Brown Shirts

To be clear: I don't think Donald Trump will be our next president. I don't rule it out, however, in part because Hillary Clinton's is a candidacy with many vulnerabilities. I still think Sanders would be the stronger candidate, undercutting Trump's faux outsider status in many ways--but that point now looks moot. Trump as we see him still seems clownish, void of any substantial policy ideas, and almost incapable of lucid speech. But all that could change, if and when he becomes the Republican nominee. A Trump 'makeover' into a more conventional, even respectable candidate--while retaining the belligerent, insulting rhetoric and directing it against Clinton--could be more formidable than many now think. I'm frankly nervous about what could happen this fall.

But even if we're spared the worst--and 'treated' to a Clinton presidency, with all its ambiguities and compromises--Trump has already impaired our democratic legacy in so many ways it's hard to know where to start. Here I want to focus on just one aspect: his strategic use of violence and intimidation. It began with his response to hecklers, denouncing them and inviting supporters to 'punch them in the nose.' Trump made his position even clearer when he offered to pay legal expenses for a supporter who flagrantly attacked a protestor in North Carolina. Last week, Trump rallies seemed poised on the edge of violence. And now Trump has suggested his supporters would 'riot' at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland if he fails to gain nomination.

Like so many of Trump's most objectionable qualities, this one merely amplifies a tendency already visible in the Republican party. We should recall that in November, 2000, planeloads of Republican operatives were flown in to Miami from Washington to stage a riot at the Dade County elections bureau; their actions successfully halted the re-counting of ballots until the Supreme Court was able to halt it by injunction and award the election to Bush. The fact of a putsch--which is what this combined action of rioters and Court amounted to--was obscured by the Court's official language, Gore's feckless surrender, and the public's willingness to move on behind a new president they regarded as moderate. But it was a putsch nonetheless.

Now Trump seems to be incorporating violence as part of his campaign rhetoric: his belligerent remarks directed against foreign powers, but also his direct calls for mob violence against protestors and opponents. And more seriously, he seems to be threatening to bring violence to the electoral process, specifically at the nominating convention. But as with so many things Trump, how seriously should we take this?

My answer: very seriously. We aren't in Weimar territory yet, but the chronic economic stagnation we face is very real, and so is the anger it is eliciting. Our political process has reached near-paralysis in the Congress, and the majority party in the Senate is openly flouting its constitutional obligation to confirm justices, in a way that will paralyze the judicial branch and undermine the Constitution. Trump's generic 'punch 'em in the nose', his vague claims that government as such no longer works, his calls to delegate all powers to a strong man such as himself--all this has appeal in direct proportion to the dysfunctions of the federal government, and that dysfunction is beginning to look as permanent and structural as the economic stagnation.

I'm no scholar of German history--or Italian, or Spanish--but I fear that we are looking at the early stages of fascism. We may as a citizenry and an electorate pull back from the precipice and elect a 'safe' president this time around. But the breaches in civility and civic process that have happened in the Trump campaign will stand as precedents in any case. The intransigent social problems that have given rise to this movement are unlikely to resolve in a 'safe,' moderate administration. The Pandora's Box of brown shirtism has been opened these last few weeks and months. Our Republic is in a dangerous place.