The possible transcendence of Donald Trump’s narcissistic and authoritarian temper tantrums

“Trump’s authoritarian backlash has already begun”

By Brian Klaas, for The Washington Post, November 9, 2018

“American democracy is now considerably safer than it was before Tuesday, but we’re not out of the woods by a long shot. For the first time in American history, a president with authoritarian instincts occupies the White House. By now, President Trump’s mimicry of the world’s despots and dictators is well-established. He attacks the press, pardons political allies while calling for the jailing of political enemies, and scapegoats minorities while wrapping himself in a symbolic flag of xenophobic nationalism. His administration is plagued with blatant corruption and ethics violations and nepotism. And his rhetoric is a constant stream of Orwellian lies, punctuated by routine incitements to political violence, and endless praise for dictatorial monsters that he doesn’t just tolerate but actually loves.

But this week, a new chapter begins in the fight to protect American democracy. The battle lines are clear: Democrats can now constrain Trump in new and crucial ways. The Trump wrecking ball — the one that he gleefully smashed into democratic institutions while Republicans in Congress watched the rubble fall — is now on a much shorter chain. Now Trump will face constraints from Democrats exercising their formal powers. But a cornered fighter can be even more dangerous. Trump might lash out against his newfound political confinement, becoming more mercurial, more willing to take risks and more authoritarian.” [….]

The rest of the article is here.

Comment:

When Trump says “Americans must unify,” what he means is that we must unite as one mass behind him and his regressive and neo-fascist politics. He cannot admit that his litany of irresponsible and irrational rhetoric has made any contribution whatsoever to a poisoned national political climate which has found most of the Right, and thus the Republican Party, slavishly adhering to “their Leader,” untethered to reality insofar as that is circumscribed by its intrinsic relation to facts and truth. He does not understand the invaluable and necessary roles of argument, criticism and dissent (including public protest) in a would-be democracy that is at once electoral, participatory, and deliberative (for him, only money and authoritarian power deserve a voice). When political pundits and talking heads on TV repeat that “all of us” must “tone it down,” or that “everybody must take a breath,” I say “f*ck that.” The President and his mass media lackeys (e.g., FOX News and Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter...) are the ones, in the first instance and ever since, responsible for a reckless and degrading political rhetoric that is crudely fashioned with the blunt tools of black and white thinking and forged in the fires of our most vulnerable emotions (hatred, rage, fear, anxiety, insecurity…). I feed no need whatsoever to “tone” anything down, nor should the vast majority of us on the Left.

Please tell me that these attempted bombings have no relation whatsoever to the President's irresponsible and reckless demagogic rhetoric and the support he receives from right-wing media sources like FOX News and radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh that likewise sow the seeds of hatred, rage, fear, insecurity, racism, sexism, extreme polarization, fascism, and all forms of violence.

The socio-pathological undercurrents in our society are seeping up with more frequency through fissures in the fragile membrane that is our “civilization.” The President responds by calling for armed guards at houses of worship and more frequent application of the death penalty, thereby according legal and political sanction to the very social and cultural pathologies that plague us. In brief, he proposes a new variation on Fromm’s locution, “the pathology of normalcy.”

I agree with much in the article by Klass, although it appears not to adequately appreciate the extent to which Trump’s presidency is at the same time symptomatic and expressive of wider social (including environmental), political, and economic trends and forces, few if any of which, it seems safe to conclude, will be substantially addressed by the Democrats (no, that does not mean one should not vote and support them), given the constitution of both the Senate and Supreme Court, as well as the moneyed interests that continue to dominate our would-be democracy. Nor will these trends and forces be sufficiently addressed if Trump is impeached or fails to achieve a second term. Our “capitalist democracy” remains in the grips of what has been called “neoliberalism,” (although this term’s insinuations fail to do justice to those aspects of the Liberal tradition which will be essential to any robust democratic society, including a socialist one, as well as failing to properly locate and identify the essential referential object: capitalism), and the crises it face are internally and externally variegated, the foremost of the latter type being the global warming associated with climate change (see Bill McKibben’s piece, ‘A Very Grim Forecast,’ in the Nov. 28 issue of the New York Review of Books). The “internal” crises we have yet to confront arise largely, but not exclusively, from forces unleashed by the Great Financial Crisis (many of which were in existence before the financial collapse of 2008), these account for the rapid rise of authoritarian and extremist right wing movements, parties, and rulers around the globe (most of which are far worse than what we are facing in this country). Another of the trends, irrespective of the two dominant political parties, has to do with the “unchecked executive power” that has become entrenched in the office of the presidency (see, for example, the respective titles by Wills, Nelson, and Alford below). I’ll stop here, leaving you with works I recommend should one care to look beyond the horrors if not evils rightly attributed to the character and presidency of Donald Trump (which I’ve spoken to elsewhere in a paper on his pathological narcissism):

• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
• Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).
• Chang, Ha-Joon. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
• Cole, David and James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution (The New Press, 3^rd ed., 2006).
• Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd ed., 2003).
• Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
• Hasen, Richard L. Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (Yale University Press, 2016).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017).
• Mayer, Jane. Dark Money (Doubleday, 2016).
• Nelson, Dana D. Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
• Sanger, David E. Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. New York: Crown, 2012.
• Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking, 2018).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Wills, Garry. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin Press, 2010).
• Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008).