Yesterday 37,077 new Covid-19 cases were reported.
Also yesterday, Trump administration filed this Supreme Court brieft to end the Affordable Care and take away health care from millions of Americans.
Timothy Snyder calls it Sadopopulism, and explains why modern fascists deliberately hurt their own constituents.
Twentieth century fascists wanted power, but they were content not to make themselves wealthy. Mussolini wore a common work shirt. Nazi policies enriched ethnic Germans by allowing them the economic spoils from their victims.
Twenty-first style fascists, on the other hand, want both wealth and power. This creates a policy-making challenge.
When democratic leaders create policies, they try to better the lives of their own constituents. Putin-style would-be oligarchs, though, can’t do that, because if they do, people will rise up and challenge their place at the top of the hierarchy.
A few months before an election, while Trump is way behind in the polls—in the middle of a pandemic that has already killed 126,000+ Americans—Trump wants to take health care away from millions of Americans.
OK, maybe Trump is just crazy:
But all Trump’s friends (Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, etc.) do the same thing. Each of them:
- identify an “enemy”
- enact policies that create pain in their own supporters
- blame the pain on the “enemies”
- present themselves as the strongmen to fight the enemies
Question: How can Trump increase his kleptocratic power & wealth if he keeps 99% of the people in poverty?
Answer: Trump wants to be a Putin-style oligarch. Putin’s Russia is what Hungarian scholar Bálint Magyar calls a “post-Soviet Union mafia state.” You see, Trump is a wanna-be Putin, so to understand Trump and Sadopopulism, you have to understand Putin, which means backing up to the early 1990s.
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government owned all the nation’s wealth and resources. When the Soviet Union broke up, the Russian Federation was established as a constitutional republic, with president and parliament and rule of law.
But democracy never took hold. Before rule of law was in place, there was a wild rush to control the nation’s resources. (Source for most of this information is Timothy Snyder’s Road to Unfreedom and this Just Security piece.)
These people who looted (grabbed control of) all the nation’s resources made themselves wealthy and seized power. One of them was Semion Moglievich. Trump and Moglievich are old pals. When Moglievich needed to launder his money, where do you think he went?
Trump Tower, of course.
By the late 1990s, Trump was uncreditworthy and bankrupt. He owed $4 billion to more than 70 banks. It was a match made in heaven. Russian looters needed to launder their money, and Trump needed cash. For more on all of this, see this post.
What Magyar calls a “mafia state” is essentially a criminal government. “Mafia states” — like Putin’s Russia — develop as the government takes over businesses. The ruler consolidates power and wealth.
Part of being an oligarch is that everyone else has to be poor. If you own all the nations resources and industries, you can maintain wealth even if all the people are dirt poor. Keeping people dirt poor is what oligarchs actually do. Hence, sadopopulism. Putin is the master at sadopopulism. He “protects” Russians from their enemies while he robs them blind. Apparently nobody really knows how wealthy Putin is, but I’ve seen it estimated as high as 200 billion.
Twenty-first century fascists don’t think:”If we raise everyone up, we’ll all do better.” They think: “I want to be at the top of the hierarchy.” For Putin and pals, much of their wealth is in hydrocarbons, so they’re global warmers (mass killers), which is the ultimate in sadopopulism.
I used the word “pals” a bit facetiously. In 1986, when Mogilevich bought condos in Trump Tower, he sent an operative. Trump personally attended the closing. Trump’s financial ties to the Russian mafia are well documented.
Like the old time kings and emperors who lived in fabulous luxury while peasants worked in the mud, Putin and Putin-wannabes want wealth and power.
Sometimes I wonder if the desire to take away health care while
- millions are unemployed and hence have no health care, and
- we’re in the middle of a pandemic
illustrates the underlying fanaticism in today’s GOP.
I generally dislike Nazi comparisons because they are so explosive, but I recall talking to a student who was then reading about the end of WWII. She told me (in a tone of disbelief) that even when the Nazis knew they were losing and nothing would save them, their final act was to kill as many Jews as possible.
MFH wants to know how what I’m describing rolls all the way down the food chain to relatively minor GOP office-holders
I think that there’s a feverish, radicalized fanaticism that has gripped the Fox-Trump-GOP. They are so persuaded that anything that smacks of “socialism” will destroy America as they know it that, in the words of Hofstader, they will stop at nothing to prevent what they see as the “final act of subversion.”
They’ve been aroused to militancy: The evil enemy must be destroyed. The “evil enemy” includes the Democrats and everything they stand for. So it isn’t politics as usual for the radicalized GOP. That’s why they’re willing to lie and cheat, and even when they’re losing and their own people are suffering, they want to take away health care.
The debate on Twitter is: Does Trump act from mental illness, or is he consciously following the fascist playbook?
Sometimes I think we should just go back to a much older word: Evil.
