The ultimate travesty of Trumpism is not simply its shocking aggression at the Capitol on January 6, but what that action revealed as the depths of division within the US polity and society. Biden and Harris have a formidable job to restore a modicum of reliable order. We need to re-think Australia’s willingness to accept US directions.
Trump planned and ordered his mob’s attack on the Capitol. This was a calculated political action designed to demolish the result of the presidential election and to seize control of the US government.
In most countries such an action, if defeated, would be severely punished.
Urgent discussions on removing Trump from office, immediately, are under way. Some 120 Republican members of Congress voted against certifying the Electoral College result after the attack on the Capitol. But there are signs of a growing awareness among Republicans that failure to hold Trump to account could damage their brand gravely.
The Biden/Harris inauguration is a little over a week away. Trump has said he will not attend.
Many commentators and some political leaders are now saying that the attack on the Capitol while the final action by the Electoral College in 2020 was under way was inevitable, as if that somehow puts it within the spectrum of political normalcy.
Such an observation is beside the point. What the events revealed was a President and an administration wanting to destroy the established system of popular government and replace it with an autocracy, led by Donald Trump.
Trump’s conduct for the past five years, in the lead-up to his presidency and during it, had two essential features.
First, to lie about everything. It was astonishing. Virtually nothing he said has been true. This went far beyond mere spin.
Second, his political currency was societal hostility, particularly between classes and regions, and racism; mainly the historic American version – discrimination against African-Americans, the descendants of slaves, but not exclusively. His attacks upon others, particularly Latin Americans and their children, were continuous and brutal.
Trump’s destruction of verity itself, in public discourse, has been massively corrosive. It has resulted in government itself and its associated structures, in the US and in many other comparable countries, being viewed with deep scepticism.
Trump and his acolytes’ trading in class and racial hostility has revealed starkly that those anxieties and phobias are deep and enduring, within the US.
Trump knew this and used it to assemble a mass political movement based on pandering to and exploiting those sources of hostility. He made this choice not only because it had political utility but because it accorded with his own, much documented, psycho- pathologies.
His success could not have been achieved within the political establishment into which he slipped, four years ago. He was given support, initially cautiously but then lavishly, by the Republican Party in its contemporary, post-Tea Party form and from its key leaders.
No one was more important in sustaining Trump, no matter what lies he told or crimes he committed, than Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
Speaking of criminal conduct, it is clear that throughout his career and, as President, Trump has conducted himself in a criminal fashion, in terms of both domestic and international law. He and his family’s conduct and that of his inner personal circle, some of whom have already been sentenced, came to be widely seen as redolent of the Mafia.
Those legal chickens are now heading towards the roost. It is persuasively reported that the Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has the indictments and supporting data in her top drawer. These apparently will see Trump charged with major crimes when he leaves office.
Characteristic of Trump, it is also reported that he has held discussions on pardoning himself before he leaves office.
More important than these details are intrinsically is how they illustrate the extraordinary extent of the tawdry bargains reached by so many senior officials and elected representatives with Trump.
From Vice President Pence to Attorney General Barr, to name just two leading examples of this phenomenon, the knowledge was widespread of Trump’s immorality, laziness, corruption and profoundly dangerous unfitness for his job. Yet they looked away, trashing their own oath of office, and sought to protect Trump including, in the case of Attorney General Barr, by lying about the outcome of major investigations of his conduct.
Above all, they stuck with Trump when the House impeached him. McConnell’s Senate refused to allow the trial to proceed with any witnesses or documents. It was ludicrous and shameful conduct.
That Kafkaesque failure was enacted shortly before Covid-19 arrived in the US, bringing with it the pinnacle of Trump’s incompetence – his determined misrepresentation and then neglect of the Covid-19 challenge. This has led to tens of thousands of needless deaths. And it has placed the US as the world leader in the number of Covid-19 infections.
The Republican leadership made Trump and Trumpism viable for some years. They did this because they believed their seats and power depended on it.
Policy choices or outcomes were almost always political and ideological in nature; such as the gerrymandering of electorates, regressive taxation legislation, court appointments, and invoking culture wars around issues such as birth control and gun ownership. Their and Trump’s rejection of climate change was flagrant.
Trump’s appeal to the working and impoverished classes involved the paradox of poverty that so often accompanies nationalist/populist and fascist politics.
The promises of alleviating the condition of poorer people are made fulsomely in language hostile to their class enemies. Those promises are never delivered on, but the poor are comforted by the hostility expressed about their perceived enemies. Indeed, not only did Trump fail the poor, but he channelled large tax cuts to those who did not need them.
There was also the leitmotif that is classic in fascist propaganda: that we are victims. “Make America Great Again” was a perfect example – the idea that we have been robbed of our greatness, stabbed in the back, and that aggressive policies can rectify this.
Boris Johnson has followed the same playbook in the UK to become Prime Minister.
He began by circulating widely in the Brexit campaign the grand lie about how much EU membership cost the UK each week and is now lying about the completed exit deal, which is wildly incomplete, in its detail.
This has been supported throughout by the nationalist motif that leaving the EU will re-aggrandise Britain, return it to an approximation of its imperial glory.
Not only is this fatuous but it obscures the most palpable of the realities the UK is likely to now face; the dissolution of the United Kingdom, through the departure of Scotland and possibly the loss of Northern Ireland to a re-unified Ireland. Where Wales will go is also under discussion.
Reference to this kind of fascistic methodology serves to underline the irreducible conclusion that what Trump’s presidency and his movement became was a cult, a cult of the Leader incompatible with popular electoral democracy.
If the US is to assert both domestically and around the world that Trump and his cult was an unacceptable aberration in its political life, it must remove him from office without any further delay, as many leaders, scholars and commentators, are now urging.
Biden and Harris face a formidable task in seeking to return some decency to US politics, public life and in societal relationships. Many Americans want them to succeed in this, but many could not be less interested. Some 70 million voted for Trump and polls show a clear majority believe the election was stolen from them.
As former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has commented, Trump waged an attack upon US democracy for four years. It will not be easy for them to recover from this.
But these are American problems for them to solve. While they attempt to do that we should think again, very deeply, about how far we should continue to take US direction on any matters of policy and substantive importance.
And America should stay its hand on lecturing others on what constitutes democracy and how it should be organised.
Richard Butler AC Former Ambassador to the United Nations, Executive Chairman of UN Special Commission to Disarm Iraq, Professor of International Affairs.
Comments
40 responses to “Storming the Capitol to destroy an election is the least of what happened”
The Achilles heel of democracy did not change:
“The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it” Joseph Goebbels
https://www.google.com/search?q=The+bigger+the+lie+the+more+people+will+believe+it&rlz=1C1GGGE_enAU419&oq=The+bigger+the+lie+the+more+people+will+believe+it&aqs=chrome..69i57.15228j1j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
There are many relevant posts here, each with its own ‘energetic’ signature, however, there are other energetic signatures that a great many fail to recognise, let alone comprehend.
They are the forces that created, shaped and evolved this planet over the past 4 billion years, and yes, they shape you and I as well, that’s a fact, not hyperbole – The Scale of the Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaGEjrADGPA
For a broader picture, see the following, this is as old as the Universe itself, and maybe some comprehension of what we are up against, which is basically ourselves and the choices that have been made to date, conscious and unconscious.
https://astrologyforaquarius.com/articles/11333/the-age-of-aquarius-in-2021/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/06/three-major-threats-to-life-on-earth-that-we-must-address-in-2021/
Amazing article. So well said too.
Thanks Richard
It is obvious that the machines used for voting calulation are not secure. The Irish Government wasted $80MM on such machines that were never used and eventually scrapped.
Democracy? Not yet.
Terrible article.
Riots have been a feature of the USA in this last year. Crisis actors hired by the day, to appear as Antifa one day, MAGA the next.
People, including myself on the day, were too quick to accept the mainstream media accounts of this so called ‘coup’ attempt or insurrection as it is also being called. Plenty of sites in the US are drawing attention to the undermanned and under protected Capitol building, and many of us have see by now the image of the policeman who was removing barriers to allow the crowds to enter the area.
While most of what you sat about Trump is legitimate, it ignores the much wider similarities of too many strong men takeovers in many other once ‘democracies’ . We have examples here of growing beliefs in conspiracy theories and excessive emphases on macho patriotism as is evident in the many other democracies where distrust of those elected to power increase.
These distrust changes are likely to be the results four decades of shifts to over-emphases on market forces, as governments feed the self interests of the wealthy. The privatisation of almost everything , cuts and too much heavy conditionality in welfare, increasing costs of once public and community services plus other neo-liberal changes creates distrust of those in power.
I signalled the risks of deficits in trust and the need for good social capital as the glue that made societies functional, 25 years ago in my Boyer Lectires on A Truly Civil Society,, but it was early days. However, the GFC fixing failed to recognise the failing market models. So now we have serious national and international crises!
It is time we examined what aspects of social democracy, that were seen as essential post war for democratic stability. need to be restored. The pandemic has revived the legitimacy of public health structures to fix crises. However, recent budget decisions still see the private sector as the answer. We need to rethink the changes to public policies that exclude fair public social policies that recognise humans are social and interdependent not mostly self interested homo economicus.
We need to be citizens again, not just customers
Eva Cox AO
Don’t worry Eva. The ABC has Andrew Forrest lined up to deliver the neo-con solution to our current political, economic and precarious welfare state. Titled ‘Re-booting Australia’ this Boyer lecture may well be the first delivered by a psychopathic persona.
A very timely article for PM Morrison and our establishment including our media corporations to learn, take note and change course for the national interest of Australia.
Much of this chaos and failure on both sides of the Atlantic with the participation and to the profit of a certain former Australian citizen who is uncharacteristically quiet about events.
We must profit from the mistakes of others, take heed and keep asking why we keep looking to both failed examples for guidance and protection.
IF you haven’t seen it, this analysis of his rally speech is rather disturbing. https://threader.app/thread/1347908845281095680
Thanks Andrew. That is a great piece of work. I would encourage people to read this- plough through it. After 4 years of numbing from outrageous behaviour, it is difficult even for commentators in the USA to scope out the enormity of what was being done – this is sedition, clear and simple. It is to some extent Trump calling the bluff of the establishment including his own GOP establishment.
Andrew, I can’t help wondering whether we overestimate Trump’s capabilities. Sometimes he sounds barely literate and often plain ignorant, in writing and speech. I suspect there must be others, much more intelligent, behind him who feed him his lines. For instance, someone like Bannon or a similar mind. Trump is simply the medium. I don’t want to create another conspiracy theory, but I don’t think Trump is that intelligent. Streetwise, yes, but not intelligent.
Andrew, I would recommend anyone who wants to understand how serious Trumps incitement to violence was to read your “threader” link. Thanks for providing it. It took me the better part of a whole hour to read it but it was worth the effort. Thanks again.
Two chances.
Arguably, it has long been the ambition of the US to either bring about the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party, or to see China broken up like the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for them, the CCP enjoys unprecedented approval ratings (over 90% according to the latest Harvard survey) from the Chinese people who are optimistic about their nation’s future.
Ironically, it is the US that now suffers from unprecedented societal division amongst the ordinary population, and unprecedented partisanship in their Congress, and it can only get worse when China overtakes the US economically and militarily.
So, ironically, the table is turned, and one might wonder, what is the likelihood, if this trend of decline and divisiveness continues over the following decades, to see the United States, currently made up of red states and blue states, splintering Soviet style, into red and blue nations?
The current US plutocracy where the 1% gets all the benefits, and the inherent corruption in the US system mean that the whole system is not sustainable; something has to give! A collapse will not be a bad thing for the rest of the planet, as long as the US military does not take the rest of us down with them. A Chinese-style Belt & Road world with the focus on building stuff for people is infinitely better than a world of endless wars dominated by the US military-industrial-intelligence complex!
Agree Ken Dyer. Morrison is following closely the attitudes of Trump and this show with no responsibility of ministers for their actions. Democracy in Australian is suffering a death of a thousand cuts.
Let’s hope we are not naïve enough to think that such a thing could never happen in Australia. Maybe not if the LNP is in government, but otherwise… There are already a number of LNP parliamentarians, such as Christensen and Kelly, who think exactly like Trump, supporting the same idiotic conspiracy theories.
Add to that characters like Dutton and One Nation members and you are well underway. And note the refusal of our own prime minister to discipline his own ministers flogging false truths and to condemn Trump’s antics (difficult when you have bent over far enough to get a medal from him).
And how many secret admirers are there in the Labor Party?
Trump no longer has access to Twitter and Facebook, and now Parler, his Twitter replacement, is also removed by Googles’s Android and Apple’s IOS. It will be interesting to see what he uses next.
Pentecostal Morrison and his government are in step with the mindless fascism and nationalistic politics of Trump and Johnson. Be afraid, be very afraid.
It cannot be repeated too often: Trump is a symptom, not a cause of the American malaise. The economic and social problems that led to his election in 2016 will not disappear with his departure. The neoliberal tide that started with Reagan has impoverished the working class, and with no genuine left-wing party to represent their interests, they turn to populist demagogues like Trump.
The POTUS still has control of the nuclear button.
“Pelosi Asks Nation’s Top Military Officer About Preventing ‘Unhinged’ Trump From Using the Nuclear Codes”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pelosi-trump-nuclear-weapons-1111783/
Maybe there is a “self destruct” button that she does not want him to press.
they should stay their hand on lecturing others on what constitutes democracy and how it should be organized.
Could not agree more however the Democratic party need to be criticised as well
American workers and those on the bottom of the food chain have been disenfranchised This is never explained to the mass of workers so they are constantly confronted by a deterioration of the social welfare system, job security etc.
American society is morally bankrupt and politically broken, and its vision of the future appears utterly dystopian.
The ongoing militarization of public life and American society.
Unchecked corporate power and a massive commodification, infantilization, and depoliticization of the polity have become the totalitarian benchmarks defining American society, especially after 1980.
Neoliberalism has created a culture of shattered dreams and a landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured.
In that climate You have a working class very much more agitated ,very anxious ,very worried . Trump is a result the failure of this system to manage the transition to extraordinary wealth for the top 5 percent.
If you make a tiny group of people relatively speaking 5 percent or whatever, a small number of very very wealthy; you plunge the mass of people into a declining frightening situation, you are going to have political explosion. You have to manage that or else it will defeat you.
The new administration is not going to address that and both Parties have not addressed workers concerns for 4+ decades
Absolutely agree Slorter. 40 years of the Establishment made Trump inevitable. Unless Biden and Harris lead a radical recalibration, next time a smart populist might come along who makes Trump look like harmless fun.
Given the torturous birth of Obamacare taking the terms of several presidents to be achieved, no doubt the beneficiaries of any recalibration even one that is not radical will vehemently oppose it.
Thank goodness you are there Slorter to balance the establishment garbage from Richard Butler. Trump is a populist, not a fascist. He is too old to play Mussolini. The fascism now taking a grip on USA comes out of Silicon Valley, Davos and the Beltway. Civil war is a distinct possibility. Trotsky made the obvious observation that revolution can only succeed if the rebels have the armed forces on their side. I wonder what percentage of American national guardsmen and private soldiers come from the ranks of the 74 million Trump voters. Quite a high percentage, I suspect.
Jerry while I actually agree with you about Butler pushing the established “approved” I am sorry to KNOW that there were forces at work which are by any rational measure fascist in the real sense of the word, including intervention of the military. While Trump is the figure head, I am not sure he is the organiser and am somewhat concerned about actions of many such.
Fortunately they appear to be as incompetent as they are stupid and with luck will fizzle out.
Hi Janet and George. I have just watched a long and thoughtful interview on Bret Weinstein’s Dark Horse podcast with Jeremy Lee Quinn who was in the Capitol with the protesters and who has been covering the BLM and Antifa marches. I wish I had been there. I was reminded of a time when I reported a Vietnam Moratorium march and of the Springbok rugby team’s arrival in Perth when local rugby supporters outsmarted anti-apartheid demonstrators. Beware of over-simplified narratives.
We need to look at the issues, forget about Trump and forget about the Republican and Democrat Parties. They are yesterday’s institutions. Joe Biden’s spray against the Trump years upset me and Richard Butler’s post disgusted me.
“We need to look at the issues, forget about Trump and forget about the Republican and Democrat Parties.”
What are you going to wave a magic wand and hey presto an new form of governance ?
Talk about over simplified narratives.
How do you propose to do that under the US constitution, or are you proposing total anarchy, a revolution, or just and American civil war again, one where the enemy is no longer conveniently divided in the North and South?
There’s good talent on the left and right, George. For the left the choice is either to strengthen the Greens or form a third party. Nothing to stop them. On the right there is the Trump movement — MAGA. The Democrats and Republicans are too compromised. We knew in the first few weeks of the Obama administration in 2009 that the Democrats had nothing left, bringing in Summers and Geithner, protecting Wall Street and kicking millions of Americans out of their homes. I do recommend you take the time to watch the interview with Bret Weinstein and Jeremy Lee Quinn. Other first class reporting is coming from Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. We are just getting propaganda from the mainstream now. For keeping up with the Trump story I listen to the Apple Podcast of Steve Bannon’s War Room Pandemic. In Australia we are fortunate to have the Greens, Nationals, Bob Katter and Pauline. I hate to think of the Parliament without them — and I am a member of the ALP.
I would see the Democrats as the lesser of two evils, the Republicans, especially with their continued allegiance to Trump after the storming of the Capitol building is shocking. It appears to be about keeping Republican loyalty, but they are making a huge mistake. They have taken what is left of US democracy to the worst moments in modern history. I realise a few have now supported calls to remove Trump ASAP, but many more need to show that they accept the results of his folly, and the results of the election. It’s hard to believe that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, for Trump has revived the Civil War, and he is clearly on the side of the Confederates. A complete full circle.
Equally in Australia I see Labor as the lessor of two evils, but as you correctly point out minor parties are valid here because of our preferential voting system and that such parties also have valid representation in government, often in in both houses. It allows for parties to grow and have much more power when dealing with the two majors. And within that there is the possibility of one or more of those parties to become as big as the current Labor and Liberal who seem to have grown out of their original reasons to exist.
Unfortunately the US doesn’t have that, and as I have seen before, the greener parties are usually blamed for the loss if the Democrats lose, but they have indirectly pushed the Democrats to be more green. The other thing in the US is money. Only Bernie Sanders has shown that it can be replaced by other means. That the richest rule is firmly ensconced in the American constitution – originally I think because the wealthiest people could afford education, but now only because they are wealthy. My view is that it will be a very long time before the dominant two party US system actually changes, too late to deal with many of the problems that confront us now and immediate future like global warming and the geographical instability that it will cause.
I read recently that wealth distribution in the US has now shifted even further to the richest. They were not long ago referred to as the 1% who presided over 50% of US wealth. Now it is 0.06%. That constitutes a very strong lobby group that largely supports the Republicans, and has certainly been behind much of the propaganda in support of Trump.
Picketty is a good starting point for what needs to be done but he does write at great length. Ian McAuley has written a summary of his arguments in “Capital and Ideology.’ Nicholas Gruen has posted Ian’s piece on Club Troppo. I don’t see Trump having any future with the Republicans. If he goes again it will be with a new party drawn from the MAGA movement.
He’s a populist and a fascist.
Fascist because pushes a small bundle of toxic thoughts like “make america great again”. It’s Donald’s way or no other. He works a crowd like Hitler or Mussolini using the same small range of ideological views.
Populist because he pushes that bundle of thoughts to people very prone to prejudice that seek to blame others for their problems like Donald himself does.
Indeed.
Now let’s see what happened in the past, say over 250 years ago….yes, history does repeat, and so do the circumstances that were brewing at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
Trump is chucking a tantrum and not going to the Inauguration, the last person to do that was Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson#Presidency_(1865%E2%80%931869) who BTW was also impeached.
NB: For some reason, my links are not working!
I doubt if it is a tantrum, Heather. He will be acting on legal advice.
And what pray tell, legal advice is that? Maybe this is your version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_anarchy
I’m following the action on Steve Bannon’s War Room Pandemic. It is an Apple podcast and has not been censored yet, as far as I’m aware Trump’s lawyer is interviewed. There is a determined effort to drag down Trump and handicap his ability to lead the MAGA movement which may form the nucleus of a new political party to displace the Republicans on the Right. The Sanders movement has a similar capacity on the Left. Sanders has wasted four years. He should have left the Democrats in 2017 and started a third force then.
Excellent article John, replace Trump with Morrison and its more than accurate of what has been occurring here, thanks to the gutless wonders that call themselves servants of the public in its entirety.
As a good friend and I were discussing earlier, ‘because you’ve been blessed with the gift of life here on planet Earth, it’s your duty to help others. We’re all responsible for one another’. Poet Kamand Kojouri touches on a universal truth which, in these materialistic times, many of us are guilty of forgetting. Duty can feel like an imposition, when really, it’s a privilege’.
Far too many swanning around with privilege and need to be held accountable.