As the US hurtles toward autocracy
Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail says the US is no longer one of the democracies.
Even now, as the United States hurtles toward autocracy – the petty grotesqueries perhaps tell the story better than anything else: a reporter barred from the White House for not using the name “Gulf of America,” President Donald Trump naming himself chair of the Kennedy Center by a “unanimous” vote of its board – the tendency is still to describe events in relatively conventional terms. For example, the “mistakes” that Mr. Trump is said to have made in his dealings with Vladimir Putin, of the United States as an “unreliable ally” under Mr. Trump, and so forth.
The tendency in journalism, that is. The rest of us are free to call a fascist a fascist.
But that is not the situation we are now in. The policies on Ukraine announced, or rather confirmed this week by Mr. Trump and his Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth – peace talks without Ukraine; Ukraine locked out of NATO membership indefinitely; Russia keeps all territories gained since its illegal and unprovoked invasion, because, as Mr. Trump said, “they lost a lot of soldiers” taking them – are not, as described, irresponsible concessions to Russia.
They are not concessions at all. They are demands, aimed not at Russia but at Ukraine, and presented to it jointly by the United States of Russia and America. They are of a piece with the Trump administration’s very clear signalling that it will not be bound by Article 5 of the NATO treaty – that the United States will not, as promised, come to Europe’s defence should Russia broaden its attacks on it, but will, as Mr. Trump so memorably put it, let them do “whatever the hell they want.”
That is not merely an abrogation of its treaty commitments, or an abdication of America’s historic responsibilities, or even a declaration that the way is now open for other hostile powers to launch attacks on democratic states. The United States, under Mr. Trump, cannot be considered an idle bystander in the great twilight struggle between the democracies and the dictatorships, as it was in the 1930s. It is now on the side of the dictatorships.
I wish I could say that’s over the top, but I can’t.
It is not just that the democratic world can no longer count on America. It is that America, under Mr. Trump, is no longer necessarily part of the democratic world: neither fully democratic in its own affairs, nor committed to the welfare of other democracies, but hostile to both. If the international order is to be preserved, then, it will have to be preserved, in part, from the United States. Certainly it will have to be rebuilt without it.
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That is not our choice. That is America’s, or at least the Trump administration’s. The democratic world must therefore regard and treat it as it does the other non-democracies: not as an ally to be consulted but as an adversary to be contained.
I wish I could disagree.
Is it now safe to conclude that the ‘Great American Experiment’ has failed?
Well, this is what every single person who voted for him said yes to, and now they have to own it. Deniability doesn’t get less plausible than this. As I keep saying, Trump is many things but subtle is not on the list. One of the very few things he can not be accused of is having a hidden agenda. He has been openly declaring his contempt for the rule of law, democratic rules of the game, and basic human decency every time he’s opened his mouth since before he was elected in 2016, and his whole life has been one long demonstration that he wasn’t kidding.
AoS #1
I’d say the human experiment.
Time for the UN to declare us a failed state, I would think.
If I thought the American Experiment had failed, I’d already have left to move to Europe. I don’t think it’s failed, just going through a very rough patch. What’s over, though, is the American Century, after somewhat less than a century.
It’s up to Europe now to pick up the torch that Trump has tossed into the gutter.
I got active with Indivisible after T**** was first elected, and the group that eliminated gerrymandering in Michigan. Back then we seemed to make an impact the good old fashioned way even in my conservative county: calling and visiting our Congresspersons and Senators, door knocking phone banking and circulating petitions.
But now I wonder if it would make any difference. Sure, I can call my MAGA congressman and make his staff sick of hearing my voice but it’s apparent he DGAF. Our Dem Senators’ staffs listened sympathetically when we visited but basically said the Dems can only do so much in the minority. They both voted for a few T appointees in the vain hope they might be somewhat reasonable.
So here I am, vacillating between hopeless despair and wondering if I should start making Molotov cocktails. FWIW at least I’m making small monthly donations to “resistance”, civil society, and immigrant rights orgs. Until Musk decides my Social Security benefits are fraudulent and a drain on deserving billionaires. Maybe then it will be cocktail time.
/rant
Why do I get the strange feeling that Canada is about to be cast in the role of “Poland” in this reboot?
It makes me think of the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who fought in the two World Wars, in hopes that their children and grandchildren would never have to. They fought overseas so that we would not have to fight in the streets. How many of them would have guessed that our country would be end up being next door to an emerging dictatorship, hungrily eyeing us and repeatedly threatening our annexation? We are oceans away from the peoples we helped to liberate; we can’t expect anything more from them than moral suppport, and I can’t blame them. The nation that threatens us is the most powerful on Earth.
As a matter of realpolitik, Canadian sovereignty, such as it is, has been at American sufferance since at least 1945. There is no way that we could meaningfully defend ourselves against a country with ten times the population, armed with nuclear weapons. Not that that was, as far as I know, ever a serious consideration. Apart from the Fenian Raids of the late 19th century, defence against a serious atteck from the US stopped being a real threat with the War of 1812.
Part of our role in the early years of the Cold War was to act as the buffer zone over which Soviet nuclear bombers flying sorties against the United States would shot down. With the advent of ICBMs, and the time during which any Soviet attack might be blunted being reduced from hours to minutes (not to mention American vulnerability to Soviet submarine-launched missiles that would bypass Canada altogether), our value as a buffer zone diminished. To the degree that mutually assured destruction worked, being under the American umbrella which, geographically, would have been impossible to avoid in any case, wasn’t something we had to “choose” or do much about. Whatever happened, Canada was along for the ride, with the US in the driver’s seat. We were the polite neighbour who didn’t usually make much of a fuss, whose recognition of Cuba and Communist China, while irksome, didn’t threaten the long term strategic balance between East and West.
As far as I know, we’ve never had to think of the consequences for Canada of the breakdown of American democracy because we probably never thought it was possible. But the ascendancy of Trump has shown just how fragile the American system is. Its rules and limits only work when they are respected and enforced, and right now there seems to be precious little respect or enforcement in evidence. These are no longer normal times in the US. They are no longer our friendly neighbour. Benign, indulgent neglect has been replaced with an unconcealed, rapacious covetousness, tempered only by noises that we are to be taken over economically rather than militarily, but I can’t help but think that the former will be followed by the latter.
Perhaps the sort-of false alarms of the Reagan and Bush II presidencies (which were each portrayed as incipiently fascistic) dulled the sensibilities of the Democratic Party, but the excess of caution that resulted in the failure to successfully prosecute Trump’s insurrection was a fatal mistake. Now we suffer the consequences along with those Americans who did not vote for Trump. What they can do at this point I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it has to be more and better than what they’re doing now.
Canada is no longer in a balcony seat; we are in the splash zone. We didn’t choose this seats, but we’re in it whether we like it or not. From our perspective, the best we can hope for is that Trump loses interest in us, or that the Trump administration comes apart through some combination of self-generated implosion (Trump vs. Musk?), actual enforcement of the Separation of Powers, and or popular resistance and non-compliance. With any luck, this will happen without violence or loss of life.Trump didn’t have the guts to actually go to the Capitol on January 6, 2021; maybe he will suffer a similar failure of nerve at some critical juncture of his current coup against the Constitution.
Good luck to us all.
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I know it’s going to be seen as pointless pedantry, but America is not, has never been, and was never intended to be “fully democratic”. We are a constitutional republic, a fact for which I am grateful.