I have not been posting much this week because I have been watching episodes of The Man in the High Castle. Without giving away too much of the plot, Season 3 is finding the story going more to the science fiction roots that Phillip K. Dick laid for it. That’s both a good and a bad thing.
One thing I like about Alternative History is that it provides an effective vehicle to comment on trends that are going on in the “real” world. In the dark world of the Man in the High Castle, one of the themes that does not get enough play (in my humble opinion) is the relative ease with which we see Americans adapting to their new totalitarian overlords. Sure there is a resistance movement, but on the whole, it’s not very effective. Japan and Germany are dealing with it – albeit in a brutal fashion. Yet given the size and scale of what it would take to occupy the entire continent of North America ( for some reason in his book Dick never talks about what happened to Canada) it requires the cooperation of a lot of Americans to make it so.
The show briefly touches
Americans (some of them) are selling their souls cheap. Consider:
There’s a new essay in the New York Review of Books, called “The Suffocation of Democracy.” It deals at some length with the parallels between the disintegration of the Weimar democracy and ours. No, it’s not a Hitler analogy, but it is an insight into how liberal democracies fail, from a historian of the Nazi era, Christopher Browning. What Browning understands is the critical role that traditional conservatism has historically played in the construction of authoritarianism and fascism. Because the old-school GOP agenda — massive tax cuts for the wealthy and ending affordable health insurance for millions — cannot get support on its own, they have hitched their wagon to someone who commands the masses through rank populism. But the risk — as occurred in 1930s Germany — is that the pawn can become the master.
As a parallel to the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, Browning proposes Mitch McConnell, a mainstream figure who has devoted his career to the wreckage of liberal democratic norms and the attempted establishment of one-party rule in America. Money quote:
[McConnell] stoked the hyper-polarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more.
This is the Erdogan model; the Orban example; it could well be the Bolsonaro formula in Brazil. It retains the trappings of a liberal democratic system, while gutting its core principles in favor of a strongman. It is entrenching itself more deeply here. And it is no laughing matter.
I find the failure of the nation to respond to the New York Times story or the horrific story of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal
The President of the United States seems determined to just go through the motions, mouthing what people have told him are the correct words while remaining greedily focused on the money the Saudis have sent his way.
And while this is occurring, the Orange Menace is finding an interesting way to package it up, to sell to his sick followers. As Trevor Noah notes in this thoughtful, well-versed monologue below, he is weaponizing victimhood. The Trump administration is committing unspeakable acts against American norms and constitutional government, and yet, somehow, he and his twisted followers think they are the ones getting the short end of the deal:
I hope you took the time to watch the whole video. He’s right.