Author: hankkalet

In many ways, the Trump administration is no different than the presidencies that have preceded it. Every new president wants to put his stamp on the office, to move the agenda outlined during the campaign forward. And when the new president is of a different party, this often includes overturning rules and policies put in place in previous terms.

So while Donald Trump’s efforts on immigration and the environment are backward and inhumane, they do not represent a complete break with precedent.

I don’t mean to normalize his presidency by pointing this out. There is little about the Trump administration that is normal — from his over-reliance on generals and corporate CEOs in his cabinet to his rapid-fire over-reactions on Twitter, he has shown himself to be unlike most who have come before him. His temper has made him easy to lampoon, just as his apparent Russia ties makes it seem as though someone else is pulling his strings.

But the danger Trump poses goes beyond standard-fare conservative policies and a potential Putin-connection. Trump is a nationalist. His rhetoric glorifies hyper-patriotism and military might for its own sake, while denigrating and scapegoating the other and his opponents. This is one way to read his Saturday tweet storm, in which he alleged a nefarious plot by Barack Obama — a president he spent eight years attempting to delegitimize as a foreign interloper — to undermine the Trump campaign and presidency. There is no evidence of such a plot and, aside from the most loyal and committed of Trump supporters, few are even willing to entertain its provenance. But that is how Trump operates — accuse others of nefarious actions, roil the base, and rely on them to maintain his legitimacy.

That was the point during Tuesday’s speech of introducing Carryn Owens, the widow of U.S. Navy Special Operator Senior Chief William ‘Ryan’ Owens, who was killed in a controversial botched raid in Yemen ordered by the Trump administration. Trump introduced the widow and then basked in the applause:

During his Tuesday speech to the joint session of Congress, he used language like “national rebuilding” and — as the clip above shows — conflated military sacrifice with religious virtue, merging love of nation and love of god into a unitary concept. This is how demagogues operate.

I have called Trump a proto-fascist in the past, meaning that he exhibits some of the traits of the traditional fascist but may not be one in practice. Those traits include hyper-partriotism or nationalism, a glorification of the military and the military ethos (often by merging militarism with religious symbols), the merging of corporate interests with the state, scapegoating of opponents and the most vulnerable, and veneration of average folk. Trump’s rhetoric is full of these attitudes. Consider his praise of Chief Owens (edited here — but you can watch it in full above):

Ryan died as he lived:  a warrior and a hero, battling against terrorism and securing our nation…. Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity…. For as the Bible teaches us, “There is no greater act of love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  Ryan laid down his life for his friends, for his country, and for our freedom.  And we will never forget Ryan.

Owens deserves gratitude — and an apology. He died in a raid that probably should not have happened, and not just because this raid does not seem to have been well-planned or executed. The raid was part of a much broader foreign policy agenda that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama are complicit in pressing and which needs to be rolled back. This is not the plan, under Trump, who apparently plans to unleash the military and, as The New York Times reports today, expand it as part of a strength-for-the-sake-of-strength approach connected to “a nationalistic worldview that is unfamiliar today but dominated the geopolitics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Trump, the Times writes, is

fascinated with raw military might, which he sees as synonymous with America’s standing in the world and as a tool to coerce powerful rivals, such as China and Iran, which appear to be his primary concern.

He also appears little-focused on the details of America’s continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and globally against Al Qaeda. None of those missions will be resolved by the new aircraft carriers Mr. Trump has promised, and generals warn that they will be set back by his proposals to slash funding for diplomacy and aid.

Trump’s ramp-up of the military, the Times writes, is as much about symbolism as it is about strategy. Erin Simpson, who has advised the military in Afghanistan, told the Times that

“I think he sees force as performative. The utility of force is in its demonstration.”

It “suggests,” the Times writes, “a pursuit of policies that seem less suited to any particular strategy or conflict than to a view of military power as its own end.”

Trump’s nationalism and militarism pose a danger, as does the cult of personality that has grown up around him as savior of the past. Power, pageantry, nationalism — the blueprint is in place for the slide into a variation of fascist rule, but I believe our constitutional order is strong enough to withstand the slide. It will take effort — nothing eases the path away from democracy more than apathy — but nothing about the future is set in stone.

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As I wrote Thursday, protest is the lifeblood of democracy. This is why I want to point out a pair of protests that occurred Saturday — a Fight for 15 rally in Teterboro (corrected) outside a Walmart, and a pro-Trump rally in Middletown.

Here is a video from Northjersey.com of the Teterboro (corrected) rally:

And here is a story from Patch on the pro-Trump rally, which appears to have been much larger and was part of a national day of support for the president.

Forget the particular politics of each protest — I support the Fight for 15 effort and am a critic of Trump. Both rallies demonstrate what makes our democracy healthy. Efforts to shut down protests — whether it is the use of racketeering statutes against anti-abortion protesters, as was done during the Clinton administration, the penning in of anti-war protesters, or the laws being proposed around the country today — are inconsistent with the ideals we profess to hold.

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What follows is a speech I created by merging several of Donald Trump’s speeches with Adolph Hitler’s Jan. 30, 1937, speech to the Reichstag. It’s part of a piece of fiction on which I’m working.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

— First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Protest is as American as apple pie. We are a nation formed through protest, that has enshrined the right of assembly and petition in the constitution. But we also are a people who prize order. The standard response to protesters — especially from supporters of Donald Trump — is that they are whiners, sore-losers and malcontents, even that they are dangerous.

I’ve written about some of the conversations I’ve had with friends and acquaintances, live and on Facebook, conversations in which I have had to defend what I consider an indelible American right. Presenting the issue this way can be problematic — relying on stray comments and individual discussions makes the evidence seem suspect and opens me up to charges of creating a straw man argument. But the antipathy to protest is real and it is now taking forms that could have a deleterious impact on our democracy.

As The New York Times reports today,  at least a dozen states are considering legislation that would criminalize protest, subject protesters to excessive civil penalties, or indemnify those whose actions in response to protesters ultimately lead to injury — efforts that are designed specifically to quiet citizens who seek to push back against their government.

Defenders of these efforts have been making what sound like reasonable arguments about safety, about access. But in most places, the laws already allow police to arrest protesters who create hazardous conditions, either for themselves or the public at large. The motivations, then, appear to go beyond that — and that’s where this becomes a constitutional threat.

“There are already laws on the books in states that say if you break something or harm somebody, you’re going to be prosecuted,” said Patrick F. Gillham, a sociologist at Western Washington University who studies protests. “They’re troubling. They potentially have a chilling effect on protest.”

The laws target something that is endemic to successful protest actions — the need to inconvenience people, to create tension, to wake people from their slumber. Creating tension is a primary goal of protest, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Direct action — sit ins, marches, rallies are not ends in themselves, but a means to move the culture, the society.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

Critics called King and civil rights protesters extremists — a description he found honorable. The extremist, he said, is willing to put his body on the line for justice. The question, he said, “is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”

Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

King’s language might surprise some — given the “whitening” his image has undergone in recent years. By this I mean the efforts to make him palatable, easy to digest, to recast him as a colorblind exemplar of American equality. We quote the “content of their character” line, but we ignore his calls for justice, his demand for freedom, for liberty, for the nation to make good on its own “promissory note.” It wasn’t Dr. King who asked “can’t we all just get along?” That was Rodney King and that question arose from the flashpoint of the LA riots — when a group of police officers were exonerated after being captured on tape beating King.

The LA riots occurred 26 years ago. The national debate that followed, however, drew the wrong conclusions — a ramping up of the war on drugs and get-tough policing, while only paying lip service to the actions of law enforcement. We have witnessed a massive expansion of the U.S. prison population, a militarization of police forces, quality-of-life policing — and, finally, the kind of explosive response within the community that Dr. King predicted.

I asked my students last week (as we began preparation for their research paper on power and responsibility) how they though King — along with Erich Fromm and Henry David Thoreau — might respond to today’s protest movements. The answers were telling. King, they said, would be aghast. He’d be opposed to what is happening.

“You don’t think he’d be out there leading the protests,” I asked.

“No,” was the nearly unanimous response.

We can’t know, of course, but the evidence does offer us some idea. King sided always with the oppressed. He may have abhorred violence, but he also understood its provenance. “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever,” he wrote in “Letter.” “The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.” And the “many pent up resentments and latent frustrations” need to be released. The demands must be heard.

So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides — and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.

So, yes, he condemns violence as immoral, but also makes it clear that it remains close to the surface, that it can burst forth at anytime if justice is not service, if the oppressed are not given real hope.

Laws criminalizing protest, therefore, are both antithetical to our constitutional values and counterproductive. Remember, King was writing from the Birmingham jail after being arrested on charges that he failed to get a parade permit for a march — a permit the protesters sought and were refused. The law, the broader intent of which King did not question, was used as a tool of oppression in this case and that made it unjust.

The laws being proposed today may on their surface seem benign. But like the parade permitting law in Birmingham in the early 1960s, they are not. Their application is designed to restrict protest, to chill speech, and that makes them an unjust use of state power.

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I’ve annotated last night’s Donald Trump speech, which you can find here. Here is my overall point:

Remarks by President Trump in Joint Address to Congress
― Remarks by President Trump in Joint Address to Congress | whitehouse.gov

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