American Autocracy: Let's Call It What It Is

 I was being interviewed yesterday by a media outlet about Trump's deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC, and I guess I surprised the interview and myself a bit by referring to Trump as a dictator.  Since he himself has called himself that, why not?  Because it sounds crazy.  It is also the case that there is no single act or signal that tells us when a country has moved from democracy to autocracy.  Because our imaginations are driven by Nazi Germany and Communist Soviet Union and the like, it seems extreme to say that the US is an autocracy now.  But if we look at all kinds of other countries in history that are coded as non-democratic/autocratic, the similarities to the situation in the US should be appalling yet not so crazy.  

To be clear, I am not a regime type expert.  For that, check out the Competitive Authoritarian stuff by Levitsky and Way.  But I can't help but talk about this and write about as, well, the stakes are huge.  

Anyhow, there are lots of ways to measure this.  Check out http://brightlinewatch.org/ for surveys of academics rating various components of democracy and see where things stand.  I just want to list many but not all of the things Trump has done that are not merely unprecedented or alarming but autocratic--moves that are not just harmful to democracy but are those made by dictators.

1. Declaring emergencies where there are none, to justify tariffs, to justify the use of ICE, other federal law enforcement agencies, and the military to repress people... is just classic autocracy. 
2. Pardoning insurrectionists.  Giving one's loyal supporters a break is not just about thanking them for their service but informing everyone that political violence used on Trump's behalf will not be punished.
3. Using the Department of Justice against one's opponents.  Rule of law is fundamental to democracy and liberty, so using the law selectively to retaliate against opponents is more than just a wee bit problematic. Again, it send signals--that if you oppose Trump, you will pay with your freedom.
4. Using the military against the people. Do I have to elaborate on this one?
5. Gaming the next election--competitive authoritarianism is all about making political competition tilt radically to one side.  Of course, #voterfraudfraud has always been about this, so this is not new, but taken to new lows. 
6. Coercing the media. While a number of media outlets have been more or less acquiescent to Trump's autocratic moves, we have seen major media companies face extortion, paying Trump "compensation" for their news coverage which then deters further journalism.
7. Repressing academic freedom.  Oy, this cuts close to home.
8. Defying the courts.  So many court orders have either been ignored or subverted.  Just the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is enough to illustrate that. 
9. Usurping Congress's powers.  Refusing to spend money allocated by Congress, ending government agencies without Congressional approval (USAID, Education), and so on.   
10. Executive orders as decrees. An executive order is supposed to be a modification of the discretion the laws give to the executive, not to create new laws, toss out old ones, and all the rest.  Trump's wielding of executive orders in the manner he has done has been incredibly autocratic yet has become normalized.
11. Purging the military.  Such a classic authoritarian move--to gut the military of those who gained leadership roles through merit to replace with lackeys.  This will undermine the effectiveness of the American military.  So much for lethality.   
12. Taking ownership stakes in companies.  I thought liberty meant private firms, not state ownership. Oops.  Where are the libertarians?
13.  Most importantly, the arbitrary use of power.

This has all happened and is continuing to happen.  We have a regime in power that is acting beyond the constitution, that has thoroughly subverted the rule of law, and, yes, a leader with a cult of personality who refers to himself as a dictator.  We can call this competitive authoritarianism, we can call it autocracy, we can call it a dictatorship, we can call it fascism, but we can't call the US a democracy now.  Getting it back is going to be really hard, and the norms that have been broken over the past eight years and especially the last eight months are going to be very hard to rebuild.

   

owers from other branches 

A Day at DND HQ

The CDSN Summer Institute made its annual stop at DND HQ.  This has been a highlight
of each SI, moving from a couple of briefings in a morning to several over the course of a day to eight this year.  Since this is now an annual event with similar or even the same speakers, I can get an idea of where things are generally headed.  Since last year, we have a new government although not a new party in power, we have a new President in the US, and we have the same wars and hot spots to a large degree.  So, much foddre for comparison, and comparison not the thief of joy (that would be envy) but a source of much joy and insight.

The briefings were held under Chatham House Rule, so I cannot attribute any statement to any speaker, but I can give the gist.  To be clear, this was one of those events with the Rule is most helpful, as the folks were generally quite forthcoming saying stuff that they could not say in public.  I was actually pretty surprised by some of the things that were admitted, like an honest take on the readiness of the CAF.   

The biggest difference between last year and this year: the military is getting money and spending it.  So much discussion of 2% as a real thing, which was not the case last summer.  One service's* briefing, for example, was much less about regrets about what they could not do and more about reorganizing/reconceptualizing the balance of activities given that they have some of the resources they need to do stuff.   But to be clear, the goal might be to getting things to be adequate rather than excellent--that our bases would have drinkable water, not that we about to have all the stuff necessary to fight and win against Russia.

A second big difference was a recurrent theme of sovereign capabilties/strategic autonomy.  This is the Trumpness of it all--that Canada needs to build in Canada, that Canada needs to be less dependent on the US for stuff. However, still a lot of emphasis on stuff still doing well at working level, and I wonder, always, whether wishful thinking is coloring this since the working level stuff can be turned off at any moment and especially when Canada is in a difficult spot.   

One consistency that is inconsistent--that Canadians want the military to domestic operations and the military don't.  While the priorities of Canada first and then Europe and then Indo-Pac showed up in most slides regardless of service or civ vs mil, what they mean by Canada is not domestic crisis ops but defending the north from imaginary overinflated threats.  Oh and South America--not on the list of priorities--not surprising but always notable.  For me, the big missing piece, and it is less of a DND/CAF thing than a Canada thing, is the far right threat.  I think if we had this briefing in 2004, Al Qaeda would have been mentioned.  In 2014: ISIS.  Now?  Hmmmm.

 Speaking of the Arctic, well, oh my.  So, yes, Russia and China are doing stuff up north, but this does not really threaten the peoples up north.  But since those folks are aware of Russia in Ukraine and China towards Taiwan, when the Canadian government promotes threats to the Arctic so that the public supports more defence spending, the government is scaring, rather than reassuring, the northern communities.  While I have always been an Arctic Security skeptic--that the threat is overinflated--I hadn't realized that one of the consequences of threat inflation has been to upset the folks up north.

Golden dome came up here and there.  My big question--what does Trump's $61b mean for Canada--was not clearly answered, and I don't blame the folks who talked to us.  BUT the fun coincidence is that our current planned outlay for NORAD modernization is C$82b or so over 20 years, which is about US$62b.  It is fun, isn't it?  

One thing that was an undercurrent of the briefings is humility--there is only so much Canada can do.  Given the shortages in personnel (Navy leads by being short 23%), the CAF can't do everything.  The Latvia deployment is the show for the army, with 1650 or so troops.  This was a fun number for me, since our promise to NATO is 2200 or so.  Which means we can get up to 2,200 for exercises, imitating our allies who surge troops in when they feel like. The problem, of course is that if the balloon goes up, it will be very hard or impossible for Canada to send more troops into a very hostile airspace.  The last couple of days, I have been asked whether Canada could contribute to a peacekeeping/security guarantee mission to Ukraine if Russia and Ukraine stop fighting.  Putting aside the unlikelihood of a deal and that Putin would oppose NATO troops being part of such a thing, can Canada send troops to such a mission?  Only if Canada gets out of the Latvia business or at least cuts it quite significantly.  So, probably not is my answer.

 One tidbit that reminds us how limited Canada is: we have defence attachés in 44 countries, which means that more than half of our embassies either have a remote attachés or none at all (Canada has something like 110 embassies, which also means almost half the world has no Canadian ambassador/embassy).

Finally, the Carney campaign promised a defence procurement agency, and we haven't heard much about it.  But it does seem like it may actually become a reality but not quickly.

So, it was a terrific day in a great week, and we definitely drank from the firehouse.   Much to think about.  I am very grateful to the SSHRC and MINDS grant programs that made this week possible and to the Public Affairs group at DND for facilitating this day.  Our participants got a lot out of it, and so did I.

 

* The military refers to each branch/service as an environment--army-land, navy-sea, air force-air--but I find it it awkward and I am stuck in my ways. 

Sending the Feds to the Cities: How UnAmerican!

 To be clear, to say something is UnAmerican or not something we do is usually to ignore a history of doing that stuff.   Voter suppression?  American as hell.  Selective enforcement of the law?  Sure.  Concentration camps?  That's been done.  But when I woke this morning and saw images of a bunch of different kinds of feds--FBI, DEA, etc--going through the streets of DC with absolutely no goddamned reason to do so, it struck me as damn near unprecedented.

I invoked the Declaration of Independence, rather than the Constitution, because the US was founded on a variety of complaints, but one was the capricious use of armed force to oppress the populace.  While several grievances cover this, one seems most on target: ""He [King George] has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance." [see here].  

Of course, over the first and now second Trump terms, Trump has seen those grievances as a checklist of things to do.  But seeing the actual deployment of feds to bully the capital, because it is convenient, because it is symbolic, because it has a Black mayor and majority Black population is simply appalling.  It is not a distraction-- it is one of the main events on the descent into autocracy.  Backsliding is too slow of a description--in less than six months, Trump has plunged the US into autocracy.  This stuff is exactly why the colonists rebelled (along with, um, yeah, other motives) and created the United States of America.

Sure, any nationalism is contested--what its meaning is, who counts and who does not count as a member of that nation--but an essential nugget of American nationalism is some kind of notion of freedom from arbitrary rule, from the federal government exerting its power just to exert its power.  So, yeah, this is UnAmerican to the core, and all Americans should be appalled by it. That those who have spent the past fifty years yammering about the threat of the federal government and the need for guns will either be silent or cheer this on, well, that's a tell on what they really care about.  For the rest of us, we need to protest, we need to lobby, we need to figure out ways to stymie the Trump administration, and we need to pressure the Democrats to fight like there is no tomorrow.... because if this stuff becomes commonplace, there will be no tomorrow.  That is, this strategy and abuse of power can be used to keep Democrats from voting and then that is the whole ballgame.

Why Are Civ-Mil People Freaking Out Again?

 Less than six months ago, I wrote about Trump's purge of senior officers from the US military for the sins of being African-American, women, and/or not sufficiently obsequious.  There have been many civ-mil moments since then that have been alarming, degrading the norms that govern the often challenging relationship between civilians and the armed forces.  I won't list them all here, but it has not been a good six months.  Today, we have yet another major challenge to how democracies are supposed to manage their militaries--the deployment of the national guard and "maybe" regular forces to Washington, DC to fight crime.  Yes, to fight crime.  Again, why is this so bad:

1. Most obviously, this is completely unnecessary.  Crime is down in DC.  Indeed, if Trump was worried about crime, he'd be sending the national guard and the regular forces into red cities.
2. It breaks a huge red line: using the National Guard for ordinary law enforcement.  The National Guard, as opposed to the regular military, is often used domestically--for responding to natural disasters, for dealing with large/sustained protests, etc.  When was the last time the NG was used to deal with theft and murder and bullying of random DOGE schmucks?
3. It makes the US military become not a national institution but a partisan one, as it ends up serving the needs not of the country of the whims of one guy.  The GOP is already lining up behind Trump on this.
4. One key non-obvious part of good civil-military relations is not to put the military into spots where it is damned if it does and damned if it does not.  If the military voices objections to this (or to being sent to fight the Mexican cartels), then they are seen as too woke and must be tamed.  If they don't voice objections, they will be seen as complicit.  Again, Michael Robinson's panoptic take on this is very instructive--if things are moving radically around the military, even if the military stands still, it is seen as moving towards one party and away from another. 
5. It sets the stage for Trump to use the military against his political opponents, say, Texan Democrats who are resisting the revisions of electoral maps.  In his speech justifying this unjustified act, he mentioned that NYC, Baltimore, and other Blue cities will be next.  This is notabout crime, but about undermining the elected leadership of blue cities.
6. By eroding the norms, Trump is getting the media and the military and the public to be accustomed to these outrageous deployments.  The NG and Marines should never have been sent to LA as there was no emergency there.  But now he is doing it again and again, numbing people to the autocracy that the US has become.
7.  To repeat number 7 from the previous list: Once you politicize the military, it becomes very hard to undo.  Let's say the GOP loses the 2028 election and leaves power peacefully (we can dream, right?).  The new President does what?  Fire all Trump appointees in the military?  That is pretty partisan--the replacements will be seen as lackeys to the Dems even if they are not.  Once the military is deeply into partisan politics, it simply will be hard to take it out of partisan politics.
8. DC is not a random place but the capital, where folks like to go to register their displeasure at the government.  Will protestors be able to freely assemble in a city where the National Guard is engaged in law enforcement?  Probably not.

Let me know if I have missed any other reasons why this is awful. 

So, yeah, I have to use the same Simpsons meme: 

 

*  I should note that Trump is doing me a favor--I am in the middle of a large grant effort with a great team of people.  The one thing we don't really have to do is justify why it is important to study civil-military relations right now. 

 

Pondering the Priorities of AntiSemitism and Israel

 I have been thinking about the role of Israel in Jewish identity thing for a few years now, perhaps stirred by my trip to Israel in 2019 and definitely energized by the violence since October 2023.  And then I saw a piece about how the Anti-Defamation League essentially gave Musk a pass on being an antisemite (although there may be some regret, real or feigned) because he was "pro-Israel."  That really yanked my chain, so I am about to spew about this stuff, and it will probably piss a lot of people off, but so be it.  

As always, my caveat on this stuff: I have often said that my parents are Jewish, suggesting that I am not since I don't believe and never believed.  However, as Charlottesville reminded me, the antisemites don't care about belief, and I would be sent to the camps/gas chambers/ovens along with the devout.  The key here is that I really have never thought that hard about Israel in Jewish identity, and this will be where I do that thinking based not on a thorough examination of the Torah, the Talmud, or religious scholarship but based on my background as a scholar of ethnic (yes, to me, religion is one kind of ethnic identity) conflict.   So, some of my thoughts here may be wildly ignorant or sound stupid.

First, we have to say this as clearly as possible: being pro- or anti- Israel does not really tell us that much about whether one is pro-Jew or antisemite (I don't use "philosemite" for reasons I have explained earlier.)  Evangelicals who are pro-Israel also want to wipe out Jewish identity by converting all Jews to their version of Christianity or watch them burn after the Rapture (seeing Jews as a means to an end is inherently antisemitic).  The Musk-ness of it all is a reminder: he is supposedly pro-Israel, but he is also pro-Great Replacement Theory, which puts Jews at the heart of the conspiracy to replace white people in the US and elsewhere with non-white people.  And there is that Nazi salute and his very antisemitic AI and all the rest.  Likewise, you can have people who are pro-Jew who are critical of Israel--there are numerous left-leaning Jewish groups in the US and Canada who have been protesting the policies of Israel even before the utterly corrupt Netanyahu (friend of antisemites) took power and before the violence reached the levels of the past two years. 

So, the 2x2 of Israel-support and pro/antiSemitism illustrates the reality that while there might be a relationship, each box is filled enough that we have to add other variables to get anywhere (note that the ultra-Orthodox Jews would be pro-Jewish but oppose a Jewish state until the biblical requirements are met--the Messiah comes, thanks to a friend for pointing this out).

It makes clear that one's stance towards Israel does not actually say much on its own about one's stance towards Jews. 

Second, Israel is clearly central to Jewish identity, but I have to ask what we mean by "Israel?"  Do we mean the land, the people, or the state?  So much of the ancient history of that place is central to Judaism.  The centrality of the story of Moses in Judaism is a good illustration--this big hunk of doctrine/belief/whatever is focused on getting Jews back to the lands that God gave them (note, the Torah and other texts depict that whole getting that land from God as, well, quite violent--the land was hardly empty even way back).*  In the various prayers and songs and services, Jerusalem and the land of Israel feature quite prominently.  During the last set of services I went to, I was so very struck by the Israeli flag being on the bima (the podium)--which refers to the state of Israel but can be conflated with government (note that the Canadian flag these days means many different things thanks to the convoy assholes and other false patriots).  It is so much so that it is taken for granted, and I didn't really think that much about it until recent years.  That makes me a lousy Zionist, another way I could disappoint my father.  

But as I think about it now, I wonder about the conflation of land and government.  Yes, the Jews got their safe harbor after World War II and the Holocaust in the land they long identified with.  And once you control a land, you develop a state and a government.  So, Jews could identify with the state of Israel, but do they have to identify with the Israeli government?  This is the key point that has been gnawing at me.  All governments are flawed and are thus deserving of criticism. But a holy place in a religion is probably not supposed to be criticized--the Vatican, Mecca, and the like--and are beyond reproach.  So, maybe folks get a bit upset about the criticism of Israel because it is holy to Jews?  

Of course, there is the whole "should a Jewish state exist?" question, whether Zionism is legitimate or not, hangs over all of this, but I am going to put it to the side for now (I will get to it some day, really).  Right now, I am just teasing out what it means to care as much or more about Israel than about the plight of Jews.  Because the fundamental assertion here is that they are not the same thing especially if one is thinking of Israel as government as opposed to Israel as holy place.

Third, now I have arrived at the stuff that is partly responsible for my state of anger and frustration: the contradictions between the imperatives of antisemitism and of being pro-Israel.  The ADL article makes it pretty clear that the latter has taken over the former, and that is certainly the case in American politics as well--that the concern about antisemitism, a real thing, on American campuses is mostly a concern about people being hostile to the government of Israel (again, some of them may be hostile to the state of Israel or to the Jewish people, but Trump, the GOP, and others are not focused on those ideas/identifications).  The article inspiring my post clearly shows how the ADL and others are now identifying Jews who are critical of Israel as being antisemitic--Jew-hating Jews.  While there are such people in the world, to protest genocide, to want a non-far right Israeli government, to want an Israeli government to be led by non-corrupt autocrat wannabees, to question the wisdom or legitimacy of a theocracy does not make one antisemitic.  

In the piece, accusing Israel of genocide is called blood libel, which shows how far this has gone. Blood libel refers to the accusations/conspiracy theories about the Jews killing Christian babies so they can drink their blood, a truly awful set of ideas that have around forever.  That is not the same thing as looking at Israel's deployment of violence against the Palestinians and raising questions about whether there is an effort to eliminate in whole or in part the Palestinian people.  Have I committed blood libel in my recent post?  That is not only stretching a concept so much that it becomes utterly meaningless, but it essentially defines criticism of the Israeli government as akin to the worst forms of antisemitism, and by no accident at all, aims to silence all criticism of Israel.  

I have note that we live in a moment where truly vile antisemitic people are taking pro-Israel and supposedly anti-antisemitic stances to attack universities, to attack free speech, to disrupt the Democrats, to dazzle the media with bullshit, and to distract from other stuff.  The living embodiment of this is Stephen Miller, who, yes, is Jewish, but has betrayed every lesson from the Holocaust and has become essentially the Heydrich or Himmler of our time.

Fourth, I will make a particularly provocative claim: the job and priority of the ADL and other organizations as well as the first priority of Jews in North America should be ... the safety of Jews in North America and not the government of Israel (and not even the state or people of Israel).  It is the job of AIPAC and other lobbying organizations to be focused on policy towards Israel, but if antisemitism is a great threat (and I agree that it is), the focus should be on protecting Jews.  Of course, Israeli Jews will say that the safety of Jews depends on the safety and independence of Israel.  They will say that if Jews want to be safe, don't focus on improving their safety in the US or Canada, but move to Israel.  Indeed, my trip to Israel six years ago gave me the impression that Israeli Jews are not so fussed about the plight of American or Canadian Jews.  

Ethnic conflict digression: Thinking about it now reminds me of my work on Greater Hungary in the irredentism book I wrote with Bill Ayres--that the Hungary's Hungarians of the 2000s identify somewhat with the Hungarians outside of Hungary but not completely so.  That the outsiders may share the same language but they haven't experienced post-1956 Hungary, so they aren't quite the same.  I am positive that Israeli Jews identify somewhat with North American Jews, but these outsiders are not the same as, even lesser than because they have not committed fully--they haven't moved to Israel--and by not sharing the same experiences of being under rocket attacks, have not fought in the various wars, haven't been subject to terrorism, etc.

Fifth, why is there more antisemitism in the US and Canada these days? There is clearly more violence aimed at Jews lately yet the overall count is inflated by folks calling criticism of Israel as examples of antisemitism:

"There had been more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents in the three months after October 7, he said, a 360 percent jump over the same period a year before. But in January 2024, the organization’s researchers conceded to the Forward that the increase was in part derived from a change in methodology. “Anti-Zionist chants and slogans” now accounted for more than 40 percent of the total incidents"" From here.

 However, there clearly has been a significant increase in violence aimed at North American Jews (I am guessing there is more Islamophobic violence as well, but that, too, is a post for another day).  Obviously, the rise of far right parties and actors within the political systems and within the media goes a long way.  Trump and his team have been amplifying all kinds of hate since his first campaign started, and a core part of that has been hate aimed at Jews.  The elevation of Great Replacement Theorists, the Republican focus on George Soros as the boogeyman of our time, not unlike the centrality of the Rothchilds in European anti-semitism of yore, Musk amplifying Nazis on twitter--this is all really bad for TeamJew in North America (and Europe). The right wing antisemites also have permission to deploy violence given the appearance of antisemities like Nick Fuentes at Mar Lago and the White House, and I am sure they think they have greater impunity given Trump's abuse of the pardon power and the far right take over of the Department of Justice.**

Antizionist groups and speakers are not all pro-Israel or pro-Jew, of course.  There are plenty of actors out there that conflate hate of Israel with hate of Jews, and they are deserving of condemnation and criticism.  Are they new or are they a constant?  Again, if we have more of something, we can't explain that with a constant, so what has changed?  I don't want to go too far because everyone has agency, but if left-wing/progressive antisemitism has always been burning, what tossed gasoline to inflame that some?  I can't help but think that actions of the government of Israel have some responsibility for the increase in antisemitic violence in North America.  People are angrier now because Israel is laying waste to Gaza and so antisemites are now more energized to direct their hate towards Jews.  I am not justifying the increase in violence--I am opposed to all collective punishment, whether it is punishing Jews for what Israel is doing or punishing Palestinians for what Hamas has done.

Finally, the Intelligencer piece also includes info about how the ADL dropped a lot of its civil rights stuff of late. That after Trump was elected for a second time, poof, ADL's stuff on transgender, LGBTQ+, voting rights, racial justice, and the like had disappeared from the website.  That the lesson of Never Again was being narrowed--not Never Again shall a people face the threat of genocide or similar violence, but that Never Again will Jews be threatened.  I was taught the former definition, and it will be the one I stick with.  The various horsemen of hate ride together almost always. Being opposed to racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, and the like is not a distraction from fighting antisemitism--it is the same damned fight.  That the ADL is selling all of that out to appeal to Trump and to appeal to the right as they focus on anti-Zionism as antisemitism is not only an incredible betrayal but quite self-destructive. 

Well, that's a lot.  I included way too many digressions but also dodged some obvious stuff.  What is my point?  That it is fucked up that organizations and actors that supposedly exist to fight antisemites are giving antisemites cover because of their pro-Israel stances.  That focusing so much on protecting Israel from criticism is doing lots of people a tremendous disservice and not just the Palestinians.  That there are great threats in the US to Jews, and we need to think about how to reduce those threats and giving Israel carte blanche may not be helpful in that endeavor.  That declaring any government to be immune from criticism is just wrong.

 

 *  One thing I learned when I visited Israel in 2019 is that so much of the land is, well, crappy.  Lots of rocks, especially around Jerusalem.  Sure, the beaches in Tel Aviv are nice, but the idealization of this land, well, always pokes at me.

** While all antisemitism is bad, I seem to be taking the opposite view of Israeli Jews and of Netanyahu in particular.  I think that right-wing antisemites are worse because they threaten far more violence (and they admire those who killed six million Jews) than left-wing antisemites. Netanyahu and his ilk don't mind so much the right-wing antisemites but deplore the left-wing ones, perhaps because they care more about their anti-Israel stances than they do about the threats to Jews in the west.