QOTD -- "Cartoonishly Evil"

 

This is a long excerpt from Andy Craig's substack, "The UnPopulist," on recognizing the underpinning of the drive to make the Malignant Fascist a "supreme leader" in the mold of Hitler:

... The embrace of authoritarian notions isn’t just a matter of base emotional impulses dressed up in formalistic language. There’s a deadly serious set of ideas behind it, revealing the disturbingly widespread influence of Carl Schmitt, a German jurist and political philosopher who became a prominent propagandist during the early years of the Nazi regime. You might think a literal Nazi would be thoroughly discredited, but the grim reality is he has been embraced as a respectable thinker and even a laudable role model long after the regime he served died in a bunker in Berlin.

Trump himself has surely never studied Schmitt. But those around him, influencing him, and shaping the movement which supports him, certainly have. Many say so openly, which puts them in the notorious company of Vladimir Putin’s pet "philosopher,'"Aleksandr Dugin.  [snip]

We should take heed of what it means when modern figures—no matter how polished their résumés—draw inspiration from a man whose legacy is inseparable from the Third Reich. They’re not flirting with some contrarian viewpoint on constitutional theory; they’re actively rejecting the American tradition that legitimate power comes from a constitution, created by "We the People,'" and constrained by the rule of law and individual rights.

Instead, they favor power qua power: that a single individual can stand above statute and structure, determining who has what rights, if any, no matter what the law says. The White House’s assertion that a president has not just “inherent” but boundless authority to expel entire groups without congressional approval, or that he might unilaterally redefine the bounds of citizenship, takes a play straight from Schmitt’s playbook.

This might all sound cartoonishly evil, but that’s because it is. The idea that law is subject to power, rather than the other way around, has always led to tragedy. America’s Founders understood that principle well, writing a Constitution precisely to prevent the concentration of too much power in the hands of one man. When we see these Schmittian arguments—praising the abuse of emergency powers or lauding the unfettered ability of a leader to decide who counts as American—we must recognize them for what they are: an assault on our most fundamental principles, and on civilization itself.

We don't have the luxury of time or powerful democratic institutions to rely on anymore.  It's the first time in our lifetime the vast majority of us have faced an evil as relentless and enduring as the Malignant Fascist and his fascistic MAGA movement.  We're increasingly being called upon to stand up and fight lest we lose the freedoms that we always assumed would be there for us and our posterity.  Because, as Craig rightly says, this is "an assault on our most fundamental principles, and on civilization itself."  Each of us, in our own way and according to our abilities, must meet the moment and beat back that assault.