The peril haunting America

Populism, new neo-fascist threat, everywhere, share same emotional symbols vocabulary and ideologies

During an infamous 1939 speech, Hitler dehumanised Jews by calling them vermins: “This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies,” he told the Czech foreign minister.

In his recent utterances on Veteran’s Day, former US President Donald Trump used the term for all opponents. Using Nazi terminology, he pledged: “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left, thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country; lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”

These words cannot be dismissed as mere asides of a person who many regard as the next President of the largest democracy in the world, whose foundations of inalienable human rights, of tolerance, dissent and separation of powers were laid by men like Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln.

Donald P Moynihan, Prof of Public Policy, Georgetown University in his NYT article, Trump Out To Destroy Deep State (Read: Bureaucracy) writes Trump “plans to utterly transform American government…that will undermine the quality of... government and... threaten our democracy.” He goes on to state: “A second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions.”

Nearly 20,000 potential candidates are being screened as MAGA appointees to be appointed in the State, Defence, Judiciary, Immigration, Taxation, workplace safety and welfare programmes which will lower performance levels and make government less accountable to the public and Congress. This menacing plan has several components. The first is to put Trump loyalists into government positions. History is testament to the existence of a meritorious, impartial and proficient bureaucracy, protected by impersonal laws, as a sine quo non against despotism and as guarantor of peace and economic welfare of the populace.

As a second plank of his design he may reimpose an executive order called Schedule F which would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.

Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions in the US at the federal level. But Schedule F would be the most serious threat to the civil service since its creation in 1863 which could turn another 50,000 officials — with deep experience in running major federal programme — into political appointees who will be open to political pressure, intimidation and outright dismissal in case of unacceptable uprightness.

Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance and a merit-based government personnel system.

Schedule F will also threaten democracy by making civil servants subservient to a political master rather than to rules of law and the values enshrined in the Constitution.

When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.

Prof Moynihan writes: “The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions.

“We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept. When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.

“American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome. The civil service system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is why Mr. Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Mr. Trump has a chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on presidential power.”

Trump, as he gets closer to the 2024 elections, is using language about opposition, (‘Vermins’ to be crushed once Trump gains power; Gen Milley, the US JCS, fit to be executed) migrants (are a threat to our race) and liberals (are a destructive anti-people forces).

Populism, the new neo-fascist threat, everywhere, share the same emotional symbols vocabulary and ideologies.

The question is:

Is populism rational and evidence-based? Is it people-centred? Does it or can it improve the livelihoods of the majority of mankind which is underprivileged?

Or is it a crazy mixture of emotional appeal to societal discontents and poverty for which, not a rational, efficient solution, is prescribed: the interests of the rich are protected and a hallucinatory solution is proffered for the solution of the economic problems of the majority poor: by making appeals to bringing back billions stolen and thereby transforming poverty and unemployment into rivers of honey and milk.

The main strategy and plank of populism is to sell impracticable solutions, a pie in the sky, through well devised psychological use of social media and other modern techniques of mental manipulation.

But the most serious problem lies in the fact that, like every ideology, except for a consensus-based democratic paradigm, the actual goal of populism is the sole, ominous purpose of acquiring power, retaining it, crushing all democratic opposition and imposing, through authoritarianism, its own severely intolerant ideology, about whose fallibility it harbours no doubts.

Democracy on the other hand involves compromise and consensus to increase the size of the pie and share it in such a way as to retain mutual acceptance, creating respect, unity and dignity.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 7^th, 2023.

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