Democracy is under attack all over, not just in the U.S.

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided 5-4 to allow DACA to remain in place—with Chief Justice John Roberts finding the Trump administration’s rationalizations to end it “capricious” and “arbitrary.” You need proof that Trump is “capricious” and “arbitrary?” Early in his term he claimed we needed to have a “heart” in regard to DACA recipients, and seemed poised to strike a bi-partisan DACA for border wall money deal—but then Stephen Miller and company got to him, and suddenly he didn’t want those people from “shithole” countries, since the “base” would go crazy wild if Trump “compromised” on his anti-immigration “principles.”  Trump’s reaction to today’s court decision again shows that for him this is all about playing to his “base” and getting reelected. 

But just how big is that “base”? According to a snap poll on the MSN News webpage, 70 percent of respondents strongly support DACA; only 15 percent strongly oppose the program. Trump’s out-of-touchness with reality is like that of any tin-pot dictator who personalizes the exercise of power; Trump has always been corrupt both personally and in business, and as the adage goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Like any person who cannot abide compromise or obstruction of his power, Trump has to invent an alternate reality that can only be turned into true reality by the destruction of democratic principles and institutions, and silencing his critics. 

But it isn’t just in the U.S. where democracy is under threat; at least in the U.S., voters have an opportunity to end the Trump regime once and for all and begin the moral and ethical regeneration that will take years to undo the damage Trump has caused. Even some countries that have long, stable democratic traditions like Australia show us that blindness to reality for partisan political reasons has consequences; Australia’s right-wing government still refuses to take “credit” for the bushfires that raged all over the continent, all the while still denying the truth of the responsibility of humans for global warming. 

And in the UK, barely disguised white nationalism was the true motivating factor behind Brexit, and racism continues to infect the country well after the Windrush scandal. It is important to note that the UK’s right-wing government is employing (technically) non-whites to do its dirty work; Boris Johnson’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is the bureaucrat behind the attempts to curtail immigration by establishing a “point system” that is specifically tailored to benefit high-caste Indians like herself. One must remember that Indian surnames are very important, since they identify a person’s position in India’s caste system, the discrimination of which is technically outlawed but still informs India’s culture and society. In India “Patel” denotes someone who was a great landowner, morphing into the business and merchant class. The name also tended to identify chieftains in villages; white nationalists in the UK can “appreciate” this arbitrary “blue-blood” social hierarchal system, and Indians of the privileged castes are only too happy to be obliged their own similar prejudices.

But these kind of things are only sparks for the kindling; the attempts of Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, to turn the country into a de facto dictatorship under his rule are far more pronounced in its intention. Some of the most ardent supporters of this far-right fanatic have staged demonstrations in support of a return to military rule, which isn’t so far-fetched given that Bolsonaro—a former army captain—has filled government positions with present and former members of the military. Calls to abolish the country’s Supreme Court have arisen from his supporters since the court decided to oversee investigations into Bolsonaro’s various nefarious activities, including deliberate disinformation campaigns, such as the ones in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, of which Brazil is second only to the U.S. in number cases and deaths. The health ministry’s decision to remove references to the total number of infected and dead of the COVID-19 from official government websites, plainly a political move on Bolsonaro’s part, have only resulted in anger and confusion.  Brazil’s legislature is also engaged in probes that may lead to impeachment proceedings; Bolsonaro’s response to this is to suggest that as being a duly elected official, the legislature has no authority to remove him from office even if he is convicted of wrongdoing, and that if called to do so, the Brazilian military (which is under his thumb—or vice versa) will not obey any order to forcibly remove him from office.  

Despite all the attention that Fox Business gives Venezuela, the threats to democracy around the world typically come from countries which have elected far-right, nationalist regimes, and Trump seems to have good relations with many of them. He praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during a recent visit to the White House, and Orbán is certainly a dictator-type that Trump can appreciate. The COVID-19 pandemic has given Orbán and his far-right Fidesz party the opportunity to rule by emergency decree, limiting civil liberties and freedom of the press among other things, and the decree permits only a two-thirds majority vote in the Hungary’s parliament to end the decree. Some measures in the  decree are permanent—such as the weakening of oversight of executive power, obviously something that Trump has been busy doing here with the firing of inspector generals. Something that Trump has suggested in the past and is happening now in Hungary is criminalizing for up to five years in prison the “spreading of falsehoods” by journalists, which has predictably been used to silence opponents of the regime. Also predictably, supporters amongst the populace who have openly fascist beliefs are among Orbán’s most enthusiastic supporters, and many incidents in which fascists have been “victims”  have been blamed on Roma (gypsies), underlying the racial,  cultural and anti-Semitic attitudes that infect of Hungarian society.

Hungary isn’t the only European country that entered the EU as a “democracy” that has backslid. During the 1980s, Poland’s Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa sought to overthrow the Communist government and replace it with one following democratic principles, and he eventually would be elected Poland’s first president under the new system in 1990. But it wouldn’t be long when a former ally, Jarosław Kaczynski, along with his brother, decided that Poland’s democratic institutions were too “socialist,” and decided to breakaway and create a far-right party that styled itself as more directly opposed to the former Communist regime, although in reality it shared its dictatorial aspirations. According to The Atlantic,

Over the past four years, Kaczyński has used his power to stage a massive attack on Poland’s democratic institutions. In an astoundingly short span of time, he has turned state television networks into reliable purveyors of government propaganda; gained effective control of the country’s court system; weakened the independence of the electoral commission; restricted free speech; and initiated a number of high-profile trials against political opponents, including the director of the European Solidarity Center. As Wałęsa put it in a public letter co-signed by 14 other senior statesmen from across the political spectrum, the government has repeatedly attacked the country’s “division of power” in ways that seriously imperil “the foundations of the democratic state.”

Although Kaczynski only briefly held the position of prime  minister, he is still regarded as the de facto ruler of Poland because of his position in the leading political party there, the oddly-named Law and Justice Party.  The party has maintained a hold on power by, among other things, disseminating conspiracies theories that exacerbate distrust between the working  people and the educated “elites,” and essentially bribing segments of the electorate for votes with the so-called 500+ program, which now pays all family units with at least one child 500 zloty a month (about $126). 

Although Turkey has been a secular democracy for much longer than either Hungary and Poland, it has also seen devolvement into an authoritarian regime in the past 20 years under Recep Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party. Like many countries which either do not have resilient economies during times of stress or are headed by leaders with autocratic inclinations, Erdogan’s regime has embraced the politics of division to remain in power, mainly between secular elements and religious fundamentalists, the latter adherents most susceptible to accepting one-party, one-man rule. Predictably, Erdogan has squelched opposition and institutions meant to put a check on his quest for dictatorial powers. 

India is styled the world’s largest democracy, but what that means precisely has come under scrutiny under the regime of prime minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. India is like other “democracies” that have been slowly devolving into one-party rule: criticism from the media is stifled or punished, with the national media becoming little more than a government propaganda organ. In a story in the New Statesman, 

Yet in a country with thousands of newspapers and hundreds of television channels dedicated exclusively to news, dissent — with some notable exceptions — has shrunk to the point of near-extinction. Primetime television shows on the most-watched networks are packed with panellists who trip over one another to praise the prime minister. “Influential owners, anchors, editors across the nation,” the journalist Krishna Prasad observed in The Hindu, serve as an “advance party to quell dissent, manufacture consent, set the agenda, drum up support, and spread fear, venom, hatred, and bigotry — sometimes through sheer silence.”

As if to underline the point, Prasad soon found himself out of a job after writing that. One of the few remaining independent news outlets, NDTV, was the object of obsession of Modi just as Trump is obsessed with CNN, particularly following scrutiny over the murder of thousands of Muslims by Hindu mobs when he was governor of Gujarat; Modi was accused then and is now of at the very least looking the other way at sectarian violence both against Muslim and Dalits (the so-called “untouchables”) who don’t even have the protection of belonging to a “caste.” At least 15 percent of India’s population are Dalit, and even those immigrating to this country cannot escape the stigma of caste prejudice in dealing with “upper” caste Indians here. NDTV’s criticisms of Modi would come to the attention of India’s version of the FBI (CBI) for “national security” violations, and advertisers, despite doing decades of business with network, suddenly withdrew their support from political pressure. India’s institutions, which are supposed to be non-partisan, have been used by Modi and his party for partisan political purposes, just as Trump’s Justice Department has become a political arm solely to destroy Trump’s enemies and advance his reelection chances. 

Democracy has in fact been under threat in this country for some time even before Trump, principally from the gerrymandering and exclusively Republican efforts at enacting voter suppression laws aimed at suppressing Democratic-leaning voters. Today it is under threat from a president who has spared no effort to use every organ of power at his disposal to insure the same thing that every tin-pot dictator does in a country with “republic” or “democratic” in its official name: rig the system to remain in power. Trump has actively worked with foreign governments for “favors” to help him politically, like finding “dirt” on political opponents, or as John Bolton will tell us, “asking” China to aid him in getting reelected by agreeing to import more produce—proving once again that there is nothing Trump will do unless it benefits him politically.  When the Barack Obama oversaw healthcare and finance reform, signed executive orders on DACA and strengthened environmental rules, he didn’t do this because he thought it would help him politically, but because was the the right thing to do; Trump, on the other hand, is a craven slave to Fox News, whose sole purpose of existence is to be the mouthpiece of business autocrats and politicians who behave more like plantation owners from the antebellum days.

Trump, meanwhile, has also been busy purging all government agencies under his authority of any and all persons who dare to cross his changeable whims—i.e. not sufficiently “loyal.” Only immediate family members, like Ivanka and husband, and those like Stephen Miller, who seem to be even more outrageous than he is in their ideological leanings, have survived his capricious nature. In general, the people occupying the various cabinet posts have been mainly doing as little as possible, barely even worth Trump’s notice—the exception being Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former hyper-partisan fanatic in the so-called “Freedom Caucus,” busier rooting out any and all troublemakers looking into his ethical shortcomings than doing anything of any use that has something to do with his job description. Anyone who has any authority to act independently, like IGs, have been targeted for reassignment to the unemployment line, and a partisan fanatic like William Barr is doing his level best to convince the public that Trump’s crimes have less to do with this administration’s contempt for the Constitution  and the rule of law than with claims of false “relativity.” 

The U.S. today certainly doesn’t occupy the high moral ground; what is worse is that under Trump it is laying the bedrock for further erosion of this country’s own democratic principles. He must be stopped from being allowed to completing his “mission.”