Partial attention

Speaking to Salon’s Chauncy de Vega about how the United States is mired in a crisis of democracy that shows parallels with Germany’s descent into Nazism during the 1930s, Norman Ornstein recently noted that “Most people don’t pay close attention, day to day, to what’s going on” in the political sphere.

Speaking just anecdotally, my guess is that Ornstein is correct. In my experience, most people I talk to outside of my pre-existing left circles have only the foggiest notion about the specifics and meaning of current events. ‘The news’ holds little real interest and significance for everyday Americans. And the notion of doing the work to “pay close attention, day to day,” is simply beyond the pale of imaginable life activity for most ordinary citizens in the nation that absurdly claims to be the world’s greatest democracy.

This is a problem – at least it is a problem for those who would like to live in a polity rooted in popular sovereignty and a society committed to the common good. It is an appropriate longstanding truism that democracy is impossible without an informed citizenry paying informed attention to political developments. Public knowledge is a matter of life and death, like when people learn on the radio or television that they must evacuate because a major hurricane. The political hurricane of white nationalist authoritarianism – fascism, American-style – is bearing down on the United States today (anyone who thinks it has gone away because Joe Biden is president is living in denial.)

Don’t just take it from an officially marginalized lefty like me. Listen to Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, or, further to the right, the neoconservative imperialist intellectual Robert Kagan. Kagan wrote this one month ago in The Washington Post: “Our constitutional crisis is already here…The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves…The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers…The stage is thus being set for chaos”

The white nationalist and fascist nature of the menace afoot is about to be demonstrated for those willing and able to pay attention by the trial of the teen militia MAGAt and cop-worshipper Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two Black Lives Matter protesters in cold blood with an illegally owned assault rife in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the summer of 2020. The FOX News Republican Party, wherein ideas formerly restricted to the neo-Nazi margins (notions like fascist replacement theory [FRT]) have been mainstreamed, is making a martyr of this racist killer, who epitomizes Jason Stanley’s observation that fascism’s calling card is “lawlessness in the name of law and order.” (The same goes for the tragically but justifiably killed fascist marauder Ashli Babbitt, another contemporary version of the role that Horst Wessel played for the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany). The white racist judge in charge of the trial has just declared that prosecutors can’t call Rittenhouse’s victims “victims”, but that Rittenhouse’s defense attorneys can without evidence call the people Rittenhouse murdered ‘rioters’ and ‘looters.’ Recall that Trump as president of the United States embraced Rittenhouse and stopped in Kenosha, Wisconsin to defend the killer on the last night of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Which reminds me of the following observation from former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, reported to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa after Parscale spoke to his former boss this summer: “He had an army. An army for Trump. He wants that back…I don’t think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance.”

The ‘it’ in question is Trump’s distinctly possible return to the White House, enabled by rampant right-wing state-level voter suppression and election nullification efforts underway across the nation. (I assume Jamie Raskin has his passport updated.)

Meanwhile (to steal a word from Steven Colbert), election officials, teachers, school board members, retail store managers, and even school nurses report violent harassment and death threats being issued by demented Amerikaners and Trumpenvolk who are convinced that nefarious Marxist and globalist ‘radical liberal’ elites steal elections and advance fake pandemics to ‘end America’ and crush freedom. A significant and growing, ever more hardened fascist cohort is committed to “taking back our country” by “any means necessary” from ‘the radical Left’ (a completely ridiculous description of the corporate-imperialist Wall Street Democrats), people of color, uppity women, and sexually deviant urban areas.

Excerpted: ‘On Mass Political Inattention’

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