Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.
John Oliver last night on controversy around “fetal personhood.”
Paul Krugman on authoritarianism, here now?
Obviously we have a seriously mentally ill, mentally deficient guy with his finger on the button. The president of the United States is clearly dissociating, I’ve been calling it sundowning because I personally saw sundowning during my father’s awful last year.
Trump is not in full possession of his faculties, and he is obsessing about things that are really just kind of remnant ego trips. I haven’t read the Haberman book yet, but reportedly he spends a large fraction of his time and probably a larger fraction of his mental energy on his redecoration projects, which aside from all being carried out disastrously are also in incredibly bad taste. But this is where he is. He’s actually more interested in his giant, tacky, gilded ballroom than he is in the fate of the nation.
But how does somebody like this end up able to impose his will on these disastrous things? How does he end up able to eviscerate the military?
Well, part of it is that this is a wannabe authoritarian regime. We’re in a peculiar state now where the United States is not yet a police state. It is not yet a place where the secret police will cart you away for expressing the wrong opinion, unless you are not a white U.S. citizen. Maybe the time is coming when that will happen. But in any case, we are not yet East Germany under the Stasi. We are not yet Putin’s Russia.
But the Republican Party, senior politicians, who should be feeling that they have at least some dignity, ability to take a stand, behave as if they were living in an authoritarian state. They’re obviously terrified. They’re afraid to express any dissent. They’re going along with Trump’s wishes.
On top of that, I think it really helps to think of the ruling party in America right now as being a party that behaves as if we were a full-on authoritarian state. And one of the things we learn about in studying how authoritarian regimes behave is, first of all, that the leader actually can be possibly the worst informed person in the nation because nobody dares to tell him bad news. We’re hearing this a lot about Putin, that he doesn’t know how badly his war is going. Well, Trump in many ways probably still doesn’t understand how badly his war is going.
They may not have been willing to tell Hegseth either, who by all accounts flies into a rage and punishes anybody who brings him bad news.So they just didn’t hear about this. They didn’t hear about the munitions. They didn’t hear about the conditions for US sailors until the drumbeat fromthe press became too loud for them to remain insulated, to remain in denial.
So this is what happens. This is the problem with authoritarian regimes. It goes with the related problem with authoritarian regimes, which is that they have a single point of failure. You elevate one person to a position of untouchable authority, and if that person loses it, that person is sundowning, there is no recourse.
One more thing to say about what’s going on is that authoritarian regimes systematically promote incompetence. This is Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism. That it’s not just that they value loyalty above competence. They actually actively dislike competence. Because someone who is competent, someone who knows what they’re doing, might stand on their dignity, might refuse to follow instructions from above. You need third-raters or worse.
This has long been true in areas that I know something about. It’s been true of right-wing economics forever. It’s long been the case that although there are plenty of conservative, competent economists, what the right-wing wanted, even pre-Trump, was creatures like Steve Moore or Larry Kudlow, people who had no idea actually how to do economic analysis, but were unimpeachably, unquestionably loyal because after all, they had no constituency to fall back on.
So we have this mix of leader principle, Führerprinzip. Yes, I think we’re allowed to use the original German here. Information blackout at the top because nobody wants to tell the leader bad news. And incompetence as a general principle throughout the government.
And if you want to understand how the Reflecting Pool happened, if you want to understand how we ended up with this hole in the ground, that was previously the east wing of the White House, all of this is fundamentally the same stuff and it’s true of lots of other areas of policy as well.
Music Picks
Note:
And a Wilco and Woody plea for our dark horse candidate: “Christ for President.” Vote the carpenter in.
From Tunes to Toons
Goris:
KAL:
Bagley:
Bramhall:
Molina:
Royaards:
Photo Finish
From my camera to you: Horseshoe Crab orgy on Cape Cod.
That comic strip stole my one-liner: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. But not to worry. Those who do know history are doomed to repeat it too.”
The comic strip lets the knowledgeable off the hook. Sorry, not so fast.
Krugman is not wrong but he should also consider that it is not just Trump’s influence which causes us to be descending into the fascist pit. It is the lack of the right kind of significant objection from the supposedly more enlightened wing of the intellectual and political establishment, who seem more concerned about the DSA seizing the mantle from the Democratic party to actually represent the working class than they are about the right-wing fascist movement represented by the Imbecile In Chief.
I wrote a piece about Bandy Lee (https://redbrown.substack.com/p/on-dr-bandy-lee-and-the-political), which I think is also quite relevant here in that it is not only about Trump’s Caligula-adjacent mental state that has made him successful. There is a longstanding right-wing fascist movement behind him which has been building since Reagan, the latest iteration of it being Project 2025, and until that backdrop is frankly addressed - and there is no sign that the Democratic party will address it other than verbally - the rampage will continue.
With the headline “All those fascists bound to lose” I thought you were sharing Carsie Blanton’s song with that title. Check her out. She’s fierce.