The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. The country is hearing the voices that the cacophony of fear and anger had drowned out for almost three years. The spell, such as it was, and in most places, may be wearing off at last. The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency* is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.
One day, maybe, brave Guatemalan mothers and their very brave children may be said to have saved the American Republic from slow-motion and giddy suicide. Some even may be our fellow citizens by then, and we should remember to thank them.
www.esquire.com/...
American Legal Realism was not just the possession of liberals like Karl Llewellyn; there were also many prominent American racists of the 1930s who embraced it. The “realistic” attitude in American law did not just involve yielding to political decision makers when it came to economic legislation; it was also involved yielding to political decision makers when it came to racist legislation. And while some prominent realists spoke out against American racism, during the 1930s, most passed over the race question in silence. In that sense the American Legal Realism of the early 1930s was entirely at home in the early New Deal, founded as it was on the Mephistophelean bargain between economic reformers and southern racists. (p.82)
Yes, of course it is also true that the United States was, and remains, the pioneer of many magnificent legal institutions. Of course there were also many aspects of the liberal democratic tradition in America that the Nazis found contemptible. Of course America proved a generous place of refuge for at least some of the victims of Nazism. Nevertheless when it came to race law, numerous Nazi lawyers regarded America as the prime exemplar; and, much though we may wish to deny it, it was not outlandish for them to think of their program of the early 1930s as a more thorough going and rigorous realization of American approaches toward blacks, Asians, native Americans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and others—even if the regime had shifted its sights to a new target in the form of the Jews, even if it would later take the racist exercise of modern state power in an unimaginably horrifying new direction. (p.103)
Race and American culture provide a specific context for Trump's brand of authoritarianism. His ugliest promises to his base involve the literal whitening of the United States population: Mass incarceration, state barbarism and encouragement of white extremist terrorism to handle the black and brown people whom Trump voters dislike. (Not to mention stiff-arming immigrants of color from "shithole countries.") This was the animating principle of Trump's entire campaign. While a common suspicion is that the president's sycophancy to Russia's Vladimir Putin is about personal blackmail, we should consider what we can plainly see: the two share a central political interest in their opposition to The Other.
He may not yet have gulags and execution squads, but the president's work in the service of white supremacy goes hand in hand with his authoritarian impulses.
On Friday, a Department of Homeland Security official revealed that from April 19th through May 31st, the Trump administration separated nearly 2,000 immigrant children from family members who crossed the southern border of the United States, an average of 46 per day. Border Patrol documents revealed that 91 percent of parents who were referred for prosecution after having their children forcibly taken from them were only being charged with a misdemeanor: First-time illegal entry.
As political scientist Jason Johnson said on MSNBC Sunday morning, "People need to understand that white nationalism is not, 'I don't want you in this neighborhood and I don't want you in Starbucks.' You cannot accomplish white nationalism without, basically, turning the government into a terrorist organization." How better to describe the American despotism Trump has wrought?
The Trump administration is practicing an un-legislated policy that is deliberately creating fear, pain and discord. Trump and his underlings aren't even bothering to ensure the restoration of these families, deporting some parents without their children. The president's acolytes also deny that he can stop this, and many Republicans in Congress refuse to do the same. If they wanted to pass and sign some laws offering real solutions for the immigration issue, they would do it. Trump and his party are content, instead, to destroy lives to pass the time – and to allow said destruction to become profitable for government contractors. America is what we make of it, or more precisely, what we allow our leaders to make of it.
Sometimes, we forget where we are. Folks who fail or refuse to grasp that we live in an America that is capable of shedding our democratic norms and embracing policies of pure hatred are treading water in a tsunami.
Trump is now capitalizing upon that false exceptionalism, that belief that it cannot happen here, to execute the white-supremacist agenda that got him elected. His despotic urges pair well with a complicit Congress and a devout following. Whether or not Trump actually wants to rule the United States for life, he is acting like it.
www.rollingstone.com/...