The election of Donald Trump in November 2016 coincided with an ominous historical date: the 78th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht. On that occasion, we titled the newsletter of the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Infamous Past, Disturbing Present. The shocking ascendancy in a post-Holocaust world of a socio-political movement rooted in the United States, mainly powered by bedlam and toxic rhetorical brawling, sheltering wild authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses, was destined to be a ruinous affair. The ransacking and rioting at the nation’s Capitol by those courted and enthralled by this cult of personality is deeply despairing. Among the unhinged were live-streaming neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
Five years ago, we looked carefully at the facts and summarized our concerns about the potential direction of unrestrained incendiary speech and actions. We consider it our duty at the center to point to the unambiguous historical parallelisms and alarming facts when elected officials engage with authoritarian, fascist, and neo-Nazi ideas. Despite Trump not being re-elected president, or maybe precisely because of that, we have now reached the precipice.
[image_caption]Alejandro Baer[/image_caption]
“We cannot move forward; we cannot evolve as a people because we have been choked off by weeds. Weeds of communism, weeds of socialism, weeds of leftist liberals subjecting us, suffocating us. We are a garden that needs to grow. We cannot grow if we have weeds choking us off.” The audience chimes in, shouting: “Kill the root, kill the weeds!” and the speaker closes his rant with: “We need to pull the weeds!”
Let me put things in an even clearer perspective. This is the Us vs. Them vision in its most dangerous and extreme manifestation. There is no room for both. In Modernity and the Holocaust, the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explains that eliminating the adversary is a necessary step needed to be taken to reach the end of the road, which is the desired society. Moreover, Bauman warns about a “gardener’s vision,” where those creating the garden identify its “weeds,” those groups of people who spoil their design. “All visions of society-as-a-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds. Like all other weeds, they must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society’s boundaries,” writes Bauman. But if all these means prove insufficient, he concludes, “they must be killed.”
Elected state officials endorsed a genocidal playbook with their participation in the Minnesota Capitol rally.
I write these lines with profound sadness. As a St. Paul resident, as the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, as the director of an academic center whose mission is to investigate and teach the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides, I was left momentarily speechless by the sight of America spiraling out of control. Many other colleagues across the country and I have become diligent and quick to establish the parallelisms, heeding the warning signs, raising the red flags. Meanwhile, we witness events nationwide unfolding in their grotesque and dreadful manner.
Elie Wiesel captured our sense of helplessness in a stirring way: There is something worse than the tragedy of a messenger who cannot deliver his message, he said. And that is when he delivered the message, and nothing has changed.
Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.
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Here is Matt Stoller, compiling some of the vicious responses to a Huffpost article back in 2017, about the life expectancy of white people without a college degree going down, in large part directly due to opioids, alcohol and suicide, as a direct result of economic despair after decades of declining wages and benefits. If you want to know why such people were taken in by Trump, and have fallen prey to toxic ideologies.
See, the poor encouraged to hate the poor, blaming the equally powerless for their problems, mocking them in their despair. Elites managing the economy getting the usual free pass.
https://medium.com/@matthewstoller/on-mocking-dying-working-class-white-people-d0ea653a91a9
It’s hard to understand what point you’re making. It seems like you’re claiming that people were taken in by Trump because of the toxicity of people who look down on them? (I’ve tried understanding the point of your first paragraph a few times, and that’s the best I can come up with.)
Yet nearly all of the comments at the link you provided are frustration and disgust about the fact that so many of the people being vilified … voted for Trump. Seems like circular logic.
I agree with what I see as the overarching point of many of your comments about how badly our system and both parties have failed the majority of Americans, but I’m extremely frustrated by what I see as pointless both-siderism. For 40+ years, any policies put forth by liberals/Democrats to improve equality (and by extension, the lives of the vast majority of Americans) has been resisted by the Republican party and its predominately white base. The only positive policy I’ve seen put forward by Republicans in the last 3 decades was Medicare Part D; aside from that, they have provided no economic policy other than tax cuts in *decades*.
But yeah, a pox on both parties, because Democrats haven’t solved everything.
It’s called “hijacking” in the thread parlance, I think.
Don’t sweat it, he’s arguing with himself 90% of the time.
The last 40 years union wages have collapsed in many sectors, most good jobs for the 2/3 of Americans who do not have a college degree have been eliminated by outsourcing, automation and consolidation, millions of farmers were driven from the land, with many jobs turned into low wage, part time and no benefits. That has been called by both parties just the way of things, creative destruction and the evolution of the economy.
When people are held back and down this way, in their sense of betrayal and despair they fall prey to charismatics. At the same time, the elite distract from their predations by encouraging the poor to hate the poor of the other “side”, usually with race baiting. The comments in that thread are a good example, near indistinguishable from the language in right wing outlets about black people.
I get accused of “both siderism” and “highjacking” the thread precisely for the same reason, because liberal Democrats will not hold accountable their leadership, and are encouraged to believe that all that is wrong with America is the fault of Republicans – and that I dare to compare Clinton deregulating banks and media, and Obama saving Bankers and throwing the People to the wolves, to Republican economic predations.
Education no more makes one elite than does lack of it make one noble. Instead of clamoring for the middle class to be debased, so that your sacred workers can gather a few more scraps (that’s who you attack with your screeds, you recognize “the elites” far less than those of us you accuse of shilling for them), perhaps you should encourage those unwashed masses to clamor for that very education, so that they are less persuadable by despots.
“Instead of clamoring for the middle class to be debased”
What? Seriously? When have I ever suggested that? If anything, I am trying to convince the middle class to support the working class at the expense of the top 10%, lest what has been done to the working class be the fate of the middle class (which it already is.)
“perhaps you should encourage those unwashed masses to clamor for that very education, so that they are less persuadable by despots.”
That is some seriously condescending language. That said, I remember when an education didn’t turn you into a debt serf. Speaking of that trillion and a half of student debt, methinks that is fertile ground for future charismatic despots.
Otherwise, if you ascertain some hostility on my end toward the middle class, maybe that is just because I have been talking about the need to remedy income inequality, a totally out of accountable military, and widespread ecological damage, in this middle class haven for quite a long time now, and mostly I have had little but scorn heaped upon me.
The song “Both Sides Now” has some wise comments such as basically the longer you live, the more you learn new things, which basically leads some of us to the conclusion “I really don’t know life at all”. ( I am talking about myself – NOT YOU – in regards to having less understanding) I have always found your comments to be insightful and have learned from them. I lived and worked in The Twin Cities, fortunately, with people of many different backgrounds, including black ladies in my apartment building and Control Data, who indicated things were actually getting worse for them, compared to their parents. Around that time, the upper 10% were pulling in huge compensation packages and outsourcing millions of jobs. Also around that time, the mid 80’s, cocaine and crack was flooding into America causing them much heartache and additional care giving burdens. A documentary last night showed how widespread these drugs were. Again learn from your commentaries. Feel compassion for Governor Walz, Joe Biden, and any other leader trying to cope with these times.
“It’s hard to understand what point you’re making.” Don’t worry about it as the same point will try to be made over and over again in the coming days. It won’t matter what the actual debate is. The same drum will be beaten; or, more accurately, the same dead horse. There is no room for nuance or an attempt to see differences.
Don’t even bother to try to figure out the point he’s making.
Because we cannot have a conversation about this economy that is so very good for a few and so very hard for so many, nor the ways the people are manipulated by ruling elite so that we cannot and shall not have that conversation.
Good place for ’em. Though I would characterize most of them more as of the management class protecting the ruling elite.
Though, a pretty weak “coup” with no real military support.
I guess the lack of military support somehow makes it all better. Let’s just move on and pretend it didn’t really happen. NOT.
Just because I am not frothing at the mouth or pumped up with righteous indignation does not mean I don’t support rounding up every last idiot who entered the Capital building and charging them with Federal crimes.
Calling it a coup or an insurrection however, as an English Major who cares about language, I couldn’t help but notice that while media repeats the words endlessly in their maximum drama all the time kind of way, the impeachment document put forth by the House uses the word “insurrectionary”, which pretty much admits it wasn’t a coup or an insurrection, just a bunch of idiots pumped up with delusions of grandeur with no meaningful public or military support.
English is different than “Legalese.” Those terms have legal meaning outside of ordinary language. What happened was, indeed, an insurrection. It was indeed a coup–a failed one, but a coup, nonetheless. And, while there is reasonable argument to the contrary, there is also reasonable, legal argument that there were individuals who committed treason. Although I understand why some people are squeamish about the “T word,” it’s not a good reason to avoid analyzing whether the legal definition has been met, even if no one is charged. We can’t keep our eyes closed–this can’t be swept under the rug and generally ignored because the outcome wasn’t more deadly or more permanent. Just because the criminals are stupid or incompetent does not change the crimes they committed, crimes against all of us as a nation under the Constitution.
For what it’s worth, I sympathize with your disgust of our economic system and the general lack of care our political system provides the weakest in our country. But you mistake a failure to succeed with a failure to act, which does nothing but damages the chances of future success. You are right. The SYSTEM does not care. But you are wrong in assuming that those working IN the system don’t care and don’t actually work toward more equitable outcomes.
Rachel,
Maybe I am merely wary that the system wishes to use the words coup and insurrection to institute another more invasive round of government powers called Patriot Act 2.0. Surely in this climate that will be embraced by liberals, and the law in America will be warped into oblivion by gov hunting down “domestic terrorists”, who might be little more than people like me who question corporate power and military over reach.
That said, do not mistake my being concerned with language, with some will to deflect or distract from holding these people accountable, and working to excise this toxicity from the body politic.
As for people in the system fighting for more equality, the system is people, and this system is overrun by corporate proxies doing the work of corporations and banks to the detriment of people, small business and ecosystems. Of course there are people in the system who would be more egalitarian, but the system tends to subsume them
Righteous indignation is rarely a comfort to anybody.
I was fairly certain that had Trump been reelected, we would have genocide within his second term. What has reared its head in this past week suggests that this likelihood will accompany any measurable further shift of power to the Republican party – we will remain on a knife’s edge. We now have tens of millions of citizens incapable of apprehending facts in the world, rejecting all morality, mere pawns of those realms of private power that have immiserated them for decades and that, to disguise that, have manipulated them to direct their resentments and despair, their nihilism, against their fellow citizens with increasing incoherence and violence. As private greed and ecological limit immiserates further, and as messaging continues to mainline right into the lizard brain, it isn’t clear what diverts this trajectory.
Mr. Duncan, what you miss in your automatic “Democrats-also-bad” response to any critique of the Republican party is that if those in the Republican base were not manipulated to align themselves with corrupt, autocratic, amoral power, and if they simply stood with the rest of us to demand a decent society that serves the people, the entire two-party system would be pulled strongly to the left; the Democratic party balance of power would move decisively away from its economic clientele and toward an agenda of the common good, the Republican party would collapse, perhaps a true peoples’ party would arise. But those who make up the Republican base appear irrevocably lost to the malign interests that control them, and from the looks of the insurrection, they’re not all old timers.
I am merely countering the notion that Democrats are of the inherent good who need to do the gardening of the Republican weeds.
I also can’t fathom why Democrats believe their corporatist, globalist, meritocratic leadership has any interest whatever in heading to the left, or that the only legitimate sense of any common good is to be found on a left devoid of the right/conservative?
A healthy body politic would be a well balanced left and right. The idea that one side holds all that is good while the other holds all that is evil is the authoritarian implulse destined to kill the body politic.
You present left/right as a binary choice, ignoring the fact that there could (and should!) be a broader dynamic, and also ignoring the fact that in most liberal democracies, the current Democratic party would be considered conservative.
Right now, the Republican party is largely in the grip of people who actively deny reality in the pursuit of minority rule, with a general trend towards white, Christian ethno-nationalism.
I don’t consider Democrats to be flawless arbiters of all that’s good, but I *do* consider them to be the only party out of the two in our system to have any legitimate interest in governing for the good of all. So yeah, they’re tending Republican weeds, as that’s all the Republicans have sown for decades. Feel free to explain what in the current Republican party is worth salvaging.
Most of the working class on the right I know don’t want some white ethno-state, and if they want to go back to the fifties like they are accused of, it isn’t about Race, it’s about the slower pace of life then, and the fact that you could raise a family on one working class income. That would be the part of the Republican party worth saving (if we are serious about cutting the legs out from “white supremecy”.
As for the Democratic party, at least it’s leadership, what I hear and see and feel is, they want a ruling class of many colors, with equity of at least 30% of every race with next to nothing, no power and no say.
OK, I’m pretty close to done assuming you’re arguing in good faith. You just compared ‘most of the working class on the right’ to ‘Democratic leadership’ to build a narrative of salt-of-the-earth folks vs a technocratic elite.
How about we compare the unarguably Christian ethno-nationalism espoused by a huge swath of Republican leadership to the technocratic elite of Democratic leadership?
Again, no one is claiming that the Democratic party is all sweetness and light–plenty of people left-of-center have the same criticisms of the Clinton and Obama years that you outline, but you refuse to acknowledge that economic anxiety is at best only a minority driver of Republican populism.
“How about we compare the unarguably Christian ethno-nationalism espoused by a huge swath of Republican leadership to the technocratic elite of Democratic leadership?”
Deal. Both are dead-ends for America.
“but you refuse to acknowledge that economic anxiety is at best only a minority driver of Republican populism.”
I am arguing it is a great deal more important than most liberals will allow; in fact, in this commentariat and often on corporate media outlets and NPR it is often argued that economic anxiety plays NO part in the anger on the right. I would point out too, on those media outlets, economic anxiety apparently plays no part in the anger on the left. It is almost always ONLY race that defines the rage, supposedly.
Having worked in the trenches most of my adult life, my experience is, if people head toward race to explain their anger, it is often because they feel helpless about doing anything to better their economic standing. If they did not have that economic anxiety, if they felt hopeful and empowered economically, most of them wouldn’t make race an issue.
Most of your technocrats and ethno-staters are in service to corporations, banks and oligarchs.
Mr. Duncan, your use of the terms “left” and “right” doesn’t offer confidence that you know what you intend them to mean. To the left of Democratic corporatism lies 60% of the population, from commune dwellers to Edmund Burke enthusiasts, willing to engage in good faith debate toward a better democracy. To the right of Democratic corporatism lies 40% of the population, stewing in an incoherent and paranoiac irreality and serving as witting or unwitting foot soldiers in the long-term project of private power to overturn and divert democracy, in this nation and across the globe. No, there is not any “legitimate sense of any common good” on the right, where the defining goal in fact is destruction of the common good.
“No, there is not any “legitimate sense of any common good” on the right, where the defining goal in fact is destruction of the common good.”
It is true enough that talk radio and conservative media generally has inculcated in many on the right an opposition to the common good. There are plenty of people on the right however who recognize a need for government to mediate disputes, and to regulate at least to some degree. They, like most people on the left who criticisize corporate bank and oligarch power, have no access whatever to major media, quite effectively shut out. Corporate Dems and imperialist Repubs rule the roost.
At least 30 people were killed in largely left-wing riots in the summer of 2020.
By right wing terrorists, as evidenced in the actual prosecution there-of. But hey, fellow conservatives have a habit of bludgeoning police officers with fire extinguishers and flag poles, in addition to attempting insurrection against our duly elected government, lies of ommission are like child’s play, I suppose.
The protests were left-wing. The riots were full of right-wingers.
In the act of historical revisionism, anything goes and nothing matters….
Most of the people actually indicted, at least, were lost kids of America’s consumer empire. But yeah, there were right wing lost kids present too.
False. But then what’s new.
Perhaps you were responding to the wrong post, but there absolutely were right-wingers involved. That is an indisputable fact.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/texas-boogaloo-boi-minneapolis-police-building-george-floyd
Sadly, with a compulsive liar like Trump as president, people feel like they can just ignore facts and make false claims about things like the Minneapolis were all leftists.
“Elie Wiesel captured our sense of helplessness in a stirring way: There is something worse than the tragedy of a messenger who cannot deliver his message, he said. And that is when he delivered the message, and nothing has changed.”
Alejandro Baer, did Elie Wiesel apply any of the above to Palestinians? Therein lies the double speak.
Good point about Wiesel’s later position.
We are in difficult times. Political polarization makes it hard for reasonable people to solve existing problems of all kinds, and even harder for them to strike a path to a better future for all.
Getting back to Professor Baer’s article, I would point out the cadre of political scientists and historians who assured us that Donald Trump was no Fascist back 2015 and 2016. This failure to recognize the obvious was an institutional boost for the violence, bigotry, intolerance, and ignorance that Republicans used to grab as much political power as they could and wield it with tyrannical abandon. If we continue to deny the obvious when it appears in St. Paul, MN. we do so at our own peril.
I would also note that the media by and large actively engaged in the suppression of any anti right-wing narrative for years, preferring to treat Trump as though he was merely controversial rather than a tyrannical threat to our democracy. For years the media marveled at Trump’s outrageous behavior, but refused to place it within a right wing political context. In fact I still don’t see a clear right wing political context, even now. The fact that the same media that has no difficulty reporting the imaginary presence of “Antifa” or “Anarchists” behind any demonstration, and the same media uses terms like: “Radical Left” to describe Omar and AOC, STILL has no word to describe the Fascists that attacked the Capital. In fact so incapable are so many in the media of recognizing right wing extremism, they fall back on habitual left wing descriptions, going as far as to label Fascists as “Anarchists”.
It the media how long to confirm the obvious fact that Trump is liar? And it took how long for the media to allow the appearance of the term: “Fascism” to describe our crises? Even now, the media struggles to find a name for the people who are attacking us. They had no such problem with the alleged attackers were BLM, or Antifa.
This refusal or inability to name those who are attacking us serves as a smoke screen for Fascism. This is why it’s so important to heed Professor Baer’s call to recognize the rage behind local demonstrations. This is not a DC phenomena, this is nation wide, and it’s on our streets. Republican’s who want us to pretend that people who threaten us and demand we indulge their long since debunked conspiracy theories are simply trying to obscure the attack’s they’ve been launching.
To call Trump what he is, the mainstream media and voices of respectable opinion would have to violate their prime directive, namely, to maintain the frame of a perfect symmetry of Democrats and Republicans, left and right, around a mythical center. The Republican party has recognized this and exploited it for not just four years, but half a century, pressing its authoritarian project with the confidence that the mainstream media always will normalize it back into the realm of democratic legitimacy.
Absolutely Charles.
To be fair, our media of record did eventually become openly hostile to Trump, but their refusal/inability to recognize the dangers of right wing extremism and place Trump in that context is just now beginning to unravel. They had no similar difficulty plugging Omar into a “left wing” template. While Trump is certainly getting the coverage he deserves NOW.
By the way, has everyone seen the latest stunt by Becky Strohmeier and her: “Hold the Line” MN group? They’re going to have an “invitation only” event at the Capitol. These constitutional “freedom” fighters think public spaces like the Capital steps can be reserved for private functions. And so it goes. And THESE are the people Republican’s think we need to indulge.
Paul, regarding your first paragraph, yes, to expand a bit, the role of the mainstream media in this stage of our society (past 50 years) is to present and sustain the illusion of democracy, underneath which private wealth is able to pursue and preserve its economic and political prerogatives. Two parties, each representing half the population, in shifting equipoise is the most efficient construct for this purpose. Practically, this assignment consists of three principal subtasks: (a) normalize the right, wherever it may go, to preserve the picture of a balanced, democratic tug-of-war; (b) exclude the left, as the only source of critique of the underlying consolidation of wealth and power that is to be obscured; and (c) serve up a product that appears to inform, thereby fulfilling the need for a society purporting to be a democracy to have a free press, but keep it superficial, diverting and entertaining so that the reader doesn’t question the framing or assumptions, or otherwise engage in too much critical thinking.
That was a long lead-up to say yes, the media know how to label and exclude Rep. Omar and BLM protestors, because excluding the left has been a part of the media portfolio for a long time. What has been occurring over the Trump years has been the realization of certain realms of establishment power, and hence of the mainstream media, that perhaps the Republican party can go too far to the right, so as to undermine the fundamental stability that establishment interests require for their prerogatives to hold. This is principally what underlies the mainstream media’s struggle that you describe, I think.
Charles, just to continue our sermon to the choir for a couple more minutes; yes absolutely, the role of media since the emergence of mass media has been to create and support the illusion of a two party status quo that is the end of history. The illusion/fantasy that we have two more or less moderate/centrist parties with somewhat different priorities who trade places in power ever so often has been a comforting illusion for decades.
Of course the problem with the “centrist” narrative is that it necessarily marginalizes anything beyond the status quo as “radical”. So common sense ideas and policies get classified as “leftist” simply because they don’t emerge from the “centrist” status quo. Meanwhile our “center” has been drifting to the right for decades to such an extent that the narrative habitually recognizes “leftistism” as the threat to be marginalized. So we’ve seen all this hand wringing about whether or not an FDR liberal is a “socialist” while a Fascist president flies under the radar as a “populist”. And so it goes.
Those who are interested in considering another facet of our current situation may want to look for the article on Medium.com: A Game Designer’s Analysis of QAnon.
Thanks for the referral to that article Al. Wildly interesting read. Critical thinking being used against reality.