I wrote this in February right after the Senate acquittted Trump in the impeachment trial:
The problem isn't Trump; it's the Republican Party. Republicans simply do not care about the rule of law, i.e., the constitution, except when they can use it as a club to hit their political enemies. This isn't new; it been a growing trend at least since Nixon. But if you had any doubts, their lockstep acquittal of Trump (Romney excepted) is all the proof you need.
Even if the Dems win in November, they're going to have to contend with half the country that is hellbent on destroying the current political order, and these Republicans don't care what comes out of the rubble so long as their thugs come out on top. And they have every reason to believe that they will come out on top because they understand that when you make a mockery of the rule of law and when you destroy the norms and traditions that make a small 'r' republican form of gov't possible, the authoritarian thugs usually win. The Dems will always be hamstrung by their desire to follow the rule of law; the GOP feels no such compunction. The Dems are like the feckless Weimar Liberals trying to cope with the brown-shirts. These thugs have nothing but contempt for these Liberals and their process and their laws. Roger Stone is exemplary in this respect.
I went on to point out–
Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support the social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Those conservatives in the past who have thought of themselves as advocates for Law and Order have often not opposed lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the kind of lying that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump. What has mattered to them is that the Conservative social order be maintained, and so any technical lawlessness undertaken to promote or maintain that order is legitimate. If in the past lynching some uppity Negro was technically illegal, then obviously the law is illegitimate. The same goes for Trump's illegal abuses of power.
In other words, rule of law is a Liberal thing, not a Conservative thing. Liberals are all about process; the Conservative Right is all about raw power in the service of maintaining a particular hierarchical social order.
Yesterday Thomas Edsall's column in the NY Times was very interesting in exploring a spectrum of social science theories explaining the support for Trump's proto-fascism. They focus primarily on status loss or perhaps more acutely fear of status loss. One theory resonated with what I've been writing here–
In their July 2020 paper, “Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,” Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen and Alexander Bor, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, contend there are two basic methods of achieving status: the “prestige” approach requiring notable achievement in a field and “dominance” capitalizing on threats and bullying. “Modern democracies,” they write,
are currently experiencing destabilizing events including the emergence of demagogic leaders, the onset of street riots, circulation of misinformation and extremely hostile political engagements on social media.
They go on:
Building on psychological research on status-seeking, we argue that at the core of extreme political discontent are motivations to achieve status via dominance, i.e., through the use of fear and intimidation. Essentially, extreme political behavior reflects discontent with one’s own personal standing and a desire to actively rectify this through aggression.
This extreme political behavior often coincides with the rise of populism, especially right-wing populism, but Petersen, Osmundsen and Bor contend that the behavior is distinct from populism:
The psychology of dominance is likely to underlie current-day forms of extreme political discontent — and associated activism — for two reasons: First, radical discontent is characterized by verbal or physical aggression, thus directly capitalizing on the competencies of people pursuing dominance-based strategies. Second, current-day radical activism seems linked to desires for recognition and feelings of ‘losing out’ in a world marked by, on the one hand, traditional gender and race-based hierarchies, which limit the mobility of minority groups and, on the other hand, globalized competition, which puts a premium on human capital.
Extreme discontent, they continue,
is a phenomenon among individuals for whom prestige-based pathways to status are, at least in their own perception, unlikely to be successful. Despite their political differences, this perception may be the psychological commonality of, on the one hand, race- or gender-based grievance movements and, on the other hand, white lower-middle class right-wing voters.
The authors emphasize that the distinction between populism and status-driven dominance is based on populism’s “orientation toward group conformity and equality,” which stands “in stark contrast to dominance motivations. In contrast to conformity, dominance leads to self-promotion. In contrast to equality, dominance leads to support for steep hierarchies.”
Which explains why a bully like Trump is worshipped by those you'd think would know better. In the first place, the whole Liberal prestige-based meritocracy is something that working class people never accepted as something that gave them status. They didn't value education when they had good-paying union jobs in vibrant communities. If someone among them like J.D. Vancewent to college, good for him, but that wasn't the norm but the exception.
My wife, who grew up in a blue-collar family in the Bronx, was told by her mother, "People like us don't go to college." She went anyway, but her mother knew that her going would mean her moving out of their tight-knit Sicilian social world into the world of 'white people", where 'white' means the affluent educated. Her mother was right. It was my wife's idea for us to move from New York City to Seattle back in the 80s. Being educated didn't give my wife more status with her extended family. It just made her strange.
Getting a college education is the kind of thing meritocrats like Bill Gates see as the only solution, but good paying jobs and geographical stability are the real solution for people who don't value the a prestige path in the liberal meritocracy. This is something Oren Cass talks about in his The Once and Future Worker, and it starts with recognizing that real solutions for most people are not to get a college degree and be ready to move wherever the global economy demands. That's ok for some people, but not for most. Cass talks about some intriguing policies to reinforce geographical and economic stability in a world where the machines are going to be doing more of the work.
This isn't the soft bigotry of low expectations; it's simply recognizing that what gives people a sense of dignity is different for different groups of people, and the the Neoliberal-legitimated global economy, invented by those my mother-in-law referred to as 'white people', whatever economic growth it might have generated, is something that has left an awful lot of people in destroyed communities with low-status, low-paying jobs. And these people are embracing Trump.
And so since the global economy has done its creative-destructive thing since Reagan's tearing down the New Deal order abetted by Neoliberal Democrats like the Clintons. Good paying blue collar jobs are gone, communities are destroyed, and the rich get richer. And the people who are living in the mess this global economy has made are understandably enraged at the people who they blame for bringing it on them.
That the Democrats are getting more of the blame for this than Republicans is proof of the worst kind of political malpractice on the Democrats' part. But it boils down to both parties not really caring about those destroyed by the global economy, even if the Democrats feel guilty about it in a way that Republicans just don't. It has come down to which party has most effectively channeled blue-collar rage, and the Republicans have done that using culture-war issues, which the 'white people', the meritocrats, running the Democratic Party, simply don't know how to navigate because of their own ideological blinders.
And so now you have a lot of people in an insane, white-hot rage that is directed at all establishment politicians, but mostly at Democrats whose strange, woke, politically correct ways are incomprehensible to most everybody who isn't among the urban, coastal, educated elite. The historical irony is that the Democrats are finally coming around to understand what the socio-economic causes of this anger are and are genuinely interested in developing programs to at least mitigate its worst effects. But their hands are tied because they are hated by the people who would most benefit if they they gave the Dems a governing majority.
The Republicans don't care, and they don't have to so long as they have people like Trump keeping the base so angry they don't know what they want except to be angry at Democrats. And a bully like Trump better than anyone represents the the embrace of a dominance-based strategy toward achieving prestige and status. The contempt the Liberal Left feels for him is a contempt that his followers wear as a badge of honor. So bring on the brown shirts. Now it's all about owning the Libs, making them squirm in fear, and if I come from a world where a pathway is either not open to me in the Liberal meritocracy or I just don't want that kind of life in the first place, I can still feel pretty good about myself when I see my guy Trump and his thugs taking a wrecking ball to the whole system that has robbed me of my dignity.
That this leads inevitably to the destruction of the American democracy is not something Republicans or their base care about. Francoists like Wm Barr are fine with such an outcome, but most others only see six inches in front of their noses and don't care about long-term implications. They don't understand how their anger is being manipulated to create a system that is only going to make things worse for them in the future. But then again, this is why Aristotle said that democracies were the second worst form of government because they inevitably lead to the worst kind–tyrannies. The demos is too easy to manipulated by demagogues. It's amazing, in a way, that we've lasted this long.
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