aided and abetted all along by Republican Right ideology which fought civil rights, invited the fundamentalist Protestants and Conservative Catholics into the big business alliance against reforming federal Power, once so well represented by the New Deal and the Great Society, only to fall apart under the racial reaction fanned or enabled by Nixon, Monyihan, Buchanan and Reagan…with today anti-immigration fervor replacing the “Chain Reaction” white backlash (and tax revolt aimed at not taking care of the poor and their housing and employment troubles) as the intense white rallying cry, supplimented by the Religious Right’s chant, so Putin and Islamic Fundamentalist in its targets, against secular liberalism’s “permissiveness” if not outright “decadance”…and the well earned failure of the left to create any serious alternative institutions to deal with the drug and crime fallout from the “manic” pace of modern capitalist change - not even a serious Civilian Conservation Corps to hold things together; no, it would undermine the labor market, say even wealthy Democrats like David Trone and before him John Delaney, while the Wall Street Journal rails against even Biden’s meek proposals as funding an “anti-capitalist” node in the culture. One doesn’t often hear it said, from the left or the right, but what did we expect except disintegration in a society without Solidarity, where “Competition” and not “Cooperation” is the dominant value in society? Oops, management wants labor “cooperation,” but not via their own independent unions.

In terms of the balance of forces inside American Society, there is no “counterveiling” power(s) left to counteract the dominance of American corporate and business power, which rules Congress by their lobbying power and donation power, abetted by a Supreme Court moving Right over the years, equating Freedom of Speech with open spigots of megadollars in the political arena, the decline of labor and old line Protestant liberal Churches with their quaint social consiences…all we get from the Biden wing of the party is the outline of directions, mild legislative gestures, but no transformation of the basic structure leading to the rise of Trump. And indeed, it looks to me that the current “normal” processes, without a great crisis, will not alter the current trajectory, a bit like looking for a New Deal in the “depths” of the Republican Ascendancy of the 1920’s.

“Blue-Collar Biden” from the old coal country of Eastern Pennsylvania, is the latest in a long line of Democratic Presidents starting with Harry Truman in 1948 who have promised “Labor Law Reform” but failed to deliver through - count with me now - 9 terms of Democratic Administrations: Truman (1), Kennedy-Johnson (2), Carter (1), Clinton (2), Obama (2), Biden (1) - even as these years have seen the vast upward transfer of economic wealth, some $51 Trillion (give or take a Trillion - now that’s a contemporary turn of phrase, isn’t it?) to the top 20% (1975-2018 the years of measurement) according to a Rand study which came out, cited in Time Magazine, in September of 2020 - a Presidential election year in which neither party, least of all Union Joe Biden’s - mentioned the study even while running against a purported billionaire business “genius” trailing gold plated trimmings. Need I add that these years, starting with Carter’s administration, saw a great transformation in the Democratic Party itself from a blue collar based New Deal coalition to a party dominated by Democratic banking, high tech and media sectors and professionals in the upper 20% of the income demographic. Let’s remember the thought from Mr. Blom: “This brings into play a political motivation that is probably one of the most powerful of all: humiliation. A political history of humiliation has yet to be written…” I can sense that humiliation behind all the fury of the Trump voter, and feel it everyday in Western Maryland. Just try to name the AFL-CIO presidents after George Meany, one of the three Georges which Michael Harrington named as the key to the 1970’s besides George Wallace and George McGovern.

One economist has given a pretty blunt, but accurate portrayal of just what Biden’s accomplishments have been, here: A New Industrial Policy?

Let me head towards a summary here in the way many columnists have over recent years, like Jamelle Bouie of the NY Times. And that is, to share, and reflect upon, what I have been reading.

Let me start with a very contemporary focus on our democratic troubles, fueled in no small part by the conservative if not Republican dominance of the Supreme Court. Amidst a host of bad decisions trying to take the Republic’s institutions back to the time and frame of mind of the Founders, which is a very fraught idea at best in a world whose business leadership turns the world upside down every quarter-century or so. Trump vs the United States stands out as the most egregregious for anyone who remembers Richard Nixon’s claims that if the President did “it” - it was not a crime. Roberts the Chief Justice has given any official act, broadly defined, a blanket immunity so that as a dissenting opinion maintained, a President Directed CIA assassination of a potential political rival could be justified without so much as a cover story of being a “national security threat.”

Here, for reader’s convenience is the first page of Supreme Court recent decisions for downloading. I’m in the process of reading this case now. Supreme Court Case decision listing

And the irony of this great and tragic Republican Right triumph in the long haul since Reagan in 1980, is that as I and other writers complain about the pace of change under capitalism, AI well on the way to join Elon Musk’s “Starry Night sky filled not with stars but his communication satellites, the political and constitutional response must be frozen in time to at best a tough to pin down Zeitgeist of the founders. As capitalism plunges us all through its ferocious rapids, there will be no democratic revisions to the old constitutional order where in the Senate Wyoming negates California or Colorado or New York. No “living, evolving” constitution here as the younger Jamie Raskin wrote in his prophetic 2003 book “Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs The American People,” matched in lamentations about conservative legal directions by Canadian Stephen Marche’s 2022 book “The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.” As you will see below, that future in my opinion is not far away, perhaps as close as November 5, 2024.

Also underway is my reading of the “difference this time,” the multi-faceted Republican Right effort to get the conservative counter-revolution off to a roaring start by managing Trump’s personnel and policy options for him: all 950 pages of a document called “Project 2025.” The Conservative Project for 2025

Here’s a sample written by one of the authors, Paul Dans, in an Introductory Note, page XIV. It will get your attention:

“It’s not 1980. In 2023, the game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism

through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth,

weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and

liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore

our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop

to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening

approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right.

Project 2025 is more than 50 (and growing) of the nation’s leading conservative

organizations joining forces to prepare and seize the day. The axiom goes “personnel

is policy,” and we need a new generation of Americans to answer the call and

come to serve. This book is functionally an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith,

Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can. Our

goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives

to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

While writing this essay, in the home stretch on Wednesday afternoon, July 3rd, I took my lunch break and caught Kevin D. Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, the base organization pulling together the Right via Project 2025. I urge you to read his bio at Wikipedia: Robert's Bio Wikipedia

CNN had him saying in commentaary on the pending election that the Conservative Revolution was coming as the Second American Revolution, “which like the first one would be bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” As if the civil war inside the 1st American Revovolution was bloodless, with guerilla warfare in the NY-NJ area and especially in South Carolina, between Rebels, Tories being bloody and ferocious, with about 33-40% of the population neutral and caught in the violence between the two determined poles. It’s an ominious thing for Mr. Roberts to say in the current context..

Therefore I could not but help to call to mind another book I’ve just finished, the 2006 edition of historian Paul Preston’s (of the London School of Economics) classic “The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge.” Focus on that last word now, in light of Herr Trump’s repeated very recent invocations of political revenge, now given added reality by the Chief Justice’s lead opinion doing away with checks and balances on the wide range of a Presidents official actions. The list of revenge targets is growing: here’s an update: Trump’s Revenge Agenda The article is by Chas Danner in NY Magazine and the target list is expanding at a breathtaking pace and scope as Trump surges after the disastrous debate.

It’s hard to read this knowing the motivations and the coalition that Franco put together in Spain and the Fascist tactics in fighting the Civil War, 1934-1939. It was bent on turning back any liberal secular democracy future for Spain, and royalists, oligarchic land-owners, the military and of course the Spanish Catholic Church had no trouble in justifying the torture, imprisoning and killing of more than a hundred thousand of oppenents, real and suspected sympathizers. The toll is disputed to this day, and mass graves are still being found and victims finally identified. The carnage was so great, about 3:1 Nationalists-Fascists vs Republican, that Preston has written a long documentary book going into the details of the murders, prison camps and tortured victims, which came out in 2013 and entitled “The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain.” The book is 736 pages long. I haven’t gotten to it, and maybe won’t; things here in the US are feeling too ominous to me, especially the religious overtones to this “Second American Revolution.”

And in that spirit of examing the Fascist 20th century’s past, starting with my interest the fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany, is my reading of British historian Christopher Hibbert’s biography of Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce (2008 revised edition). I’m an enemy of Fascism since I first heard the term, yet by the last third of the book I couldn’t help but feel some pity for a Fascist who had lost heart, and didn’t have the ruthlessness (nor did he feel the Italian people did either) to match Franco and Hitler. My only complaint is that I didn’t get enough, after the opening third of the book, about the details of the Italian condition, its great economic and geographical distinctions and the life of the rural Italian peasants.

And of course, from my writings just past this Spring…my re-read of the “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School,” (2016), by Stuart Jeffries. Why the re-read? Well, the Frankfurt School, consisting of affluent German Jews -the sons who didn’t want to make money - who escaped just ahead of the Holocaust, grappled with how Hitler and the Nazis happened, how democracy failed and one of the most polished propaganda efforts ever rose within mass media, and mass society and succeeded in pushing away, and burying all opposition. It wasn’t just the Nazi politics that puzzled the school; what made the German citizen susceptible to its appeal, was it something in the rootlessness of very modern German industrial society, the loneliness of former rural farm workers now poorly housed in the industrial centers of the Ruhr, and Hamburg, and the vast modernity, the modern secular “degeneracy” of Berlin between the wars? It was the acceptance by the Frankfurt schools most famous thinkers - Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm -that Marxism had failed, the vanguard working class had failed, and that led them in the 1920’s and 1930’s into the realm of Freud’s psychological universe then flowering in Vienna, before Freud himself had to flee from the Nazis reach. And I have to say that “Civilization and its Discontents” (1929-1930) is looking more and more realistic in its assessments of human possibilities and limitations, and please “enjoy” a good revisit with Freud through the ages here in Merve Emre’s fine essay, “What Does Freud Still Have to Teach Us?

After all, the school was dealing with a “Totalitarian” regime, but still a capitalist one, true, on a total war economy footing from about 1934 on, so they wondered about the democratic but still very organized capitalist regime in post-WWII USA, and especially the sway of mass media and Hollywood. Was there any serious opposition, and if there was, where was it located: in Unions, universities and media caught up in the grips of the Cold War? I didn’t find any clear answers in the work of the Frankfurt School, and they were perhaps too hard on the “liberal” democracies in the West, 1945-1968, but Jeffries’ handling of the later years of the Institute in West Germany, under Jurgen Habermas, had him asking all the right questions about the collapse of reason and the search for Truth in the “Public Square” - in the light and stresses of modernism and post-moderism in French philosophical thought.

Readers whom Trump and his movement have wondering about the death of “truth” in today’s very fragmented public square, where long exchanges and debates between opposing philsophies have been driven from the main spectrum of channels, are right to be skeptical of the powers of the tiny audiences on YouTube or remote blog sites. You can say that the millions who have listened to Professor John Mearsheimer’s dissents on US foreign policy show thought and reason still alive, but then again he didn’t have much luck in changing policy - thanks to AIPAC in part.

Let me suggest a little exercise to demonstrate that the pursuit of truth is a very exhausting, difficult proposition. Do some research on just a couple of famous/infamous incidents from the outbreak of widespread barbarism under Fascism and Communism, 20th century style. Start with the Katyn “Forest” Massacre of some 22,000 Polish POW’s and professionals held in prisons by the Russians, and killed in April/May of 1940. The Nazis found the bodies in April of 1943, three years later and it was on, the grand propaganda battle between two of the champions of full throated fabrications and lies, each of which had a motive in disposing of the Polish threat represented by their captive intelligentsia and officers. Actually the Soviet NKVD did the crime under Stalin’s orders, but Russia denied full responsibility well into the years after the Soviet collapse, and given the fact that the Nazis were murdering Poles throughout WWII, the public was kept in the dark until forensic evidence eventually pinned the blame on Stalin.

Or perhaps you would like an excursion back into the Spanish Civil War, and a famous incident which occured in the Basque heartland, in a town called Guernica, which Picasso’s painting kept in the world’s memory even onto the present time. The destruction of the town occurred on the afternoon of April 26, 1937 by the massive conventional bombing and fire bombing carried out by the German Condor Legion and allied Italian aircraft. The scandal of Britain and France’s failure to intervene to save the Spanish Republic was a contributing factor to what happened to Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.

The fact that the bombing happened at all was denied by the Franco forces, then grudgingly admitted with the historical arguments continuing even today over the numbers killed and wounded and whether there was any military justification to bombing the center of the town on a market day when it was filled with civilians. The pages Preston devotes to it in the book I mentioned above made it clear that in his research, he found that it was part and parcel of Franco’s slow, deliberate policy to terrorize the civilian Republican population in advance of his military’s attacks. If that reminds any readers of the coming Nazis tactics beginning on September 1, 1939, in Poland and then into Soviet Russia starting on June 21, 1941…and again in the collapsed Russian empire’s modern war against break-away Chechnya, welcome to the return of barbarism. And one can fairly say that Russian barbarism towards break away “colonies” is “thriving” in its conduct towards Ukraine: terror bombings, torture, deportations, capturing children for de-programming and then re-programming as model Russian Putin conservatives. No Pussy Rioting for them any more.

Trump’s success is proof that truth in the public square has been driven into a corner where it doesn’t seem to matter, can’t defend itself, or at least affect a good part of public opinion.

What is the best way to debate someone like Trump, an entertainment star who has entered the political arena, and in a mass media era where the old Firing Line of William F. Buckley, Jr. one of the founders of modern conservatism in the 1950’s, now would simply fail the “thrill a minute” pace of modern media?

My own instinct on how to debate Trump is that there is no choice but to jump in, right “in his face” the moment the first lie erupts, because you cannot let the full “firehose” of lies to follow unchallenged. If that means that reason must give way to passion under current circumstances, even if it is a “passion for the truth,” I don’t see any other way to debate him…and my recommendation does imply a risk of “civil war,” right on the spot, because it may end the ability to have a civil exchange “out of the gate.” That’s not my usual style, but I recently told our elected Western Maryland conservative Republican Senator, in a chance/random encounter a few days ago in our parking lot that “if someone labels me as a specimen of ‘vermin,” that those are fighting, not debating words” because everyone knows their origins in 20th Century Fascism.

And my mind goes back to my first discovery of the writer, activist, economist, Greek Civil Servant and member of the Greek Parliament, Yanis Varoufakis, and his opinion piece at Naked Capitalism on February 22, 2014, more than a decade ago. It was entitled “Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?” So far the answer is, the drift of events here and in Western Europe and beyond, is no, and we may be in for a period of 20-30 years or more where an authortarian right and oligopolistic capitalism are the dominant feature of our lives. Varoufakis on Democracy/capitalism/internet

Since my burst of writing/posting in April and May, I’ve been light on the comments in the Times, the WSJ and the WaPo. But the pace has picked up again in the train of events, and I’ll leave you with one made in the response to a Thomas Edsall column on June 26th, entitled “The Ground is Shifting Under Trump and Biden” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/opinion/democrats-republicans-coalitions-electorate.html

And my comment:

William Neil

MarylandJune 26

I raise the following objections: no mention of neoliberalism, which on matters of free trade and the glorification of the free market, united upscale dems and traditional repubs: NAFTA, China WTO etc...No mention of labor unions, declining in numbers and power throughout the whole period under discussion, and no mention of the failure of the Dem party to deliver labor law reform through Truman, Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden. No mention of the Green New Deal opposed vehemently by the Repubs and the Dem center, including old labor. Only very late in the backlash against China cornering worldwide manufacturing processes do Dems emerge under Biden with the ghosts of working class policies. Little discussion here of the lack of subtance by Trumpians and the far Right on the actual economic benefits of their programs: no day care, parental leave, expansion of medical coverage...anti-trust policy...their "working class, no college degree program" is shut the immigration door and tighten the bootstraps to the American Dream: previous blue collar generations got no child care, paid leave, national miniumum wage unless they were in the labor aristocracy. And no mention, which the WSJ did in trying to explain the Biden-economy-polling problem: which isn't that unemployment is high, it's very low, but that life even with two jobs costs so much that until one gets to that $100,000-500,000 income level, housing, medical care, child care, college tuition, auto ins. are all up - and out of reach.

And then in response to the Times’ call for Biden to step down, made, to their credit the very day after the debate debacle, I wrote this:

William Neil

MarylandJune 28

Well done. The ability of the Democratic Party to conduct an open pursuit of the nomination, before and during the convention itself in August, will go some of the way to restoring faith in a broader democratic process. But just some of the way. The deeper problem is what set the stage for Trump's run of dominating the public discourse for what now - nine years? Since 2015. How can so many tens of millions still back a man who "spouts lies like a fire hose" - a phrase which I think Michelle Goldberg of the Times first broached and I keep hearing others repeat - that is the deeper question, and part of the riddle to effectively blunting Trump's appeal. Is it that the few public debates have no timely referee to "police" the historical records and claims of the candidates - to have done so Thurs. evening would have taken beyond midnight - and who would have vetted the claims? The encylopedia Britannica? The Smithsonian? The Department of History Chair at Oxford - or Brown, or Princeton? Those elitist schools? How about George Mason Univ. or Larry Arnn at Hillsdale College? Bill Clinton wanted to give the workers of the country the tools to succeed in "the new economy." Besides STEM, did that include a history of democracy from Athens to Weimar? Has something been lost with the Neolibs replacement of masters in history with MBA's? A Russian exile in Britain gives us some perspective: "Trump is a communications genius but a weak politician. Worse will follow..."

Cover of the January 15, 2024 edition of the New Yorker magazine, by Barry Blitt, entitled “Back to the Future.”

The best to all my readers, and remember the challenge made at our founding:

“A Republic: If You Can Keep it.”

I don’t fully recognize the regime that Trump, the Supreme Court and Project 2025 have lined up for us. But I can see the outlines, maybe best foreshadowed in the years of General Franco’s regime in Spain, 1939-1975, despite all my earlier focus on the demise of the Weimar Republic. I think if they follow the likes of Kevin D. Roberts at Heritage, some form of civil war is possible, maybe even likely.

William R. Neil

Frostburg, MD