In a recent speech, Donald Trump said, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

In case anybody misses the point, the people Trump is calling “radical left thugs” include the entire Democratic Party.  He undoubtedly agrees completely with Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who in her Republican rebuttal to President Biden’s state-of-the-union address earlier this year declared that Biden had surrendered the country to “the woke mob.”  So when Trump uses the term “vermin,” he is openly encouraging his supporters to think of the people who don’t share their political vision as being less than human.  It should also be remembered that Trump has regularly called journalists “enemies of the people.”

This kind of rhetoric, this dynamic between a demagogue and his base, can be termed authoritarian populism, and if you carry it to its uttermost conclusions, it amounts to grassroots fascism.  That’s right, you heard me.  I normally avoid using such extreme terms about American political figures, but we’re not living in normal times, and I totally regard the terminology I’m using as being applicable.  Moreover, I would consider myself to be intellectually dishonest if, in the name of being “objective,” I failed to let students know that this is how I view the situation.

Let me quickly outline the elements of authoritarian populism that I see going on, and again, I’m talking about a mindset that is shared by Trump and the people who want him back in the White House.  Those elements are:

–the perception that the country is under siege by sinister, conspiratorial forces, including both foreign enemies and portions of the country’s own population;

–the feeling that the very identity of the nation depends on having a strong leader who will fight those forces and protect the true Americans from being victimized by them;

–belief in wild conspiracy theories about political opponents, including, in the present instance, those which link the Democratic Party with child-trafficking rackets and with the desire to bring in as many unauthorized migrants as possible to “replace” the true patriotic Americans;

–a willingness, even a sense of necessity, to undercut the normal checks and balances and civil liberties protections in order to allow the strong leader to fight that fight unhindered; and

–the opinion that sometimes it’s necessary to resort to violence and to relaxing the rule of law in the face of the perceived threats to the nation’s existence (i.e., existential threats) that must be fought against.

In the NPR report that I link below, Trump is heard defending himself against comparisons to Nazis by insisting on what a friend he is to the Jewish people.  I’d like to suggest that this misses the point completely.  It’s beside the point whether Trump is anti-Semitic, or even how racist he is.  I actually think that the main kind of bigotry he panders to is not so much racial as cultural and political.  That is, the people he calls “vermin” are those people, whether Black or white, Jewish or gentile, who do not share his conservative nationalistic vision of the nation, but rather, believe in so-called “woke” ideologies.  He’s encouraging his followers to regard themselves as the true Americans, the ones who truly love their country, and to think of liberals as their enemies, as “vermin.”  (And I would add that, while Trump’s base includes many who do not espouse racist/anti-Semitic views, they don’t seem to mind being part of the same coalition as groups like the Proud Boys that are all about that.  I would also add that, where immigration and the border are concerned, racism is exactly what his rhetoric is about.)

In a democracy, you can expect the pendulum to swing back and forth between liberal and conservative outcomes in the elections.  In a democracy, all people have to be willing to share the space and the national identity with people whose political opinions and policy preferences are very different from their own.  In a democracy, no party wins or loses all the time.  Political extremism is commonly defined as a rejection of those principles; an insistence that one party, one ideology, must be in power.  And that is the mindset that Trump panders to.

This post was inspired by this NPR report which ran Friday morning, November 17, 2023.  I urge you to give a listen, even though the voices you’ll be hearing are clearly those of people whom Trump calls “enemies of the people.”

On Tuesday, November 14, 2023, the House of Representatives passed Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the government funded into the New Year.  The Senate passed it the next day, and President Biden signed it.  Part of the government is funded through January 19, and the rest until February 2.  The one part of government expense that’s taken care of for the entire fiscal year is the farm bill; everything else requires further action in early 2024.

The CR was very much a bipartisan action.  In the House, it passed 336-95, with 90 Republicans and 2 Democrats voting against it; in the Senate, it was 87-11, with 10 Republicans and 1 Democrat voting no.

In making this happen, newly installed House Speaker Mike Johnson did pretty much the same thing that his predecessor Kevin McCarthy had done a few weeks earlier–which led to McCarthy’s swift ouster.  And while the hardline conservatives in his party don’t seem to be itching to remove Johnson as Speaker at the moment, they are also letting him know that he can’t keep on doing this if he wants to keep their support.

Realize, it’s just a tiny handful of Republicans in the House who would rather shut down the government than compromise with the Democrats, or even the less hardline Republicans, on the budget.  But with the narrow majority that the Republicans hold in that chamber, there are enough of them to block any bill that doesn’t have any Democratic support.  And they are insistent that the bill the House passes must be a bill that the Republicans all agree on, not a bill that Republicans and Democrats together form a majority on.  And this is in spite of the fact that any bill that passes the House is going to have to be reconciled with a bill passed by the Senate, where the Democrats are in the majority, before it can be sent to the president for his signature.

What the hardliners in the House apparently want is for their party, rather than compromise with the Democrats, to stand its ground for an ultraconservative budget that would include some policy-related measures that the Democrats call “poison pills,” including provisions unfriendly to immigration, abortion rights, and LGBTQ+ interests.  They apparently want to shut down the government until the Democrats cave in completely to their demands.  And because no such cave-in is likely, what we can expect to see in January is either of two things: either another bipartisan budget renewal, which could be followed by a vote to remove Mike Johnson from the Speakership, or a government shutdown.

Yahoo News story, November 19, 2023