Too many American observers, writing in what they believe are safe offices on the 18th floor, condescend inappropriately to “failed states” like Haiti where armed gangs control the streets, where government and public safety have broken down and seem unlikely to be restored. Americans have no reason to be smug. The Capitol insurrection last Jan. 6 occurred in exactly the same spirit of mob violence and incoherent protest as the current upheavals in Haiti, Cuba and South Africa.
There are neighborhoods in Chicago that are no safer than the streets of Port-au-Prince. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Chicagoans celebrated their nation’s birthday in their special way — by shooting each other. One hundred people were shot, 18 fatally, over the long holiday in the Windy City. The hospitalized victims included a police officer and two federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. So far this year, there have been 36 shootings of Chicago police officers, six of them and counting in the month of July.
In the nation’s capital, a major-league baseball game was suspended and postponed after gunshots from a drive-by skirmish (three wounded) outside the ballpark sent players fleeing the field to the safety of the visitors’ clubhouse.
The question is whether we’re on the verge of chaos, or in the midst of it. Two blocks from my house in the quiet, Democratic-leaning village of Hillsborough, North Carolina, a downscale bar was recently exposed as a sort of clubhouse for a dozen members of the Proud Boys, one of the White Power militias that joined in the ransacking of the Capitol building. The Proud Boys even wear uniforms identifying themselves, but the owner of their chosen saloon refuses to ban them from the premises because so far they’ve done nothing wrong — they don’t dare, he explained to a reporter, because at least half of them are on parole.
A thousand miles north in New England, where we had fled to escape the heat, Massachusetts state troopers encountered another alarming face of America’s belligerent polarization. They pulled over a suspicious-looking van and found it occupied by 11 members of a Black militia called Rise of the Moors, all heavily armed and in full combat gear, as if they were driving to a revolution. The Moors, whose beliefs combine Black nationalism and aspects of Islam, explained that they were on their way to Bangor, Maine, to “train.”
It turned out that none of the Moors’ weapons were legally purchased, and that they boasted no valid driver’s licenses, either. The authorities are still trying to sort out the purpose of their mission. On the other coast of this disintegrating Republic, in California, two men with connections to the Proud Boys and another White paramilitary group called the Three Percenters were arrested for plotting to blow up the state’s Democratic party headquarters in Sacramento. In the home and business of one suspect, Ian Benjamin Rogers, police found 50 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and five pipe bombs. “I want to blow up a Democratic building bad,” Rogers had texted his co-conspirator. Other texts between them mentioned a scheme to kidnap or assassinate the liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros.
You don’t have to be paranoid to conclude that there’s no place to hide from armed and violent Americans, including citizens whose cognitive wiring has suffered irreparable meltdown. Among other signs of rapid civic decline that seemed to accompany the COVID-19 pandemic was an alarming increase in attacks on Asians, Blacks and Jews by rabid “White” men. What constitutes a “failed state”? I think a fair definition would be any nation where the government is no longer able, willing or interested in protecting its citizens from each other. If the United States of America has joined the sorry and growing roster of failed states, when and why did we turn the corner toward anarchy? I’d argue that the last pretense of civilization disappeared when military assault weapons were legalized for civilians, and an insane minority of Americans purchased a lion’s share of all the functional firearms on the planet Earth, roughly 400 million at last count.
A future historian writing our national obituary, “The Rise and Fall of the American Empire,” would be flying blind if he didn’t highlight the lethal role of the National Rifle Association, the once-innocuous “sportsman’s club” that evolved into what Southern novelist William Styron denounced as “one of the most evil organizations to exist in any nation, past or present.” Of course there’s plenty of blame to pass around. The Democratic Left, pharisaic and often lemming-like in its ideological conformity, can appear irrelevant or worse when it throws its weight behind something like “Abolish the Police” at a point in our violent decline when we seem to need a dozen policemen patrolling every city block. Systemic racism is America’s ancient curse, and Black Lives Matter is a rational response to its agonies. But pretending that all criminals and inmates are victims and all peace officers part of some official racist Gestapo is no sane route to our salvation.
When a powerful nation slides toward dystopia, there’s generally folly on all sides. But let’s not pretend that responsibility is equally distributed. I have friends who claim to see no difference between Democrats and Republicans, but in fact that difference has never been greater. Nearly all Democrats and left-of-center independents vote to protect the vulnerable and the environment, eliminate the grossest inequities in the American system and throttle, if possible, the winner-takes-all capitalism that has hand-delivered most of our wealth and power to a corporate plutocracy. That doesn’t make them all wise and generous—except in contrast to their hostile rivals on the Right.
If there’s a single dominant reason for America’s descent into raging incoherence, it’s the appalling putrefaction of a major political party, a condition confirmed in Washington Jan. 6. For 50 years the Republicans have been straining to the right, but that movement accelerated so rapidly in the past couple of decades that the party’s electoral power now rests entirely on the votes of the bigoted, benighted and belligerent — those Killer B’s. Once the party of emancipation, it’s now the party of White nationalists and Jim Crow-style crusades against voting rights. The GOP “base,” White, angry and tragically, heartrendingly, mind-bendingly stupid, worships Donald Trump, and to please him, it’s more than ready to rip a once-admired democracy up by its roots. When Dick Cheney’s daughter is your last voice of reason and moderation, friend, your party is way down the road that led Germany to swastikas and jackboots.
Personally I’d never use that other F-word, “fascist,” in polite discourse — so I leave that escalation to astute foreign observers. “The most dangerous threat facing the world is the transformation of the Republican Party in the US into a fascist movement,” writes the Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn. In support of Cockburn’s warning, the London-based Canadian columnist Gwynne Dyer writes, “Fascists do not have horns and a tail. They are mostly ordinary people who believe that they will lose something vitally important (their wealth, their status, their values) if they do not break the rules and take over. The changing demography of the United States means that the Republicans will lose almost every election in the future if they don’t seize power now. They are not planning death camps or world conquest, but they have become fascists, and they will not be good neighbors.”
The party of Middle-American schoolteachers and farmers has become the party of Proud Boys and neo-Nazis. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has emerged as a Trump-resisting hero in several new books about the last agonies of post-election Trumpworld, recognized the Jan. 6 insurrectionists for what they were:
“These are the same people we fought in World War II,” he told his staff.
I try to imagine what my late father, a WWII naval officer and a good (liberal) Republican all his life, might make of a GOP of potential storm troopers who would have scared the hell out of Gen. Eisenhower and maybe even Richard Nixon. There seem to be tens of millions of these 21st-century neo-Republicans, and they’re not just exasperating us and blocking any hope we might entertain of fair and rational government in this country. They’re also killing us — many of the rest of us — quite literally.
Consider, first, our four years under a Trump administration that barred its officials from using the words “climate change” (and now we have hellfire in Oregon, 110-plus temperatures in British Columbia and Siberia). Second, the Right Wing’s crazy politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is filling hospitals at this moment, and third, the GOP’s blind alliance with the NRA, which insists that every lunatic, felon and brooding loner should own all the deadly weapons his homicidal heart desires. Contemplate the eventual body count. The Fourth Horseman of the Republican Apocalypse is, of course, the demented ex-president, a coarse, profane bully deep in the late stages of cognitive disintegration.
Among the revelations from this summer’s wave of books offering Trump post-mortems — along with the fact that the ex-president uses the other F-word almost constantly — is the consensus from alienated administration officials and even White House insiders that Trump is mentally ill. Sadly, they seem to have known it all along. “Unhinged,” “deranged,” and “off his rocker” are among their verdicts. I can’t resist boasting that I told you this all along, as far back as 2015, when I polled a couple of Georgetown psychiatrists and reported their diagnoses in this publication.
Michael Wolff, whose book “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” comes out this week, concludes that Trump has “completely departed reality.
You didn’t need a degree in psychiatry to recognize that this man is nuts. What’s shocking is that so many knew it, and kept it a secret to retain their Republican credentials. But the most competent ones seem to have abandoned him. The Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, whose new Trump book is titled “Nightmare Scenario,” write that his administration, at the time the pandemic struck, was staffed mostly by “a mix of family members, 20-somethings, hangers-on, fourth stringers, former lobbyists, sycophants.”
This team of ciphers and losers was running the United States when it faced one of the greatest threats and challenges in its history. I guess that’s what it means to be a “failed state.” “Nightmare Scenario” chronicles that failure.
But Donald Trump was the past — we pray to God — and most of us still hope to live a little way into the future, even in a failed state, even with the mess he leaves behind. It seems possible that we could weather one insane, incompetent president and regain our balance. Joe Biden hopes so. But what scares me even more than the memory of an awful presidency — one new book reports that Trump told his aides we should “just shoot” civil rights protesters — is this QAnon cult that deifies Trump as the messiah of a violent new religion. You have to be stark raving mad to subscribe to QAnon, which is silly sci-fi conspiracy loaded with hatred, anti-Semitism, and psychotic demonization of Democrats. Was there ever even one pedophile who was also a Satanist, and a Democrat? But I read somewhere that 15% of American adults—-30 million?—- believe in at least some part of QAnon’s theology. There are 40 QAnon candidates, all Republicans of course, for the 118th Congress.
QAnon believers are totally on board for the violent overthrow of the government, and the ex-con, ex-Trump aide Gen. Michael Flynn is ready to lead the charge if Trump isn’t up to it. Democracy depends entirely on getting actual facts to the voters — and on educating the voters to recognize the facts, and the fiction, when they see them. The very existence of QAnon seems to indicate that the United States is failing on both scores, and on a critical scale.
“So how did we end up here?” asks Paul Krugman in the New York Times. “How did one of our two major political parties come not only to reject democracy, but to exalt ignorance and despise competence of any kind? I don’t know, but if you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention.”
Failed state or fascist state? Now there’s a choice to ponder.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@ gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021
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