Resurgence of Authoritarianism
THE RESURGENCE OF AUTHORITARIANISM
What I don’t understand is why House Republicans are not part of Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation.
Yes, nobody wants to lift the ideological rock under which this GOP Congress conceals itself because the implications of their policies and actions represent a treacherous departure from our historic values. But failing to look will bring with it a deadly shift toward some of the worst historic divisions of the past - divisions that challenge the legal framework that was conceived to protect the very identity of the United States as the leading liberal democracy in the world. To some, this sounds hyperbolic, but in the era of Donald Trump, anyone who sees how our government is being dismantled and remains silent is in need of an emergency ice bath.
We all believed that Hillary Clinton’s election was inevitable – that Donald Trump was an un-electable buffoon; that Russian efforts at espionage could be silenced by a triumphant Clinton with the power to enforce crippling sanctions on its economy. Obama looked at the numbers and famously concluded that Russia was merely a troublesome rogue state with a GDP that was 7% of that of the US. As president, Clinton would extirpate this Cold War menace once and for all.
So we didn’t look under that rock because we were living in Francis Fukuyama’s, “End of History”, where liberal democracies had won the historic game, and globalism was taming the world. In 1992 Fukuyama wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such.... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
So, no wonder Hillary failed to recognize the global trend toward a resurgence of authoritarianism; we had won the Cold War, and now all that was necessary was to clean up the sporadic messes that crop up from time to time. We were already squeezing Russia with crippling sanctions, and our NATO alliance was proving a powerful hammer to protect democratic institutions in nascent democracies among the post-Soviet states.
But as we shared a sanguine view of our global future, with its Paris Agreement and the international response to the Ebola epidemic, we failed to look at ourselves domestically. We failed to look under the rock of political indifference that has come to characterize the Democratic Party. We refused to examine the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan over 30 years ago and the corrosive effect his ideas have had on our domestic policy. Intemperate political statements like “Government is the problem” have morphed into calamitous doctrine as Trump and the GOP have decimated government institutions in order to “deconstruct the administrative state”. Reagan’s ill-considered deregulation rhetoric in the 80s has led to the dismantling of virtually all regulatory agencies in the era of Trump. As Obama said in 2008, following the Wall Street crash, “Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it,” …“Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one—aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight.”
These Republican ideas have consequences, but we were afraid to act then as we are now. We do indeed have the government we deserve today - because no one was willing to lift up the rock and look at what was underneath. We are victims of demagoguery now because we view our democratic ideals through the Manichean lens of good and evil. A biblical template that’s as inadequate today as it was in Europe during the 30s. It can, indeed, happen here; it is happening here.
