Posts Tagged ‘Trump’
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
Democracy probs in the USA
If you don’t want kings, limit the power of your Prez, or better still, change your system
I’ve written about how the US political system seems much more susceptible to demagoguery than, say, Australia’s version of the Westminster system, not to mention that of Canada, or Britain, or the governments of the Scandinavian countries – a fact that, it seems, many US pundits haven’t recognised, though some may just be recognising it now.
However, I might be focussing too much on problems instead of considering solutions. This is important as no democratic country is immune from the sort of government over-reach (to put it mildly) that the US is currently dealing with. I’ve recently had Mallen Baker’s ‘dangerously reasonable’ videos recommended to me, and his review of the book How democracies die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, has convinced me to get a copy, as I’m getting the impression that conservative intolerance seems to be sweeping through the WEIRD world at the moment – in spite of Australia having decisively voted to re-elect its centre-left government recently, something which took many by surprise. The mess in the USA seems to have been a central factor. That way lies horror. But just a few days ago the major capitals of Australia held well-attended anti-immigration rallies, in which neo-nazis were apparently involved, which surprised many of my friends and myself, living as we do in a bubble of moderation, as well as satisfaction and pleasure regarding the multicultural environment we’re now living in. We’re all old enough to remember how different it was some fifty years ago.
So Baker reflects on the aforementioned book, and the state of democracy, 80 years after the fall of nazism in Europe. Perhaps the first feature of democracy maintenance is civility, and mutual recognition that a free and fair system of elected government needs to be maintained, and sometimes reformed in line with a society that itself is never static. Lapses in civility and fairness are warning signs that need to be heeded. Spurious attacks on opposition politicians, unsupported claims about election rigging, partisan manipulation of electoral boundaries, violent and inflammatory rhetoric, attacks on civil liberties and the so-called ‘fourth estate’, manipulation of the law to silence critics, these are the most salient issues – but they are most concerning, as I’ve often said, when a great deal of power is given to too few, or even to one ‘I alone can fix it’ individual. This is the massive weakness of the US political system, which shrieks at democrats outside of that country but is hardly noticed by those within it. This is the USA’s tragedy, not Trump’s advent.
The principal problem, of course, is the Presidential system itself, and as long as it is retained, with all its powers, privileges and immunities, the USA will be vulnerable to the kind of takeover that’s currently occurring – a takeover that seems to be only temporarily blocked by the courts, a blockage that I’m sure the current administration is trying to overcome. And of course the courts too – especially the Supreme Court, which clearly has been given too much power – are systems that can be and will be politicised, as this downhill spiral continues. To my amusement/bemusement, AI offers solutions:
The US finds reform difficult due to ingrained structural issues like the Electoral College, and the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments, which are exacerbated by a lack of collective imagination for what comprehensive reform looks like. Additionally, some voters believe the system is inherently “rigged,” making them skeptical that procedural fixes can work, while others feel that small procedural changes are inadequate for addressing deep-seated problems and building social cohesion.
I note that this AI guy makes no mention of the presidential system – clearly he was born and bred in the USA. So, if they won’t jettison this disastrous system in favour of something more collaborative and issues and policy-based, rather than personality-based, we’re left largely with tinkering, but important tinkering. So, what of this Electoral College? It’s a system of 538 ‘electors’ whose role is supposed to be quite minimal, in that they simply represent the winner of the vote count in their electorate. There are 538 electorates, and the winner of the overall vote count (of electorates, not voters) wins the Presidency. Thus it’s possible, and has often happened in recent times, that the winner of the Electoral College is not the winner of the popular vote. Strangely, but not at all strangely, every time this has happened, the less than 50% popular winner has been a Republican.
So the Electoral College system is clearly not a fair system, it has a Republican bias which appears to be increasing. This means, in effect, that the national vote, and so the nation itself, is becoming increasingly less democratic. This isn’t partisan bluster, it is fact. The Electoral College problem should be able to be fixed in a non-partisan way, as it should be the case that an overwhelming number of the electorate would want elections to be fair. However, when a nation is fundamentally divided into ‘two tribes’, each fuelled by contempt for the other, and one of those tribes has gotten the upper hand vis-a-vis rigging, democracy has clearly failed. And this Electoral College problem is exacerbated by gerrymandering at the state level, always carried out by Republican-held states.
There’s also the effect of party discipline and solidarity upon its members, the expectation that people in government will be team players. In Trump’s case he was supposedly a Democrat in earlier times, though never active, never having to display loyalty or team discipline. In the run-up to the 2016 federal election he was at first ridiculed or dismissed by most leading Republicans, but the populist rhetoric of his speeches, violent and abusive though they often were, gained him a strong following among the ‘left behind’, or the deplorables, as Hilary Clinton termed them. So gradually the Republican Party as a whole got behind him, because, it seems, winning was more important to them than policy coherence or party discipline.
So Trump became President in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, and the nation survived, despite a less than effective handling of the Covid crisis, and two impeachment inquiries based on solid grounds. His obvious fomenting of an uprising and a violent attack on Congress after his 2020 election loss, resulting in the arrest and criminal conviction of almost 1300 people, would have prevented him for standing for office in any other democratic country, surely. Instead he received no punishment whatever, and was able to pardon virtually all the other offenders, a disgraceful situation that seems to have been ‘swept under the rug’. Could any other western democracy have stood for this? And allowed the principal perpetrator to recover ‘supreme power’?
Anyway I’m having technical problems with my blog or browser or something at present so I’ll send this off and try to continue with it next time.
some thoughts on the Ukrainian tragedy
M Carney and V Zelenskyy with their Action Plan for the Implementation of the Agreement on Security Cooperation between Ukraine and Canada.
I’m by no means an expert on international affairs, though of course I’m interested in humanist, peaceful, equitable solutions to what’s happening in troublespots such as Ukraine, Palestine and the USA, to name the only three that I know a little bit about at present, but I have to admit that the very sight of Putin, Trump or Netenyahu or their minions on my screen has negative impacts on my health, as I’ve always been a bit overly emotional. So I’ve been both chillaxing and better informing myself recently by listening to articulate, intelligent, calm (above all calm, even humorous!) members of the commentariat (mostly female,) discussing these troublespots and troubling characters (mostly male).
So, with that, let me return to the Putin-Ukraine horror-show. Russian troops began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, though you might say the 2014 annexation of Crimea was Putin’s prelude, and the pre-2022 aggression in the Donbas region helped to clarify his entirely hostile intentions, not to mention the build-up of troops and materiel on Russia’s border with Ukraine in the preceding months.
It could be argued, and Putin would certainly argue, that Kievan Rus was central to the ‘development’, mostly through warfare, of the pan-Russian nation. These irredentist views of a Greater Russia that needed to be revived and presided over by Vladimir the Great have been central to Putin’s grand vision. To strengthen his claim, as least to his compatriots, he concocted a Ukrainian government infested with neo-nazis intent on wiping out the Russian minority in the eastern Donbas.
So when the ‘denazification’ invasion came, from the Belarusian border in the north, threatening Kiev, with accompanying attacks into the Donbas and threatening Kharkiv, and in Crimea, it looked, at least for a moment, that the claim by Belarusian president and Putin puppet Aleksandr Lukashenko (among others) that Ukraine would belong to Putin within three days would be proven.
But the march on Kiev was stalled and soon abandoned, to the whole world’s surprise it seems, and the reasons remain murky, and were probably multi-faceted. They include – bad weather and poor reconnaissance regarding terrain; Ukrainian attacks; fuel shortages and maintenance problems; poor planning, organisation and communications. The long delay before the initial march southwards allowed Ukrainian forces and individuals to prepare sniper and other attacks. Russian forces began a retreat from Kiev only three months after launching their northern invasion.
Currently, some three and a half years after the war began, Russia has control of some 20% of Ukrainian territory. The death toll, especially on the Russian side, is extremely hard to pin down, given Putin’s obsession with disinformation, but at least 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country, with another 8 million or so being internally displaced. Of course their have been multiple human rights abuses, and ICC arrest warrants have been issued for Putin and other Russian officials.
Putin has been in power in Russia for well over 20 years now, having eliminated all opposition and bolstered and clarified his dictatorship. However, this invasion and war has clearly endangered his position and indeed his life. One might fancifully compare it to Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in the 1940s. If the advent of Trump, a product of the world’s worst democratic political system, had not supervened, and a more NATO-supportive and decisive US President had been elected in 2020 and/or 2024, Putin’s fate would have been sealed. Instead we’re forced to witness what we’re witnessing.
The USA’s floundering, destructive horrorshow is essentially a reprieve for Putin, though it’s always possible that Trump will flounder in the direction of liberation for Ukraine. Of course that can’t be counted on. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has just visited Kiev and given a rousing speech with promises of financial and military support, and even the possibility of ‘boots on the ground’. We need much more of this.
Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO, and it should be. It seems that some NATO countries are reluctant to accept Ukraine’s membership at this time of war, which seems to me cruelly crazy. It’s also worth noting that Ukraine came very close to NATO membership in the pre-Yanukovych era, though popular support for the move was low. Today, unsurprisingly, it’s at an all-time high, and NATO membership was been a priority for successive governments since 2014. So why the delay?
Apparently there’s this thing called a Membership Action Plan (MAP), which is the Royal Road to NATO membership, and this has been touted for years for Ukraine, but fear of Putinland seems to have been central to the delay. Here’s what the Latvian foreign minister had to say on the issue, in April 2021:
We are watching closely as Russia draws troops to Ukraine’s borders. It is not clear at this time what this is: a show of force or real aggression. But there is every reason to worry … Ukraine has been trying to join NATO for 15 years by obtaining a Membership Action Plan. Apparently, it is time to provide this Plan to Ukraine [!]. This will be at least a signal from us [NATO] that Ukrainians will not be left without support. I will definitely support this decision…
You would think that Putin’s aggression would’ve stiffened the resolve of all NATO nations to include and support Ukraine. Pusillanimous is the word that comes to mind. And this has clearly cost lives.
Putin has to be defeated, kicked out of Ukraine completely. He, for one, will never compromise, and is completely incapable of negotiating in good faith. As various pundits have pointed out, withdrawing now, giving up, will likely be the end for him, with all the suffering this has caused to so many Russians. We – the west, NATO, the democratic world, whatever, need to go full bore at finishing this war and offering Putin nothing. He’s a criminal of the worst kind and always has been, throughout his adult life. The Canadian PM has shown the way, and we must all offer what we can, for humanity’s sake.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Kyiv_convoy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine–NATO_relations#Popular_opinion_in_Ukraine
on fascism, buffoonery, criminality and a pretty crappy political system
On asking myself what fascism is, considering that it’s quite topical at present, my first answer is ‘nothing much’, by which I mean, on an intellectual level. The standard fascists of the past, Mussolini and Hitler, could never be described as intellectuals, and nor could Trump, though all might be described as clever in their extremely self-regarding ways. Good old AI describes fascism as ‘a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology characterised by a dictatorial leader, a centralised, autocratic government, militarism, and suppression of opposition’. This certainly describes much of the current Trump playbook, though it says little about the psychology of the typical ‘fascist’ leader, who, it seems to me, is always noisy, extremely thin-skinned, and has huge problems with listening to voices other than his own (though of course it needn’t be an exclusively male thing, but few women have ever been given the political power that the aforementioned men have been given).
The term didn’t exist before the 20th century, but of course the character type certainly did. It was apparently born out of the first world war – think of Hitler’s war experience; but it was Mussolini in particular who was central to the term, founding the Partito Nazionale Fascista, (PNF) in the early 1920s. It involved wholesale militarisation of the state, ultra-nationalism, and was of course molto macho. With Trump the draft dodger, however, fascism has taken on a different character. Definitely not so macho (many of his fellow-travellers are women), and focussed more on bullying his own critics, as well as a collection of ‘outsiders’ and competitors, and generally seeing the world in terms of win-lose scenarios, with a brutal edge. Whether or not this can be called fascism is no doubt an open question, and it isn’t of huge interest to me. It sure isn’t what I would call humanism (I was formerly involved with the SA Humanists), or a fair, inclusive, healthy or effective approach to politics.
So, much as I’m depressed with current US politics, and have long found their politico-social system far less impressive than most United Staters seem to think it is, I can’t help but hope it can be reformed and improved, considering the power that nation wields globally.
Firstly the US presidential system is quite obviously a bad system – obvious to most people outside the US. It gives a ridiculous degree of power to one individual, with limited checks and balances. Not only the ridiculous level of immunity, and the over-reaching pardoning powers, but the power to choose any unelected person as ‘running mate’, a person who can become President if something unforeseen happens, as has occurred in the past. This is clearly not democratic. Another problem is the influence of the almighty dollar. Campaign financing is very inadequately regulated and has been rising steadily over the past 30 to 40 years. Obviously this favours the rich in a nation with a larger rich-poor gap than any other democratic nation.
This one-man rule (it has always been a man and I can’t see that changing in the foreseeable) seems unable to be stopped even by clear evidence of criminal activity (Trump was convicted on 34 counts of felony business fraud re hush money payments in 2024; was found to have sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll in two lawsuits, in which Caroll was awarded $88.3 million dollars in damages, the case being currently under appeal; was indicted on 40 felony counts related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents related to his 2016-2020 presidency; and of course Trump’s involvement in the violent January 6 2021 insurrection in Washington DC and subsequent fraudulent attempts to claim that the election had been won by Trump, have never received proper legal treatment from the court system, due to his re-election in 2024). It’s surely obvious that no other nation in the English-speaking world, or throughout western Europe, would have allowed such an obvious reprobate to continue to play a role in their political affairs. (I must also say that the Wikipedia articles on the above-mentioned Trump ‘activities’ are impressively detailed and damning).
So what is to be done? Is there any hope for a nation that allows such a felon to be their president twice, with no doubt the hope of evading justice by buying a third term? And the way things are going over there, he might just succeed.
I have many good, and screamingly obvious, ideas about how the US polity could be overhauled, but I’m absolutely certain none of them will be implemented. In order for that to happen, the nation needs to be far more modest about itself, and to subscribe to a philosophy of constant renewal, to match the renewal of social values recognised by most other WEIRD nations, and by some progressives within the US.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned some of these ideas before in this blog, but… first, scrap the presidential system, which is beyond repair. Giving such vast powers to one person, who doesn’t even have to subscribe to the discipline of a political party and its collectively devised platform, more or less understood by the voting public, or at least there for every voter to consider, is highly problematic. Such a system is tailor-made for wannabe dictators. Nobody in Australia, where I live, or Britain, where I was born, goes into politics hoping to be a dictator – they would have to win over their local electorate, as a member of a political party (if campaigning as an independent they would’ve had to gain a local reputation through commercial or community activity), and then, if elected, would have to impress their party colleagues vis-à-vis their ideas, their communication skills, all the factors that make for a good team captain. This isn’t to say all ‘team captains’ have been effective or anything much more than disastrous -in Australia I can think of Mark Latham for Labor, or Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott for the Liberals (aka Conservatives – yes, it’s confusing: it’s about individual liberty and small government – think Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’).
So if the US scrapped its much-worshipped Presidential system, what then? It already has a functioning Congressional-Parliamentary system, elected every four years (called mid-term elections). It seems to have become increasingly partisan, whereas in Australia, cross-bench numbers (independents or ‘mini-parties’), with stops and starts, have grown. In Australia, our national elections vaguely resemble the US mid-terms, in which we elect local electorate hopefuls to the parliament (or re-elect incumbents), most of whom are members of the right or left party. The leaders of those parties are chosen, and can be dumped, by their elected peers in the party. Thus we have a Prime Minister and an Opposition Leader, working in a parliament, defending their policies and attacking the policies of the opposition, as of course occurs in the US Congress. We don’t have this extra, surely unnecessary, layer of power, an individual who sits in the White House like a king in his palace, surrounded by courtiers and flunkies, appointing various unelected ‘Secretaries’ to positions of massive power and authority (Treasury, State, Defence, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Education, etc, etc, – and also members of the judiciary – all subject at least to Congressional approval). The same king also has massive immunity and pardoning powers.
What could go wrong?
Anybody who thinks this is a good, let alone great, political system has surely to be certifiably insane, or born in the USA. Propaganda, anyone?
I’ve touched on just some of the problems of the US system. There’s also a disastrous ideology of ‘individualism’, in which you’re on your own, you’ll get very little government help in terms of education, health and general welfare, leading to a massive ‘left behind’ population susceptible to obvious charlatans like Trump. Hilary Clinton once called them ‘deplorables’, an indication of the problems they face vis-à-vis the wealthy elites on both sides of the political divide. The nation seems to have no shame about having the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world (this is always arguable, as naturally the world’s vilest nations don’t come clean about their rates), and some of the most disgusting prisons.
All in all, it’s pretty depressing, and I don’t see any change on the horizon. Yes I’m happy I wasn’t born there – if so, I would surely have been marked as another deplorable, given my background. I just hope the country doesn’t infect others with its disease. We all have enough problems…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_(election_obstruction_case)
The USA’s political system is not normal
Andrew Weissmann, the well-known US lawyer, legal expert and, I believe, MSNBC politico-legal commentator, has presented a talk from his home called ‘Reality Check’. My purpose here isn’t to respond in detail to his critique of the current US situation, but to return to and elaborate upon some of my own critiques of the USA’s social and political systems.
First, the Presidential system, which is way too much like a monarchical system, albeit elected. Weissmann has emphasised, as I have, channelling Benjamin Franklin, that politicians are our servants. If Trump had ever been made to accept that this really was the case, he would never have run for President, or for any political office. When Trump first started making noises about running for President, about a decade ago, many prominent Republicans spoke out strongly against him, knowing not only of his ignorance, but his passion for self-aggrandisement – effectively his only real passion. So Trump quickly realised that he needed to get ‘the people’ behind him, and was successful enough to ‘win’ the 2016 election, though Hilary Clinton was the actual winner (yes gerrymandering and Electoral College-type systems plague many countries, including my own, and constant reform needs to be advocated). Why did this happen?
It’s complex, but has largely to do with a huge rich-poor divide, much larger than any other WEIRD nation. The poor, many of whom would never bother to vote, in a system they don’t much understand, are generally under-educated, and easily manipulated. The rich, on the other hand, in a system which is all abut money, are happy to donate to a fellow flouter of the tax system. Most WEIRD nations have strict rules about campaign contributions, even the USA, but compliance with those rules is another thing, and while there might be a few law-abiding super-rich people…. haha, I’m joking. Huge amounts of money are shifted during US elections, and money is still flowing swiftly today, into Trump’s coffers.
So that’s how an obvious grifter and ignoramus can get into office today in the US, in a way that couldn’t happen in Australia – to focus on the country I obviously know best, but which I think is similar enough to other English-speaking Westminster-based nations (Britain, Canada and New Zealand) to be representative. It couldn’t happen here because we don’t have a Presidential system. We have a party-based system in which the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) is voted to that position by the elected members of her or his own party, and can be voted out at any time by same. This doesn’t have to be disastrous because we vote for parties and policies, not individuals. Nor do we give our Prime Minister any pardoning powers, or any immunity. We do have a pardoning system, rarely used, which is ultimately in the hands of the federal Attorney-General, usually on the advice of the High Court, the highest court in the land. The monarch in Britain has a similar rarely-used pardoning power, which is only granted on the advice of the government of the day. The contrast with the US President’s freewheeling powers is too horrendous to dwell upon. To mention some others – the Presidential candidate gets to choose her or his running mate, who, if she becomes Vice President, will become the leader of the nation if the Prez becomes incapacitated, or is bumped off, without ever having been personally elected to the position.
And that’s just the beginning. The President gets to select a whole squadron of unelected people to positions of great power and responsibility – positions that, under a party-based system, would be taken up by individuals elected by their local constituents. And this same President gets to stay far from the madding crowd in a White Palace surrounded by courtiers, while our Prime Minister sits in the parliament with her fellow ministers and MPs, defending their government’s policies against the opposition’s jibes and critiques. Moreover, most WEIRD countries have a multi-party system, in which a variety of views and approaches to government can be aired and debated. This can make decision-making more cumbersome, but also more nuanced, as a wider variety of the people’s views are taken into account. Government can be a little more participatory, whereas I would argue that there is no government less participatory, in the WEIRD world, than that of the USA.
Moreover the USA is the most divided nation in the WEIRD world. It may be united in its jingoism, but that’s about it. I’ve mentioned the huge rich-poor divide, and this is exacerbated by that nation’s having, by a long, long way, the highest per capita incarceration rate of any WEIRD nation, and the lowest minimum wage, federally. It also has the lowest federal spending on education, health and welfare. All of this hurts people, especially the poor. You could say that the country is united by all these failings. I certainly can’t think of any other way that it is united.
So Weissmann is worried about the current US political situation becoming normalised, but my view, on learning about the US socio-political system, in place more or less since its inception, is that Trump’s accession to the ‘throne’ is largely the result of the normalisation of that seriously, almost fatally flawed system. In other words the problem is much deeper than Weissmann realises, or seems prepared to admit.
Jingoism, as mentioned, is a big problem in the USA. One can be nationalistic, or patriotic, to use the term preferred by Timothy Snyder, while recognising that all political systems need to be open to reform, as society evolves. But the USA’s system has congealed into a highly combative two-party contest, as if they’re rival football players and their fans. One gets the impression that most of the ‘fans’ have little idea of their party’s policies, as long as they win the game. And any criticism from outside, I’ve learned to my bemusement, meets with a torrent of invective and jingoistic claptrap – and it’s really hard to know whether this is a superiority complex or the opposite.
The advent of Trump, however, and the lack of proper checks and balances within the US federal system, has raised serious international concerns. Trump is an extremely lazy, ignorant and noisy man who is drawn to other big boss figures on the world stage. He’s keen on making big, momentous, much talked-about decisions in which he’s seen as a winner, and damn the details (and the effect upon the losers). I can’t help but feel that Tom Phillips had Trump in mind, when, in his 2017 book Humans: a brief history of how we fucked it all up, he described the attitude toward leadership, and work, of the world’s most notorious mass-murderer:
… it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show. In fact, this may have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies…
Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren’t actually wrong in their assessment of his competency – they just failed to realise that this wasn’t enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich wrote later in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, ‘In the 12 years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilised state’.
His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea of what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans.
There’s a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really really bad at being in charge of stuff… But when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country.
Tom Phillips, Humans… pp 129 -132
This is Trump to a T – (okay, replacing the obsessive anti-semitism with a more generalised bigotry). In his previous outing as Prez there was much bemused reporting about his ‘down-time’ and his ‘passion’ for playing golf… You just don’t get that kind of ‘leadership’ from someone who has come up through the party ranks via a proven ability to work for her constituents, to bring people together, to effectively articulate and institute policies. As I’ve written before, if there was an effective vetting system for candidates, a system Trump has never been subjected to, he would never have been hired to manage a public toilet, never mind a nation. Nevertheless the US system allows this. They even boast that any of their citizens can become President. But that’s definitely not what you want, and it’s nothing to boast about.
References
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017
Tom Phillips, Humans: a brief history of how we fucked it all up, 2017
this disastrous election and its global consequences
A Palestinian protest held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the day of Trump’s election
It’s November 5 in Australia, 1.32 am in the USA and their election is determined. Not already determined, but determined nonetheless – just as Trump and Harris are determined, by their respective genetic inheritances and their vastly different backgrounds. I don’t know vast amounts about those backgrounds, but enough to know that they were raised in very different circumstances by very different people.
Trump’s influences were mostly male, capitalistic and grasping, to the effect that he had a million dollars to play with, sort of, by age 8. As an adult he has bankrupted himself six times. He has of course, been a chronic tax avoider, and it’s clear that this and other traits, such as his everyday racism, his attitude to women, his big-noting of himself, and his various get-richer schemes, were laid down early in life. Trump’s father Fred was a real estate developer and businessman who lived well into his 90s, and clearly he was the principal influence in Donald’s life. His mother Mary is described as a socialite and philanthropist, presumably on the basis of her husband’s wealth.
Kamala Harris is the USA’s current Vice-President, which means, according to the USA’s rank-obsessed political system, she has already become the USA’s highest ranked female. Her father is a Jamaican-American professor of economics, and her late mother, born in Madras (now Chennai) in India, was a researcher in women’s health, notably breast cancer. They divorced when Kamala was a child of 6 or 7. Clearly these academic interests impacted on Kamala just as Fred Trump’s pecuniary interests heavily influenced Donald, but the fact that Kamala was brought up for much of her childhood by a single mother would have heavily shaped her view on women’s issues.
I’ve collected this scanty information from the public record, which of course provides very little in the way of granular detail, but enough to indicate vastly different life trajectories in a land of great contrast socially and culturally, together with the developed world’s most massive rich-poor divide.
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So twenty-four hours later, Trump has won the presidency of the USA, this time including the popular vote, which, in my view, is the only vote that should count in a one-on-one election for near-dictatorial powers (though of course no such political system should exist in a democracy and, as far as I’m aware, no other democratic system provides such dictatorial power to a single individual).
In my view, the most serious disadvantage Harris faced in this election was the fact that she is a woman. We don’t know as yet how the election, for the first time, of a convicted felon to this dictatorial position will pan out, but even if it ends in disaster, it’s my view that no woman will be given the top job – held by men in that country for over 230 years – for decades to come. And I suspect that the presidential role will only cease to be overly empowered to the ridiculous and catastrophic degree that it is today when a woman is elected to that position. Not any woman, it must be said. Not a woman like Margaret Thatcher or Sheikh Hasina, but a woman indeed like Kamala Harris or Jacinda Ardern.
I’m reluctant to think about the internal future of the USA over the next few years – I thankfully live far away from that storm – but of course I worry for the Palestinian and Ukrainian people, and for Xi’s now-boosted ambitions regarding Taiwan. The world is terribly interconnected, and we should have interconnected and humane concerns, but there’s not much use telling that to one of the most self-centred human beings on the planet, an individual who now has control of the world’s largest military-industrial complex, and who worships dictators.
My first instinct is to avert my eyes from the USA. And yet, I have that curiosity that allegedly killed the cat. I shall try to direct this curiosity to related matters. Having just read Peter Apps’ comprehensive biography of NATO, I know that this development will create something of a crisis for other NATO nations. They will have to step up their support of Ukraine, and do all that they can to avert the serious possibility that Trump and his minions will actually provide support to the dictator. As to the people of Gaza – what is there to say? Trump has no fellow-feeling whatsoever. Absolutely none. This has nothing to do with politics. Trump is not a politician, or anything like a normal human being. The term malignant narcissist has never been more apt for an individual, and it’s obvious to any reasonably informed observer, that’s why the fault of his becoming any nation’s leader doesn’t lie with him but with that nation’s massively ineffective guardrails. And the whole world is going to suffer, we don’t yet know how much, for that nation’s massive failure.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyamala_Gopalan
Peter Apps, Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO
On the strange world of US politics, jingoism, superheroes and the rise of social media
the mind’s new minefield
The main problem with the US Federal political system, it seems to me, is that far too many United Staters, including the nation’s political pundits, think there’s nothing much wrong with their political system. Jingoism doesn’t tend to foster a reformist agenda.
Here’s a simple example. On MSNBC, during a discussion of the two failed impeachment proceedings against then President Trump, Chuck Rosenberg, a lawyer and NBC pundit, referred to the resignation of Britain’s former PM Boris Johnson. ‘Removing a President should be hard’, he said with much gravitas, ‘we certainly don’t want to be able to dump our political leaders the way they do in Britain’. I felt a very strong urge to scream at the screen “YES YOU DO!” It should be policies and effective governance that counts, not pumped-up individuals.
It has since become clear that even a clear-cut federal election loss isn’t enough to convince some that their time of leadership has come to an end. This isn’t particularly surprising in the case of Trump, who ‘always wins’ in spite of losing the 2016 election to Hilary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. But of course he ‘won’ that year by virtue of a bizarre system known as the Electoral College. In fact he was the fifth candidate in US history to win only by virtue of this system after losing the popular vote. Even so, we have to ask how such a profoundly ignorant, lazy, corrupt, habitually duplicitous buffoon could have managed to score anything like enough votes to take over the running of the wealthiest, most heavily armed and internationally dominant country on the planet.
Well, needless to say, the problem lies with the USA’s socio-political system, not with Trump, who likely hasn’t added a single neuron to his pre-frontal cortex since the age of seven.
Firstly, that impeachment issue, and the concept of Presidential immunity. Impeachment, which either doesn’t exist or is never used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK or Ireland (and I think that’s all of the other majority-English speaking democracies), is an overly politicised weapon, best abandoned. If a President has broken a law – and he (it’s aways been a he) or she should be subject to all the laws that other citizens are subject to – then they should be tried by the courts, not by any political body. And it goes without saying that court justices and magistrates should not be appointed by political bodies but by independent authorities, insofar as this is possible.
Secondly, on immunity. The British monarch is immune from prosecution, a hangover from the days of Divine Rights. Fortunately, these monarchs today have no political power, and I’m not opposed to vestigial monarchies, such as exist in Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium, as a link to the past, an anchoring national symbol and a tourist drawcard, though I do think they should all be as subject to the nation’s laws as all other citizens. US Presidential immunity, however, is far more disturbing, as Trump’s attempts to utilise it reveals. So, in some respects, Trump is an asset, in that he’s exposed the gaping holes in the US Presidential system. Will United Staters unite to fix their system? I very much doubt it. Recall that their nation’s Attorney-General, or chief law enforcement officer, is chosen by the President himself, and recall that William Barr, realising full well that Trump was looking for a potential A-G that would protect him from the consequences of his own crimes, wrote an ‘unsolicited memo’, which some lawyers (non-Republicans of course), criticised for
its sweeping views of the president’s constitutional role and prerogatives, including the notion that the president has “absolute” and “all-encompassing” constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress, including decisions about criminal investigation and prosecution.
and so forth (this from the ACLU) . Barr went on to become Attorney-General and to suppress any action based on the Mueller report’s damning findings. Since then, Presidential immunity has been argued with immense tediousness by people who should know better. Of course there should be no immunity for politicians of any kind. Their actions can have huge effects, so it stands to reason that a whole suite of laws should regulate their behaviour, above and beyond the behaviour of others. And the greater the politician’s power, the more it should be constrained by law. But of course, much better not to give your political leader so much power in the first place. These people are public servants after all.
This brings me to the USA’s attitude to their Presidents, which strikes me as quasi-religious. They even, rather bizarrely, remember them by number.
Here’s a bit of my view on this. The USA is the land of the super-hero. Make no mistake, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonderwoman, The Justice League of America, all these I alone can fix it guys are US-born aliens. And not only do they defeat all the bad guys, they clean up or go over the heads of all the corrupt or incompetent local officials. It’s a childish fantasy but it seems the USA’s great unwashed are full of these childish fantasists
In the USA, the President gets to choose many powerful figures apart from the A-G and the Vice President, who have never been elected by the people. Unlike in the Westminster system, none of these powerful figures have to show up in Parliament/Congress, to face opposition or questioning of their actions. They seem more like Presidential courtiers than government ministers. Here’s a quote from the White House website:
The President also appoints the heads of more than 50 independent federal commissions, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as federal judges, ambassadors, and other federal offices.
Of course, in Australia and other Westminster-based nations, the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) gets to select and reshuffle her cabinet, but all are elected officials who must work within the parliament and within spitting distance of the opposition. I’ve written elsewhere about my – discomfort, shall we say – with adversarial systems, and I would like to see more of a multi-party system in all of the countries of the WEIRD world. The USA has become more of an Us v Them system than most, to its detriment, I think. After all, governments usually ‘get in’ by relatively slender margins and will be ousted by slender margins in their turn, and yet we constantly see the incoming government overturning the best work of the previous government, and then having their changes overturned in their turn. Surely we can do better than this.
Under Trump, of course, the partisanship has become more extreme, and the Republican Party itself has become bewitched, bothered and bewildered by their nation’s laziest and most corrupt and deceitful leader. And surely, to understand this you have to understand his appeal, for the non-cognoscenti in particular.
Voting isn’t compulsory in the Land of Freedom, so it’s not surprising that millions don’t give a damn about their government, but many of those people must be feeling the squeeze. The USA has the largest per capita imprisonment rate in the WEIRD world (3.5 times higher than here in Australia), as well as the death penalty in many states (Australia abandoned the death penalty nationwide nearly 60 years ago). It has the lowest federal minimum wage, and a rich-poor divide much larger than ours (Australia has the highest minimum wage, federally, outside of Luxembourg). It also fares poorly in terms of basic healthcare and education, and its high levels of Christian religiosity – only about 5% of United Staters identify themselves as atheists – helps explain the current disastrous situation regarding women’s control of their bodies. And with the USA’s more or less never-ending ‘war on drugs’, the country’s poor would be ill-advised to find relief in that area.
And yet. Even with all these problems and disaffections, I find it hard to credit the public gullibility vis-a-vis Trump. Reading history helps, sort of. Hitler had millions of admirers, both inside and outside of Germany, before his downfall, and the same could be said for countless dictators of nations large and small – they’re not called populist leaders for nothing. How do we explain this? – by looking at the situation, and most notably the economic situation, of the dictator’s followers, learning about their grievances, their fears, their group dynamics, sharpened nowadays by social media….
Here’s another anecdote. A few years ago, shortly after the 2020 Presidential election, in an attempt to get out of the house and meet real people I decided to go to a meet-up (here in South Australia) with the impressive name ‘Deep Thinkers’, with decidedly mixed results. After a couple of pleasant chats I moved on to buttonhole a bloke sitting at the bar. As he looked Middle-Eastern, I asked him where he was from (I didn’t say he looked Middle-Eastern). ‘Port Pirie’, he said, naming a small industrial town about 250 kilometres north of Adelaide. I felt as if I’d made a blunder, but we went on to talk about infotech, his field of work, and computer literacy. Then, during a lull, apropos of nothing, he said, ‘I think Trump is one of the greatest Presidents the USA has ever had’. Well, needless to say, things went downhill fast after that (though on the whole, relations remained amicable), but on later reflection, I felt the effects of trepverter, a Yiddish word, supposedly meaning ‘a witty comeback you think of too late’, but which I think of more broadly, as a response I only come up with when I’m alone and my head is clear (I seem to live most of my life in this broadly defined trepverter world). So instead of rabbiting on about Trump’s ignorance and incompetence, I’d have done better to inquire how my interlocutor had arrived at this conclusion. Was he perchance a historian of the US Presidency? Would he be able to name any of the other great US Presidents? Provide me with a top ten, along with a bottom ten? The point being that it was obvious that he was not an authority on US politics, which was confirmed by other remarks he subsequently made, that he was a ‘conservative Christian’, and that he ‘never listens to the mainstream’ (a particularly telling remark). His ‘opinion’ of Trump was purely a parroting of a social media meme, and I rests my case.
This social media phenomenon is quite powerful, and it’s relatively new, and certainly has disturbing elements. To be explored in future posts.
a conversation about dictatorship, intellectuals, bonobos and the strange case of the USA
Francisco Lopez, one of the world’s lesser known dictators – unless you’re Paraguayan (see references)
Canto: So there’s now Putin’s macho invasion of Ukraine, Trump & co’s macho trampling of US democracy, such as it is, Hamas and its macho terrorist attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s massive macho response, Xi’s macho politburo and his assault on female empowerment, and the usual macho claptrap in Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Yemen, etc etc, etc, so how’s your bonobo world going?
Jacinta: Well, my teensy-tiny part of the world is going okay, and hopefully that tiny-teensy patch south of the Congo River is too, for now. And patches of the WEIRD world are making slow progress, from century to century.
Canto: So you’re taking the long view. How admirable. Seriously, it’s the only way we can maintain any optimism. When the internet suddenly became a big thing in everyone’s life, I was excited – so much useful knowledge at our fingertips without having to visit libraries, subscribe to science magazines, buy books and so on – I didn’t really pay much attention to the social media aspect and its dangers, which have become so overwhelming in the USA, but probably here as well for all I know. I often hear – it’s repeated so often it’s almost as if I comprehend it – that so-and-so has been ‘radicalised by social media’. But what does that really mean?
Jacinta: Well, I think it starts with the fact that people want to be with like-minded people. They like to be part of an ‘in-group’. People who really deserve the ‘intellectual’ title are actually in a tiny minority. They’re generally more independent-minded and suspicious of any in-group thinking.
Canto: And yet, bonobos are real groupies, aren’t they? Isn’t that a problem for you?
Jacinta: I’m not pretending we should be like bonobos in all ways, but, since we’ve been focussing on free will, and the lack thereof, our recognition of this lack should make us more compassionate, from an intellectual perspective. And bonobos are the compassionate, and passionate apes, presumably not coming at it from an intellectual perspective. What they’ve become ‘instinctively’, we need to become from a more knowledge-based, intellectual perspective.
Canto: Way to become more sexy, by just giving it more thought.
Jacinta: It doesn’t require that much thought, just an open-eyed – and certainly more female-centred – view of what macho violence has done and is still doing.
Canto: What about the ‘problem’ of female self-obsession, fashion-consciousness, and general ‘femininity’ – highlighting the decorative over the functional?
Jacinta: Like the ‘problem’ of male dressing tough, or business-like or sporty-casual or whatever, these are minor differences which are already changing with greater equality. Visit any Aussie pub. Anyway, looking decorative rather than functional has often to more to do with status than gender. Though there’s still a way to go.
Canto: I’ve noted that human society, at least in the WEIRD world, seems to be divided into right or left wing obsessionalism. What do you make of this?
Jacinta: Taking the long view, it’s a passing phase..
Canto: Well if you take the long view everything’s a passing phase. Nations are a passing phase, and now everyone’s obsessed with borders and the status of immigrants, as if migration hasn’t been a thing since humans came into being and before – ask any bird-dinosaur.
Jacinta: So, such terms as neo-Marxism or neo-fascism seem laughable to me. It’s largely macho stuff. We’re more about wanting to get on with people, recognising our different backgrounds and influences and trying to find common grounds rather than ideological grounds for grievance. And what are those grounds? The desire to be heard, accepted, even loved. Youse men are too interested in besting, in winning. Of course, I’m generalising – there are male-type females and vice versa.
Canto: Well, I can’t disagree. But isn’t that competitive spirit good for capitalism as well as war?
Jacinta: Ah, capitalism. There are info-wars out there about whether capitalism is good or bad. To me, it’s either, or it’s both, because it’s much more than some political ideology. Birds do it, bees do it, even the fungi in the trees do it. It’s more than just human nature.
Canto: So, you mean capitalising?
Jacinta: Yes, and you can do it in a dumb way – say, by basing much of your diet on one or two species, hunting and gathering them to extinction, then heading towards extinction yourself because you can’t change your culinary ways. Moving to an agricultural lifestyle was a smart but risky thing to do, and was best done gradually, as with any change of diet….
Canto: But this has nothing to do with capitalism as we know it.
Jacinta: Ha, I neither know nor care about the dictionary definition of capitalism. Or the political definition, I should say. I’m thinking it in the broadest sense – capitalising on food and other resources, on our smarts, our technology, our history. And we can be synergistic capitalists, or symbiotic capitalists. Isn’t that what trade is all about? And getting back to bonobos, isn’t their sexual play a kind of synergistic capitalism, especially with the females? They’re building bonds that unite the community, especially the females when the odd too-aggressive male starts to cause trouble. Social capital, they call it. We need more social capital.
Canto: Trade alliances seem to be good for maintaining the peace I suppose, but it’s all beginning to fray…
Jacinta: Idiots like Trump, as far as he has any policies, think that closing the borders and shitting on your allies will MAGA, as if isolationism has ever benefitted any nation that wants to progress. How are the Andaman Islanders going?
Canto: Trump just intuits that the idea will resonate with his base, insofar as he thinks at all.
Jacinta: Yes, being born into wealth, but without intellect, by which I mean intellectual curiosity, the kind of mind that tries to ‘rise above the self and grasp the world’, to quote our blog’s motto, he’s purely interested in self-promotion, and his instincts tell him it’s not the curious and the questioning that’ll follow him, but those impressed by his wealth and his bluster. Look at any dictator – they all project this air of extreme self-importance, it’s the first and last, the ‘must-have’ quality.
Canto: And the fact that there are always so so so many dupes for these guys, that’s what astonishes me most. Why is it so?
Jacinta: I think conditions have to be right. There has to be a substantial proportion of the population that are under-educated, but above all suffering, feeling deprived, abandoned, desperate. Smart, successful and well-heeled people seek out their own, and easily slip into the fantasy that most people are like them. They’re not, especially in places like the USA, with its rich-poor gap, its tattered social safety net, its pathetic minimum wage, its massive incarceration rate, its group-think holy rollers and the like. And surely no nation is more deluded about its own superiority than the USA, so vague but persistent appeals to patriotism, which are the sine qua non for dictators (Hitler being the prime example of that) will always play exceptionally well there.
Canto: Hmmm, quite an indictment, but the USA, to be fair, is very diverse, almost like a few countries rolled into one. New York State and the north-east coast seem to be no-go areas for Trump, and California too… that’s my uneducated guess. It’s like the civil war never ended, it’s so divided. United States indeed!
Jacinta: Haha, we should get off this obsession with the US, but indeed, I’ve often thought they’d be better off dividing the place into two, or even three. Or rather, I just wish they’d do it for our entertainment’s sake.
Canto: Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of macho ground – though it often feels like the female Trumpets blow the hardest. But they can’t help it – no free will after all, right?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but that’s not a cause for despair – determinism isn’t pre-determinism. It means working towards a world in which the determining factors are as positive as they can be. But that’s for another time…
References
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/trump-approval-rating-by-state
revisiting US ‘exceptionalism’, Trumpism and justice delayed
Canto: We’ve been watching US politics with a kind of painful obsessiveness, I suppose because it’s more colourful, but not in a particularly good way, than anything we experience in Australia. The Presidential system is largely a shocker, and should be best jettisoned altogether, IMHO, but that’ll never happen. The USA is exceptional only in its jingoism and its religiosity, as I’ve said many times and oft, and that is best seen in its attitude to its political system and its Dear Leader…
Jacinta: Well the thing is, before the advent of Trump we paid scant attention to the details of the US political system, but since the election of someone so obviously incapable of running a public toilet let alone a barely inhabited country, to the position of President of the most militarily and economically powerful nation on the planet, we’ve set ourselves on a steep learning curve.
Canto: Or we’re just watching like ghouls at a smouldering train wreck. By the way, I should point out that Russia has slightly more nuclear warheads than the USA (though as to the comparative cumulative power of those sets of warheads I’m not sure), though doubtless their non-nuclear materiel and personnel are far superior. And as for their economy, yes they have the world’s largest GDP, collectively (though I’m sure that’s an over-simplifying measure), but Ireland’s per capita GDP is quite a bit higher!
Jacinta: Yes I think per capita GDP is a better measure of economic success, but then you’d have to realise that’s just total GDP divided by population – doesn’t tell us about how the wealth is distributed. But it’s interesting to compare the USA with Australia, which has a similar land mass, especially if you exclude Alaska. The population of the USA is about 14 times that of Australia, and it’s not because the superiority of the USA’s ingenious people and political system has made it a magnet for immigrants. Most of Australia has infamously poor soil and climate for agriculture, as white colonists soon discovered, and it’s much further from Europe than the so-called New World is. We call ourselves ‘the lucky country’, dog knows why – presumably because every nation has to find or invent something positive to sing about itself, aka nationalism, but the fact is that Europeans found it very difficult to establish themselves here. We don’t have any records about the Aboriginal population that arrived here some 50,000 years ago, but my guess is that it was a slow, painstaking learning process, even if the climate was very different then.
Canto: So getting back to that steep learning curve, what the advent of Trump taught us was that, indeed, anyone can become the USA’s Dear Leader, even a tantrumming man-child who’s likely never read a book in his life and has spent the last fifty-odd years grifting, bullshitting and fucking people around. And what does that say about the USA?
Jacinta: And can it happen here? The reason that it’s unlikely to happen in Westminster-style countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and of course Britain is that a political leader first has to win his own local seat, then has to win over her political colleagues with her abilities – her understanding of policy, her articulacy, her charisma or je ne sais quoi, and so forth – which isn’t to say that a bunch of reasonably sophisticated pollies can’t be taken in by a pig-ignorant narcissist posing as one of their own – it’s just a lot less likely.
Canto: Yes, your point is that we don’t have a system where a wannabe demagogue can go straight to the people, bypassing parties, policies and local elections in an effort to be king for a few years. And we certainly don’t have a system which gives that demagogue/king massive pardoning powers, wholesale immunity, a White Palace to live in, and hand-picked courtiers in charge of foreign affairs, federal law, the treasury, the defence of the realm and dog knows what else.
Jacinta: And yet… with all the leeway given to Trump, I’m still amazed that someone so obviously a charlatan to us could have fooled so many into thinking he, of all people, would make a good leader, would somehow improve their lives, make their country ‘great’ in some vague way. Admittedly those people were never in the majority, he has never won an election on the numbers alone, but still a very substantial number were taken in by him. And still are.
Jacinta: There were probably some who thought him a useful idiot for their purposes – for example, libertarians who saw him as the sort of wrecker of government they were looking for – but their numbers wouldn’t have been that great. It’s a worry, but again it’s the US political system that’s largely at fault. As I said, the reason it’s unlikely to happen here isn’t because our population is smarter or less easily swayed by demagogues – it’s because of the checks and balances of our system. A Trump-like figure would have to persuade his political peers long before he tried to persuade the people. And if he couldn’t do that, he wouldn’t be in a position to go ‘to the people’. And of course we don’t do political rallies like United Staters do.
Canto: In any case, the Trump saga is becoming increasingly entertaining for us here in the peanut gallery, with a number of indictments converging upon him. Let me see – there’s the hush payments that Cohen was sentenced to three years’ jail for, and ‘individual one’, Trump, was regularly mentioned in the paperwork. It was obvious that Cohen only did it for Trump, so Trump should’ve gotten a much stiffer sentence than three years – at the time. Immunity for political leaders is total shite, and justice delayed is justice denied. I mean, duh!!!
Jacinta: Okay, calme-toi, better late than never. So that’s a biggie, and pretty much an open-and-shut case. Then there’s the classified docs case, which also looks straightforward, and looks even worse for him after recent revelations that he was personally involved in obstructing those trying to recover the documents. Again this is a jailable offence even without the obstruction, and Jack Smith, the DoJ’s Special Counsel, has himself handled lesser cases involving this crime, which have resulted in prison sentences. He’s also faced with a rape case brought against him by E Jean Carroll – in fact, now two cases involving rape and defamation, as the presiding judge refused to put them under one umbrella. You’ll be pleased to know that the defamation matter seems to hinge on whether the Dear Leader had immunity about what he said while holding office.
Canto: Yeah, despicable. So we’ve mentioned three, and there are at least two more – or no, three. There’s the investigation into Trump.org, which he can hardly be said to be innocent of. And then there’s the Fulton County case of election interference, which again looks open-and-shut, and of course the whole January 6 insurrection, resulting in well over 1000 people being charged thus far. And how involved was he in the fake electors scheme? It all makes me feel quite dizzy, in a pleasant way.
Jacinta: Meanwhile, there seems to be no appetite for diluting Presidential power or changing their system, or any realisation that it’s the screamingly obvious problem that outsiders see it as being.
Canto: And most of the current Republican leadership seem to be supporting Trump! How can that nation ever recover from this disaster? My view has long been that Biden (now 80 years old) should have declared himself a one-term President ages ago. They need renewal, to get over all this…
Jacinta: Yes, age limits might be a good idea. But I don’t want to be ageist – Biden has a lot of experience, and he’s surrounded himself with a very competent team, to be fair. Still, limiting all Presidential terms to four years would be an excellent reform, methinks.
Canto: The good thing, re Trump, is that they’re much more prepared now against his shenanigans. Let the court cases begin! The next year or so will be most memorable for Trumpworld.
References
https://www.worlddata.info/largest-economies.php
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/02/trump-mar-a-lago-obstruction-classified/
Getting wee Donny 5
DA Fanni Willis – going for it
Canto: so our last conversation on this topic was subtitled ‘the waiting game’. We’re still waiting.
Jacinta: Never fear, the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends towards getting wee Donny.
Canto: Yeah well I want it to happen within his lifetime thanks. It seems the number of civil and possibly criminal cases keeps rising, but it’s like heaven, where nothing ever happens.
Jacinta: Yes, we are not amused, but we are a bit. Wikipedia even has a page called ‘list of lawsuits involving Donald Trump’, but it’s probably well out of date.
Canto: I suppose we need to divide them into civil cases – suits for damages – and criminal cases. We’re certainly not lawyers, though of course we’re super-smart, so we should be able to make sense of it all.
Jacinta: Yes, well we’re not going to deal with them in order of importance, because there’s a certain degree of subjectivity in such ordering – many civil cases are of vital and immediate concern to some but not to others. For us non-United-Staters little of this is of direct concern, we’re just watching from the peanut gallery.
Canto: Yes, so Trump v Vance – which has been rather long-running, but with important recent developments. It started with a subpoena by Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance in August 2019 to obtain multiple wee Donny documents from the Mazars accounting firm – though there’s been pressure on the wee one to present his tax returns ever since his infamous election.
Jacinta: Yes, and it’s been resisted with BS like he’s perennially under audit, that nobody cares about his taxes, and that he’s the boss of everyone so nyanya. Anyway, on July 20 2020 the US Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, found that a sitting president wasn’t above having to comply with a state criminal subpoena. The case was sent back to do the rounds of the lower courts, on the basis that Donny and his wee minions might be able to find other reasons for not complying, and so it went – the lower courts dismissed claims that the subpoena was over-broad, and the case eventually arrived back at the Supreme Court, which sat on it from October 2020 to February this year, presumably because of the election, but eventually it denied the request to hear the case again, so Mazars has handed over the docs for review by a grand jury in Vance’s criminal case, which started with hush money payments to Stormy Daniels but has since clearly broadened. The House Oversight and Reform Committee, which issued a subpoena for the same Mazars records some years ago and was ignored, has now reissued that subpoena, which the wee one will no doubt fight.
Canto: Expensive business. But the Vance case has generated much attention due to his hiring of forensic analysts and a highly-touted mob prosecutor recently. An interesting piece in the New Yorker last month, though, presents the case as running for at least the rest of this year, just in its investigative phase, which means Vance will have retired by the time we get to see any action. It’s still very much a waiting game.
Jacinta: The other major case is out of Georgia, where they’re trying to rig elections beforehand, so that future trumpery types don’t have to get their hands dirty trying to throttle votes out of hapless officials next time around. Fulton County DA Fanni Willis, who’s pursuing wee Donny on illegal interference, including ‘solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy and racketeering’ in the 2020 election in Georgia, has hired one John Floyd, a lawyer who has written a book on prosecuting racketeering cases. I suspect, though that these possible charges will end up being watered down.
Canto: Well it might be that Willis has a thing for racketeering, as she won a high-profile racketeering case, re cheating on school tests, but this one takes high-profile to a higher level, to put it mildly.
Jacinta: Anyway Willis is being gutsy, in a traditionally Republican state (though it might well be changing, as witness the Ossoff and Warnock victories), taking on the Republican enfant terrible, wee Donny, when the Republican governor is doing his utmost to support the wee one by trying to make it impossible for Democrats to win there again.
Canto: But I really think the Republicans are shooting themselves in the arse with all this voter suppression shite. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few months, with, it seems, the Democrats on the up and up re popular support. But I must say, I rather enjoy watching United Stater politics compared to the Australian version. I’m talking just as a spectator sport. There are just so many arseholes, lick-spittles, gold-diggers, out-and-out morons, and their counterparts, underdog heroes, justice warriors, passion-spun vloggers and the like – it all makes Australian politics look hopelessly staid.
Jacinta: Well, having 14 times Australia’s population certainly helps, with the good, the bad and the ugly. But getting back to wee Donny, clearly his criminal activities over a lifetime should see him in jail for the rest of his hopefully long and painful life…
Canto: And may dogs have mercy on his bloated carcass.
Jacinta: … but we’re talking about the USA here, so he won’t get much if anything in the way of jail time. For example, like Al Capone, he might get caught on his tax dodges, but not on fomenting insurrection or causing widespread death through covid disinformation and negligence.
Canto: Hopefully all the lawsuits will lighten his wallet, but I have to concede that he’s an expert sponger and grifter, and I imagine that an ex-President’s emoluments would be eye watering from our modest perspective, never mind all the real estate he’s accumulated.
Jacinta: Well let’s be optimistic, apart from the 29 lawsuits, most of which are undoubtedly of the sort any decent lawyer would love to act on, it really does look like the Manhattan case has legs. Everybody knows he’s a tax crook – he’s more or less admitted it himself.
Canto: Interestingly, an Australian news piece agrees that he could see jail time, though they quote some of his associates saying he’s more likely to flee the country – something I’ve often thought myself. Vlad would welcome him – he’d get an erection at the very thought of harbouring wee Donny, and having him speak out endlessly against the US from his new home.
Jacinta: Yes, Vlad would make him very comfy, that’s for sure. More fodder for the peanut gallery. It would be amusing if these turkeys didn’t do so much damage…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Donald_Trump
https://abcnews.go.com/US/fulton-county-da-opens-criminal-probe-trumps-efforts/story?id=75804119