{"id":1465652,"date":"2024-01-26T06:58:31","date_gmt":"2024-01-26T06:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=311726"},"modified":"2024-01-26T06:58:31","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T06:58:31","slug":"the-atlantics-special-issue-on-if-trump-wins-a-radical-critique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/01\/26\/the-atlantics-special-issue-on-if-trump-wins-a-radical-critique\/","title":{"rendered":"The Atlantic\u2019s Special Issue on \u201cIf Trump Wins\u201d: A Radical Critique"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Image by Jon Tyson.<\/p><\/div>\n

The bourgeois press is deeply flawed by ideological and related empirical limits on what it can and can\u2019t report and opine. But of course: it belongs to and works for the capitalist-imperialist ruling class.<\/p>\n

It should nonetheless be consulted by radicals who know how to \u201cread between the lines,\u201d\u00a0as Lenin said<\/a>. It has unmatched resources for gathering and relaying information on current events \u2013 information vital to those who rightly want to overthrow the capitalist-system, which is cancelling prospects for a decent human future at an ever-escalating pace. Its top outlets like (in the United States)\u00a0The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books<\/em>\u00a0are assigned with the task of conveying a reasonable measure of reality-based news and analysis to elites who need to know enough of what\u2019s really going on in the world to properly manage and advance the capitalist-imperialist system.\u00a0 It can\u2019t deal only in fantasy and lies.<\/p>\n

At the same time, capitalist media is itself both a big player in the shaping of history and a great window on the world view(s) of the ruling class and its servants.<\/p>\n

Take\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s new special January-February 2024 issue titled \u201cIf Trump Wins.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0It contains 24 essays from\u00a0Atlantic\u00a0<\/em>staff writers warning about the horrors the nation and world face if Donald \u201cTake Down the Metal Detectors so the Oath Keepers Can Take AR-15s to the US Capitol\u201d Trump returns to the White House on January 20, 2025.<\/p>\n

The special issue is fundamentally flawed in numerous and related ways that reflect the bourgeois world view of its glib, high-profile editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who wants readers to know that he and his staff are \u201cnot part of the resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The special issue can barely bring itself to mention the\u00a0fascist<\/em>\u00a0nature of \u00a0Donald \u201cImmigrants Poison Our Blood\u201d Trump and Trumpism and then does so only on the preposterous grounds that\u00a0 Trump only crossed into fascist space last November \u2013 a problem I\u00a0addressed at length in my \u00a0last\u00a0Paul Street Report<\/em><\/a>.[1]<\/strong><\/p>\n

The special issue naturally has nothing to say about the underlying capitalist-imperialist taproots of Trumpism-fascism and the ruling class divisions that both reflect and advance the extreme sociopolitical polarization that has produced the Trump era.<\/p>\n

Reflecting its clear but unstated alignment with the party of Joe Biden, it says nothing about the critical Weimar-like role of the Democratic Party in the creation of the Trumpist-fascist menace.\u00a0 It offers no criticism of the unpopular incumbent US president,\u00a0a decrepit and eco-cidal warmonger who is running well behind Donald \u201cClear Out the Marxist Vermin\u201d Trump, the malignant putschist who tried to overthrow the republic and who is facing 91 felony charges.<\/p>\n

The special issue fails to acknowledge that the whole Republican Party has crossed over into fascist face. Goldberg\u2019s introduction to the 24 essays labors under the childish illusion that the Republican Party retains a meaningful cohort of decent \u201cconservatives\u201d hoping to be released from captivity to the indecent Trump cult:<\/p>\n

\u201cOur concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces \u2013 when convenient \u2013 certain conservative ideas.\u00a0 We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish.\u00a0 Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Please. It\u2019s been the \u201cradical Republicans\u201d \u2013 radically reactionary and revanchist \u2013 for many years now. At Refuse Fascism we call them the Republi-fascist Party.<\/p>\n

The special issue is brazenly imperial, criticizing Trump for undermining US power in the world, as if the United States hasn\u2019t been the world\u2019s top mass-murderous, criminal, and aggressor state for the last eight decades.<\/p>\n

Except for some suggestive comments from David Frum in the first essay, the special issue says nothing about the archaic US constitutional governance structure that favors Trumpism-fascism by functioning as a right-tilted form of Minority Rule (something I have been writing about in great detail for many years now).<\/p>\n

The special issue shows no sense of the horrors that await America and the world with a second Biden administration. It says nothing about the lethal absurdity and moral emptiness of a political order that has the gall to call the binary contest between either the noxious 77-year-old Hitler fan Trump or the pathetic 81-year-old capitalist-imperialist warmonger and climate killer \u201cGenocide Joe\u201d a \u201cdemocratic choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The special issue offers no serious solutions to the Trumpist menace. It advances nothing more than the wan hope that we can keep it at bay by participating for two minutes next November in the democracy-flunking US Electoral College, which reduces presidential outcomes to winner-take-all Elector slate contests in just seven states and requires the Democratic presidential candidate to win the national popular vote by 4 to 5 percentage points.<\/p>\n

The special issue imagines no anti-fascist politics beyond the quadrennial big money-corporate mediated-major party-candidate-centered electoral extravaganza. It is of course unthinkable that\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0would advance anything like what is really required within and beyond the United States \u2013 a socialist revolution beyond a capitalist system that is literally ruining life on Earth and that has hatched a new fascist politics meant to crush all opposition to that system.<\/p>\n

Why should a Marxist or left anarchist radical read the special issue at all, then? Because once you understand these limits and control for them, it\u2019s a relevant guide to some of the policy and political fractures that now threaten to tear the world\u2019s most powerful country apart, opening the door perhaps for revolutionaries to challenge the whole damn system. Goldberg and his writers do a decent job of detailing numerous ways in which \u201cTrump and Trumpism represent an existential threat\u201d (Goldberg, \u201cA Warning,\u201d p.11) to what\u2019s left of previously normative bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule of law democracy \u2013 to what Goldberg calls \u201cAmerica and the ideas that animate it\u201d (p 11).<\/p>\n

David Frum\u2019s opening reflection (pp. 18-20) is very well done.\u00a0 Frum notes that a second Trump White House will be a virulent \u201crevenge presidency\u201d lethally devoid of the \u00a0establishment Republican checks that limited the considerable damage inflicted by the first one. Enabled by \u201cservile\u201d staff, a Republican Party that has now fully embraced \u201cTrump-style authoritarianism\u201d (Amerikaner fascism, that is), and a \u201cminority rule\u201d \u201celectoral system\u201d that \u201chas privileged a strategically located minority over the democratic majority,\u201d a second \u201claw-breaking\u201d Trump presidency will in Frum\u2019s view end\u00a0\u201cthe possibility of progress\u201d and \u201cthe constitutional democratic structure of the United States\u2026It would mark the turn to a dark path, one of those rips between \u2018before\u2019 and \u2018after\u2019 that a society can never reverse<\/em>\u201d (emphasis added).<\/p>\n

No shit: it would mark the American Empire\u2019s shift from bourgeois democracy to fascism atop its domestic political superstructure.<\/p>\n

I was struck by Frum\u2019s reflections on the sheer legal-constitutional absurdity of the notion that a president can pardon himself for a federal crime and suspend ongoing federal prosecutions of him, two things Trump will certainly try if he returns to power:<\/p>\n

\u201cthen he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon himself.\u00a0 If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal a case against him \u2013 as Trump would surely do \u2013 then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the special issue went to print, one of Trump\u2019s attorneys told a DC Circuit Court of Appeals justice that (in\u00a0The Hill\u2019s<\/em><\/a>\u00a0accurate paraphrase) \u201ceven a president directing SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent would be an action barred from prosecution given a former executive\u2019s broad immunity to criminal prosecution\u201d \u2013 unless, the full argument runs, that president had already been impeached by the US House and convicted by the US Senate for this crime!<\/p>\n

McKay Coppins (pp. 22-24) notes that a second Trump term will \u201cprioritize obedience over credentials,\u201d \u00a0producing an \u00a0administration staffed by \u201cloyalists, lapdogs, and cronies\u201d from top Cabinet posts down through the executive branch\u2019s rank and file bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

Caitlin Dickinson (pp. 24-26) projects that Trump will bring back the aggressive and sadistic separation of immigrant families at the southern US border as part of a sweeping immigration crackdown that will \u201cshut off access to asylum,\u201d attack birthright citizenship, and \u201cexpand the use of military-style concentration camps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barton Gellman (pp. 26-29) sees Trump47 using the US Department of Justice to escape prosecution and conviction, make his political enemies\u2019 lives miserable, and \u201cobtain legal blessing\u201d for terrible actions like deploying the US Army against domestic \u00a0protesters, seizing voting machines, and cancelling future elections.<\/p>\n

Sophie Gilbert (pp. 29-30) warns that a second Trump term will embolden virulent misogyny and rape culture.<\/p>\n

Zoe Schlanger (pp. 30-31) shows that a militantly climate denialist Trump 47 White House will further decimate the United States\u2019 already weak commitment to ameliorating the US-led global climate catastrophe.<\/p>\n

George Packer (pp. 32-34) worries that a Trump return will further journalism\u2019s ongoing descent into profitable sensationalism and public interest irrelevance.<\/p>\n

Sarah Zang (pp. 34-35) tells us that a re-elected Trump will reduce science to a \u201cslogan\u201d and \u201cattack any science that stands in the way of his agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frankling Foer warns that a second Trump term will involve \u201cunbound corruption,\u201d turning the US into a \u201cMafia state\u201d where \u201ccorruption [is] a purely instrumentalist concept \u2013 useful for besmirching rival Democrats but never applicable to member of the [Republi-fascist] party.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two of Goldberg\u2019s writers \u2013 Joyce Applebaum (\u201cAmerica Will Abandon NATO,\u201d pp, 20-21) and Michael Schuman (\u201cChina Will Get Stronger,\u201d pp. 37-38) \u2013 fret that the US global power will weaken under a second Trump term.<\/p>\n

Adam Serwer (pp. 39-42) sees Trump expanding the scale and virulence of the blatantly Trumpist\/Christian fascist \u201cMAGA judiciary\u201d Trump began to create in his first term. An expanded number of \u201cRepublican-appointed judges\u201d like the anti-abortion zealot Matthew Kacsmaryk will be \u201cunlikely to resist just about any of Trump\u2019s effort to concentrate power in himself. They will\u2026invoke \u2018history and tradition\u2019 to justify this project but their eyes are on a future utopia where conservative\u00a0<\/em>[try radical and fascist, P.S.]\u00a0political power cannot be meaningfully challenged at the ballot box or in court<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elaine Godfrey (pp. 43-44) sees a second Trump administration possibly ordering its Justice Department to invoke the Comstock Act to outlaw abortion in all fifty states.<\/p>\n

Megan Garber (p. 45) sees fact-based truth rendered yet more irrelevant and subordinated to angry \u201cgut\u201d and hateful emotion under a second Trump administration.<\/p>\n

Clint Smith (pp. 48-49) sees\u00a0 a second Trump administration building on its reactionary 2020 \u201c1776 Commission\u201d to promote the right-wing whitewashing of American history \u2013 a rewrite of the past that drains the US national experience of any complexities that challenge blind white-supremacist, imperialist, and patriarchal patriotism. \u201cTo Trump and his allies,\u201d Smith notes, \u201ca professor stating [the obviously true fact, P.S.] that the Confederacy seceded from the Union because of slavery and racism is a member of the \u2018woke mob,\u2019\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

An especially incisive essay by Ronald Brownstein (pp. 50-51) notes that Trump 47 will build on his authoritarian response to the George Floyd Rebellion to \u201cfurther escalate his war on blue [that is, metropolitan] America\u201d by: withholding federal funds from urban schools accused of teaching \u201ccritical race theory\u201d and \u201cgender ideology;\u201d investigating liberal urban prosecutors (\u201cwhom he calls \u2018Marxist local District Attorneys\u2019\u201d), making cities undertake fascistic police methods (e.g., stop and frisk) \u201cas a condition for receiving federal grants;\u201d \u201claunch militarized law-enforcement campaigns inside blue cities,\u201d essentially \u201ccreate[ing] an occupying federal force in the nation\u2019s largest cities\u201d while undertaking \u201can invasive door-to-door offensive against undocumented immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Graham (pp. 51-52) warns that \u201cTrump isn\u2019t bluffing\u201d when he promises violent political \u00a0retribution and repression in a second term.\u00a0 Graham thinks that \u201cTrump\u2026has changed \u2013 the old Trump seemed to be running for office partly for fun\u00a0 and partly in service to his signature views. Today\u2019s Trump is different. His fury over the election defeat, the legal cases against hm, and a desire for revenge against political opponents have come to eclipse everything else<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham warns against normalization, worrying that a constant barrage of previously unthinkable rhetoric can \u201cacclimate the nation to authoritarianism\u201d in ways that will lead masses of people to \u201cwring their hands\u201d and then \u201cshrug and wonder why he didn\u2019t do it sooner\u201d when Trump \u201cdirects the Justice Department to lock up Democratic politicians or generals or reporters or activists on flimsy or no grounds at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Van R. Newkirk II (pp. 52-54) warns that a second Trump presidency will complete the undoing of the great anti-racist Civil Rights victories of the 1960s \u00a0by eliminating the venerable \u201cdisparate impact\u201d standard used by the Justice Department to prohibit discriminatory practices even in cases where no explicit racial prejudice is found.<\/p>\n

Spencer Kornhaber (pp. 54-55) notes that a second Trump administration \u201cwill stoke a gender panic,\u201d taking aim at transpeople and LGBT rights and signing off on \u201copen queer-bashing.<\/p>\n

Tom Nichols (pp. 55-58) warns that a new Trump White House will make a potentially successful effort to bring the US military under its \u201cauthoritarian control.\u201d\u00a0 A retired professor at the US Naval War College, Nichols reports that there is considerable support for Trump and hatred for liberal presidents among \u201csenior officers\u201d and that \u00a0that US military office and base televisions are locked on FOX News. Nichols notes that the military\u2019s \u201cdefault instincts\u201d are to \u201cdefault to the orders of their chain of command\u2026to obey, not resist, the orders of the civilian commander in chief.\u201d Nichols observes that Trump and his advisors are acutely aware that his first administration failed to garner a second term in part because it \u201cleft the military outside their political control.\u201d They are determined to \u201cnot make the same mistake twice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jennifer Senior (pp. 60-61) warns about \u201cthe psychic toll\u201d of a second Trump term. She thinks a Trump return will \u201cintoxicate\u201d and embolden the Trump base while inflicting on the rest of the country a level of chronic stress that shuts down bodies, hearts, and minds, fracturing attention spans while spreading mass helplessness, despair, \u201canxiety and moral cynicism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Juliette Kayyem (pp. 42-43) warns that a second Trump victory will \u201cembolden\u2026right wing extremists,\u201d many of whom will be pardoned by the orange beast.<\/p>\n

Mark Leibovich (\u201cThis is Who We Are,\u201d pp. 62-63) concludes the special issue not with a warning but by questioning the standard Democratic refrain that Trump and Trumpism are \u201cnot who we are\u2026.Here we remain,\u201d Leibovich writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cready to do this all again\u2026.Trump might be the ultimate con man but his essential nature has never been a mystery.\u00a0 Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent.\u00a0 A durable coalition seems fully comfortable entrusting the White House to the guy who left behind a Capitol encircled with razor-wire fence and 25,000 National Guard troops protecting the federal government from his own supporters\u2026If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here \u2013 to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, \u2018Yes, that\u2019s our guy.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

While I am more than a little sympathetic to Leibovich\u2019s critique of the comforting liberal and American exceptionalist notion that Trump and Trumpism are \u201caberrations\u201d (as Biden says) outside the noble, democratic norms of American history and character (I dedicated an entire chapter of\u00a0my latest book to a detailed critique<\/a>\u00a0of that na\u00efve belief), Leibovich really ought not say that \u201cthis is who we are.\u201d The Trump voters he fears are a minority of the country.\u00a0 We \u201chave to reckon\u201d not just with them but also and more fundamentally with: an archaic \u201cminority rule\u201d political and governance order that (as David Frum suggests in his opening commentary) vastly overrepresents the nation\u2019s most reactionary people, regions, and states; a dismal, dollar-drenched and neoliberal, Weimar-like Democratic Party that opens the door to fascist power and then appeases it; a capitalist-imperialist system that undercuts and de-legitimizes democracy and positive government action at the same time that it creates multiple crises that require big government intervention.<\/p>\n

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there\u2019s a serious and more than merely pejorative name for Trump and his fans\u2019 \u201cmoral void\u201d: f a s c i s m. Leibovich should use the word.<\/p>\n

Leibovich seems to have missed an essential point of the special \u201cIf Trump Wins\u201d issue: that a Trump return will be\u00a0worse than \u201cdoing this all again\u201d\u00a0<\/em>since a second Trump administration will be more horrific than the first one.<\/p>\n

Leibovich and other special issue contributors might have added that we \u201chave to reckon with\u201d millions and millions of decent Americans who have still not woken up enough to look honestly and seriously at the depth and degree of the fascist horror that has been let loose in Amerika – a horror that is now coming to a great showdown this and next year. We are living in a time when, as young Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in their beautiful and brilliant\u00a01848 critique of capitalism,<\/a>\u00a0\u201call that is solid melts into air.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Good portions of both the US populace and the US ruling class are ready, willing, and quite possibly able to sweep previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy (such as they are) into Marx\u2019s proverbial \u201cdustbin of history.\u201d\u00a0 Sadly, as Yeats wrote, \u201cThe<\/em>\u00a0best lack all conviction, while the worst\u00a0are full of passionate intensity<\/em>.\u201d That needs to change.<\/p>\n

This essay originally appeared on <\/strong>The Paul Street Report<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Endnote<\/strong><\/p>\n

+1.\u00a0<\/strong>In a\u00a0 November 2023\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0commentary, Tom Nichols (also a contributor to the special issue) argued that Trump had finally crossed into \u201crecognizable fascism\u201d with his dreadful 2023 claims that immigrants are \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country\u201d and his reference to leftists as \u201cvermin.\u201d\u00a0 Goldberg\u2019s introduction to the special issue approvingly quotes from Nichols\u2019 absurdly belated recognition (Goldberg, \u201cA Warning,\u201d\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>, January-February 2024, pp.10-11). \u00a0As I pointed out in my January 19, 2024 Paul Street Report<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>(\u201cThe Erudite Idiocy of the Liberal Centrist Intelligentsia\u201d) and showed in my most recent book\u00a0This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America<\/em><\/a>, Trump exposed himself as a \u201crecognizable fascist\u201d in 2015 and 2016 and all through his first presidency.<\/p>\n

The post The Atlantic’s Special Issue on “If Trump Wins”: A Radical Critique<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The bourgeois press is deeply flawed by ideological and related empirical limits on what it can and can\u2019t report and opine. But of course: it belongs to and works for the capitalist-imperialist ruling class. It should nonetheless be consulted by radicals who know how to \u201cread between the lines,\u201d\u00a0as Lenin said. It has unmatched resources More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post The Atlantic\u2019s Special Issue on \u201cIf Trump Wins\u201d: A Radical Critique<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465652"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1465652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1465653,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465652\/revisions\/1465653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1465652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1465652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1465652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}