In short, we are living through the fall of a great power. With it will go a unique way of organizing the world. The symbolism of president Trump cowering in an underground bunker beneath the White House in late May couldn’t be plainer.
“Trump is using military-style tactics because he has a political beef with cities whose policies he doesn’t like.”
The real issue: Are we a nation of laws or men? Do we have checks and balances on power or do we side with Trump’s repeated assertions that as president he is unbound from any limits on his conduct?
There’s a simple fact that I don’t think Americans are reckoning with. That Americans are maybe even capable of reckoning with. It’s this. They’re living in what’s becoming a fascist society. And that fact raises the simple question: how do you live in a fascist society?
Defying evil cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life or the natural world. It refuses to see anyone as superfluous. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t do this.”
The reason impeachment matters — and I think every one of us should remember this in the days and weeks to come — isn’t so that political points are scored. It isn’t so that the “will of the people” is done. That’s got nothing do with it at all. Impeachment matters so that the rule of law matters again. It’s so that we say as a society there are red lines, which nobody should step beyond. It’s so that the phrase “abuse of power” means something again. It’s so that democratic norms and values of equality, justice, and freedom carry hard and real authority again. Impeachment matters so that power begins to flow in the opposite direction again — back from autocracy, and towards a democracy capable of healing its badly broken social contract, institutions, norms, and values.
Wait…wasn’t capitalism supposed to bring freedom and democracy with it? Isn’t that whate every American thinker, economist, pundit, politician argued? Isn’t it why America bombed half the world for capitalism’s sake? So…what happened? Here’s what’s really happening. Capitalism’s imploding into fascism. And now it’s going global. The global economy America built is falling like dominoes. Bang, bang, bang. It’s not a coincidence that China and India are imploding into different kinds of authoritarian-fascism shortly after America did. It is a relationship. China and India were the linchpins of America’s model of global capitalism. They are the two countries that bought into it most heavily after America.And now, my friends, they are paying the price: they are collapsing right along with it.
America’s not just in danger of having a fascist collapse. It’s having one. It’s bang in the middle of one. It’s not in the early phases — but in fact, beginning the later ones. The ones where concentration camps rise, and hatred spews from the head of a state, and papers are checked on public transport. How much more obvious could it get? How many more data points do you need? If this isn’t enough…what could be?
The institutions of bona fide fascism are rising in America. But what else did you think the fascists would do, except use their newfound power, money, and resources, to build them?
America is the canary in the coal mine of global collapse.