On Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Militarism

As an anti-Zionist Jew born in 1946 my understandings of authoritarianism are rooted in lessons from the Nazi Holocaust and World War II. Two books were especially important to me, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and her fellow philosopher Karl Jaspers On the Question of German Guilt. But there was more, from Arthur Koestler to Milovan Djilas. Essential to Arendt’s analysis of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union were her understandings of the central roles played by fear, terror, and ideology, all designed to destroy individuality. This led to interpersonal atomization and isolation and totalitarian control of society. Essential to these processes is the assault on and manipulation of truth.

These dynamics are all at play today in the United States, as they are in China, and Russia. A friend of mine put it this way. We are dealing with very powerful and aggressive fascist forces, but the US is not yet fascist.

Fortunately, there is broad popular, legal, academic, and media resistance to President Donald Trump and MAGA fascism. But it is also true that I could be arrested and tried as a “terrorist” if what I have to say here is misinterpreted as anti-Americanism, rather than as the affirmations of constitutional democracy, the Enlightenment, and human rights.

In 1787 Benjamin Franklin, one of the authors of the US experiment in democracy, was asked, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Two and a half centuries later billionaire kleptocratic autocrats are on the offensive, among them Trump, whose father was in the Ku Klux Klan, as well as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, whose worldviews were forged by African apartheid.

Reading and listening to our daily news has become painful, even when it doesn’t include deepfake propaganda from the White House press room.

The Trump-MAGA rise and seizure of power is the consequence of at least four powerful forces: 1) unresolved racism whose origins lie in the country’s original sin of slavery; 2) the loss of Roosevelt-Johnson New Deal values combined with neoliberal greed and the technological and structural changes that allowed the creation of the billionaire class and growing economic inequality; 3) corruptions of the Democratic Party that date from President Bill Clinton and earlier; and 4) the debilitating and lost endless post-Cold War imperial wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere that along with the rise of China and the Global South accelerated the decline of the United States and the West.

If you want a historical analogy, think in terms of German disillusion and dislocations that followed their World War I defeat, the Versailles Treaty which inflicted staggering inflation and poverty in Germany, and the power of historic antisemitic and Nazi ideologies.

In the US we speak of the Trump-MAGA regime “flooding the zone”: Illegal and unconstitutional assaults come at us faster than we can track or respond to them. Over the past 40 years our Supreme Court has been stacked with extreme right-wing ideologues, and Republicans in Congress have given up on holding the executive branch accountable, fearing that they will lose their status and privileges as they opportunistically click their heels in response to each nationally destructive Trump demand. There is a reason that our massive and smaller rallies across the country have been mobilized under the slogan “No Kings!

As I said, I could be prosecuted for what I say here. Many of us are now working to understand the implications of and to respond as necessary to a “little-noticed national security directive that identifies 'anti-Christian’ and ‘anti-American' views as indicators of radical left violence.” NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political violence,” directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to take action against "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;… extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality."

Reading and listening to our daily news has become painful, even when it doesn’t include deepfake propaganda from the White House press room. On a daily basis we read or hear about the government’s illegal and unconscionable actions. Innocent immigrants, and sometimes even citizens, kidnapped from our streets, from their homes and workplaces by masked Gestapo-like police in Trump-MAGA, white-nationalist ethnic cleansing. The Supreme Court has authorized racial profiling by the police, and as a result my Latino grandson, who is a citizen, lives with fear of being arrested, incarcerated, maybe even being sent to a concentration camp or far-off country. And the former FBI director and New Your attorney general have been indicted for lack of loyalty and for attempting to hold Trump accountable for a few of his many crimes.

The writers George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut, and the historian Howard Zinn, wrote that if we don’t know our history, we cannot be free. Now, in the tradition of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Viktor Orban, our press faces constant threats and restrictions and is subject to deepfake videos. Not unlike German universities, museums, and industry in the 1930s and 40s, Trump is now requiring our institutions of higher learning to align with MAGA ideology. Priority funding will go to universities, like the University of Texas, which revise their curricula, including any criticism of conservative ideas, and hire faculty to align with MAGA commitments. References to diversity, equity, and inclusion are being banned from universities, workplaces, and even the military. Thus, the history of slavery and the struggles for justice are being literally whitewashed, with curricula rewritten, books vanishing from libraries. And even photographs of brutally abused slaves removed from some museums.

Beyond history, the president, who once recommended injecting cleaning agents including bleach to overcome Covid-19, has unleashed a war on science, blocking billions of dollars needed for research and unleashing his anti-vaxxer Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. against our health systems and against our very lives.

Stupids In Charge

They say that history does not repeat itself but it can rhyme. Recently reading about Charles De Gaulle, I found that during his first term as French head of state he humiliated a member of his cabinet, saying, “I chose the most stupid man because I thought he would be the most loyal.” Bingo! The Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman put it succinctly. We are being ruled by an “autocracy of dunces.”

Three weeks ago, and at enormous expense, Trump and his secretary of defense, a former TV personality who has installed a makeup room in the Pentagon and sports a Christian Crusader tattoo to advertise his commitments, ordered 800 generals and admirals from around the world to assemble at a Marine base in Virginia. The gathering’s purpose was a deeply held secret, arousing fears that like other banana republics, our military would be required to pledge loyalty to Trump not the Constitution.

Instead, with obvious displeasure they endured embarrassing, racist, and rambling bloviation from the Commander in Chief. Trump’s incoherence was so unhinged that it raised questions about possible invocation of the 25th Amendment that provides for the removal of an incapacitated president. The generals and admirals had to sit through a soliloquy about how presidents should walk to avoid falling, condemnations of fat, and disregard for racial and gender equality. Still more disturbing, the president urged the military to use Trump’s accelerating troop deployments to US cities as training grounds “to fight the enemy within”—understood to mean urban communities of color. This was followed with brutal and dehumanizing effect in Chicago and a warning from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker that the deployments are being made in part to seize ballot boxes during our 2026 midterm elections.

The day after the assembly of generals and admirals, in an example of the Trump-MAGA primacy of fascism over morale, the Pentagon moved to instill fear among 5,000 of its most senior officers and employees. They are now required to sign nondisclosure agreements and will be subject to random polygraph tests, to confirm their loyalty to Trump and prevent embarrassing leaks.

Militarism

Our headlines have been full of what we can read between the lines will prove to be the failures of Trump’s Middle East grand bargain and his smash and grab threats to seize Panama, Greenland, Venezuela, and Gaza’s beaches. But allow me two frameworks to illuminate the most dangerous tensions and rising militarism.

With the post-Cold War era now history, we have faced an increasingly dangerous time reminiscent of the years leading to World War I. We have a Thucydides trap of rising and declining powers, a dynamic that has often led to catastrophic wars. We have arms races with new technologies, complex and uncertain alliance structures, intense economic competition and integration, growing nationalism, territorial disputes, and wild card actors from Trump and Putin to Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te and Britain’s Nigel Farage.

Compounding these dynamics is the Ukraine War which is in fact a war between Putin and the West over Europe’s future, and which still carries the danger of escalation to nuclear war. No longer contained to the Ukrainian borderlands, drones that threaten airports and infrastructure compound fear that is driving increasing military preparations, spending, and operations across almost all of Western Europe.

My second frame of reference comes from a Chilean Methodist minister who was imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship and was later exiled to the United States. At a meeting of US peace movement organizers in the 1980s, he was asked, “When do you know if you have a military government?” His answer: “Look at your national budget.”

While it is difficult to mobilize people and actions for abstractions, it is past time to revive the call for Common Security. It can serve as a model for mutual aid, justice, and equality within our societies.

In the US, more than half of national government discretionary spending is devoted to the military and to military-related institutions like the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and so on. With that budget now exceeding a trillion dollars and totaling 40% of world military spending—not counting its leading role in arms sales—US military spending is greater than Russia and China’s combined. This while despite ostensible Trump-MAGA “America First” commitments, our educational, health, and social welfare services are being slashed and all lag behind those of the most advanced nations.

China, which has been modernizing its military spending for the past 30 years and now rivals US power in the western Pacific, is responsible for just 12% of world military spending while it produces four times more engineers every year than the US does. Despite its imperial intrusions in the South China Sea, with some success Beijing advertises itself as a stabilizing force in the era of Trumpian turmoil and dangers.

Long ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower wisely warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, whose tentacles subvert democracy. Members of Congress are not only lobbied by the Pentagon and by major military contractors, they are also expected to bring military profits and jobs to their districts and states. Failing to bring home military pork can spell the end of a political career. And this militarism permeates our schools, sports, and even the arts. Thus, military Keynesianism has long been a driving force of the US political economy, and it appears that Germany and others in Europe are about to adopt this dangerous and corrupting model.

Of course, the US is not the only power or nation with a military-industrial complex. With the rise of China, we are now three scorpions in the nuclear bottle. In addition to Ukraine, the most dangerous potential nuclear flashpoint is Taiwan, where the Chinese government remains committed to finish the nation’s civil war via reunification with what it perceives to be a rebel province. Meanwhile the US Congress, the Taiwan Relations Act, and the US Seventh Fleet are resolved—possibly with nuclear weapons—to reinforce US Asia-Pacific hegemony by defending the island’s democracy and de facto, if not de jure, independence.

And as we learned from this year’s India-Pakistan War, the danger of nuclear war which could lead to global cooling and deaths by starvation of up to 2 billion people is not limited to the greatest nuclear powers. And in an era of cyber warfare, AI technologies, and preparations for total war, military and imperial power depends on more than bullets, bombs, missiles, and numbers of armed soldiers.

Europe, we must acknowledge, finds itself between a rock and a hard place, between NATO and the increasingly autocratic and greedy United States on one side, and on the other, a Russia whose response to NATO expansion was the invasion of Ukraine and its call for the roll back of NATO from former Soviet republics.

Neither subservient kowtowing to Trump’s 5% demand for NATO spending increases nor ambitions to create a parallel or independent European superpower are the answers. Like the US trading the welfare state for the warfare state will result in growing economic insecurities that further open the way for the fascist and neo-Nazi right, as we see in Germany, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe. Spain, with its refusal to increase military spending, provides a far better model.

At the most basic level, as the forces of fascism and neoliberalism threaten our freedom and our most basic human rights, the imperative is to insist on respect for our dignity, for constitutional democracy, and for the rule of legitimate law. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valleys of authoritarianism, deceit, and militarism, to the sunlit path of justice and peace. Now is the time to lift our nations from the quicksands of brutality and injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

And, while it is difficult to mobilize people and actions for abstractions, it is past time to revive the call for Common Security. It can serve as a model for mutual aid, justice, and equality within our societies. It was the paradigm with which the Cold War ended even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and which served as the basis for the first years of the post-Cold War order. Common Security achieves peace through strategic empathy, recognition of the fears and insecurities our actions engender in other nations and respect for the truism that we cannot win security against our rivals. Security is only through the sometimes demanding diplomacy that addresses and resolves fears on all sides. This applies to Israelis and Palestinians as much as it does to Americans, Russians, and Chinese.

Friends, we make our road by walking. I look forward to our journey which must include revitalization of the United Nations Charter order and renewed respect for international law and the full implementation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In Europe, it requires negotiation of a new regional security architecture. It means reinforcing the welfare, not the neoliberal warfare, state. Of necessity that would include a European nuclear weapons-free zone and a new Conventional Forces in Europe agreement. We have the outlines of an Indo-Pacific common security order with last year’s Indo-Pacific Common Security Report. And it means building on the International Peace Bureau’s appeal for Disarmament for Development.