Stalin
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2008
- Messages
- 3,810
"...The advanced civic infrastructure of the US could not easily be turned against itself. It required careful planning over the Joe Biden years by Trump-allied strategists, thinktanks, policy wonks and planners. During this period, every ideological cough from Trump was turned by these adjunct players into a menu of detailed executive actions.
Trump and his supporters, spread across a hefty network of rightwing thinktanks as highbrow as the Heritage Foundation and as lowbrow as Breitbart, have been busy for at least a decade laying the foundations of the greatest democratic rollback in US history, designing a newly minted form of jiu-jitsu to undo the grand American democratic tradition. This form of jiu-jitsu puts law against law, police forces against other police forces, court against court, media campaigns against other media campaigns, science against science, religion against religion, and deals against markets.
Thus Ice is ranged against more conventional police departments, the FBI has been internally polarized, pro-Israel evangelical Christians are turned against more liberal Christians, university trustees are turned against faculty, Robert F Kennedy’s lunatic science is turned against the scientific mainstream, and the supreme court is pitched against the lower courts willing to check Trump’s power.
And of course there is Trump’s attack on US higher education, which has been widely dissected, turning universities into hostages of the federal government, and civil rights law into a tool to attack civil rights. It is precisely universities’ commitment to debate as a path to new knowledge that motivates Trump’s effort to take them apart.
The very distinctive pillars of American democracy are being turned into fifth columns. Trump and his allies have created a massive autoimmune disorder – one in which the features of American democracy turn on themselves, re-engineering democracy to kill democracy
...
Consider the orgy of recent executive orders, which clearly diminish the scope of the relevant constitutional provisions that give Congress the power to legislate. But they are the first in a series of dominos. The use of every kind of lawfare, every form of legal loophole, delay and workaround by Trump’s army of lawyers, takes energy from this initial domino to chip away at the principles of the rule of law, using the law as an autoimmune weapon against all forms of due process. The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, among a multitude of others, shows the president’s readiness to use specious interpretations of the law to play chicken with the supreme court.
Much of this assault can be explained by Trump’s poor education, contempt for liberals, megalomania, personal greed and his unselfconscious vulgarity and lack of any discernible moral compass. But the assaults run deeper than that. Trump wants to produce a new social order as far as possible from the liberal democratic order as he can envision.
www.theguardian.com
comrade stalin
moscow
Trump and his supporters, spread across a hefty network of rightwing thinktanks as highbrow as the Heritage Foundation and as lowbrow as Breitbart, have been busy for at least a decade laying the foundations of the greatest democratic rollback in US history, designing a newly minted form of jiu-jitsu to undo the grand American democratic tradition. This form of jiu-jitsu puts law against law, police forces against other police forces, court against court, media campaigns against other media campaigns, science against science, religion against religion, and deals against markets.
Thus Ice is ranged against more conventional police departments, the FBI has been internally polarized, pro-Israel evangelical Christians are turned against more liberal Christians, university trustees are turned against faculty, Robert F Kennedy’s lunatic science is turned against the scientific mainstream, and the supreme court is pitched against the lower courts willing to check Trump’s power.
And of course there is Trump’s attack on US higher education, which has been widely dissected, turning universities into hostages of the federal government, and civil rights law into a tool to attack civil rights. It is precisely universities’ commitment to debate as a path to new knowledge that motivates Trump’s effort to take them apart.
The very distinctive pillars of American democracy are being turned into fifth columns. Trump and his allies have created a massive autoimmune disorder – one in which the features of American democracy turn on themselves, re-engineering democracy to kill democracy
...
Consider the orgy of recent executive orders, which clearly diminish the scope of the relevant constitutional provisions that give Congress the power to legislate. But they are the first in a series of dominos. The use of every kind of lawfare, every form of legal loophole, delay and workaround by Trump’s army of lawyers, takes energy from this initial domino to chip away at the principles of the rule of law, using the law as an autoimmune weapon against all forms of due process. The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, among a multitude of others, shows the president’s readiness to use specious interpretations of the law to play chicken with the supreme court.
Much of this assault can be explained by Trump’s poor education, contempt for liberals, megalomania, personal greed and his unselfconscious vulgarity and lack of any discernible moral compass. But the assaults run deeper than that. Trump wants to produce a new social order as far as possible from the liberal democratic order as he can envision.
‘An autoimmune disorder’: how Trump is turning American democracy against itself
Unlike autocracies such as Russia or China, the US has strong liberal guardrails to prevent a dictatorship. But Trump has a plan for dismantling them
comrade stalin
moscow
