It IS Happening Here, And It's Happening Now
Even before the dawn of the Trump administration, I have been ranting about the rapid decline of our democracy. And Trump’s ascendency has only increased the rapidity of the Putinization of America. Of course, America’s institutions have a longer history and are far more robust than what Putin confronted when he first took over Russia. But the perpetual conservative project of asserting the primacy and supremacy of corporate interests fused with the ideological shift of the Republican party to protect the overlapping interests of white privilege has created the tyranny of two minorities whose apotheosis is Trump. And now the flaws in American democracy that have long existed are now being exploited by Trump and the Republicans in an attempt to install a durable autocratic regime.
When Putin assumed power, he attacked any restrictions on his power on three fronts. First, there was the effort to create a “managed democracy” where the trappings of democratic elections existed but the outcome of those elections are never in doubt. This is exactly the environment that Republicans are creating with extreme partisan gerrymandering, restrictions on voting rights via voter ID and felon disenfranchisement, and creating an actual lack of ballot access. We see clear instances in places like Wisconsin and Virginia where Democrats win an overwhelmingly larger share of the vote but gain absolutely no power. We have seen the Electoral College allow the last two Republican presidents to assume office after decisively losing the popular vote. In another two decades, it is estimated that 30% of the population will control 70 seats in the US Senate, rendering that body obsolete as representative of anything but a minority and effectively able to block any actions of the majority.
The second line of attack for Putin was to gain control of the judicial system. Again, long before Trump arrived on the scene, Republicans essentially determined that no Democratic president should be able to make appointments to the judiciary. This required blocking numerous qualified candidates for years and culminated in the unconstitutional refusal to even give Merrick Garland a hearing, much less a vote. Assuming that Trump will fill Kennedy’s open seat with Kavanaugh or someone else, that means that four of the nine justices on the Supreme Court will have been appointed by the loser of the popular vote. At the same time, Trump is packing the lower courts with political hacks and ideologues. Trump verbally attacks judges who rule against him and his administration, and Republican state legislators either attempt impeachment, block Democratic governors’ appointments, or rig judicial elections in order to maintain ideological control over the judicial branch. Yesterday, the administration also announced that administrative law judges will be political appointees rather than merit-based, effectively leaving government agencies at the mercy of the very corporations they are supposed to be regulating.
The corruption of the judiciary has been a decades-long conservative project, driven by the Federalist Society which now provides the ideological vetting of almost every judicial nominee. That ideology, under the guise of “originalism”, looks at the Constitution not as a framework for democracy but as a declaration that property rights should be enfettered and unencumbered from any governmental interference. In the 18th century, that meant slave-holding land owners. Today, that means favoring capital over labor or, to use Mitt Romney’s more blunt terminology, protecting the “makers” from the “takers”. The Democratic party, with its penchant for regulated capitalism, is an heretical attack on this view and, accordingly, is denied rights given to the Republican party which is the vehicle for the supremacy of corporate interests.
This corruption has infected the Supreme Court for decades already, with Bush v Gore, a decision so bad that its majority denied it should ever be used as precedent, an early indicator. At least a small part of the reason for that decision was the fact that Sandra Day O’Connor wished to retire but was loathe to let a Democrat nominate her replacement. With the appointment of Roberts and Alito, the Federalist Society view of the Constitution became the norm, leading to Citizens United, which allowed corporate and dark money (and yes, Justice Alito, foreign money) to further corrupt and dominate our political system, the destruction of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for partisan and racial gerrymandering as well as the suppression of voting rights, and now the destruction of labor and the establishment of rights for corporations not given to individual citizens. This view has led at least one of Trump’s potential nominees to seemingly indicate that Brown v Board of Education, the establishment of Social Security, and the ACA itself are all unconstitutional.
Finally, in a bizarre twist of logic, however, certain social and religious issues, such as restricting abortion or allowing discrimination based on religious preference, do require the intervention of the state, leading to incredible legal gymnastics by the Court’s majority.
That corruption is literal as well, with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society essentially paying a million dollar bribe to get Neil Gorsuch on the Court. And while Mitch McConnell may have killed the illusory independence of the Court with his denial of Merrick Garland, Anthony Kennedy certainly put the final nail in the coffin by negotiating his retirement and naming his successor at the same time his son was bailing Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner out of a horrendous real estate deal that threatened the viability of his entire company and while Kennedy himself was sitting on cases involving presidential power. That is more than unusual, it is clearly unethical. And nothing screams abuse of privilege like getting a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and then essentially being able to name your ideological successor as both O’Connor and Kennedy have clearly done. And Kennedy’s presumed successor perfectly reflects the partisan Federalist Society view, determining that a Democratic president must sit for a civil trial but a Republican president has unfettered power.
In a similar vein, the policing functions of the state are also becoming a political arm of the current Trump party. James Comey was fired for investigating Trump and his Russian connections. ICE and CBP are basically lawless policing forces unleashed by Trump. Both agencies have continually defied the courts, with the missed deadline for reuniting those children under 5 years of age with their parents being simply the latest abuse. The GOP Senate is close to confirming a Russian-tainted Trump crony to head the criminal division of the DOJ.
Of course, with the neutering of the judicial system and the regulatory and policing power of the state, rampant corruption becomes far easier. Trump himself violates the Emoluments Clause on a daily basis, ignores Congressional laws such as the imposition on Russian sanctions or the requirements of the Presidential Papers Act. His cabinet has been stuffed with grifters and charlatans like Tom Price, Mike Flynn, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Wilbur Ross who constantly engaged in brazen corruption. Almost every senior Trump official, from Jeff Sessions to Jared Kushner, has lied to Congress under oath or lied on their disclosure forms.
This goes hand-in-hand with the regulatory capture of government agencies by powerful oligarchic corporate interests. That power lies in the tremendous transfer of wealth to a barrel-full of individuals over the last forty years, driven by the GOP and Federalist Society view of the supremacy of capital. Admitted sexual abusers and enablers, including Trump himself, litter this administration and simply move on to the right wing grift machine when they are exposed.
In many ways, today’s corporate leaders in the US are perhaps only a few degrees in magnitude away from their Russian oligarch counterparts. Certainly, as the Great Recession showed, they can engage in massive malfeasance in order to enrich themselves while nearly bankrupting the country and bringing down the entire world financial system and know that they will suffer no penalty. While they may not fear being killed or having their business stolen from them or forced into exile as their counterparts in Russia do, corporate leaders here obviously live in fear of a Trump tweet knocking billions off their stock value or, worse, Trump’s using the power of government to harm their business should they oppose him. Certainly their silence, as well as the impotence of Congressional Republicans, in the face of Trump’s initiation of a global trade war speaks volumes about their fear. Similarly, while Putin’s political enemies actually have to fear death, Trump has so far only gone as far as threatening to prosecute and jail his political opponents.
In recent years, Republicans have been essentially ignoring court orders with a certain degree of impunity. For most of this decade, certain voters in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas have been disenfranchised by illegal and unconstitutional gerrymandering. But either by basically redrawing the same maps or constantly appealing those judicial decisions, those gerrymanders have largely remained in place. Kris Kobach was recently found in contempt of court for refusing to comply with a court order that required him to add thousands of voters to the rolls whom Kobach had illegally blocked from registering. In Pennsylvania, the Republican State Senate leader initially refused to comply with an order from the State Supreme Court to produce documents about the legislature’s gerrymandering and Republicans in Pennsylvania actually tried to start impeachment proceedings against those justices. And just days ago, the Trump administration again defied a court order, managing to reunite only 4 of the over 100 children under 5 that had been separated from their families by the time of the court hearing. This despite HHS Secretary Alex Azar telling Congress, in a blatant lie, that it would take a few keystrokes to match up the parents with the children. In addition, it appears that one of the children detained was actually an American citizen.
The final line of attack for Putin when he gained power was to create a “managed media”. Obviously, this is a far more difficult task with so many media outlets here in the US and the importance of the First Amendment, but Trump and the GOP have certainly made inroads. Again, long before Trump, Fox News was basically a propaganda outfit for conservative and Republican views. But the ties between Fox and the Trump campaign have now become so entwined it is difficult to tell whether Trump is driving the Fox propaganda or vice versa. Sinclair Broadcasting has been allowed to expand its reach to nearly 70% of the American people and constantly forces its stations to run Trump propaganda pieces. Trump’s attacks on any opposition media, such as CNN or the Washington Post or NY Times, is designed to force those outlets into some sort of self-censorship, as has become the norm in Putin’s Russia. And the GOP in general is creating “news organizations” that are essentially fronts for Republican propaganda. Trump himself is a master media manipulator and the daily barrage of scandals and outrages committed by Trump and his administration makes it difficult for the media itself to paint the forest through the trees. As the Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development says, “Today, autocrats don’t need to kill people, they just need to control media and money. If you’re good at that, you can stay in power for a long time”. So far, Trump and the GOP seem to be taking that to heart.
But the Putinization of America goes beyond looking at the frightening similarities in the current power structure of both the US and Russia. It also begs the question as to whether Trump and the GOP are actually working for Russian interests. Trump seems intent on destroying NATO and the Western Alliance and in ceding Crimea to the Russians. Those actions simply play into Putin’s grand design to restore large segments of the Soviet empire and threaten the existence and independence of the Baltic states and other eastern European countries. Similarly, Trump’s attacks on the global trading system, his threats to withdraw from the WTO, and his initiation of a global trade war also support Russia’s interests in weakening those Baltic and eastern European states and weakening opposition to Russia.
Last week, like a delegation from a vassal state, a unusual partisan group of Republican Senators went to Moscow and largely played down the Russian attack on our democracy to help Trump and Republicans get elected. They left the Russians with the impression that only Democrats actually care about that attack. And Senator Ron Johnson came back from those meeting suggesting that perhaps the sanctions on Russia should be lifted.
We all know that Mitch McConnell refused to defend the Untied States when he learned our democracy was under attack from the Russians. He chose party over country. We also know that Paul Ryan has abetted the Trump co-conspirators in his Republican caucus in their attempts to sabotage the Mueller investigation. There is also a pretty large amount of evidence that the Russians were helping Republicans in general and not just Trump in the 2016 election. It is time to seriously consider whether the Putinization of America is more than just emulating the autocracy in Russia and instead is really indicative of the fact that Trump and a not insignificant segment of the Republican party are actually working to advance the interests of Putin and Russia.
There are still pockets of resistance to this takeover. The GOP is lost, merely a rubber stamp in the same vein as Putin’s One Russia. But elements within the judicial branch are still adhering to the rule of law. And, of course, the Democratic party stands in strong opposition. And, perhaps unlike Putin, the current Republican party is actually a minority party. History has shown that autocrats seemingly in full control can easily fall when the citizenry finally stands up.
The midterm elections may well be the most important elections in our nation’s history. If Democrats can win one or both houses of Congress they may be able to restrain this President and his runaway party. But we should also consider the very real possibility that Democrats will again win an overwhelming majority of votes, perhaps winning the House by six or seven percentage points, and still remain a minority party. The implications of that result should scare all of us into making sure that everyone votes.
