Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology

[Sixties Fan]

Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying (Published 2014)

I've discussed this many times. Hence my position in your thread.

I cannot read it. How did that move turn Obama or anyone in his administration an authoritarian or pro turning the government authoritarian.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Ahhh so your thread requires that we only discuss one party. break down the wrongs of one political party. So is this an authoritarian thread?, a thread by the way which endlessly attacks only one side?

Discuss what the articles talk about. Prove anything that the articles say to be wrong, with evidence. Are you not capable of it? Then what are you doing here?

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Republican Party is of interferinism with each other. Designed that way in recent decades as to give the Democratic Party the realism as the Progressive Socialist Party. Republican voters get levels of people they vote for. With many of them activated for federal agendas pushed by the elites as we move further left in legislation votes. I understand it. One party is everything is free and do what you want. The other officially says we are going too far and is accused of pure hate.

Is that what the articles are about? What in the articles say that? Who is the author of the articles?
What is his knowledge about politics and about both parties?

Start investigating.

 

[Dragonlady]

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.

Here are some of the lessons I learned.

1. Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
2. Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
3. Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
4. Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
5. Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
6. Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
7. Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
8. Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
9. Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
10. Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
11. Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
12. Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
13. Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
14. Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
15. Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
16. A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
17. Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
18. Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
19. It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
20. It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.

Academic and authors who have studied why democracies fail have been sounding the alarm on Donald Trump and the Republican Party since before he was elected.

Several European organizations and governments have labelled the Republican Part as a fascist right wing party.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

In the early days of 2017, Graham began to work his way into Trump’s circle. He flattered the incoming president and abased himself. “Donald, you beat me like a drum,” he told Trump in a Fox News interview. “We’re going to make America great again.”

Backstage, Graham reached out to Kushner. By March, he was lunching with Trump, exchanging jokes, and offering advice on Iran and North Korea. “I’m humbled by being beat, and I accept your victory,” he told the president. He would later recall telling Trump, during this conversation, “I am all in for you.”

Over the next several weeks, their relationship grew: dinners, long phone calls, and eventually golf. Under Graham’s influence, Trump’s foreign policy became more assertive. But at home, Trump was incorrigible. He continued to attack human rights and democratic institutions. Graham, despite his concerns, offered only entreaties and half-hearted attempts to coach the president.

Here’s some of what Trump did in the months after his election:

He alleged massive voter fraud. In late November 2016, Trump claimed that millions of illegal ballots had robbed him of victory in the popular vote. (He had won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.) Trump repeatedthis falsehood in his first days in office.

No previous president had so wildly slandered American democracy. But Graham responded only with political advice. “Watch what you say,” he counseled Trump, or “you’re going to shake confidence in your ability to lead the country.”

He refused to acknowledge foreign interference. In December 2016, when U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had interfered in the election on Trump’s behalf, Trump rejected their findings and attacked the agencies. Graham recognized Trump’s reaction as pathological: Trump viewed any talk of foreign interference as an attack on him, and he couldn’t distinguish the national interest from his personal interest. This made him mentally incapable of confronting Russia over anti-American operations that were designed to help Trump politically.

But Graham didn’t want to antagonize Trump. So in January, he credited the president-elect with “progress” toward acknowledging what Russia had done. And in March, he pleaded on behalf of the intelligence agencies: “I would beg the president to recognize them as the heroes they are.”

He defended torture. On January 25, five days into his presidency, Trump reaffirmed his support for torture. ISIS was “chopping off the heads of our people,” he fumed, and “we have to fight fire with fire.” But two days later, he grudgingly agreed to defer to Defense Secretary James Mattis, who opposed waterboarding.

Graham decided that was good enough. He set aside the moral question, on which Trump was unrepentant, and applauded the president for yielding to Mattis’s position that “torture, including waterboarding, is not an effective tool for obtaining information.”

He attacked the press. On February 17, Trump called the “FAKE NEWS media” “the enemy of the American people.” Graham disagreed, but he brushed off Trump’s menacing language, and he said the president had a point. “America is not becoming a dictatorship,” Graham scoffed when he was asked about Trump’s statement. He added, “I would say this to the American press corps: When it comes to Trump, you are over the top. You are acting more like an opposition party.”

He claimed that his predecessor had wiretapped him. On March 4, Trump accusedObama of “tapping my phones in October, just prior to [the] Election.” Trump’s allegation was bizarre and false, but Graham dismissed it as a side issue. When the senator was asked whether Trump should apologize, he ducked. “That’s up to him,” said Graham. “He’s the president.”

Again and again, Graham downplayed Trump’s eruptions or pretended that he could be coached out of them. But it was Graham, not Trump, who began to change.

The clearest example was Trump’s persistent campaign to block Muslims from entering the United States. In December 2015, when Trump first proposed the idea, Graham denounced it. Then, in June 2016, Trump modified his language to hide the bigotry. Instead of referring explicitly to Muslims—against whom Trump continued to display animus—the new version of the ban would apply to “areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism.”

At that time, in 2016, Graham held firm against the euphemism and the ban. “I’m unnerved to hear that Donald Trump talks about a Muslim ban as the way to solve the problem,” he said.

But Trump didn’t let up. A week into his presidency, he announced a ban on “entry into the United States” from “countries referred to in section 217(a)(12)” of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. That meant seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

This time, Graham accepted the euphemism. “It’s clearly not a Muslim ban,” the senator argued on Fox News. “There are Christians and other people in these countries that can’t travel either.”

Graham’s rationalization was spurious. On the same day Trump announced the ban, he promised to make it easier for Middle Eastern Christians—not Muslims—to come to the United States. But now that Trump was president, Graham didn’t want to fight with him. So he ignored Trump’s bigotry, and he said courts had no authority to “second-guess” the president’s decision.

Chapter Two: A Trump’s Best Friend

A WEEK AFTER Trump’s election, Graham went on TV to start sucking up. He had congratulated the president-elect; now he wanted to build a relationship.

specialto.thebulwark.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Altered Bargains​

​

FOR THREE MONTHS, Graham’s bargain—going easy on Trump’s domestic behavior while pressing him on foreign policy—paid off. From Syria to Iran to North Korea, Trump was doing what Graham wanted. “I am, like, the happiest dude in America,” Graham exulted in a Fox News interview on April 19. “I am all in. . . . Mr. President, you’re doing a good job. Keep it up.”

Then, on May 9, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.

The Comey firing, while technically legal, was a blatantly authoritarian act. The FBI had been investigating relationships between the Russian government and the 2016 Trump campaign. Trump had just fired the man in charge of that investigation. It was the kind of thing that happened all the time in autocracies. Now it was happening in the United States.

In a phone call before the announcement, Trump gave Graham a cover story. He told Graham that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had instigated the firing and that the reasons, which had nothing to do with the Russia investigation, were laid out in a memo from Rosenstein.

Graham, like other congressional Republicans, bought the story and peddled it on TV. “To suggest otherwise, show me proof,” he said.

Almost immediately, the story fell apart. On May 10, the Washington Post reported that Trump had told Rosenstein to create the memo as a pretext for the firing. On May 11, in an interview with NBC News, Trump said he had been thinking about “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia” when he decided to fire Comey. That same day, the Timesreported that Trump, according to Comey, had privately pressed Comey for his loyalty—with apparently unsatisfactory results—before firing him.

On May 16, the Times reported that Trump had been trying to corrupt Comey for months and that Comey had documented this pressure campaign in contemporaneous memos. One of the memos described a February 14 meeting at which Trump had asked Comey to drop the FBI’s investigation of Mike Flynn—at the time, Trump’s national security advisor—for lying to the FBI. Specifically, Flynn had misled the FBI about his back-channel phone calls with Russia’s ambassador to the United States in December, shortly after Russia helped Trump win the election.

By this point, it was clear that Trump had fired Comey because Comey had ignored Trump’s signals to curtail the Russia investigation. The firing was corrupt, and Graham knew it.

How can we tell Graham knew it? Because in numerous on-camera interviews, he spoke candidly about Trump, Comey, and the investigation.

From Graham’s interviews during this time, we know he believed:

• that Comey was honest,
• that Trump often lied,
• that Trump had pressed Comey for personal loyalty,
• that Trump had asked Comey to “go easy” on Flynn, and
• that Trump, by his own admission, had fired Comey over the investigation.

Based on these beliefs, we can infer that Graham also knew:

• that Trump had used Rosenstein to cover up his corrupt motives, and
• that Trump, as he continued to deny Comey’s account, was still lying.

In the days and weeks after the firing, Graham repeatedly implored Trump not to impede or shut down the investigation, especially after it was handed off to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That’s another window into Graham’s mind: He felt it was necessary to tell Trump not to obstruct the inquiry, because he believed this was what Trump wanted to do.

In a June 8 interview on CBS News, when Graham was asked about Trump’s private attempts to coerce Comey, the senator admitted what he really thought of the president: “Half of what Trump does is not okay. If you try to convict him for being a bull in a china shop, crude and rude, you’d win. I mean . . . this is Donald Trump.”

What Graham recognized in Comey’s memos and in Trump’s public behavior was confirmation of everything Graham had said in 2015. Trump had the mentality of an autocrat. Now that he was in power, he was trying to rule like an autocrat. He hadn’t changed a bit.

But Graham had. He was now an influential adviser to the president. He was in Trump’s orbit.

Chapter Two: A Trump’s Best Friend

A WEEK AFTER Trump’s election, Graham went on TV to start sucking up. He had congratulated the president-elect; now he wanted to build a relationship.

specialto.thebulwark.com

 

[Dragonlady]

The first impeachment was bogus. The second he was on his way out anyway.

The only thing “bogus” about the first impeachment was that he got away with it. And since they didn’t vote to impeach him the first time, his behaviour gotten much much worse.

Now he’s running for reelection and the mask is completely off. The monster we saw on the CNN Townhall made it clear that he will destroy the nation if reelected.

The man I saw on Tuesday night was crazy. Totally fucking bat shit crazy. But what was far more frightening than the madness of Donald Trump call mom was the cruel and callous response of the cult members cheering his every cruelty.

They actually cheered separating families at the border. They mocked and laughed at the woman he sexually assaulted. They cheered when he slandered her just as the posters in this forum talked about what a great job he did taking on that nasty woman who kept calling him on his lies.

Sane and reasonable Americans are calling the CNN Townhall toxic waste dump of lies, misogyny and paranoia. Nobody wants four more years of that.

 

[BlueGin]

Do people actually read these copy and paste word walls? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

[Independent thinker]

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.

Here are some of the lessons I learned.

1. Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
2. Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
3. Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
4. Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
5. Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
6. Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
7. Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
8. Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
9. Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
10. Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
11. Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
12. Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
13. Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
14. Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
15. Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
16. A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
17. Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
18. Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
19. It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
20. It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.

It is when one side takes people's rights away, claiming emergency powers for the greater public good, and that at some future point when they declare the emergency to be over, they would give Americans their rights back. In the meantime, they try to eliminate the Senate filibuster in order to pass any laws they want, including approving more blue states to the Union and adding seats to the Supreme Court and loosening voting laws.

 

[pknopp]

I cannot read it. How did that move turn Obama or anyone in his administration an authoritarian or pro turning the government authoritarian.

Obama on Mass Government Surveillance, Then and Now | FRONTLINE


On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama promised to preside over the most transparent administration in U.S. history. “No more secrecy,” he said. “That is a commitment that I make to you.”

As president, however, Obama has embraced many of the same domestic surveillance programs he once derided as a candidate. For the one-time constitutional law professor, the shift has been particularly striking.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Do people actually read these copy and paste word walls? Inquiring minds want to know.

Intelligent people do. That says plenty about many of you.

It is about a Republican Senator. It is all verifiable.

 

[Oddball]

I cannot read it. How did that move turn Obama or anyone in his administration an authoritarian or pro turning the government authoritarian.

IKR!...Using the bureaucratic apparatus to hassle your political opponents is so not authoritarian!

 

[BlueGin]

Intelligent people do. That says plenty about many of you.

It is about a Republican Senator. It is all verifiable.

Intelligent people don’t read propaganda. Which is all you post.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Obama on Mass Government Surveillance, Then and Now | FRONTLINE


On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama promised to preside over the most transparent administration in U.S. history. “No more secrecy,” he said. “That is a commitment that I make to you.”

As president, however, Obama has embraced many of the same domestic surveillance programs he once derided as a candidate. For the one-time constitutional law professor, the shift has been particularly striking.

What harms did that decision cause? Did he make that decision alone without consulting anyone else?

 

[22lcidw]

Is that what the articles are about? What in the articles say that? Who is the author of the articles?
What is his knowledge about politics and about both parties?

Start investigating.

The same old same old may not be true. The questions you typed is what I do at times in threads, and you mock. Investigation is nothing in the real reality of a nation moving further and further left. There is no battle in the boxing ring. The game is fixed and over. It's just flyover country admitting it.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Intelligent people don’t read propaganda. Which is all you post.

You are better off reading nice things about the Republican Party of today.

There are plenty of threads on that.

 

[pknopp]

What harms did that decision cause? Did he make that decision alone without consulting anyone else?

President Obama.

Sorry, I can't take blind partisans seriously in anything they post.

 

[Oddball]

What harms did that decision cause? Did he make that decision alone without consulting anyone else?

There goes that famous liberal defense-to-the death of civil liberties, the presumption of innocence, right to privacy, and the 4th Amendment!

 

[Muhammed]

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States.

Your TDS is showing, moron.

 

[Sixties Fan]

The same old same old may not be true. The questions you typed is what I do at times in threads, and you mock. Investigation is nothing in the real reality of a nation moving further and further left. There is no battle in the boxing ring. The game is fixed and over. It's just flyover country admitting it.

Are ANY one of you actually going to bother to read the articles from this journalist?

Do you actually know anything about Lindsay Graham?

No?

Than we are done.