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Dictator Series
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<!--Xholon Workbook http://www.primordion.com/Xholon/gwt/ MIT License, Copyright (C) Ken Webb, Mon Mar 13 2017 18:16:28 GMT-0400 (EDT)-->
<XholonWorkbook>
<Notes><![CDATA[
Xholon
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Title: Dictator Series
Description:
Url: http://www.primordion.com/Xholon/gwt/
InternalName: 3d4d5e61b26d5c376a7c6789f11d4b4c
Keywords: Dictator Series - Who selects the leader
My Notes
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Compare the rise of different dictators and would-be dictators.
and compare this with what Trump is doing and might do in the future
Refer to these people as Authoritarian Agents (AA)
I'll focus on the institutions and people they opposed and neutralized, for example the free press and the judiciary.
In this workbook, I will mostly gather some information, think about what I'm going to do, and work on some specific cases.
Vladimir Putin
Benito Mussolini
Hugo Chavez
Silvio Berlusconi
Franco
Adolf Hitler
Lenin
Juan Domingo Perón
Viktor Orbán of Hungary
Jacob Zuma of South Africa
current Romania
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
south-east Europe
Maybe have individual "dictators" move through the same space of possible actions that previous dictators have moved through.
Co-dependency between Trump and terrorists - they can use each other.
TODO
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- start creating node types in the Inheritance Hierarchy starting with [17]
TODO
----
- do a separate model of forms of government, based on who selects the leader
[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forms_of_government#By_elements_of_who_elects_the_empowered
- use active objects (avatars?) with behaviors to select leaders and policies
References
----------
(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/opinion/sunday/our-putin.html
Our Putin
When it was my turn, I asked about the brutal war against separatists in the southern province of Chechnya. His long answer makes for striking reading all these years later: It combined media-bashing (we were failing to sufficiently cover atrocities committed by the separatists, he said); anti-Islamic sentiment (“What do you suggest we should do? Talk with them about biblical values?”); and the insistence that he had to attack in Chechnya to keep the rest of Russia safe. As the night went on, he proposed American-Russian operations against the real threat in the world, Islamic terrorists, and proclaimed his patriotic plan to restore the country after the economic reverses of the previous decade. Sound familiar? Mr. Putin’s slogan back in 2001 might as well have been Make Russia Great Again.
Both Mr Trump's rhetoric and actions as president bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Mr Putin during his first yers consolidting power.
The media-bashing and outrageous statements. The attacks on rival power centers, whether stubborn federal judges or corporations refusing to get in line. The warnings, some of them downright panic-inducing, that the country is not safe - and we must go to war with Islamic extremists because they are threatening our way of life. These are the techniques that Mr. Putin used to great effect in his first years in power, and they are very much the same tactics and clash-of-civilizations ideology being deployed by Mr. Trump today.
Early Putin was positively Trumpian, his presidency a blitz of convention-defying that conjured up the image of a leader on the march after President Boris Yeltsin’s drunken stumbles and the economic uncertainties of the late 1990s. He had the state take over the first independent national TV network, he turned the state Duma into a pocket parliament, he went after uppity oligarchs. He said things that politicians didn’t normally say, like vowing to rub out the Chechen opposition “in the outhouse” and to castrate a French reporter who asked a question he didn’t like.
In retrospect, the best guide to his actions should have been his statements. Mr. Putin did exactly what he said he would do. I’ve thought a lot about that over the last year, as Americans have puzzled over Mr. Trump’s surprising rise, and whether he really means all those outrageous things he says and plans to follow through with the policy shifts he promises.
counterbalancing institutions, like a free and independent press and a federal judiciary, that are already demonstrating a deep resistance to the kind of political steamroller techniques that Mr. Putin deployed so effectively in Russia
(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/opinion/dysfunction-and-deadlock-at-the-federal-election-commission.html
Dysfunction and Deadlock at the Federal Election Commission
(3) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/politics/john-mccain-donald-trump-critic.html
John McCain Becomes Critic in Chief of the Trump Administration
A day later, in an interview for “Meet the Press,” Mr. McCain challenged Mr. Trump’s contention that the news media is “the enemy of the American people.”
“The first thing that dictators do is shut down the press,” he said, adding that while he was not calling the president a dictator, “we need to learn the lessons of history.”
(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSDClxjcR-4
Tyranny, one tiny step at a time
(5) http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/note-trump-press-conference/story?id=45558530
the president repeatedly claimed that he has “nothing to do with Russia,” calling assertions to the contrary “fake news” and insisting “leaks” are the real problem.
KSW - trying to deflect from the issue and blaim someone else
(6) Trump tweet$
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
(7) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-and-the-enemies-of-the-american-people
en the leaders of the Bolshevik movement—Lenin, Stalin, and the rest—used the term vrag naroda, an “enemy of the people,” it was an ominous epithet that encompassed a range of “wreckers” and “socially dangerous elements.” Enemies included clergy, intellectuals, monarchists, Trotskyists, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and well-to-do farmers. To be branded an enemy of the people was to face nearly inevitable doom; such a fate was soon followed by a knock on the door in the middle of the night, a prison cell, the Gulag, an icy ditch—a variety of dismal ends. To be called an “enemy of the people” did not mean you had to hold oppositional thoughts or commit oppositional acts; it only meant that the dictator had included you in his grand scheme to insure the compliance of the population.
Now Donald Trump, the elected President of the oldest democracy on earth, a real-estate brander and reality-TV star, has taken not to Pravda but to his own preferred instrument of autocratic pronouncement—the tweet—to declare the media “the enemy of the American People.”
What Trump resembled at the lectern was an old-fashioned autocrat wielding a very familiar rhetorical strategy.
Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, makes the point that autocrats from Chávez to Erdoğan, Sisi to Mugabe, all follow a general pattern. They attack and threaten the press with deliberate and ominous intensity; the press, in turn, adopts a more oppositional tone and role. “And then that paves the way for the autocrat’s next move,” Simon told me. “Popular support for the media dwindles and the leader starts instituting restrictions. It’s an old strategy.” Simon pointed to Trump’s lack of originality, recalling that both Néstor Kirchner, of Argentina, and Tabaré Ramón Vázquez, of Uruguay, referred to the press as the “unelected political opposition.” And, as Simon has written, it was the late Hugo Chávez who first mastered Twitter as a way of bypassing the media and providing his supporters with alternative facts.
At the same time, there are distinct signs that Trump is losing ground among members of the conservative media who had initially cut him some slack, not least because they felt the liberal media had been besotted by Barack Obama. The attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, on the intentions of the intelligence agencies, and on the patriotism of the press have become too evident, too repulsive to be discounted as mere sideshow. Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman from Florida and the co-host of “Morning Joe,” tweeted a telling call to the right on Friday: “Conservatives, feel free to speak up for the Constitution anytime the mood strikes. It is time.”
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as in every genuinely authoritarian state, there are no “enemies”—or, at least, none with the capacity to challenge power. Calling on all the repressive means available in such a state—compliant courts and legislatures; the elimination of political competition; comprehensive censorship of television—soaring popularity ratings are achieved. President Trump may wish for such means, just as he wishes for such popularity. For all the chaos and resulting gloom these past weeks, it has been heartening to see so many “enemies of the American people”—protesters, judges, journalists, citizens of all kinds, even some members of Congress—do their work despite Presidential denunciation, not necessarily as partisans of one party or another but as adherents to a Constitution.
(8) http://www.cjr.org/opinion/trump-chavez-media.php
What does Trump have in common with Hugo Chavez? A media strategy. By Joel Simon, Columbia Journalism Review
PRESIDENT TRUMP IS AN AVOWED ADMIRER of Vladimir Putin, and his administration is under investigation for its ties to Russia. But Trump’s governing style in the first few weeks has more in common with the Latin American populists who have risen to power in the last several decades. In particular, Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the media and attempts to undermine its credibility and paint it as an opposition force are straight out the Latin American populists’ playbook. Thursday’s press conference, in which he railed against “very fake news,” was a case in point.
While Trump is on the right and most of populist movements of Latin America are leftist-oriented, there are remarkable similarities between the two in the rhetoric they employ to mobilize supporters. Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner—along with the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela—all rose to power in campaigns that targeted the media. In office, they continued their attacks.
For these leaders, the shared insight is that a mobilized and committed base is more important than broad popular support in advancing their political agenda. This realization turns standard political practice on its head: Creating a more polarized society—rather than a more unified one—becomes an explicit political goal. For example, soon after taking office in 1999, Chávez rallied his supporters behind a Constitutional Referendum. It passed with 88 percent of the vote—but a 60 percent rate of abstention.
The necessary first step of a strategy of fomenting greater political polarization is to marginalize the media, and more broadly to undermine its ability to provide a shared, unifying narrative. In Latin America, this process was aided by the fact that the traditional media has been allied with oligarchic interests. When Correa or Morales denounce the media it resonates with their supporters. Trump’s larger goal seems to be similar; certainly his tactics are.
These systematic attacks on the media accomplish two things. First, they fire up the base, which believe that traditional media do not represent their interests or concerns. Second, they provoke the media itself, which feeling threatened, adopts a more oppositional posture. This in turn further fuels the polarization on which the leaders depend and paves the way for the government to introduce legal restrictions.
But Trump’s intent is clear. Through his relentless attacks, he seeks to create an environment in which critical media is marginalized and the truth is unknowable. The experience in Latin America—which, unlike Russia, has a democratic tradition, a robust civil society, and a history of independent media—shows that the strategy can work.
(9) http://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/journalists-trump-media-press-calling-fake.php
TRUMP’S GREATEST STRENGTH, if you can call it that, is his ability to make others feel vulnerable. Trump has exposed vast numbers of Americans to their most primal fear. He has reduced people to their social identities, and made them feel that their social identity is becoming a weapon that will be used to undermine their existence. There aren’t many people who feel protected under his watch.
I don’t believe that we are headed for an authoritarian state at this juncture in American history, but the sudden popularity of the term “existential threat” reflects a new reality: Every day we grow a little closer to one of the conditions of authoritarian rule, which is to reduce life to a struggle.
(10) http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21709984-americans-could-look-italy-taste-things-come-what-donald-trump-and-silvio
What Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi have in common
Americans could look to Italy for a taste of things to come
DONALD Trump ended his victory speech with the words: “And I love this country. Thank you.” A fondness for fervently patriotic declarations is just one of many similarities between America’s president-elect and another billionaire who made his fortune from real estate before turning to politics.
Where Mr Berlusconi did succeed was in passing copious volumes of legislation that favoured his own interests. By one count, his governments introduced more than 30 so-called ad personam laws that helped his businesses or shielded him from indictment or conviction by the prosecutors and judges who he argued were hounding him.
(11) http://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/journalists-trump-media-press-calling-fake.php
ONE DOOR CLOSES, another opens. If Trump thinks that by playing both on journalists’ fears of the media’s warping influence on journalism, and on ordinary people’s resentment of the media, he is going to undermine the media, then he has made a bad miscalculation. What he has done is to finally liberate journalism from the media’s stranglehold and return it to its rightful place as the friend and ally of the common person. In presenting the media with a big, unique story that is, all at once, profitable, urgent, and serious, he is allowing journalists to be journalists without worrying about all of the concerns harbored by the bean counters. What is meaningful journalism is now profitable, and what is profitable is now meaningful journalism. Hail the new synergy of the Trump era!
(12) http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL KNEW TRUMP WAS COMING By Alex Ross December 5, 2016
By 1952, though, he had become convinced that McCarthyism was a prelude to fascism, and felt compelled to emigrate again. At the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communism in Hollywood, Mann said, “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in Germany.”
Mann was hardly the only Central European émigré who experienced uneasy feelings of déjà vu in the fearful years after the end of the Second World War. Members of the intellectual enclave known as the Frankfurt School—originally based at the Institute for Social Research, in Frankfurt—felt a similar alarm. In 1950, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno helped to assemble a volume titled “The Authoritarian Personality,” which constructed a psychological and sociological profile of the “potentially fascistic individual.” The work was based on interviews with American subjects, and the steady accumulation of racist, antidemocratic, paranoid, and irrational sentiments in the case studies gave the German-speakers pause. Likewise, Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book, “Prophets of Deceit,” studied the Father Coughlin type of rabble-rouser, contemplating the “possibility that a situation will arise in which large numbers of people would be susceptible to his psychological manipulation.”
Adorno believed that the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus of film, radio, and television. Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought. Nazi Germany was merely the most extreme case of a late-capitalist condition in which people surrender real intellectual freedom in favor of a sham paradise of personal liberation and comfort. Watching wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the “culture industry,” as he and Horkheimer called it, was replicating fascist methods of mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw a blurring of the line between reality and fiction.
In his 1951 book, “Minima Moralia,” he wrote:
Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no one can say whether he died or escaped, survives.
I spoke too soon. His moment of vindication is arriving now. With the election of Donald Trump, the latent threat of American authoritarianism is on the verge of being realized, its characteristics already mapped by latter-day sociologists who have updated Adorno’s “F-scale” for fascist tendencies. To read “Prophets of Deceit” is to see clear anticipations of Trump’s bigoted harangues.
(13) http://www.ajcarchives.org/main.php?GroupingId=6490
The Authoritarian Personality, Studies in Prejudice Series, Volume 1
T.W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, Harper & Brothers, Copyright American Jewish Committee, 1950.
the complete contents is avaiable online
(14) http://www.ajcarchives.org/main.php?GroupingId=6530
Prophets of Deceit, Studies in Prejudice Series, Volume 5$
Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Harper & Brothers, Copyright American Jewish Committee, 1949.
the complete contents is avaiable online
(15) http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries.
MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.
So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.
KSW - I need to model these authoritarian individuals, and their interaction with the dictators and the would-be dictators; a co-dependency
(16) http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/7/14454370/trump-autocracy-congress-frum
How to stop an autocracy Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Feb 7, 2017, 9:40am EST
The danger isn’t that Trump will build an autocracy. It’s that congressional Republicans will let him.
There is much talk of the resistance to the Trump administration, and many protests happening outside the White House. But it is in Congress members’ districts — at their town halls, in their offices, at their coffee shops — where this fight will be won or lost. This is why it matters that the anti-Trump movement has begun adopting the tactics the Tea Party used to great success against President Obama in 2010: Those tactics focused on congressional offices, and that’s why they worked.
In the end, it is as simple as this: The way to stop an autocracy is to have Congress do its damn job.
(17) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/
How to Build an Autocracy DAVID FRUM MARCH 2017 ISSUE
The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.
What has happened in Hungary since 2010 offers an example—and a bl$ueprint for would-be strongmen. Hungary is a member state of the European Union and a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. It has elections and uncensored internet. Yet Hungary is ceasing to be a free country.
Viktor Orbán of Hungary, the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and Jacob Zuma of South Africa all turned their countries away from liberal democracy and toward kleptocracy. Worldwide, democracy is in recession.
The transition has been nonviolent, often not even very dramatic.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s rule over Hungary does depend on elections. These remain open and more or less free—at least in the sense that ballots are counted accurately. Yet they are not quite fair. Electoral rules favor incumbent power-holders in ways both obvious and subtle. Independent media lose advertising under government pressure; government allies own more and more media outlets each year. The government sustains support even in the face of bad news by artfully generating an endless sequence of controversies that leave culturally conservative Hungarians feeling misunderstood and victimized by liberals, foreigners, and Jews.
You could tell a similar story of the slide away from democracy in South Africa under Nelson Mandela’s successors, in Venezuela under the thug-thief Hugo Chávez, or in the Philippines under the murderous Rodrigo Duterte. A comparable transformation has recently begun in Poland, and could come to France should Marine Le Pen, the National Front’s candidate, win the presidency.
What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.
Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
Just such a contest was waged at Fox, between Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly. In both cases, the early indicators seemed to favor the women. Yet in the end it was the men who won, Hannity even more decisively than Trump. Hannity’s show, which became an unapologetic infomercial for Trump, pulled into first place on the network in mid-October. Kelly’s show tumbled to fifth place
Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.
Donald trump will not set out to build an authoritarian state. His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.
If Congress is quiescent, what can Trump do? A better question, perhaps, is what can’t he do?
In an online article for The New York Review of Books, the Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen brilliantly noted a commonality between Donald Trump and the man Trump admires so much, Vladimir Putin. “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”
The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.
Yet there’s also something incongruous and even absurd about applying the sinister label of fascist to Donald Trump. He is so pathetically needy, so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted. Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.
Many of the worst and most subversive things Trump will do will be highly popular. Voters liked the threats and incentives that kept Carrier manufacturing jobs in Indiana. Since 1789, the wisest American leaders have invested great ingenuity in creating institutions to protect the electorate from its momentary impulses toward arbitrary action: the courts, the professional officer corps of the armed forces, the civil service, the Federal Reserve—and undergirding it all, the guarantees of the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights. More than any president in U.S. history since at least the time of Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump seeks to subvert those institutions.
Trump and his team count on one thing above all others: public indifference.
What happens in the next four years will depend heavily on whether Trump is right or wrong about how little Americans care about their democracy and the habits and conventions that sustain it. If they surprise him, they can restrain him.
Public opinion, public scrutiny, and public pressure still matter greatly in the U.S. political system. In January, an unexpected surge of voter outrage thwarted plans to neutralize the independent House ethics office. That kind of defense will need to be replicated many times. Elsewhere in this issue, Jonathan Rauch describes some of the networks of defense that Americans are creating.
(18) http://www.vox.com/videos/2017/2/13/14597968/kellyanne-conway-tricks
Kellyanne Conway’s interview tricks, explained
Conway has a supernatural ability to derail tough interviews about Trump. How does she do it?
Updated by Carlos Maza Feb 13, 2017, 12:34pm EST
I talked to Seth Gannon, a former champion debater and coach at Speech Labs, who explained how Conway masterfully redirects key terms and concepts, preys on interviewers’ politeness, and displays an almost “postmodern” ability to recreate reality in order to trip up her interviewer and paint Trump in the best possible light.
(19) http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533
I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism.
That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.
My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.
Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.
(20) http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/16/opinions/trump-following-authoritarian-playbook-ben-ghiat/
Trump is following the authoritarian playbook
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Updated 5:47 PM ET, Tue January 17, 2017
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion and a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Her latest book is "Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
In less than a week, America will embark on a new political experience: rule by an authoritarian President.
Many Americans were initially confused by Trump and his unorthodox behavior, or dismissed him as a joke. I have spent decades studying authoritarian and fascist regimes and saw in Trump a deeply familiar figure: the strongman who cultivates a bond with followers based on loyalty to him as a person rather than to a party or set of principles.
Such individuals inevitably seek to adapt the political office they inhabit to serve their needs. They are clear from the start about this intention, refusing to submit to shared customs and norms -- such as releasing tax returns -- that would mean they were submitting to the will of the political class. Anyone who believes that Trump will morph into anything resembling a traditional politician will be sorely disappointed. Authoritarians never pivot.
Strongmen show aggression to the press as part of a slow-drip strategy of discrediting all information that is not dispensed by their close allies. Many were surprised at Trump's rude treatment of CNN at his recent press conference. Calling the media outlet "fake news," he refused to allow reporter Jim Acosta to ask a question. This was classic authoritarian posturing.
The media must push back strongly now or pay a heavy price later.
Strongmen also target the judiciary, since it stands in the way of their "reforms" that often veer into extra-legality.
One more thing: Authoritarians love to think they are making history, and never hesitate to rewrite the past to suit their political agendas. Trump's use of racism as a campaign tool laid the foundations for what will be a concerted effort to delegitimize the history of civil rights struggles in our country.
Do not lose hope. Do not hide away. Be visible and be heard, on the street and in phone calls to your elected officials.
(21) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms. Individual freedoms are subordinate to the state and there is no constitutional accountability under an authoritarian regime.
(22) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality
Authoritarian personality
Authoritarian personality is a state of mind or attitude characterized by belief in absolute obedience or submission to one's own authority, as well as the administration of that belief through the oppression of one's subordinates. It usually applies to individuals who are known or viewed as having an authoritative, strict, or oppressive personality towards subordinates.
(23) http://www.dw.com/en/populism-analyzing-a-phenomenon/a-37658323
Populism: Analyzing a phenomenon
It's the word on everyone’s lips, and has lent its name to our times: We are living in an age of populism. Being populist has long been seen as a political stigma. But what is populism, and who does it speak to?
(24) http://www.dw.com/en/how-to-deal-with-democracy-in-crisis-in-southeast-europe/a-37823267
(25) google: Ruth Ben-Ghiat
) http://www.ruthbenghiat.com/
(26) The Origins of Political Order, by Francis Fukuyama, 2011
(27) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/09/the-man-who-declared-the-end-of-history-fears-for-democracys-future/
(28) https://www.meetup.com/Ottawa-Graph/events/235623922/
The Structure of Corruption
"In some countries, the government is not a government that may be failing. It’s a criminal organization that’s succeeding."
Sarah Chayes, A senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
is exploring the link between corruption and violence by mapping out "kleptocratic" networks.
Looking beyond the sensationalist details of criminality, bringing network thinking to foreign policy holds the promise of more stable,
predictable and peaceful engagements with countries around the world.
(29) http://carnegieendowment.org/files/CP274_Chayes_EurasianCorruptionStructure_final1.pdf
THE STRUCTURE OF CORRUPTION - A Systemic Analysis Using Eurasian Cases, by Sarah Chayes
(30) http://www.slate.com/articles/slate_plus/fascism.html
Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a serious contender for the Republican nomination last year, opponents have leaned on the term fascist to describe him. But what does that toxic word really mean?
) http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017/01/introducing_a_new_slate_academy_on_the_history_of_fascism.html
(31) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forms_of_government
(32) book: A History of Fascism, 1914–1945, Paperback – January 1, 1995, by Stanley G. Payne
(33) http://dlia.ir/Scientific/e_book/Political_Science/Political_Theory_The_State_etc/JC_348_497_Forms_of_the_State_/004754.pdf
Kevin Passmore, FASCISM - A Very Short Introduction, 2002
(34) google: netlogo political science
) google: agent based modeling political science
]]></Notes>
<_-.XholonClass>
<PhysicalSystem/>
<!-- people -->
<Person>
<Authoritarian/> <!-- a person accepting a strong leader [19], OR a person who is a string leader [20] -->
<Leader>
<StrongLeader/> <!-- [19] Autocrat -->
</Leader>
<Author/>
<Journalist/>
</Person>
<!-- forms of gevernment -->
<FormOfGovernment>
<Democracy/>
<Authoritarianism> <!-- [15] [21] -->
</Authoritarianism>
<Tyranny/>
<Fascism/>
<Autocracy/> <!-- [17] -->
</FormOfGovernment>
<Populism/> <!-- is this a form of government? -->
<Codependency/> <!-- [15] -->
<!-- things that dictators don't like -->
<NewsMedia/> <!-- fake news -->
<Leaks/> <!-- information that leaks out of the system that the striong leader has control over -->
<Courts/> <!-- judges -->
<IntelligenceAgencies/>
<PublicEngagement/>
<PoliticalOpponents/>
</_-.XholonClass>
<xholonClassDetails>
</xholonClassDetails>
<PhysicalSystem>
<Author roleName="Ruth Ben-Ghiat"/> <!-- [20] -->
<Authoritarianism> <!-- [15] [21] -->
<Annotation>a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms</Annotation>
</Authoritarianism>
</PhysicalSystem>
<Blockbehavior implName="org.primordion.xholon.base.Behavior_gwtjs"><![CDATA[
var a = 123;
var b = 456;
var c = a * b;
if (console) {
console.log(c);
}
]]></Blockbehavior>
<Heightbehavior implName="org.primordion.xholon.base.Behavior_gwtjs"><![CDATA[
var myHeight, testing;
var beh = {
postConfigure: function() {
testing = Math.floor(Math.random() * 10);
myHeight = this.cnode.parent();
},
act: function() {
myHeight.println(this.toString());
},
toString: function() {
return "testing:" + testing;
}
}
]]></Heightbehavior>
<Brickbehavior implName="org.primordion.xholon.base.Behavior_gwtjs"><![CDATA[
$wnd.xh.Brickbehavior = function Brickbehavior() {}
$wnd.xh.Brickbehavior.prototype.postConfigure = function() {
this.brick = this.cnode.parent();
this.iam = " red brick";
};
$wnd.xh.Brickbehavior.prototype.act = function() {
this.brick.println("I am a" + this.iam);
};
]]></Brickbehavior>
<Brickbehavior implName="org.primordion.xholon.base.Behavior_gwtjs"><![CDATA[
console.log("I'm another brick behavior");
]]></Brickbehavior>
<SvgClient><Attribute_String roleName="svgUri"><![CDATA[data:image/svg+xml,
<svg width="100" height="50" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<g>
<title>Block</title>
<rect id="PhysicalSystem/Block" fill="#98FB98" height="50" width="50" x="25" y="0"/>
<g>
<title>Height</title>
<rect id="PhysicalSystem/Block/Height" fill="#6AB06A" height="50" width="10" x="80" y="0"/>
</g>
</g>
</svg>
]]></Attribute_String><Attribute_String roleName="setup">${MODELNAME_DEFAULT},${SVGURI_DEFAULT}</Attribute_String></SvgClient>
</XholonWorkbook>
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