Dunce Confederacy Does the White House

 

Tom Nichols assembles a platter of remarks from Trump's Merry Mopes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in his recent article in "The Atlantic."

Mad Dog had not seen assembled such a collection of piffle before, but in the aggregate, they gel into a pretty clear picture:

1/ Karoline Leavitt (Press Secretary)

When asked by a reporter who planned a meeting between Trump and Putin, a rather mundane, but staple question asked routinely, Ms. Leavitt replied, "Your Mom did." The reporter might have replied, "Uh, please? And thank you," but we'll never know.

Ms. Leavitt is clearly no C.J. Craig. 

She did not know the answer, or she knew the answer and knew it would be embarrassing, so she simply dug deep into that repertoire from the elementary school playground, which is about where her intellectual development stalled.

2/ Pete Hegseth

Announcing the end of "DEI" practices said, "We're done with that shit."

That, of course, would have sufficed at Joe's Bar, but we were all hoping for something more quotable, something along the lines of, "Diversity has been distorted into an excuse for incompetence, replacing real merit with group think, as if being a particular race is a qualification or virtue" or something. Some actual argument, you know?

But no. We get, "We're done with that shit." Did he lock and load and fire off a round after saying that, or just throw an axe at some poor drummer?

3/ Vice President Vance, asked whether destroying boats in the Caribbean, killing all on board, without first stopping and searching them, to establish guilt or innocence might be considered a "war crime," replied, "I don't give a shit what you call it."

And he's right to not care whether it's a war crime or not, as recent events, and distant events have demonstrated--you can do all sorts of war crimes for years from Ukraine to Gazza and there will be no calling to account. 

4/ President Trump responded to the No Kings rallies with an AI cartoon showing him joyfully dumping feces on the protesters.

At least Nixon tried to respond to war protesters by calling them "bums." Didn't work. But, you know. He tried.

One might ask:

1/ Do these players think profanity, scatological cartoons are edgy? Do they think if they respond to questions, which is a part of their official duties, with hostility, taunts or by passing gas, they are South Park funny?

2/ Or, could it be, they each realize they have no capacity to formulate a reasonable response, so they just resort to jibes and what they think are ribald jokes, believing themselves to be witty and/or commanding?

There's a wonderful scene in Roxane, the Steve Martin movie which updates the Cyrano De Bergerac play where a knuckle dragger in a bar calls him "Big nose," and Martin challenges him to come up with a better insult, which, of course this Hegseth like buffoon cannot do, and then Martin launches into twenty really funny insults to his own nose, each funnier than the next, which unmasks the goon as a simpleton and thoroughly humiliates him, while at the same time generating considerable sympathy for Cyrano, who has clearly had to live with insults about his nose his whole life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdf4g-LXk4

But neither Hegseth nor the bar dweeb are capable of any real wit.

Nichols calls this "post-ironic glib dismissal." 

They delight in the crass and the lewd, rude, crude and foul.

They think it makes them more accessible, less like the polished,  Hillary Clinton model, with her crafted sentences, designed to allow for plausible denial which came off as sounding to formulaic, dodgy and legalistic.

They delight the Hulk Hogan, Joe Rogan, FOXNEWS mob.

"Just tell it like it is!" the MAGA mob smirks. 

This is the segment of the population which consists of people who get drawn into an argument about tariffs or ICE kidnappings or January 6th, or shutting down the government and once they see, after a few sentences of exchange, that they are failing to persuade, pervade or punish, they expostulate, "Fuck you! You radical leftist effete snob!"

And then they turn their backs and strut away thinking they've just driven their opponent into a dot of humiliation. They have got attention and they think they've intimidated.

Trump is the patron saint  of the third stringer, Nichols suggests, and the only way to respond to them may be to say, "Feel better now? Well, good, Now answer the question. Who arranged the meeting? What is the difference between murder and blowing up a boat with human beings on board without warning--especially when there are other effective options?"

Many have observed you cannot argue with the MAGA mob, because they do not understand how to argue and they simply degenerate into name calling and insults, the way Trump does whenever a reporter asks him an embarrassing question: "You are a very bad person? Did you know that?"

But it's somehow a comfort to see it laid out: These are simple not people worth worrying about. They have been plucked out of obscurity and given their moment in the spotlight, but they cannot sing, dance or even be funny.

They can delight some folks with their insouciance and crudity and vulgarity, but that too grows old pretty quickly. We are only 9 months in this time. It's already stale.

All we can do now is persist and tune into Colbert, Kimmel, Adam Schiff, Paul Krugman, Paul Offit and Bernie Sanders.

And maybe now, Zohran Mamdani. 

Like most newcomers to the political scene, we really don't know much about him. He may be another Obama, or he may crash and burn. But, at least, his vocabulary includes words with more than four letters.

Every Journey Begins With A First Step

 

It's not the beginning of the end. It is not even the end of the beginning. But it might be, if we are lucky, perhaps the beginning of the beginning.

California passed Proposition 50 to allow the state to try to balance the cynical wild west tactic of Texas to pack the Congress with loyal MAGAts. 

And, in New Jersey and even in Virginia, the Democrats won governorships, so Trump cannot simply pick up the phone to the governors in those states to demand they Gerrymander their states to safeguard him from impeachment by a hostile Congress bent on bringing a lawless despot to justice. 

Trump is not impeached.

Trump cannot be impeached unless the Congress changes hands, both House and Senate, in 2026. 

We are a very long and improbable way from that.

And Trump and his MAGA mob are not stupid when it comes to political power. That's why Trump implored Texas to find him 5 more Congressional seats, just as he insisted the Secretary of State of Georgia manufacture 11,000 votes for him in 2020.

The mantra has been that would-be authoritarians always overplay their hands, and Trump's dictate to wimpy Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find him more Congressional seats did cause a reaction in California. Trump is out there stumping on the Gerrymander circuit to extract more Congressional seats for a reason, and that reason is not because he has a grand legislative program he wants to pass--although Project 2025 would be that plan if his acolytes could get him to read,  and he might embrace Project 2025 it if they can package it into small video pieces presented by blond women showing lots of leg on white leather couches.  

No, what Trump fears is a Democratic House which would certainly impeach him, and if the U.S. Senate turned 2/3 Democrat, they might just possibly work up the spine to convict him. 

The math, of course, is in his favor, even if redistricting delivered the House to the Democrats. There is no reasonable calculus for a Democratic Senate any time soon. We have six Senators from the Dakotas and Alaska who represent fewer people than live in Chicago, which has no U.S. Senators. 

The United States Senate is by design, anti-democratic, anti-Republic, a design meant to insure that the will of people is thwarted by wealth and aristocracy, a concession to fears that democracy would mean mob rule and trustworthy men of wealth and property had to be given a stranglehold on the processes of government, to insure "stability" and "reason."

A single Senator from Montana represents roughly 500,000 people, where a Senator from California represents 18,000,000. 

So we have the senators from tumbleweed ruling the Senate, and they have to be persuaded before the representatives of the people, in "the people's house" can do anything which might threaten the interests of the wealthy who have always controlled the country.

Of course, if you add up all  those Red states which look so big on those election maps--North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Alaska you have fewer people living in all those states, represented by 14 United States Senators than you have people living in New York City, which has no U.S. Senators.

So, the founders were not clairvoyant. And they knew at the time their experiment was imperfect and would have to be adjusted to meet the needs of the future. But, of course, no adjustments have fixed the problems of representation, beyond changing that rule that slaves count as 3/5 of a person.

But, for now at least, we've got a new mayor of New York City, who represents and will lead a jurisdiction with more people in it than those seven red states combined. 

And the man was born in Uganda. A naturalized citizen. 

No doubt Trump will send ICE after him. 

Trump has already said he'll cut all federal funds from reaching New York City, which he's been itching to do ever since a NYC jury found him guilty of 39 felony counts and he got kicked out of the city, sent on his way to the sanctuary state of Florida and his Gatsby house, Mar-a-Lago.

Mad Dog has no idea what Mamdani's win says about New York or the USA, but he is pretty sure Mamdani did not win because he is a Muslim who was born in Uganda.

Maybe it had something to do with Mamdani's willingness to address actual problems faced by citizens who hoped or maybe even expected that government might actually solve problems rather than become the problem. 

Making buses free is one thing but providing affordable housing is not something governments have had much success doing--"the projects" became festering wounds in every city they were tried, except for some projects in NYC, where they worked well some of the time. In Baltimore they became such a center of crime and decay they simply had to demolish them.

So affordable housing and even more so, homelessness, may be complex problems beyond simple government solutions. 

But, at least, New York has voted for hope rather than cynical dismissiveness.

Meanwhile, in Mar-a-log the party goes on, and we've got the woman in the cocktail glass, the perfect symbol for the Trump/MAGA concept of the good life. 

The roaring twenties.

Just off Mar-a-Lago

And we know how that ended.

Boats Against The Current: Borne Ceaselessly Back Into the Past

 

Hard as it is to believe Donald Trump has ever read "The Great Gatsby," it is absolutely believable he seized upon the Gatsby theme when it was presented to him, likely with a clip of the Leonardo Di Caprio movie, the very best adaptation ever done.

It's got that Geoffrey Epstein vibe, after all.

And it's all of piece with the new marble in the bathroom off the Lincoln bedroom. And wait 'til you see the new ballroom. That'll make Gatsby turn green with envy!

Nearly naked women in cocktail glasses, women in flapper outfits, which is to say, very short skirts, flashing lots of thigh at rich men in tuxedos. 

It's so very Trump.

And his MAGA boys lap it up. 

I'm sure Joe Rogan, FOXNEWS will run with it.

After all, isn't that what FOXNEWS has been selling for lo these many years?

And as for those folks who rely on SNAP benefits, let them eat cake. They don't deserve any handouts, anyway, and it's all the Democrats' fault.

All of it.

What is the Democrats' fault? You may ask.

Well, just everything. All of it. 

What It Means To Be An American

 

All Persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof [if you are born here or legally immigrate, you're in the club]

are citizens of the United States

and of the State wherein they reside.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; [so Alabama, Mississippi cannot refuse to let colored folk vote or run for office just because it's not what we do hereabouts]

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law;

[So you cannot just round people up and throw them into vans, or send them to concentration camps for being Japanese born in America, or break into their houses, or stop them while walking or driving while looking foreign or not white, or for Speaking Spanish or looking like an "illegal alien." ]

nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[So, guys gobbled up in vans cannot be sent to Alligator Alcatraz, without having been convicted in a court of law.]

--Fourteenth Amendment of the United States of America Constitution

Before the First World War, as Mark Mazower points out, if you lived in Europe, you were a subject or citizen of an empire, whether it was German, Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish or Swedish. So, you could be a person raised in a home where French was your native tongue, and still rise to be an official or a businessman in Russia or Germany, as long as you owed your allegiance (and your position) to the emperor.

Getty Images: Japanese off to Concentration Camp

But, after the war, and the Treaty of Paris, what mattered was what nation state you belonged to.  A German speaking person living within the borders of Austria, was not German but Austrian. A German speaker living in Poland was Polish, or Latvian if he lived within the borders of Lativa, or French if he lived in Alsace-Lorraine. 

As Donald Trump observed after the Brexit vote, "They want borders." The English were sick and tired of looking around their streets in London and seeing men dressed in long Thobs wearing Kufi's on their heads, drinking coffee at outdoor cafes, as if they were in Bagdad. They did not like the fact that the women behind the counters in the convenience stores spoke Polish first and English as a second language. And they did not like seeing Bobbies walking the street whose faces were black as night. They wanted their "England" back. They wanted the rosy red checks of little children. They wanted those Bobbies on bicycles two by two to be White, to look like Roger Miller's Englishmen right out of "England Swings."

So, World War One did not make the world safe for democracy; it made the world safe for nationalism and democracies melted away, collapsed, unable to provide solutions to wealth disparities, inflation, economic Depression, and a capitalistic system which kept the masses down and the only alternative seemed to be either communism, which was totalitarian, or a system of cult leaders which went under the name "fascism."

As Mazower notes, there were different types of fascism: The type in Italy, Spain and Hungary allowed other centers of authority, like the church, the judiciary to continue (as long as they behaved) and there was Germany where Hitler and his mob were hostile or, at most, barely tolerant of religious institutions, demanding that all that mattered was the enthusiastic embrace by the populace of Der Fuhrer. 

The judiciary under Hitler embraced the idea that law, which is a process involving consistency and rules should support the goals laid down by Der Fuhrer, especially when it came to protecting the "racial hygiene" of the nation. Hitler's judiciary served the idea of supporting the state, i.e. Der Fuhrer, not protecting individual rights. 

Trump is different from Hitler in that he has no underlying driving philosophy of racial purity or anything else. He just wants to be loved, obeyed and enriched. He is more like Louis XV than he is like Hitler. Just kiss my ring, give me money, never criticize me and you're fine, no matter your color or your religion, which are matters of indifference to him, as long as you pay him.

Citizenship in other countries looks different. 

In Israel a major rift has developed because 14% of the population is now "Haredim," or "ultraorthodox,"  and as many of 18% of men of draft age are Haredi. This group poses a problem for a nation which perceives itself as being surrounded by hostile neighbors and beset by groups within its borders bent on its destruction, e.g., Hamas. Facing an existential threat, the Israelis perceive themselves in a position of needing "all hands on deck." 

But the Haredi do not buy in to this. For the Haredi, ideally, many young men should spend all day indoors reading and studying and arguing about the Torah. Their wives can go out and work and support the family, but these men live in God. They are often quoted as saying that the continued existence of the state of Israel is of no concern to them. They are concerned only with God. Serving in the military exposes them to a secular, and often sacrilegious culture, where they would have to violate the Sabbath, live in sinful proximity and style with women and simply be unable to devote their lives to God.  So for them, being good citizens is not the idea; being good Haredim is the idea.

This has provoked much ire among Israelis who are not Haredi, who are secular or who simply ask, "Why should I send my sons and daughters to fight and die for our country while you are protected in your yeshivas?"

It's not hard to understand the fury of citizens trudging home bloodied from Gaza and northern borders, looking at young men their own age, walking untouched to their yeshivas, scholars insisting that they should be able to continue their studies, their holy relationship with God, fed, protected, coddled, and tacitly demanding others to provide for them their safe space so they can live their lives almost as queen bees, supported by worker drones. In Israel, women have not been exempted from military service, but 18 year old Haredi men have been exempt.

Citizenship, it seems, in democracies can be a problem.

One reason Trump is able to claim the loyalty of men whose parents were Born in Mexico or Cuba or Guatemala is that these men were born in the United States and thus have played by the rules and are law abiding full fledged "Americans."  Even if one or two of them are swept up and thrown into a van and sent to Sudan or Gitmo or Alligator Alcatraz, these men feel Donald Trump embraces them as real Americans. Plus, they embrace "machismo," and Trump has plenty of that. 

Democrats used to taunt Republicans for being "country club Republicans," emphasizing that Republicans looked down their noses at the hoi polloi, and separated themselves in clubs and gated communities. But Trump has performed the neat trick of saying that it's the Democrats who look down their noses at the common man, with their Ivy League institutions forming a club the common man cannot breach, and if you are a born in America, legal American you are in the club that matters.

Except, of course, for some people who are born here by "gaming the system," i.e. those folks who crossed the border either illegally or legally, popped out their babies in American hospitals, got their legal papers and became birthright citizens so they could live off the generous welfare state of America which they do not really deserve. 

Of course, the argument is made that a child should not be able to benefit from gains made by the illegal activities ("ill gotten gains") of his parents, and so children born in America to parents who got here illegally cannot benefit from their parents' crime of illegally crossing the border. But, of course, the reason the 14th amendment was put in place was to benefit the children of slaves who were stolen from their homes in Africa and the Caribbean and born in America, the result of the crime of a  slave trade which was so illegal and immoral we had to fight a war over it to be sure it was outlawed. Slaves been transported on the underground railroad north to freedom were called "contraband." So when you invoke the history of how a particular person gets born on American soil, you get caught in the sticky web of history.

The MAGA crowd says if parents rob a bank and steal a million dollars, they should know that money cannot be inherited by their children, and the same for the financial benefit of their parents stealing citizenship for their children. But then we get into the definition of a "crime." Clearly, the million dollars was taken from someone and that money should be returned to its rightful owner. But what as been taken from whom in the case of an "illegal" or unsanctioned border crossing? You might argue, well, if they go on welfare...But what if they simply go to school and then become productive members of American society? What if they become doctors or engineers? Where is the crime in that? Well, but we paid for that with our public schools. But is that not an investment we make in any and all children, even the children of diplomats who go back to their native countries? The nation benefits from an educated workforce and so one might argue those children of illegals have paid back their debt to society by becoming productive workers. 

For present day people of Spanish speaking descent, Trump makes a distinction. If their parents were legal immigrants, they are in the club, but if their parents were "illegal aliens" at the time of their birth, they are excluded, they should be denied membership in the club, which makes those Hispanics who "really belong" feel like members of an exclusive club and they can feel superior to the "illegals," who are actually legal, under our Constitution, but, you know, not really.

So, where does that leave those White Nationalists, who believe, as Hitler did, that this is a White nation? And for some a White, Christian nation? That 14th amendment sure gets in the way. There is the argument that common law says children cannot inherit ill got gains from their parents, but now we are up against the "originalist" Supreme Court, who say that you cannot refer to anything other than what is written in that sacred text, the Constitution.  Of course, as always, this SCOTUS will find its way around the text of the 14th. They are only originalist when it takes them to the place they want to go. When the text gets in the way, they just make things up.

Trump's theme song has been Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA."

Not an American, But Beloved Not raised in a Camp

Greenwood tells us he's proud to be an American.

Now, pride, is an interesting thing. For Mad Dog, pride must involve some effort, suffering even, overcoming adversity--but being an American is really an accident of birth. You are proud because your parents happened to live in Kansas?

"And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me," he sings. And he avers he too would fight for that flag.

But Trump says you've got to be a sap, a fool to join the army, so fighting for the country can't be the virtue.

And, in fact, under Trump, men who were not citizens, who fought in the American army have not been granted citizenship--they are not members of the club.

Greenwood sings of the pride of being a member of the club which includes Detroit, Houston, New York and LA, which Trump decries as dens of iniquity which have descended into chaos and have to be rescued by National Guard troops from Texas, South Carolina and Mississippi.

So what is an American? What have you done to be an American that you can be proud of?

The South Done Rose Again!

 

Mad Dog was born in Washington, D.C., but he was brought home, swaddled, transported across the Potomac River to his first home, where he spent his first nine formative years, in Virginia. Arlington, Virginia, within bicycle distance of the former home of Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Anna Custis, which was used for the military cemetery after the Civil War.

So, he is steeped in memories of the Civil War, and he grew up running through the woods in Arlington, where he could dig the occasional musket ball or bullet out of a tree, or find some relic of one of the armies which trudged through that cursed land ninety years earlier.

He handled the old pink Confederate dollars, relics treasured by the families of friends who would, with a quiet wink, say, "The South shall rise again, don't you know? And these will be worth something again." There were people still living who had been young during the Civil War. That war was within living memory. It was almost as close to them as World War II is to us now.

Lee Crosses the Potomac: Invasion

And, in a very real sense, they were correct about the South rising again, the Lost Cause being redeemed. 

Through Reconstruction, then Jim Crow, and now unto Donald Trump, the undying resistance, the White nationalist spirit remained unbowed, embers burning, waiting to be fanned into a conflagration.  

Read "Gone With The Wind." Really read it,  and you will find passage after passage where Margaret Mitchell inveighs about the disaster of the Confederate defeat the way Vladimir Putin rues the collapse of the Soviet Empire:  Starving darkies on the street, unable to take care of themselves or their children now that their masters were gone; rapacious freed slaves raping White women and then drinking themselves to death; Corrupt Negroes taking over legislatures and enriching themselves; Negro women given plots of lands from former plantations, unable to manage, and starving alongside their children. That is the real "Gone With The Wind," not the Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable version with swelling musical chords and huge vistas of dark clouds scudding across a windswept sky, spread out over a huge silver screen. No, the actual novel is a  mean, hate filled ode to a Lost Cause, a hymnal to a slave state, of lost aristocracy and plantation life.

Confederate Diaspora

During that war, Lee cross the Potomac to invade the North, first at Antietam and then later on his way to Gettysburg. Neither of those two incursions was particularly successful from the Southern point of view, but now we have a third invasion from the South and maybe the third time's the charm.

Even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the war was not over until successive Confederate armies capitulated further south, and the White population, particularly the aristocracy, never conceded defeat mentally. They made heroes of the murderous Bedford Forest, who carried on a guerilla campaign, culminating in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which Grant had to finally address with federal army forces, but the Southern gentry and the Southern hoi polloi never accepted the fact that White folks should give up their place of privilege in the South.

Tony Horwitz wrote about this in "Confederates in the Attic" and Heather Cox Richardson covered it in two books, "West from Appomattox," and "How the South Won the Civil War."

There have always been signs: Monuments from Richmond to New Orleans with Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis staring out imperiously, forts named after Confederate generals, A.P. Hill, Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood.  Now the War Department, under Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, have renamed those forts with the same names but putatively named after some other soldier with the name Hill, Bragg or Hood, wink wink. 

This was all part of the "Lost Cause," campaign, which taught that the Civil War was not about slavery at all--even in the South, folks knew slavery would be a hard sell to the rest of the country, but no, the Civil War was about a war of Northern aggression, and it was about economics--the South, you see, wanted low tariffs so it could sell its Cotton on a world market, particularly to England, but the North wanted higher tariffs to protect its budding industrialization and factories.  So slaves had nothing to do with it. And racism in the South was not really a thing.  That all reached a peak in the 1950's, the sanitizing of the war. 

Of course, nobody today was alive in the 1850's and 1860's, so we cannot get new testimony, but Lincoln was alive then, and he gave compelling testimony about the cause of the war--it was called his Second Inaugural address:

"And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. 

All knew this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

And now, we all know what the cause of MAGA is. 

You can say it's chaos in the cities, the inner cities, which is a dog whistle for those colored folks in the cities are running  wild and we have to send in the troops to put them down. 

You can say it's that invasion over the Southern border, not by white, blonde South Africans or Norwegians, but by those folks--we don't even have to say it--who are dark skinned--rapists, seeking out white women and selling drugs. 

The odd thing, of course, is MAGA has many Hispanic and Black adherents who do not seem to understand that the MAGA base is White nationalists, or maybe they do but the Hispanic males love machismo and the Black MAGAt's may be suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, figuring if they join Trump, they will be safe.

What's Wrong with This Picture? 

The reveal has been more dramatic recently, with Trump sending troops from Texas to invade Illinois, and from Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama to invade the capital of the Union, where Abraham Lincoln resided, Washington, D.C.

It's no more horses fording the Potomac; they've got big airplanes to transport them and their armored vehicles. 

National Guard from Rebel States and Diaspora 

There must be much smug satisfaction in the Confederacy now: Finally, we have won!

The Strange Case of American Democracy Demise

 

Mad Dog has stumbled upon a dusty book in the Hampton public library (a taxpayer supported institution) which, Heaven help us, got him thinking and wondering.

Mark Mazower, a professor at Columbia University, wrote the book: "Dark Continent," about Europe's twentieth century. He speaks English (born there), German, French, Italian and Greek, so he's in a position to write about Europe.

Thus far, only halfway into it, the big surprise for Mad Dog has been the idea that fascism and communism did not so much rise up, as simply replace democracies, which preceded them. 

Fascism was an opportunistic infection, or more accurately,  a saprophytic infection, as it were, establishing itself amidst the collapsed ruins of failed democracies. 

In fact, the idea of democracy did not well up from the pent up desires of Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, Estonians and Greeks, but it was imposed on nation states as part of Woodrow Wilson's messianic exhortation to make the world safe for democracy. 

This brought to mind a conversation Mad Dog once had with a Saudi prince, a very Westernized, erudite and cosmopolitan man, who smiled and confided,  "You know, not every people wants or even likes the idea of democracy."

Churchill, of course, said that democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all the others which have ever been tried, and Mazower's post mortem surely exposes the first part of that couplet.

Of course, part of the problem is that shorthand word, "democracy." What does that word even mean?  Rule by the people? 

"The people?" Who, on earth would they be?

In large, industrialized countries it is not practical to have people dropping their day jobs to meet and decide all the issues and administer all the efforts to sustain production of goods and services, provide health care, build and maintain transportation and communication, provide for education and training, in short, to do what large, successful societies need doing. 

So we have "republics," that is, we elect people to do all that for us, our "representatives," our hired guns, to do all that stuff so we can do what we want and need to do, manufacture stuff, provide medical care, build towns and cities, and places for mass entertainment and systems for mass communication.

"A Republic, madam," Franklin said, "If you can keep it."

Mad Dog has been devouring every book about the Weimar Republic he can find, seeing, of course, parallels, echoes, origins to our present day America. Mad Dog thought if he could understand the disease process as it played out in Germany, a country not unlike America, he might understand the disease, the brain worm afflicting America.

So Mad Dog began with "Before the Deluge," Otto Friedrich's easily digestible essay which is so accessible Linda Ronstadt read it and recommended it to Jackson Browne and it became au currant. If you are looking for entertaining treatments, you could not do better than "Babylon Berlin," that estimable and highly accurate TV series, or, for that matter, "Cabaret," which is based on Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin," the most literate and artful treatment Mad Dog has found. Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture"  details the fecklessness of the advocates of a liberal democracy. Eric Weitz's "Weimar Germany," takes you through a kaleidoscope of the experimentation in architecture, music, drama, educational innovation alongside the politics of that brief inter war interlude, that failed experiment we call Weimar. 

Erik Larson's "In The Garden of the Beasts" should not be forgotten account of the US ambassador to Germany on the cusp of Hitler's ascension and he ties together the Sally Bowles like ramblings of the ambassador's daughter, Martha Dodd, as she discovers the magnetism, the charm and the hideous truth of Hitler's mob.

But what he missed is that what was going on in Germany was only the most famous and visible example of what was happening all over Europe, from Hungary to the Baltic states, to the Balkans, and, in a twisted way, in Russia.

Which is to say, people all over were trying democracy, and parliaments, and these governments were failing miserably, seriously and truly and people all over Europe lost faith in unwieldly, messy democracy. They just wanted something that would work.

("Mussolini made the trains run on time.")

When Wilson declared the whole reason for World War One was, or should have been, to make the world safe for democracy that was more than aspirational, however deluded. 

World War One was a catastrophe, millions dead, a vector for the great influenza epidemic which killed far more people than battles did, and which reached beyond the battlefields to every bedroom, kitchen and parlor. Post war Europe was a wounded, diseased animal, in need of intensive care.

Arguments rage, even today, about it's causes--John Reed said it was simply a matter of two big empires (Britain and France) being simply unwilling to cut Germany in on the take, and that America got dragged in because American bankers (J.P. Morgan, in particular) had lent so many billions to the Brits and French, they could not afford to let Germany win.

One thing which is pretty clear, is that that war did overthrow monarchies/oligarchies/autocracies in Germany, Austria and Russia, and a bunch of other smaller countries, like Hungary, Serbia, Latvia, and attempts were made to replace all those strutting princes in their elaborate, ridiculous, bemedaled, bejeweled costumes, with parliaments, representative bodies of men (not women) wearing dark wool suits.

The problem was, none of that democratic reform worked, or it didn't work well enough.

Just reading about the Paris conference where new countries were drawn up, where people like Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam were ignored, where Russia was simply rejected for being Bolshevik, where the Middle East was served up as an oil resource for the "great powers" and where Africa and Asia were viewed as dark continents filled with sub-humans, one gets the idea the whole enterprise of post war reconstruction was not reconstruction at all, but simply a twelve course meal devoured by Britain, France and America, and to some extent, Italy.

So the unsolved problems of 1918 festered and ate out Europe like a spider wasp, devouring from within. 

The fact is, government of the people, by the people and for the people is doomed, because, well, maybe 40% of the people are well meaning, industrious, cooperative, but 30% are selfish, indifferent, just plain stupid and 30% are just flat out insane. 

Right here in Hampton, even at the peak of our giddy interlude, when Obama was in the White House saying articulate things, entertaining and inspiring us at the White House Correspondents' dinner (an overlooked but revealing exercise in American culture), and making decisions, we could see the cracks in the body politic expanding and admitting the destructive elements.

Obama, faced with the threat of Islamic fundamentalist groups determined to make the 9/11 attacks a weekly event, sent killer drones to execute the bad guys, without trial or due process, which opened the door to Trump bombing whatever he wants. 

Political correctness morphed into public meetings where speakers announced their pronouns before they even began to read their texts, where any woman accusing any man of unwanted sexual advances was to be "believed," as in "believe the woman," and the men fired, jailed and disgraced, where college boys were expelled from school by star chambers because they stood accused of date rape, and these boys often were not allowed to confront their accusers or even speak in their own behalf, because to allow the accused man to speak would be too "traumatizing" for the female accuser, where a young man who was a middling competitive swimmer as a male, at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, started setting records and winning championships as a woman, having undergone trans sexual surgery, but having also undergone a male puberty which benefited him greatly and nobody even asked, "Hey, why do we have women's sports separated from men's sports anyway?"  And we had local folks in Peoria, who were not yet ready for drag queens learning that their kids had seen a drag queen performance at their elementary schools.  And we had affirmative action in schools and for public contracts which established racial quotas and dismissed the idea of a "level playing field" as inadequate because it did not produce the desired results. Small wonder displaced White males began to howl. They might not be smart, but at least they were White. And who needs democracy, anyway, when you've got Amazon, Google, X, Apple watches, Microsoft, Facebook and Infowars?

But most of all, the reigning liberal "elite" was unwilling to hear the opposing point of view; no wonder when the opposition got power, they were inclined to return the favor.

And the opposition, the White Christian Federalist Society, Russel Vought, Stephen Miller mob were ready. It wasn't that they succeeded so much as the liberal lobby failed and someone would inevitability fill the vacuum--nature abhors a vacuum. They were, if you'll permit another image, the cockroaches picking through the debris after the apocalypse of ideas.

In short, one wing of democracy got ahead of the social and cultural norms embraced by a lot of White, Christian, religious folks in Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania. What and who exactly was being "represented"?

And mix into that brew the race and class factors and you've got Donald Trump. 

All those good ol' boys in Alabama, the entire Confederacy and its diaspora in the Mountain West, were still reeling from the idea of having a Black man sleeping in the White House and they were growing alarmed that the points they got for simply being White in Mississippi would no longer accrue, and they were just looking for something and someone to latch on to.

For Rome, it was the Vandals, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths; for America it was the Vulgarians. (See the shit dumping video, the gold ladened Oval Office and the destruction of the East Wing.)

The perplexing thing is America didn't have Germany's problems or Europe's problems when it rejected democracy and representative government and went full on cult autocracy. The Weimar Germans, the post war Hungarians, Serbs, Austrians, Estonians were dealing with starvation, hyperinflation and devastating unemployment, which the Reichstag and the various parliaments responded to with paralysis. 

The American economy was roaring under Biden. Inflation was down, despite all the noise saying otherwise. Health insurance was a problem but it was no worse than it had been. Unemployment was almost de minimis. World trade was humming along. NONE of the post war conditions which set up wounded Europe were extant in America, and yet democracy, the liberal experiment imploded.

Somebody was not happy.  Enough somebodies were not happy that America went full Weimar unto Third Reich.

Americans looked at Congress and said, "Nope. Not me. Those liberals are for them, they, not for Me!" 

Mark Mazower

It wasn't that Trump had something to offer; it was that government for the people, by the people of the people failed. 

It was not E Pluribus Unum. It was E Unum Pluribus.

Out of our unity, we shattered into pieces because the glue which held us together failed. 

So, today, we have the East Wing demolished.

Next target: The Lincoln Memorial. 

You heard it here first.