Supreme "Surprise"

Let's Stop Suspending Belief on the Fascist Shit Going Down

It’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down.

- Buffalo Springfield, 1966

I want to briefly build a bit on my last essay here.

The creeping authoritarianism of our times may remind some readers of what it is like to be stalked or otherwise menaced by a sociopath.

That experience often involves a recurrent process of having your disbelief confronted with a dark reality you find hard to process.

“They wouldn’t actually do that,” you think to yourself again and again, suspending belief. And then they do what you previously thought was beyond the pale, just too much to take seriously.

“Wait, that really happened?” You are taken aback, thrown for a loop.

Unless you know the score.

Nobody should have been surprised by January 6 and the broader rolling coup attempt of which it was the wild physical expression (I wasn’t). Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump and other Trumpists had made it abundantly clear that his first presidency was a wild and fascist departure from the previous and long-established bourgeois-democratic norm and that he would not accede to a peaceful transfer of power if it lost its first attempt at re-election.

But most Americans who cared to think about their nation’s politics to any serious degree couldn’t or wouldn’t process that wild reality. It was too far outside what they took for granted as normal political and presidential behavior in the US: you lose an election and you accept defeat.

Now we live in a time when political violence and an intimately related Big Hitlerian Lie about a supposed stolen election have been normalized to the point where the vengeful fascist maniac and wannabe strongman for life Trump — described by Noam Chomsky in January of 2020 as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” — has a strong chance of returning to the most dangerous office on Earth, the US imperial presidency — a presidency his new army of Republi-fascist policy wonks are scheming to make more powerful than ever.

And yet many of us still cling to the notion that the fascist creep will be properly checked and balanced and that we’ll return to the old “normal.”

Remember how so many of us laughed at Trump's extreme presidential immunity argument in a lower court last winter? Last January, Trump attorney D. John Sauer actually told U.S. Circuit Judge Florence Pan that if a president ordered SEAL Team 6 to kill a political opponent this action would be covered by presidential legal immunity, unless that president had been impeached and convicted by Congress? Remember how amused many of us were that such an openly dictatorial argument had actually been made in a US court of law, our laughter validated by the Washington DC Circuit Court’s firm rejection of the argument.

Surely, many of us thought, this wild and extreme immunity claim would elicit sharp repudiation from the US Supreme Court. When the case came before the high Court, this disbelieving reasoning went, the only practical question would be not whether the Supremes would rule against Herr Trump but whether they would rule soon enough for the federal January 6 trial to take place before the 2024 election.

Think again, cuz guess what: Trump’s fascist lawyer made the same fucking arch-authoritarian argument before the Supreme Court two days ago and the highest judicial body in the land seemed quite ready to take it seriously.

Two days ago, The New York Times reports, the “court’s conservative [try Christian fascist] majority treated Mr. Trump’s assertion that he could not face charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election as a weighty and difficult question.” Further:

“They did so, said Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, by averting their eyes from Mr. Trump’s conduct. ‘What struck me most about the case was the relentless efforts by several of the justices on the conservative side not to focus on, consider or even acknowledge the facts of the actual case in front of them,’ she said. ..They said as much. ‘I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,’ Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said, instead positing an alternate reality in which a grant of immunity ‘is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society, which is something that we all want.’”

“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him,” the liberal Justice Katanji Brown Jackson asked Trump’s Hitlerian attorney Sauer, “is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”

Sauer’s response: “that could well be an official act” immune from prosecution!

As the Times further reports:

“Justice Elena Kagan also gave it a go. ‘How about,’ she said, ‘if a president orders the military to stage a coup?’ Mr. Sauer, after not a little back and forth, said that ‘it could well be’ an official act. He allowed that ‘it certainly sounds very bad.’ Justice Clarence Thomas, who participated in the case despite his wife Virginia Thomas’s own vigorous efforts to overturn the election, was not so sure. ‘In the not-so-distant past, the president or certain presidents have engaged in various activity, coups or operations like Operation Mongoose when I was a teenager, and yet there were no prosecutions,’ he said, referring to the Kennedy administration’s efforts to remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba.”

The Times report I’m quoting from here is titled “Conservative Justices Take Argument Over Trump’s Immunity in Unexpected Direction.”

Why “unexpected”? This Trump-created neo-Jim Crow forced-motherhood women-enslaving Court has shown its far-right Christian- fascist hand in revanchist rulings on voting rights, guns, abortion rights, business’s right to discriminate, church and state, environmental protection, and more.

Of course this last supremely F’d up high court episode is just one of many ways in which “shit is out da box” in America today. We live in a failing and oxymoronic capitalist democracy that is careening towards a far more openly authoritarian and neo-fascist form of governance, aided and abetted by people who continue to hold misplaced faith in the power of worn-out bourgeois-establishment institutions to hold back the far-right tide (the creeping fascism).  Much of the US ruling class will be fine with a more openly authoritarian sea change in the US political superstructure, which will come with major tax breaks and deregulation for the obscenely rich and parasitic Few.

We can see what our rulers (in both parties) think of their much-vaunted democracy right now with the savage and bipartisan repression of U.S. students who have heroically risen up on campuses from coast to coast against the genocidal US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza.  

It’s called chickens coming home to roost. The shit has hit the fan. If you think the establishment bourgeois US institutions are going to save “democracy,” rule of law, decency, and the common good, you are living in a dream world. It’s time to wake the fuck up! As I argued in my recent essay “The U.S. Bourgeois Democracy Farewell Tour,” the different institutions, practices, and values that were supposed to check Christian  white nationalist tyranny and keep Amerikaner fascism at bay are falling by the wayside one by one.  

This latest news from the illegitimate far-right Supreme Court is a perfect example of what I’ve been talking about for some time now.

Let’s can it with the shocked surprise.

Speaking of fascism, I have just learned that one of the nation's leading Christian Republi-fascists and a top neo-McCarthyite represser of anti-genocide and pro-Palestine activism --- US House Speaker Mike Johnson --- is coming to bright blue Iowa City (IC) tomorrow.

https://dailyiowan.com/2024/04/25/house-speaker-mike-johnson-to-visit-ic-on-sunday-support-miller-meeks/?

Location: Courtyard by Marriot Iowa, 901 Melrose, Iowa City, IA, 3 pm.

If you are anywhere in driving distance of IC, please strongly consider coming to protest this highly placed Republi-fascist thug.