{"id":30288,"date":"2023-12-01T21:50:35","date_gmt":"2023-12-02T05:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=30288"},"modified":"2023-12-01T21:50:36","modified_gmt":"2023-12-02T05:50:36","slug":"rise-of-the-vichy-democrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/12\/01\/rise-of-the-vichy-democrats\/","title":{"rendered":"Rise Of The Vichy Democrats"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Andrew<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Tanner<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2 days ago (andrewmtanner.medium.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With comparisons between Trump and Hitler almost banal these days, it\u2019s worth looking at what happened the last time the left lost big to fascism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fall of France in 1940 was a more shocking event than most American histories of the Second World War admit. Like Trump\u2019s win over Clinton in 2016, the leading experts of the day were absolutely certain that Hitler\u2019s triumph over Britain and France an utter impossibility after enduring four years of bloody stalemate on the very same battlefields during the First World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Vichy France, from Wiki Commons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a myth that the French had no idea that German troops could punch through the Ardennes forest. They had defenses in the area and inflicted a lot of pain on the advancing enemy. Paris thought the situation was handled \u2014 then the Germans broke through at Sedan, crossed the Meuse, and charged to the Channel in defiance of their orders from Berlin, which planned for a much slower pace of attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, France only fought for about as long as Poland, and Warsaw had faced much worse odds in 1939, particularly with Stalin launching his own invasion in accordance with the agreement Hitler and Stalin <\/a>inked. With Paris occupied, a remnant of the French state did their own deal with Hitler and the Vichy Regime was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Trump is manifestly not<\/a> Hitler reborn\u2014 that title belongs to Vladimir Putin if anyone can claim it \u2014 there are<\/em> strong similarities between his MAGA movement and every other fascist group since, well, ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fascism arises when inequality in any dimension \u2014 political, economic, or social \u2014 passes key thresholds. It is essentially a twisted answer begging for a particular question to be asked, an ideology that aims to blame some convenient scapegoat for all that ails a country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No society is immune to fascism \u2014 it\u2019s a kind of latent infection that rages out of control if things get too out of balance. Real democracy, truly free markets, and a meritocratic social order are the only long-term solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberalism, being a secularized version of Christianity, eventually decomposes to fascism because it roots all the high-minded ideals about equality and justice in the requirement that adherents adopt the faith system as a package. One of these, ever since the days of the Enlightenment, has been the deliberate philosophical and scientific choice to elevate individual ego as the driving force in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But because humans are a tribal species, this invariably leads to fragmentation and power struggles over who gets to decide what truths rule all. Public debate is valorized as the path to revealing such truths, but it is always biased by the ability of a subset of the population to set the rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The end result is one constellation of groups securing lasting power over others, which leads to exploitation and all the other ills that liberalism is supposed to prevent. Rooted in dualistic Manichean thinking, liberalism causes an endless series of schisms that lead to pointless, mutually destructive conflicts over global truths that can only be resolved by giving different people their own space to govern according to the will of that particular community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The populism that so may people denigrate these days is an expression of this process in action. That being a Democrat in the United States is now almost perfectly synonymous with possession of a university degree, and these are all but required to survive in American life, is a deadly warning sign of the disconnect between the people who sincerely believe they\u2019re making life better for everyone and those they claim to serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you take a look at the left-leaning media ecosystem of late, the rising panic about Trump\u2019s electoral strength in 2024 is hard to miss. Pretty much the only people who aren\u2019t deeply worried by the mounting pile of evidence that Biden is an extremely bad bet for the Democrats going forward are Bidenworld loyalists, a combination of Boomer elders and the small sliver of young liberals they have allowed to rise in the party ranks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having made every excuse not to have Biden be that promised bridge to the future and hold an open primary, watching in dismay as Biden sheds the support of younger voters disgusted by his near-total support of Israel\u2019s openly genocidal response to Hamas\u2019 brutal assault, leading Democrats have one last bitter argument for everyone holding their tongue about how bad a president that Joe Biden has been: Trump will destroy the Republic<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe he will. And maybe that wouldn\u2019t be such a bad thing. Count up the death toll from all the wars the USA directly or indirectly wages and it\u2019s pretty much a certainty that future historians will group the USA along with every other decomposing European colonial empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the thing about the Democrats \u2014 it\u2019s kind of strange, if you stop to think about it, that so many of the same people who have spent years talking about their privilege and the perils of white supremacy have done absolutely nothing to prevent Trump or any future demagogue from abusing the power of the Executive Branch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re old enough to remember the debates that dominated the early War on Terror, you might recall that many smart people warned that the amount of power being handed to the federal government would come back and bite Americans in the end. American media fawns over the institution of the presidency so much that most Americans don\u2019t understand just how unnecessarily powerful the position became during the Cold War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Presidents were never supposed to have the power to end the world in a brief nuclear holocaust in the USA envisioned by the Founders; nowhere does the Constitution envision such a concentration of terror. Yet it is entirely possible for Joe Biden or Donald Trump to launch a world-ending war pretty much on a whim, with military officers they appoint having to decide whether an order is legal or not in a nuclear crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do Democrats say boo about this? Nope. Did Obama pull back on presidential privileges Bush abused to prosecute the War on Terror? Nope. Has Biden placed any guardrails that might prevent Trump from using dangerous legislation like the Insurrection Act? Nah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when they start crying about all the evils a second Trump term will unleash, it\u2019s all just partisan politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s <\/mark>not<\/em><\/mark> to say that Trump <\/mark>isn\u2019t<\/em><\/mark> in fact a dire threat to America and the world. But the reprehensible failure to get executive powers under control is what allows him to do real damage.<\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, all his \u201cnorm-breaking\u201d behavior is irrelevant. Democrats have come to embrace an authoritarian vision of the presidency where the executive is only constrained by a long list of customary rules ordinary Americans have no say over. They\u2019ve spent years trying to impose costs under a system that Trump\u2019s entire brand is about setting on fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Joe Biden is running for re-election gives away what the Democrats\u2019 \u201cresistance\u201d to Trump has truly been about from day one: preserving the status quo at any cost. This is why you see so many old-school conservatives like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney rejecting him: they are part of it, their careers built on negotiating the delicate dance party elders on both sides of the partisan divide worked out during the Cold War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democrats like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi \u2014 whose net worth well over $100 million<\/a>, making her claims to care about the working class so much hot air \u2014 nakedly pursue culture war arguments that avoid addressing the real issues affecting all Americans. Everyone has their favorite, of course, but deep down they all reduce to the same problem: the US economy will never grow as quickly as it once did for a variety of reasons. But the rising inequality that is tearing at the fabric of American life and reducing opportunity for all but a lucky few could only be masked with constant rapid growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hell of political economy is that the most dismal discipline of all is one of the few parts of social science not completely shot through with ideological bias. Scholars like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, though they might themselves be members of the priestly professor caste that sustains liberalism through the education system, have been forced to accept<\/a> the malignant nature of extreme inequality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans are being driven to hate and kill each other because a small minority control most of the wealth, dominate the values it is acceptable to express through the media, and have colonized the federal government to such a degree the integrity of the Constitution has been compromised. A total de-escalation and systemic reforms are the only way out, but history shows that passions tend to prevail in difficult times, driving fragmentation and mistrust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here\u2019s the real hell of it: the very people who are shouting the loudest about Trump being America\u2019s Hitler \u2014 Hillary Clinton for one \u2014 are the ones who will ultimately surrender to his second term if he prevails in 2024. They are so craven, so in it for the money, authority, and prestige, that even if the Republic falls and Democracy dies they will do nothing to oppose Trump that would jeopardize their hopes of retaking power in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look, if you sincerely believe that Trump is a Hitler-level threat, then nothing <\/em>the Democrats have done over the past eight years has represented anything other than appeasement of the worst form. The sick irony of Democrats throwing a fit every time a Republican says a thing that sounds the slightest bit violent is that what do you do when Nazis attack but fight to the death?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right there is the lethal hypocritical tension between Democrats\u2019 rhetoric about the threat to America and their actions. You can tell that they aren\u2019t serious, that this is all just politics as usual, by the fact that Trump\u2019s re-election is presented as an apocalyptic event without any thought for what happens after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apocalyptic rhetoric is about provoking Christian (or sometimes Islamic or Jewish) fears of the world they have chosen to believe in falling apart. In the mindset of a devout Christian, simply being proven wrong about what they believe is true about God and Faith is akin to a kind of death. For adherents to its secular counterpart, the end of Democracy is so catastrophic that the after isn\u2019t worth considering \u2014 even if that means that in the real world, where actual people live, there\u2019s no plan to respond if the worst happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What this represents is a total abdication of responsibility. It\u2019s a kind of intellectual surrender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In effect, Democrats are telling their audience that if the voters are too stupid to do what is good for them, then Trump is their fault. It\u2019s dangerously similar to the party\u2019s near-obsession with \u201ceducating\u201d voters about Biden\u2019s accomplishments. In both cases their only real goal is to evade accountability for failing to develop an adequate response to a threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is an exceptionally tin-eared play to tell an audience that despite their probably feeling like times are tough and frightening, they shouldn\u2019t complain or ask for anything better because look at everything Biden has done<\/em>! You aren\u2019t supposed to reply by pointing out that his signature bipartisan infrastructure bill was nothing more than clearing part of the backlog of engineering projects this country hasn\u2019t bothered to fund for a generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, the Covid relief bill he passed was virtually identical to one that nearly made it through congress just a few months prior, and that Trump was apparently happy to sign in order to get his name on more checks being sent to voters. Pelosi killed it to avoid giving him a boost before the election, making millions of unemployed workers make due with reduced benefits during the pre-vaccine days of the pandemic for several months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And do you really believe that Biden\u2019s team didn\u2019t know that the Supreme Court was certain to knock out the modicum of loan forgiveness he deigned to back? Look, as much as I want to see all student loans forgiven right now, doing it through presidential fiat is a bad way to go \u2014 it doesn\u2019t fix the problem, only makes the next generation of students have to fight for a future president to do it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doesn\u2019t it start to look just a little bit convenient that the Democrats get to pass off every betrayal and failure by shouting but what about Trump<\/em>? Biden\u2019s apparent favorite propaganda line, that he shouldn\u2019t be compared to the almighty, but the alternative<\/em>, is little better than cheap rhetoric that only appeals to elder Democrats any more \u2014 but they\u2019re still calling the shots, so the party remains their club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as the first rule of Democrat Club is thou shalt not question the leader or any designated expert<\/em>, the fatal doom loop accelerates. It is becoming clear that senior Democrats would rather have Trump rule until he dies than admit the magnitude of their failings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason I started this by talking about Vichy is that France and the USA have a lot more in common than residents of either country generally like to admit; strong left-right polarization is one such area. And in both, where you fall on the spectrum is mostly a function of your place in society \u2014 group identity bound to economic livelihood is at the very foundation of political economy under Western Liberalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This truth is denied because the high priests of the faith did well under the system, so why would they ever change it? They identify with it, seek immortality through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A key reason why the French military performed so poorly in 1940 was the partisan rancor within French society. At the time, France was led by a center-left government that was opposed on the far left by the communists and most of the aristocratic, colonial right. The right and center-left clashed on issues as esoteric as military doctrine, the left preferring a French Army powered by conscripts and the right, with its experience running colonies abroad, wanting a more professional force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, French military thinkers like Charles de Gaulle were as savvy when it came to the style of warfare Americans labeled \u201cBlitzkrieg\u201d as their German counterparts. But their experiments were limited and influence truncated by their affiliation with the right, leading to the better French commanders having less influence in the fighting that occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Germany had forced the British to evacuate at Dunkirk and turned to march on Paris, the collapse of most French forces in the field pushed the French government to seek an armistice. This caused it to fall apart, and a conservative clique centered on old army officers took over that swiftly became known as the Vichy Regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Petain and the other conservatives had one goal: preserve as much of France as they could while vanquishing their political rivals much as the Nazis had. Perceiving a German-dominated Europe to be inevitable, they sold out the Third Republic and participated in the Holocaust in order to preserve what of their power Hitler deigned to allow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the French left went along with them. The majority of French citizens, like people anywhere, simply wanted to survive \u2014 and most did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But not all French people agreed with this approach. Both the right and the left splintered, Charles de Gaulle leading conservatives in the colonies to form Free France with the backing of the Allies. France\u2019s communists went underground, many forming the core of the resistance movements that plagued the Nazi occupation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

France was liberated in the end, but not before becoming a battlefield and bombed to ruins. And many of the tensions of that day remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is important to recall the lessons of Vichy now because the Democratic Party is in much the same position as the French center-left. Underestimating Hitler even though they openly declared him to be their mortal adversary was a fatal error rooted in a tragic failure of imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Trump is Hitler, then he\u2019s doing an excellent job of repeating his predecessor\u2019s ability to defy expert opinion. The MAGA movement is more fragile than it looks and can\u2019t deliver anything material to the majority of its backers in the long run, but by the time it runs its course the damage will be done. Democratic party leaders are effectively enabling Trump and MAGA as they have done since the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For them, it\u2019s better to be the perpetual powerless resistance than actually do the hard work of building a real alternative people can believe in. Joe Biden isn\u2019t that, and if he were half the foreign policy savant his propagandists keep trying to insist then Putin would never have gone into Ukraine, the Taliban wouldn\u2019t have walked into Kabul, and Israel wouldn\u2019t be committing outright genocide in Gaza with the US providing diplomatic and military cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a sense, Vichy America has already begun. Despite all their talk about stopping Trump and saving democracy, America\u2019s leaders are already factoring in how they can profit from another four years of madness and keep the game going into the next decade no matter the cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thing is, they might have already caused history to rhyme, if not repeat. Once you play the Hitler card, it\u2019s very hard to roll that back. If Trump does win a second term, what will the millions of people the Democrats have primed to believe that democracy is under imminent threat do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a country where 80% of states are dominated at all levels of government by one party, those on the losing side in 2024 \u2014 whatever the ultimate outcome \u2014 are bound to start questioning the point of continued union at all. And in a world where domestic and international politics are more closely intertwined than ever before, that could easily produce a world in 2025 that looks an awful lot like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
The Fractured World Of 2025?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Retire, Joe Biden \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. Frankly, it probably already is. This was not the world you thought you were going to rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Andrew<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Written by Andrew Tanner<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Writes Rogue Systems Recon on Substack. Cat fanatic. Author of many books. Anti-partisan. West Coast = Only Coast \ud83d\ude1b Slava Ukraini! Heroiam Slava!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Tanner 2 days ago (andrewmtanner.medium.com) With comparisons between Trump and Hitler almost banal these days, it\u2019s worth looking at what happened the last time the left lost big to fascism. The Fall of France in 1940 was a more shocking event than most American histories of the Second World… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1478,335,1535],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30288"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30289,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30288\/revisions\/30289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}