Something that can’t be repeated often enough: this is NOT a normal election. The choices have never been more stark. What happens in November could mean the end of America as a democracy. Even if that doesn’t happen, the threat will remain. We need to understand what we are up against.
David Corn is currently traveling, so the latest issue of his Our Land newsletter is a September27, 2023 rerun — but an especially relevant one, given the battle with Trump over gag orders.
...Stochastic terrorism is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonization of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence. Scientific American recently put it this way:
Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims. At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.
In addition to disgust, fear and hatred can work, the point being to depict a person or set of people as a loathsome other undeserving of respect or acceptance, and a dangerous threat. Establishing such a framework boosts the odds that a lone individual or group will violently assault the deprecated.
emphasis added
January 6 showed how incendiary words repeated and amplified can incite violence on a large scale. A constant drumbeat attacking individuals or groups can lead to attacks and worse — while the people inspiring such can escape consequences because there’s no direct link. They’re “just asking questions”,
”many people think”, “everyone knows” etc. etc.
Trump has always used bullying and intimidation throughout his business career — because it works. What he’s discovered is those tactics applied to politics can have even more leverage. He’s not the first in recent memory. Go back to Newt Gingrich and his memo Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. It showed how word choices can shape debate and perceptions. Trump has turned it up to 11, also applying Steve Bannon’s flood the zone with shit for maximum effect.
It’s not just Trump doing this either, as Corn notes:
Trump is hardly alone in deploying this form of terrorism. Last week, billionaire Xer Elon Musk tweeted, “The Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.” Given that billionaire philanthropist George Soros has long been the target of antisemitic attacks, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and at least one assassination attempt, that Musk himself has previously mounted an antisemitic attack on Soros, and that Musk’s X platform has been credibly accused of hosting an increase in antisemitic posts, one might expect Musk to be a bit careful here. But…no. Musk didn’t call for violence to be waged against Soros, yet by characterizing Soros as seeking the “destruction of western civilization,” he hyperbolically presents Soros as an existential threat to the United States and the entire Western world. Now what should one do about such a threat?
READ THE WHOLE THING. The press and the legal system is having trouble coping with this reality. It’s not something that will go away if polite people refuse to acknowledge it. Where are the consequences that would deter Trump and those like him? As Corn concludes:
Then again, why should it? Trump has done worse. He has (so far) gotten away both with trying to mount a coup and with inciting a violent riot that he hoped to exploit to stay in power—at least insofar as he’s the odds-on favorite to snag the Republican nomination. And despite all that, he’s often treated by much of the mainstream media as a politician, not a peril. Yet for the security of American democracy, Trump needs to be widely seen for what he is: this stochastic terrorist. The more he vilifies his detractors, the more he assaults the justice system, the more likely there will be more violence. He knows this, and that is the point.
What Comes After Stochastic Terrorism? Jamison Foser spells it out in his Finding Gravity sub stack newsletter. He addresses directly what the mainstream media is still unable to articulate. Trump is embracing Fascism.
...For years, media coverage of Donald Trump’s fascist tendencies has typically focused on one question: Is he?
Yes, he is. We know this. He tells us as much every day, with both words and actions.
And so it is time — long past time, really — for media coverage to turn to a new central question: Trump is campaigning the way fascists campaign, so how do fascists govern? What is life like in fascist regimes? Not just the broad strokes or big principles — everyday life.
…What would life for everyday Americans look like in a Trumpian autocracy? How would turning our government into an oligarchy of Trump cronies and sycophants affect the economy, the delivery of basic services? The collapse of liberal democracy is not an abstraction. There’s a story to tell there. An important one. What does life look like in Putin’s Russia, in Orban’s Hungary? In nations that have been controlled by autocratic regimes in the past? That's a Trump-assault-on-democracy story that remains largely untold: How will it affect people? It’s a good and important story.
Foser observes that the media has failed to grasp and report how the GOP assault on democracy has real consequences.
How much coverage has there been about this? The Seattle Times reports on the recent Washington State Republican convention where the party openly rejected democracy with explicit language. Danny Westneat reports:
...A resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.
“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”
...Then they kicked it up a notch. They passed a resolution calling on people to please stop using the word “democracy.”
“We encourage Republicans to substitute the words ‘republic’ and ‘republicanism’ where previously they have used the word ‘democracy,’ ” the resolution says. “Every time the word ‘democracy’ is used favorably it serves to promote the principles of the Democratic Party, the principles of which we ardently oppose.”
The resolution sums up: “We … oppose legislation which makes our nation more democratic in nature.”
Egberto Willies covered this with a podcast. He also posted about it here at Daily Kos. This is not something exclusive to Washington State.
Sleepwalking into the Abyss
The warning lights are flashing red; the alarm sirens are screaming. Is anyone paying attention? Digby cites Dan Pfeiffer who sees the problem as this:
Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today answers one big question:
The biggest divide in politics is not between Left and Right; it’s between political junkies and everyone else. There is a massive chasm between those who actively seek out political news and the vast majority of the country. The gap has been exacerbated by tectonic shifts in the media environment. I summarized the changes that led to this “News Gap” in a recent post:
It has never been more difficult for voters to follow the news or for politicians to get attention. The traditional political media is at its nadir in influence, reach, and credibility. Audiences are declining and becoming more ideologically homogeneous. All but the most engaged voters have tuned out political news altogether.
Social media used to be a major conduit for news — no more. Elon Musk rendered Twitter utterly unusable. Facebook, once the most dominant media platform in the world, moved away from news and politics. TikTok emerged as a major news source for younger voters, but the information on that platform is often present without context; and credibility can be impossible to divine.
emphasis added
If you are reading this here at Daily Kos, odds are pretty good you are a ‘political junkie’. I don’t know about you, but I find it extremely frustrating that, not only do many people not realize what is happening, many of them actively do not want to know. Ever been told “Please don’t talk politics?” It’s like watching someone about to step in front of a bus even while you are yelling at them to look out.
Tom Sullivan writing at Digby’s Hullabaloo has a couple of posts on what’s happening. He links to a Jon Stewart clip while noting this about what the GOP wants:
A Jon Stewart clip from March resurfaced that echoes what I’ve been arguing for years. The underlying ethos of conservatism in this country is not patriotism but “monarchy shit.” Neofeudalism, to use a pointy-headed term. It’s not freedom orliberty, but a desire to bow and scrape before people believed to be your superiors by birth. Among people who fancy themselves superior by birth and their willingly supplicants.
Sullivan also echoes what Foser is warning about: people can’t imagine what life under a second Trump regime would be like.
We suffer from a failure of imagination, Tom Nichols argues, about what a second Trump administration would actually look and feel like. It’s not that the clues aren’t there. They are. Trump told us again in his Time interview this week:
In the interview, Trump once again promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists; once again, he vowed to use the Justice Department as his personal legal hit squad. He said he will prosecute Joe Biden, deport millions of people, and allow states with newly strict abortion regulations to monitor pregnant women. He will kneecap NATO and throw Ukraine to the Russians.
[…]
Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.
They say all politics is personal. Well, a lot of people are about to find out how personal things can get if things go south this November. It seems like a Phil Ochs classic is about as good a way as any to end this.