VIEWPOINT / ATTACK ONTHE DEMOCRATIC STATE

By Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

The trucker protest at Canadian border and in Ottawa is a fascinating development in a larger movement in which the goal seems to be an attack on the democratic state and the professionals who run agencies, make decisions, conduct research and create policies that affect many lives. The point of this attack seems to be striking out against faceless experts in government who they blame for the misery and restrictions they feel ever tightening around them. In this distorted view, those regulations and those restrictions are, themselves, the problem, not the problem they are designed to mitigate. This group is also suffering from a form anomie due to large economic, cultural and demographic disruptions, and it is striking out in response. 

The target of the Canadian protest and border blockades is completely illogical. The Canadian economy is being damaged. The political leaders in Canada are being attacked. Yet, the US has imposed the requirement they are protesting, not the Canadian government. The Canadian government has no say in US border policies regarding vaccine mandates. The biggest truckers’ union in Canada is opposing the blockades and the protest itself.

The only logic I can find here is that the leaders believe chaos and big attention-grabbing demonstrations prove that democratic governments are unable to manage chaos and disruptions. If these disruptions are big enough and serious enough, the support for the democratic state will weaken. Then, only a strongman executive with centralized authority and power can save us (“Only I can fix it”). It is an anti-state uprising, an attack on the postwar administrative state filled with nameless experts and professionals, actually the best educated among us, who the protestors are led to perceive have taken over every detail of their personal lives. It is pure and simple, an attack on the democratic state. That state relies upon science, research and professionals to run the institutions that support the democratic state. The democratic state depends upon consensus. Disruption and division are antithetical to consensus. The ultimate goal is weakening the institutions needed for democracy to work and thereby create space for a more autocratic state to flourish as the solution. 

This is a tactic in which a very small number of people, usually minorities within their own groups, are able to cause disruptions and stir up the fringe elements in today’s inequitable western societies. The gap between rich and poor in America is reaching Robber Baron levels. This fact is causing immense anger and frustration among those falling behind. Their tactics are spreading worldwide where there is growing discontent among all the losers in the new knowledge economy. The Canadian trucker protest is apparently coming to America and it is being financially supported by Americans and cheered on by the far right media and rightist politicians. The French are already seeing this phenomenon. It is happening in New Zealand.

The protests are not dissimilar to the protests that led to a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. The foot soldiers of this movement are violent anti-government zealots. One of those loosely organized groups, the Three Percenters, has now been labeled a terrorist group in Canada. Members of this group have been indicted for their role in the Capitol attack. Another of the foot soldier leaders is being charged with seditious conspiracy. They are both being sustained by rightwing money, are based entirely upon lies, and are supported by the right wing leaders whose agenda is autocracy. Fox News has taken up the cause. Fringe groups are organizing fundraisers. 

Trump is cheering this movement on and so too are the other suspects from Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Green to Louie Gohmert and Q-Anon. They are virtually begging the truckers to come to the states. All the usual suspects are joining this latest form of chaos. This movement is about big goals, tectonic shifts in political arrangements, and a complete renegotiation of the Constitutional Republic. Steve Bannon tells us out loud he intends to dismantle the administrative state, burn it to the ground. The flip side of this is eliminating counterbalances to the autocratic state. The protestors, as in centuries past, are pawns in a game with huge stakes, the outcome of which will determine whether this democratic state or any other can survive. This an all-out assault from the right to turn existing democracies into autocratic states. 

By doing so, the perpetrators of this scheme will concretize existing privileges of the elite. This only works when centralized control of the state succeeds and the counterbalancing effects of the professional class (insistence upon working with knowledge, facts and evidence) is silenced. The timing is instructive. We are approaching the apex of 40 years of tax cuts and reductions of revenues to support social programs. The pendulum is poised to swing in the opposite direction as it did a bit in the last election. We can see the fright in the eyes of those whose privileges are threatened. We can see it in their responses. 

These large opposing forces are not new, but the modern form is what we have to examine while we can do it up close. It is a hydra of forces, counter forces and dynamics, and a gallimaufry of actors, ambitions and goals. But, at its core is the intent to disrupt the inner workings of government, in this case, of a democratic state. This is an effort to throw into chaos the operating rules and principles established by an educated professional class. For the Trumps of the world, this class is like a cross at an exorcism. He shrinks from anything striking him as truth-telling. He and his ilk cannot bear up under the intense, brilliant stare of Timothy Snyder of Yale whose elegant and simple truth-telling cuts to the bone and marrow. (See Tyranny: Lessons From the 20th Century.)

This movement may be best viewed through the lens of a modern day rebellion of the proletariat. Here we see the white working class becoming more and more deeply involved in carrying out the blueprint of the intellectual leadership egging them on from the far side. This class of people worldwide seems to have been moved as a whole to action. 

Fear is a big part of the stew they are being fed. Fear of losing ground in the new kind of economy, an economy that demands intellectual skills and knowlege, rather than common sense and physical skill. Fear of being displaced by immigrants. Fear of becoming outnumbered by black and brown people. Fear of isolation and being left out, i.e., anomie. Fear of losing control over their lives to anonymous bureaucrats. Fear of knowledge which can expose them. 

It is no coincidence that Critical Race Theory is about to be banned from every level of education, Pre-K through graduate school, in Mississippi. Knowledge is dangerous to liars. The intellectual leaders feeding this movement are diabolically aware of these fears, while being themselves among the class of Americans who are seeing enormous upsurges in wealth. Their motive is to lock down in perpetuity the privileges and wealth they currently enjoy. Democracy has become a threat to their status. 

Bannon is a wealthy former member of the New York exchange. Their cult hero, Donald Trump, was born to family wealth and is estimated to be worth a billion dollars. Rudy Giuliani is collecting millions shamelessly from his unsavory consulting practices along with Mike Flynn. The highly paid talking heads on Fox News are rich beneficiaries of inside tips, bloated salaries and bonuses, GOP tax cuts, and many are from family wealth. The members of Congress who identify themselves as being with the working class and downtrodden protestors are very rich people. They come from family wealth or have become wealthy by “legalized” insider trading in stocks the Congress allows of its members.

The only people not rich and not benefitting from their positions in this movement are the dupes that buy into the magic broth. They are aware that they are losing ground each year, although they lack a paradigm for figuring out why. They have not had an increase in real wages in more than 40 years. Their standard of living is declining while they watch the rich become ever richer. They’ve been led to blame the administrative state, the social spending of Democrats and the benefits they see going to the poorest Americans. 

They should blame the right wing extremists that have gradually taken over the Republican party. Although their hopes are crushed each time a right wing state government passes right to work legislation, each time the Republicans pass a massive tax cut for the rich, thus denying funds for middle and working class programs such as college and early childhood education, daycare, healthcare and cost of prescriptions–they cannot process the complex dynamics and deceit producing this pain. One of the reasons is that the intellectual leadership they rely upon on for cues are morally rotten to the core. They’ve no interest in their followers knowing the truth about why the working and middle class is stuck in a 1980 standard of living, while the top 10% are basking in the bright sun of 2022 prosperity.

This movement, well under way for decades but becoming more highly visible since Trump’s inaugural, appears devoid of moral conviction. It is not clear what high ideals the movement’s spokesmen hold, if any. However, there seems to be a kind of central purpose guiding leadership—the preservation of privileges of the few through power politics and the corruption of institutional tools once designed to do the opposite: insure justice, fairness and a more egalitarian society. 

An example of the latter is the so-called “Green Bay Sweep”, a clearly extra-legal set of steps with the ultimate aim of throwing the election into the chaos. The scheme included the Vice President doing something unconstitutional—refusing to certify the electors from certain states. He didn’t have the authority and in the end rejected the game plan but this was part of the scheme. Another clearly unconstitutional part of the scheme was the appointment of “alternative” electors in seven states who could not represent the winner of the vote in those states. The previously counted votes (some several times) resulted in Biden winning the electors of the seven states, and those states had officially appointed electors for Joe Biden. Creating another slate of electors in the face of a certified election winner is illegal in election law and not in the constitution. 

This bending of rules, the ignoring of long standing democratic protocols (McConnell holding hostage Merrick Garland and a few years later ramming Amy Comey Barrett through on the eve of an inaugural), deliberate and willful lying, and strange forms political and legal legerdemain have all added up to a corruption of the intent of our democratic founders.

Should we be worried by these efforts to subvert democracy? You are damned right we should be!

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]