Finally Friday Reads: Red Caesar and White Elephants

Birch Forest, Gustav Klimt, Date: 1903

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Political antics in the Beltway and every red statehouse in the country continue to be worrisome.  Maga-bent pols are creating waves of chaos and trouble wherever they go.  We’re going into election season with the country in philosophical disarray. Only one candidate is getting any oxygen in the Republican Primary.  It’s the former guy with all his felony charges, exposed business failures, fraud, and his penchant for treating every institution in the United States as a playhouse in his reality show.

I’m going down a dank rabbit hole, but please, for the good of everything righteous, come with me.

Will Bunch has written a gobsmacking Op-Ed published in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. I can only hope everyone reads this. “America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship. “Thought leaders” of the far right talk openly about a 2025 dictatorship. People need to be alarmed.”

The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy. And most of the folks who get paid big bucks to understand politics could not make any sense of it.

TV pundits compared a near-shutdown of the federal government and Kevin McCarthy’s subsequent ouster as speaker to the iconic sitcom Seinfeld — a show about nothing. In capitals around the globe, world leaders and baffled analysts struggled to make sense of the utter dysfunction paralyzing the nation that just a generation ago held itself out as the lone superpower.

Yet to a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.

The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through the what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.

If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

Autumn Effect at Argenteuil, 1873, Claude Monet

There’s more detail on this scheme in The Guardian, the newspaper of my choice now. I started reading it in High School when it was the Manchester Guardian, and my advanced World History Teacher recommended it. Back then, it was the way to get real coverage of the situation with Ireland, Watergate, and the Vietnam War and what the CIA was doing in Southeast Asia, peddling opium and mayhem.  Today, it reports, “‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening.”  The analysis is by Jason Wilson. “Argument for a ‘red Caesar’ to rule US may seem esoteric, but conservative thinktank behind the idea has connections to Trump.”  It appears I should no longer joke about Trump as Orange Caligula.

In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.

Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.

In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.

Mulberry Tree, Vincent van Gogh, 1889; France

“Post-Constitutional?”  WTAF? My blood boils at that description alone.’

For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic in conference rooms, podcasts and the house organs of the extreme right, especially those associated with the Claremont Institute thinktank.

Though on the surface this discussion might seem esoteric, experts who track extremism in the US say that due to their influence on the Republican party, the rightwing intellectuals who espouse these ideas about the attractions of autocracy present a profound threat to American democracy.

Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.

The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.

Anton has been an influential rightwing intellectual since in 2016 penning The Flight 93 Election, a rightwing essay in which he told conservatives who were squeamish about Trump “charge the cockpit or you die”, referencing one of the hijacked flights of 9/11.

He gave Caesarism a passing mention in that essay, but developed it further in his 2020 book, The Stakes, defining it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”.

Catskill Mountain House, 1845-7, Thomas Cole

Claremont Institute is a fascist hotbed that’s well-funded. It’s responsible for some of the most deadly policy ideas since Hitler’s Final Solution.  Among the other things they have taken on is to present climate change as a hoax. They believe the country is in a “cultural civil war.”  They also supported the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rife with corruption and wasn’t decided correction.  This New York Times article will give you an idea of some of the dangerous, crazy ideas coming out of a place that considers itself a “think tank.”

“All weak sisters on the right must be called out,” wrote the editors of The American Mind on Nov. 5, 2020, in the uncertain days after the election. Their editorial, titled “The Fight Is Now,” warned that Democrats were all but declaring themselves the winners “before the votes are counted,” making a mockery of the law and trying to “demoralize half the country,” just as they had for the “last damned century.” But the 2020 election — like the contest for America’s future — was not yet over, they vowed. “The fight has just begun,” The American Mind declared. “This is the moment that decides everything.”

The American Mind is an online magazine of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California that has, in recent years, become increasingly influential in Republican circles. Scholars at Claremont have long subscribed to the belief that the American republic has been dismantled, the Constitution corrupted by left-wing ideas, a viewpoint that is increasingly in step with that of the broader American right. In recent years, the Claremont Institute has also drawn attention for its deliberate provocations, most memorably with the publication in 2016 of “The Flight 93 Election.” The essay took as its guiding metaphor the only plane on 9/11 prevented from hitting its target by passengers who wrested control of the aircraft, arguing that the election that fall presented conservatives with a similar choice: either “you charge the cockpit” (i.e. vote for Donald Trump) “or you die.” In many ways, “Flight 93” was era-defining, abetting a reckoning within the conservative movement and prefiguring the take-no-prisoners style of right-wing politics that would soon hold sway.

Originally published under a pseudonym, “Flight 93” was written by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and a skilled polemicist, schooled, as he has written, in making “public arguments that move politics.” If his essay achieved anything, Anton told me, it was to turn Trump into a legitimate candidate of necessary change. “The initial assumption was: This guy’s a buffoon, a reality-TV star, not even an amateur politician, not a politician at all, there’s nothing serious about any of his ideas or any of his program, therefore no serious person could possibly support him or make an argument on his behalf, ” he said. “And then we did it.” Thomas Klingenstein, the chairman of the board at Claremont, went further, telling me that “if there is within the conservative movement a kind of intellectual justification for Trump, it comes from Claremont.”

The Claremont Institute is not a conventional think tank — comparatively small, its main outlets consist of two politics-and-ideas publications and several fellowship programs, including Publius and Lincoln, that have attracted rising stars on the right. Yet Claremont’s reach is extensive: Claremont scholars have collaborated with Ron DeSantis and helped shape the views of Clarence Thomas, Tom Cotton and the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, and the institute received the National Humanities Medal from President Trump in 2019. When Trump failed to win re-election, some Claremonters accused Democrats of using the pandemic to unconstitutionally change election laws to benefit themselves, and in “The Fight Is Now,” they called for “swarms of lawyers” to push for “transparency in all the Democratic city machines now churning out votes for Biden.” One lawyer who can be said to have taken up the challenge was John Eastman, a senior fellow at the institute for 30 years and the founder and director of Claremont’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917

Politico has this discussion on political dysfunction in our country. “‘What Is Broken in American Politics Is the Republican Party’. Fourteen experts on the roots of Kevin McCarthy’s ouster and why Republicans keep destroying their own leaders.  I’ve chosen a few of the essays to highlight.  The first is this one. ‘McCarthy did little to resist the feral direction of his party’ as preferred by Geoffrey Kabaservice. “Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C., as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party.”

Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from the speakership was, from a short-term perspective, merely the result of his own bad decisions and the leverage his enemies could exercise in an evenly divided House. In a longer view, however, the chaos within the Republican Party comes from a failure to heed the exhortation Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona offered his followers more than 60 years ago. “Let’s grow up, conservatives,” he urged at the 1960 Republican National Convention, and work to “take this party back.” They obeyed the second part of Goldwater’s injunction but not the first. The conservative movement that has dominated the Republican Party for decades has attained power without reaching political maturity.

A grown-up Republican Party — even a deeply conservative one — would accept the rule of law, the norms of liberal democracy, and the legitimacy of the opposing party. It would seek to represent all Americans and would prioritize winning converts over destroying heretics. It would be a governing party, understanding full well that governing is impossible without negotiation and compromise. It would accept America’s responsibility to uphold the post-World War II global order. Its leadership would seek to address the real needs and problems of its working-class base while resisting the conspiracy theories, demagoguery and temptations toward political violence to which populism is all too susceptible.

Unfortunately, that’s not the Republican Party we have. Instead, we have a party that prefers temper tantrums to governing, fantasies about stolen elections to the hard work of appealing to swing voters. It would rather destroy the federal bureaucracy than use it to implement conservative policies. Increasingly it poses a threat to national stability and world order. Kevin McCarthy did little to resist the feral direction of his party and much to indulge it. The next speaker will either find the courage to stand against this Republican nihilism or be consumed by it in turn.

Wassily Kandinsky, Autumn in Murnau, 1908,

This second Essay is by Mary Frances Berry, who “is the Geraldine Segal professor of American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘Our infatuation with the two-party system … has always been balky’.”

Kevin McCarthy’s ouster is another important symbol of a break in the American political system. In 1910, Democrats joined Republicans aggrieved by Speaker Joe Cannon’s tyrannical control of the House to reduce the speaker’s powers. But then they helped Cannon to defeat the insurgent motion to vacate intended to remove him from the speakership.

This time the Democrats voted against the Matt Gaetz-led rebels to pass McCarthy’s continuing resolution to fund the government, and then they turned against McCarthy to pass the motion to vacate. This may seem like smart politics in its crudest form. But if we view the current situation not as an “American” political system (which is a two-party system), but as a parliamentary system (Britain, Canada, Australia, etc.) then McCarthy’s ouster is a vote of no confidence in the current “coalition” of “parties” — or caucuses.

Our consistent and ill-advised infatuation with a two-party system — something that the Founding Fathers did not include in the Constitution — has always been balky, forcing the electorate and its representatives to hew to one of two party principles in rhetoric if not in fact. The stranglehold of the current party system and the exclusion of insurgents in the electoral process under Republican and Democratic party rules just adds to the numbers of citizens who feel their views are ignored.

Autumn Study in Oberau, 1908, Wassily Kandinsky

Even while Trump is currently having a dalliance with the open Speaker’s position, we see how his term as President has deeply wounded the national security of the country and global security.  ABC News reported this last night.  I would like to call it a shocker, but the only thing that shocked me was the type of top-secret information handled so haphazardly. An Australian billionaire took no time spreading it extensively. “Trump allegedly discussed US nuclear subs with foreign national after leaving White House: Sources. Trump allegedly discussed the information with an Australian billionaire.”

Months after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago Club — an Australian billionaire who then allegedly shared the information with scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The potential disclosure was reported to special counsel Jack Smith’s team as they investigated Trump’s alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the sources told ABC News. The information could shed further light on Trump’s handling of sensitive government secrets.

Prosecutors and FBI agents have at least twice this year interviewed the Mar-a-Lago member, Anthony Pratt, who runs U.S.-based Pratt Industries, one of the world’s largest packaging companies.

In those interviews, Pratt described how — looking to make conversation with Trump during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April 2021 — he brought up the American submarine fleet, which the two had discussed before, the sources told ABC News.

According to Pratt’s account, as described by the sources, Pratt told Trump he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United States, to which an excited Trump — “leaning” toward Pratt as if to be discreet — then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.

Today also brought us the unsurprising news that Orange Caligula is backing crazy Gymbro Jordan for Speaker. This is from the Washington Post. “Trump endorses Jim Jordan for House speaker after Kevin McCarthy ouster.”

Former president Donald Trump is throwing his support behind Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to become House speaker after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was ousted in a rebellion by far-right Republicans.

In an early-morning post Friday on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said Jordan had his “complete” and “total” endorsement. “He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House,” Trump posted. “…He is STRONG on Crime, Borders, our Military/Vets, & 2nd Amendment.

We need people to vote the kooks out!  I’m afraid it will take longer to get these crazies out of the States, but it’s time to seriously do community organizing in your neck of the woods. Tell everyone you know that the United States of America does not need a Red Caesar.  Meanwhile, Biden keeps Bidening, which is good for us. “Low weekly jobless claims, shrinking trade deficit boost US economic picture .”  More of this.  Less chaos. I’m not going to a white elephant sale today, are you?

What’s on your blogging and reading list today?