In a December 2023 article explaining the GOP’s stubborn opposition to a deal with President Biden on funding for Ukraine, David Frum in The Atlantic, asks, “How [does the Democratic Senate] get to ‘yes’ when the other side refuses to state its terms [for border policies]?” Frum dissects the political reasons behind the callousness and indifference to Ukraine’s needs. One of the reasons is the pro-Putin politics of the far right even in the United States. Yes, it’s true — Ronald Reagan of Tear-Down-This-Wall fame wouldn’t recognize his own party’s willingness to disgrace their country. “Where are the Reagan Republicans?” he would wonder.
I don’t usually wonder about Reagan or worry about his legacy in Trump’s America. But a conversation during the holidays with a Trump fan who is an acquaintance got me thinking about what a paradoxical position Republicans have put themselves in.
My acquaintance, an Indian immigrant in the U.S., gets his kicks by pushing most people’s buttons. It is really important to him to command attention upon himself and his intellect, which he believes dazzles his (captive, mostly subordinate) audience. A registered Republican, he is not worried about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies or the damage Trump can potentially cause to the world if re-elected.
“Trump is harmless,” says he. “I am only worried about who he will surround himself with.” Who Trump will surround himself with will largely depend on who is left to hang around Trump. There are no more adults left in the room with Trump. That fact has been said enough by those raising the alarm on what four more years of Trump could do to this country.
My acquaintance likes Trump because, among many other reasons, Trump will break up NATO, or at least pull the U.S. out of NATO. Which is also his way of reinforcing to me that he cares nothing about Ukraine or its future. I’ve heard this conversation before in its multiple iterations.
This immigrant who earns in the top 5% of U.S. incomes emphasizes: “Why should my tax dollars go to protect [a Scandinavian country] so [Scandinavians] can build their economy at my expense?” That’s NATO in a nutshell to some, as simplistic and uncomplicated as that may seem. My acquaintance is pleased with himself. By the expression on my face, he knows he has burrowed under my skin like a scabies mite.
I wish my retelling of this argument could end here. I wish I could say I walked away in search of a glass of some much-needed wine, acknowledging the futility of discussions that go nowhere and accepting the limits of my words, my values, my place in this crowded world. But what came next is what got me started on this article.
“Do you know who my favorite president is? Reagan! No one comes close to his greatness,” says he. Without any irony, he explains, “He single-handedly brought down the wall. He broke up the Soviet Union. He ended the Cold War.”
The juxtaposition is jarring to me. It is disorienting that words and world-views can exist in silos inside the same mind.
Normally I am uncomfortable when people deliberately ignore, or are ignorant of, Mikhail Gorbachev’s role in history. I tend to protest. But this time I was too distracted by the disconnected mind in front of me — a small-scale view of the sociopolitical phenomena sweeping much of the United States.
When I came to study in the U.S. in the mid-90s, after 6 years in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Ukraine, I was embarrassed for the Russians by the vitriol of the likes of Rush Limbaugh who painted all Russian and post-Soviet immigrants in unflattering light. In those years, conservatives and Republicans typically bought and spread the propaganda based on stereotypes about state-dependent citizens dipping into the welfare system in the U.S. The picture was that of unproductive immigrants enveloped in lives of crime, coming with insufficient gratitude to and patriotism for the new country.
Now, however, influential people from these same interest groups are flirting with authoritarianism and counting on ordinary people’s morbid fascination with steely men and strongholds of power to vote against their own rights and long-term freedoms. The newer cult leader appears to be welcomed as long as the ‘other’ ordinary people do not get any ideas about inherent dignities. Alliances have shifted in such a way that yesterday’s enemy is today’s savior. So much so that American voters are at risk of throwing the baby (reason) out with the historic bathwater (Cold War fears) they soaked in for decades.
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In the writing of Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor who explains the history behind today’s politics, I find the answer in the form of economic forces behind today’s widespread politics in the country:
The collapse of the USSR gave the branch of the Republican Party that wanted to destroy the New Deal confidence that their ideology was right. Believing that their ideology of radical individualism had destroyed the USSR, these so-called Movement Conservatives very deliberately set out to destroy what they saw as Soviet-like socialist ideology at home. As anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home. Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn't have nuclear weapons.”
In the 1990s the Movement Conservatives turned their firepower on those they considered insufficiently committed to free enterprise, including traditional Republicans who agreed with Democrats that the government should regulate the economy, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. Movement Conservatives called these traditional Republicans “Republicans in Name Only” or RINOs and said that, along with Democrats, such RINOs were bringing “socialism” to America.
With the “evil empire,” as President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union, no longer a viable enemy, Movement Conservatives, aided by new talk radio hosts, increasingly demonized their domestic political opponents. As they strengthened their hold on the Republican Party, Movement Conservatives cut taxes, slashed the social safety net, and deregulated the economy.
At the same time, the oligarchs who rose to power in the former Soviet republics looked to park their illicit money in western democracies, where the rule of law would protect their investments. Once invested in the United States, they favored the Republicans who focused on the protection of wealth rather than social services. For their part, Republican politicians focused on spreading capitalism rather than democracy, arguing that the two went hand in hand.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, December 26, 2023.
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Robert Reich, who has a comprehensive, online course titled, “Wealth & Poverty,” connects the rise of demagoguery/neofascism with economic inequalities in the U.S.
THE CONVENTIONAL explanation for the decline of the American dream posits that globalization and technological change have made most Americans less competitive.
But another — perhaps larger — cause is the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite.
Meanwhile, centers of countervailing power that between the 1930s and 1980s enabled America’s middle and lower-middle classes to offset the power of large corporations and Wall Street have withered. These included labor unions, small businesses, family farms, the civil rights movement, grassroots political movements, and political parties anchored at the local and state levels.
As I’ve discussed in the previous weeks of our Friday series, this imbalance of power has allowed America’s corporate and financial elite to reorganize the market for their own benefit.
Americans correctly perceive that our economic and political system is now rigged.
When most people stop believing they and their children have a fair chance at the American dream, public trust in the major institutions of society declines — as has happened over the past decade and a half in America.
For the same reason, many become vulnerable to the rants of a demagogue who promises radical change by taking a wrecking ball to democracy.
Robert Reich, December 29, 2023.
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I find that people from my neck of the woods typically don’t analyze their own ideologies and motivations (or those of the societies we live in) as scholars do. But they do have an instinct for self-preservation, a reflex to protect their hard-earned (or not so hard-earned) incomes or wealth irrespective of the tax brackets that they belong to. So despite convincing themselves that they want the best for their society and community, they are really preserving themselves, their privileges, their lifestyles, first and foremost. Everything else is just dinner conversation to them.
I will end with an observation from Liz Cheney whose words were simple and to the point.
People who say, ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. — Liz Cheney, CBS News, 3 December, 2023
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