Crises Of Democracy

07-30-2017

Crises Of Democracy

We are experiencing a worldwide rebellion against liberal democracy. In Hungary, Russia, Turkey and other countries across Europe, right- and left-wing parties flirt with authoritarian rule. In the United States, President Donald J. Trump channels the voices of the self-described disenfranchised. Representative governments everywhere are shown to be corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic. The great political achievement of the modern era — stable representative democracy — is everywhere under attack. Hannah Arendt rooted the crisis in democracy in the dissipation of public power. She understood how cynicism invalidates factual truth and fans the creation of conspiracies and coherent fantasies. Arendt saw how cynicism turns us away from the common public world and leads to a narcissistic preoccupation with our internal feelings and personal beliefs. More than ever our world needs Arendt’s fearless and bold inquiry into the political and ethical results of cynicism. Arendt knew that despair, hopelessness, and homelessness lie at the root of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, conditions too frequently the result of a globalized, cosmopolitan society. In times of mass cynicism we need to join together and affirm common values. The Hannah Arendt Center works to keep Arendt’s vision of loving the world alive even in the darkest times. There are 3 days left in our annual Summer Membership Drive. Join or Renew your membership now. Members get TWO free tickets to our 10th Annual Conference, "Crises of Democracy" on Oct. 12-13, 2017. Members also get free access to our Virtual Reading Group, in which we are reading On Revolution beginning in September. We also feature great deals like a dual membership with the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Forward. In these dark times, Arendt’s courageous and deeply honest writings are more relevant than ever. On questions of authoritarianism, refugees, cynicism, and above all on the importance of truth-telling, Arendt can help us understand and rethink our present predicaments. Bold thinking about politics in the humanist style of Hannah Arendt is profoundly necessary in our increasingly thoughtless era. The Arendt Center exists to nurture provocative thinking about politics and ethics. We are grateful for your confidence in us and your engagement in our work to build a community around the thinking of Hannah Arendt. We thank you in advance and look forward to seeing you at our future events. Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: hac.bard.edu/membership

The Mafia State

[caption id="attachment_19065" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0[/caption]   Karina Orlova and Damir Marusic offer a deep dive into the corruption of the Russian mafia state and its ties to the family and associates of President Donald Trump.

"The truth is, there is no such thing as an independent billionaire in Russia. The line between “the state” and “private” enterprise is more than just blurry; in many cases, it doesn’t exist at all. The security services are not just responsible for intelligence gathering; they also run extortion rackets and take cuts of everything from the illicit drug trade to cross-border financial transactions. Every larger business needs a krysha (literally “roof”, or protection) from someone in power. As Russian corruption-fighter and opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s most recent exposé showed, the extravagant looting has directly benefited the second most powerful man in Russia, former Western darling Dmitry Medvedev. Estimates of Putin’s own take vary, but it is no longer much in dispute that the Russian President is the King of the Kleptocrats. Of course businesses and companies exist in Russia, but the larger they get, the more their corporate structure becomes nothing but a thin veneer of legitimacy over corrupt patronage schemes that flaunt both the spirit and the letter of the law. The passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012 seriously upset a large subset of the Russian mafia state, including Putin himself. To those unfamiliar with how Russia works, this might seem puzzling at first. Why all the drama over sanctions on a few oligarchs? But to those more attuned with Russia’s inner workings, it’s much less perplexing. As American financier Bill Browder, whose wildly successful asset management company Hermitage Capital had been the target of a state-backed raid and takeover attempt in the 2000s, explained to us last week when we caught up with him, Putin and his subordinates live by a kind of Faustian deal. “[Putin] allows people to get rich off the proceeds of government service,” Browder said, “and then he asks them to do services he’s interested in for the state.” In the process, Putin takes a cut for himself, and of course jealously guards his loot. But there is also a larger contract being observed that forces Putin to act forthrightly. “He asks [his subordinates] to do very terrible things—to torture people, to kill people, to kidnap people, in order for the government to seize people’s properties. And in return he offers them impunity. If all of a sudden…he can’t promise them foreign impunity, that messes up everything for him.” Digging through the murky networks connecting the people who attended that mysterious meeting at Trump Tower last year won’t provide the definitive “smoking gun” that so many in Washington are desperate for, tying the President’s campaign to some fanciful plot hatched inside the Kremlin to subvert American democracy. But at the same time, it casts serious doubts on arguments that there is nothing to see in the meeting itself. On the contrary, there is plenty to see. Looking at these networks recasts both our understanding of the real nature of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, and of what having a purely transactionally minded businessman for a President might mean for the United States—whether there was “collusion” or not. So let’s have a look. Bear with us, as this gets a little dense."

In writing about the differences between traditional authoritarianism and totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt focuses on the different ways they view the state. Both forms of government emerge out of "the alienation of the masses from government" and the rising "hatred of and disgust with Parliament." As the institutions of government came to seem corrupt, "they looked like expensive and unnecessary institutions." The rising populist movements in the 1930s "claimed to present something above party and class interests and started outside of Parliament"; these movements felt authentic, free from hypocrisy, and seemed "more competent, more sincere, and more concerned with public affairs." In Italy, Mussolini's Fascism "was not totalitarian but just an ordinary nationalist dictatorship developed logically from a multiparty democracy." After decades of failed governance and inefficient rule, Mussolini's "seizure of the state for the advantage of one party can come as a great relief." Once Mussolini seized the state, however, his movement had largely succeeded. It wanted to control the state, not to destroy it. His "movement had come to an end with the seizure of power." The Nazi movement, on the contrary, wanted to destroy the state. The Nazis "clearly kept aloof from this Fascist form of dictatorship, in which the 'movement' merely serves to bring the party to power." Whereas Mussolini strengthened the army as a national institution, the Nazis "destroyed the spirit of the army by subordinating it to the political commissars of totalitarian elite formations." Driven by a hatred of the state, the totalitarian movements "attacked the institutions of the state and did not appeal to classes." The Nazis embraced a mania of disruption, a mood for "change at any price (even at the price of destruction of all legal institutions)", and presented the old parties of both the left and the right as "mere defenders of the status quo." Unlike the Italian Fascists, the Nazis did not staff their leadership positions with old-guard bureaucrats and leaders, but brought in committed party outsiders to run the government. Arendt sees this shift from established leaders to ideologically driven Party members as one of the key shifts in the rise of totalitarian government. The hiring of Anthony Scaramucci and the humiliating attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions are so disturbing because they portend a trend in which President Trump would clean house of those political leaders over whom he does not exercise full control. One of the few hopeful signs of his early months in office was his appointment of independent people like General James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, and Reince Priebus. Whatever one thought of their politics, they are strong leaders with their own views and constituencies. Now we see the President pushing out those who push back against him, circling the wagons around his family. The resemblance to Putin is sadly uncanny. Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: https://www.the-american-interest.com/v/karina-orlova/

Convenient Targets

[caption id="attachment_19066" align="alignright" width="300"] By Alexei Kouprianov, CC BY 2.0[/caption] Masha Gessen, one of the speakers at our upcoming fall conference Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times, considers why LGBTQ rights are a common target for autocrats, aspiring or otherwise:

"The appeal of autocracy lies in its promise of radical simplicity, an absence of choice. In Trump’s imaginary past, every person had his place and a securely circumscribed future, everyone and everything was exactly as it seemed, and government was run by one man issuing orders that could not and need not be questioned. The very existence of queer people—and especially transgender people—is an affront to this vision. Trans people complicate things, throw the future into question by shaping their own, add layers of interpretation to appearances, and challenge the logic of any one man decreeing the fate of people and country. One can laugh at the premise of the Russian ban on “homosexual propaganda”—as though the sight of queerdom openly displayed, or even the likeness of a rainbow (this claim has been made) can turn a straight person queer. At the same time, in Russia queer people make an ideal target for government propaganda because the very idea of them—of people freely choosing and expression their sexual orientation—serves as a convenient stand-in for an entire era of liberalization that is now shunned. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, queerdom was unthinkable. Afterward, it became possible along with so many other things: the world became complicated, full of possibility and uncertainty. It also grew frightening—precisely because nothing was certain any longer... Looking at a person who embodies choice—the possibility of being or becoming different—can be like staring into the abyss of uncertainty. In this sense, seeing a Pride march or a trans person can make a person feel very queer: it demonstrates possibility, making the world frightening. It speaks to the modern predicament the social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote about in his book about the rise of Nazism, Escape from Freedom: the ability to reinvent oneself in almost every way. One is no longer born a tradesman or a peasant, or the lifelong resident of a particular quarter, or a man or a woman. This freedom can feel like an unbearable burden. No wonder the most notorious piece of American anti-transgender legislation—the North Carolina bathroom bill—focused on the birth certificate as the most important document. In mandating that people use public bathrooms in accordance with the sex assigned at birth, the law created a situation where some people who looked, acted, smelled like—who identified and lived as—women were required to use the men’s bathroom, and vice versa—but it established that one’s position in the world was set from birth."

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/27/why-autocrats-fear-lgbt-rights-trump/