Bleak Monday Reads: Wherefore art thou Democracy?

“For once, I have to agree with JD” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Morning, Sky Dancers!

I’m trying to get this posted early since the Poland Avenue Rooster and the thunder have me awake, and I have another doctor’s appointment today.  The weather is not good here. We have flash flood warnings. My first look at the headlines this morning made me want to go back to sleep. My first two suggested reads come from two of my favorite writers.  The articles are both horrifying, but these are the times we live in. We cannot look away.  Marcy Wheeler and Anne Applebaum tell it like it is.This first one is by independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, whom I have not since our days at the long-gone Fire Dog Lake, my first stop in blogdom.  She writes this at her home at emptywheel. This is about how the press has been instrumental in trying to normalize a regime that is other than normal with their “hypothetical discussions” about the U.S. Constitution. I know I have a new term to add to our tags today: instrumental language.  I will use Google’s AI function to give you a brief definition before Marcy applies the term.

In the context of language, “instrumental” refers to language used as a tool or means to fulfill a need or achieve a goal, such as obtaining something or expressing a desire

Here’s the application from a phone conversation between FARTUS and Kristin Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press. Sit down and put the cup of coffee down.  You may need a deep breath. “Trump’s Threats to the Constitution Are Happening in Real Time, Not (Just) in a Third Term.”

There is no doubt in my mind that the intent of the Trump team is to retain power indefinitely, via whatever means.To fight that effectively, you should focus your action and words on the most pressing issues before us — elections on Tuesday, legal cases before appeals courts, legal US residents in detention — rather than trying to discern the means by which Trump will codify all the actions he is taking today, yesterday, last week. The actions he is taking in real time, and their goals, are utterly transparent.Which is why I think it a colossal waste of time that the punditocracy spent much of Sunday talking about Kristen Welker’s “report” that Trump says he wants a third term.You don’t say?Rather than spending the day discussing Trump’s Executive Order presuming to dictate to states how they — with the involvement of DOGE!! — must start suppressing the vote over the next months, we talked about something that might happen in 2028. Rather than spending the day talking about how Trump is already using federal funding and immigration law to silence speech protected by the First Amendment, we discussed what gimmick Trump might use in the future to evade the 22nd Amendment.Almost no one even tried to use Trump’s comments about a third term as a way to explain the end goal of assaults on civil society, speech, and voting — to connect the actions Trump took in the last week to what he says he’ll do in 2028 — something that would at least make use of Trump’s own rhetoric to educate low-information voters. Instead, they talked about Trump’s assault on democracy in the way Trump wanted it framed — distant, allegedly constitutional, and uncertain, rather than an imminent unconstitutional assault on democracy.What the fuck are we doing here, folks?

Indeed. Please go read this.

“The fact that Welker brought up this plot for a third term herself, mentioning Steve Bannon (who was presenting it on another channel), suggests that was the entire point: Trump called her, she dutifully brought it up, she got video but used almost none of it, leaving only Markwayne Mullin on camera (who should never be invited as a credible interlocutor in any case) to answer for the Administration on MTP itself. Not that it mattered; Welker was even more solicitous than usual yesterday.Trump’s genius is in managing attention: both keeping it, and directing it away and towards topics of his choosing. He has long integrated assertions about a third term into his political spiel. This is nothing new (indeed, NBC linked an earlier instance in the story). And yet NBC — along with a pack of credulous pundits — chose to focus on Trump’s third term comments all day Sunday rather on the things he did in the last week, covering up disappearances on Monday, tampering in elections on Tuesday, assaulting the independence of another law firm on Wednesday, attacking unions and whitewashing history on Thursday, compromising DC self-rule on Friday, that are obviously about a third term and beyond.How can you have lived through that week, or any of the last nine, and have doubts about the intent here? Why do you think hypothetical discussions about assaults on the Constitution will better serve fighting back than concrete discussion and organizing about specific assaults on it?This seems to be yet another instance where journalists and liberals, both of whom institutionally presume that language is transparent, misunderstand how authoritarians use language instrumentally and therefore forgo the most effective response to instrumental language.”

Human guardrails are not present in this administration. I’m not even certain you may call anyone in the administration fully human. Constitutional Guardrails are questionable even as we are not even in the first 100 days of this surreal mess. It’s no wonder former Yale History Professor  Timothy Snyder and his wife have taken off for the Great White North.  It appears Fascism scholars can read the writing on the wall from the capitulation of major universities on the attacks they’ve received.Here’s The Guardian‘s take on yesterday’s advance notice on the march to dictatorship. “Donald Trump criticized for suggesting there are ‘methods’ for a third term – US politics live. President attracting criticism from some in both parties after telling NBC ‘there are methods’ in securing a third term despite constitutional barriers.”

Republican John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon as president, who was jailed for his involvement in the cover-up of Watergate and later testified to Congress as a witness for the investigation into the scandal, criticized Trump’s apparent aspiration for a third term, in an interview with CNN.

“He likes constitutional end-runs … and that’s what seems to be on his mind is how he can get around the very clear language of the 22nd amendment [to the US constitution], which precludes getting elected to more than two terms,” Dean said.

CNN asked, if there are ways to get around the law, constitutionally what could those be?

Dean said: “They would have to be written by the supreme court, that would redefine the constitution. I just describe it as a constitutional end run.”

An end run is an American football term for the ball-carrier running around the end of the defensive line in their attempt to reach the line to score a touchdown.

The key line from the 22nd amendment, forbidding anyone who has been elected president twice from being elected again. reads:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

The US Congress approved the amendment in 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures, where it was then ratified in 1951.

It’s the end-runs that worry me. He’s already got a history of back-to-back self-coups. I really don’t think most people realize how serious this is.  FARTUS also has two Supreme Court justices in the tank for him; the rest of the right-wing majority is wobbly at best.The other must-read article today comes from The Atlantic. It’s written by Anne Applebaum. “America’s Future Is Hungary. MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.” This is a bleak picture of our economic future, given the fascination with Orbán by this administration and its crazy White Nationalist Christian wing.

Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies.He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Remember the idea of visas for $5 million dollars?  Well, now we know where that scatterbrained idea came from.  Politico‘s Jack Blanchard warns us we are in for another mind-blowing week.

Get ready: We’ve got special and state-level elections happening Tuesday; Donald Trump’s latest tariff bonanza unveiled Wednesday; a budget vote-a-rama expected in the Senate Thursday and the TikTok ban deadline looming Friday night. On top of that, we’re expecting another big Trump phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and potentially the first Supreme Court ruling on the president’s efforts to deport migrants using an 18th-century wartime law. And that’s just the stuff we know about.

I really do not get anyone who can’t see FARTUS and his cronies as a clear and present danger to our country. This is from CNBC’s Jeff Cox. “Goldman Sachs sees Trump tariffs spiking inflation, stunting growth and raising recession risks.” Well, can’t say I didn’t tell you this would happen back in mid-November when the real agenda became evident.

With decision day looming this week for President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs, Goldman Sachs expects aggressive duties from the White House to raise inflation and unemployment and drag economic growth to a near-standstill.The investment bank now expects that tariff rates will jump 15 percentage points, its previous “risk-case” scenario that now appears more likely when Trump announces reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday. However, Goldman did note that product and country exclusions eventually will pull that increase down to 9 percentage points.When the new trade moves are enacted, the Goldman economic team led by head of global investment research Jan Hatzius sees a broad, negative impact on the economy.In a note published on Sunday, the firm said “we continue to believe the risk from April 2 tariffs is greater than many market participants have previously assumed.”On inflation, the firm sees its preferred core measure, excluding food and energy prices, hitting 3.5% in 2025, a 0.5 percentage point increase from the prior forecast and well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.That in turn will come with weak economic growth: Just a 0.2% annualized growth rate in the first quarter and 1% for the full year when measured from the fourth quarter of 2024 to Q4 of 2025, down 0.5 percentage point from the prior forecast. In addition, the Wall Street firm now sees unemployment reaching 4.5%, a 0.3 percentage point raise from the previous forecast.Taken together, Goldman now expects a 35% chance of recession in the next 12 months, up from 20% in the prior outlook.The forecast paints a growing chance of a stagflation economy, with low growth and high inflation. The last time the U.S. saw stagflation was in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Back then, the Paul Volcker-led Fed dramatically raised interest rates, sending the economy into recession as the central bank chose fighting inflation over supporting economic growth.

One more read from me, and it’s off to the shower. This is from Salon. It’s a commentary from Chauncey DeVega.  “Sadopolitics: Why MAGA clings tighter to Trump the more his policies hurt them.  Psychology helps to explain why Trump’s followers will not abandon him”  H/T to BeadBear.   The explanation that I like best is this one. “Donald Trump is an expert at sadopolitics “

In a 2018 conversation with historian Timothy Snyder here at Salon, he elaborated on the meaning of sadopolitics (what he terms as “sadopopulism”) and its implications for the Age of Trump and the larger democracy crisis:

“Sadopopulism” is the notion that you’re doing half of populism. You promise people things, but then when you get power you have no intention of even trying to implement any policy on behalf of the people. Instead, you deliberately make the suffering worse for your critical constituency. The people who got Trump into office, for example, are traditional Republican voters plus people in counties who are doing badly in terms of health care and other measures, and who need help.

Under Trump, of course, things will just get worse in terms of both the opioid addictions and in terms of wealth inequality. But that’s OK, because the logic of sadopopulism is that pain is a resource. Sadopopulist leaders like Trump use that pain to create a story about who’s actually at fault. The way politics works in that model is that government doesn’t solve your problems, it blames your problems on other people — and it creates the cycle that goes around over and over and over again. I started talking about sadopopulism because I got tired of people talking about populism.

In such a toxic relationship between the leader, the followers and the larger public, the abuse and misery actually bond them all closer together. The most loyal followers see their leader as simultaneously a source of protection and safety, even as he or she hurts them. To that point, the more Trump’s policies hurt his followers, the more likely they are to cling to him. Trump’s followers are also going to misdirect their rage, anger, blame, and other negative emotions and behavior at some “enemy.” In the Age of Trump, that enemy is Black and brown people and other nonwhites, “Woke” and “DEI, “illegal immigrants” and migrant “invaders,” the LGBTQ community and specifically transgender people, social “parasites” and “takers,” government employees, those not deemed sufficiently “patriotic” and therefore disloyal to MAGA and Trump (which here is synonymous with “Real America”), Muslims and other non-“Christians,” the Democrats, “liberals,” the news media (“fake news” and “lugenpresse”) and other targeted groups and individuals.

Hold on to the family silver.  It might be more valuable than the dollar and more useful than cryptocurrency. Hold on to anything gold.  That’s about to go way up.  It ain’t that pretty at all out there.  Remember stagflation?  We really don’t need to see that again, but then, we have an incompetent Dotard with insane ideas in charge of the country. He’s got equally incompetent Dotards out there wrecking the government.Well, that’s enough of what looks like a Debbie Downer Day for me, and it’s just started.  At least the thunder is letting up.What’s on your reading and blogging list today?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwpagb-_Zk0