When Edward Snowden provided documentation that our intelligence agencies are monitoring and spying on nearly every citizen and downloading our data and metrics into government computers where they will be stored for perpetuity, nothing was done. Obama misused the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force to erase due process and give the executive branch of government the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son. Obama also signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, in effect overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force.
Obama and Trump have violated clauses of treaties ratified by the Senate. They violated the Constitution by making appointments without seeking Senate confirmation. They bypassed Congress by abusing executive orders. These are very dangerous bipartisan tools in the hands of a demagogue. This steady corrosion of democracy, as in Germany and Italy, opened the door to fascism. The blame lies not with Trump but the ruling political elites who, as their predecessors did in the 1930s, abandoned the rule of law.
Peter Drucker, who was working in Germany as a journalist during Weimar, astutely observed that fascism succeeded in spite of the chronic lies spread by the Nazis, not because of them. The rise of Nazis, not unlike the rise of Trump, took place in the face of "a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course." Drucker, in a remark we should interpret as a grave warning, noted that no one "would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite." As Hett writes, such hostility to reality translates "into contempt for politics, or, rather, desire for a politics that was somehow not political: a thing that can never be."
"The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection," the left-wing playwright Ernst Toller wrote of Germans in the Weimar Republic. "They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us."
When ruling elites are unable to protect the rights and needs of citizens, or no longer interested in doing so, they become disposable. An enraged public sees any political figure or political party willing to attack and belittle the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. Lies and truth no longer matter. This was the appeal of the fascists. It is the appeal of Trump. Democracy was not extinguished in 2016 when Trump was elected. It was slowly strangled to death by the Republican and Democratic parties on behalf of their corporate masters.
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