Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books on the American right, was early in noticing the extreme right’s drift towards Caesarism.
Linker told the Guardian that Anton and others in the Claremont milieu “have convinced themselves thoroughly that the current order is decadent, corrupt and far removed from the proper, admirable origins of American government”.
Linker said their current view is related to a long-held position among Claremont scholars that “democracy as they understand has been supplanted by bureaucrats and entrenched executive branch departments”.
“The fact that Trump lost in 2020 has just radicalized a lot of these people – it occurred to them that they might not win a proper election again,” he said.
The MAGA movement rolls on, full steam ahead — not just because of his delirious followers but because of mass moral failure. Hordes of Republican officials still promise to support him if he is the nominee. They join in attacking prosecutors and reiterating the lie that he won in 2020. Legions of major media voices strain to avoid “taking sides.” (Declaring winners and losers in debates among uncompetitive Republicans. Saying things like “Well, Biden has issues, too. After all, people think we are in a recession.”) The result is virtually no scrutiny is applied to Trump’s moral, mental and emotional state.
And, worst of all, the supposedly sane conservative gatekeepers and pundits (from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Federalist Society to right-wing think tanks) refuse to level with Americans who might not carefully follow Trump’s public ravings. These purported pillars know that media the MAGA crowd imbibes will underplay Trump’s rants and conceal the seriousness of the four indictments and massive civil fraud trial.
The problem for democracy goes well beyond Trump. No right-wing authoritarian has attained power without the complicity of groups and individuals who sought some personal benefit, be it as small as keeping a right-wing media audience loyal or as large as multibillion-dollar tax breaks for corporations. The enablers ignore, minimize or rationalize dangerous and grotesque conduct, telling themselves the threat is exaggerated or their own survival is more important.
Ignoring bizarrely unacceptable conduct depletes democracy’s defenses, but small acts of moral clarity can stimulate a democracy’s antibodies. Major media could seriously analyze Trump in the context of authoritarian movements, identify aberrant conduct and press Republicans to defend it. The media could level with voters that Biden’s mental and physical fitness are not at issue; Trump’s cognitive abilities are. There is no excuse to avoid highlighting Trump’s deviant behavior.
Republican officials could say they will not vote for Trump under any circumstances. They could specifically denounce calls to violence. Respectable right-leaning pundits could stop carrying water for Trump’s legal defense team (First Amendment violation! The indictments aren’t so serious!). And corporations and other special interests could refuse to trade silence about Trump’s defects for economic and political influence. (They might even cut off support to pro-insurrectionist lawmakers.)
No one should be confused: Without these enablers’ subservience and moral obtuseness, Trump cannot prevail. With a modicum of courage, they can make sure he doesn’t.
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Anton Gerashchenko
@Gerashchenko_en
Medvedev calls for a civil war in the United States.
He wrote this on his Telegram channel:
"The start of hostilities between Hamas and Israel on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War (Doomsday War) is an event that could have been expected. This is what Washington and its allies should have been dealing with. The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been going on for decades. And the U.S. is a key player there.
But instead of actively working on a Palestinian-Israeli resolution, these assholes came to us and are busily helping neo-Nazis, clashing two close nations.
What can stop America's maniacal passion to ignite conflicts everywhere on the planet?
Apparently, only civil war on U.S. soil."
In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, the centrist liberal Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.
[...]
So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.” In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny.”
[...]
But in thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” But in the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.
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