Trump’s authoritarian threat: this time it’s for real

Plus: Buddhism and racial justice, Christianity and eternal damnation, etc.

Hi! In this issue of NZN I try hard to convince you that (1) we now, for the first time in my life, face the real threat of America becoming an authoritarian state and (2) there are things we can all do to make that outcome less likely. Also, this issue brings good news for President Trump: I interview a Christian scholar who says he doesn’t think hell exists. Plus I steer you to readings on such things as: the unprecedented magnitude of the George Floyd protests, Buddhist takes on racial justice, covid-19 (there’s good news from Europe), Biden’s disconcertingly blobbish foreign policy, and, most important of all, what to make of quantum physics. 

The true Trump nightmare is finally upon us 

As of November 9, 2016, here was the bad news: America had elected as its president an egregiously incompetent, childishly impulsive, crassly narcissistic man with authoritarian instincts. Here was the good news: it was possible to imagine these causes for concern interacting in such a way that some would neutralize others.

In particular: Maybe Trump’s incompetence, impulsiveness, and narcissism would keep him from realizing his authoritarian potential. After all, it takes skill and focus to erode civil liberties and aggrandize power while maintaining a critical mass of public support. Mussolini didn’t get to be Mussolini by throwing a public tantrum every day, filling his administration with dimwits, and engaging in zero long-term planning! 

As of five months ago—three years after inauguration day—this hopeful scenario remained more or less intact. Trump had been thuggish and cruel, and he’d weakened norms that guard liberties, but it was still hard to imagine him systematically subverting liberal democracy and ushering in an authoritarian state. 

But then the ground started to shift, and over the past ten days it’s shifted a lot. Trump’s incompetence and self-absorption, rather than short-circuit his authoritarian bent, are now energizing it.

What started the shift was the arrival in January of something the country had been spared throughout the Trump era: a new challenge of epic scale that urgently demanded presidential competence. Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus with early and decisive intervention meant that his belated intervention would have to be dramatic but still couldn’t be conclusive. A nationwide lockdown would now “flatten the curve” but at this late date couldn’t crush it and meanwhile would create massive unemployment. America was condemned to a state of widespread economic deprivation and social dislocation with no end to the epidemic in sight. 

This atmosphere of disease and discontent fed the civil unrest of the past ten days in various ways. For starters, if it weren’t for the pandemic, George Floyd might still be alive. Before he allegedly handed a counterfeit $20 bill to the store clerk who fatefully called the police, Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer because of the lockdown.  

News of Floyd’s death—probably the most plainly indefensible killing of an African American by a police officer ever captured on video—would have been explosive in any event. But the pandemic and its mishandling had created an especially incendiary landscape. Millions of young people had more time on their hands and more pent-up, edgy energy than three months earlier. And they were, more than ever, surrounded by signs that the system just wasn’t working—including an imploding economy that not only added urgency to calls for social justice but strengthened the incentive of some to seize chances for looting. And, of course, it’s easier to break the law with impunity—whether you’re a looter or a violent provocateur of the far left or far right—when you’re wearing a mask.

So it naturally took state and local authorities a few days to grasp the magnitude of the challenge and respond effectively. Which was long enough for Trump to start feeling his authoritarian oats. 

First came presidential tweets saying only “LAW AND ORDER!” Then Trump used federal park police to aggressively displace peaceful demonstrators as prelude to his strongman stroll to St. John’s Church. Then federal forces, including soldiers, started showing up in various Washington venues.

None of this transformed America into a fascist state, but it did provide vivid glimpses of how authoritarianism grows in increments. There was the needless use of violence in Lafayette Park to get a TV cameraman to vacate the premises. There were the vaguely uniformed forces—presumably from some federal agency or other—who lacked the personally identifying markers (a nameplate, a badge number) that help hold cops accountable. There were the helicopters whose pilots tried to almost literally blow protestors away.

Fortunately, Trump encountered influential resistance. His own secretary of defense, Mark Esper, showed previously hidden reserves of principle by arguing publicly against invoking the Insurrection Act, which Trump had threatened to do and which would bring the nationwide deployment of soldiers in a policing capacity—whether governors wanted them or not. And James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense (a status Esper may soon occupy if he keeps piping up), denounced Trump and warned against blurring the line between soldiers and police. 

This and other such unfriendly fire from the military establishment must have shocked Trump and no doubt caused him to think again about the further extension of federal power. This elite blowback was in a way reassuring, but it was also alarming, because interventions this extraordinary could only have been motivated by a sense of real danger. It’s great that Esper, Mattis, and others rose to the occasion but scary that the occasion existed.

This particular occasion may be passing. But even if so, the landscape has changed. The economic and social stress brought by the pandemic and by Trump’s inept response to it will fade only slowly, and the civil unrest, even if it ends soon, will leave strong emotional residue. The atmosphere will be ripe for another crisis that brings out the strongman in Trump. 

And though this week’s exercise of authoritarian impulses got lots of establishment pushback, it got positive reinforcement from many elite and grassroots Trumpists. Trump has gotten a taste, and there’s no reason to think it tasted bad.

Warnings about Trump’s fascist potential have often been hyperbolic. The idea that he was crafty and capable enough to lull us to sleep while morphing into Mussolini never made sense. The only real threat has been that we’d be wide awake but frightened—that a sufficiently terrifying crisis, whether a foreign attack or chaos of domestic origin, would permit even a crude, ham-handed power grab to succeed.

This past week fell short of that threshold. But it brought us closer to the next level of crisis—violent conflict between groups of Trump supporters and groups of Trump opponents. 

In Philadelphia’s Fishtown—a white working class neighborhood already ambivalent about the young progressives who are gentrifying it—men carrying baseball bats, golf clubs, and in one case a hatchet were milling around, poised to act, until Philadelphia police arrived and defused the tension. In Oregon, a group of people carrying those same weapons—plus guns—gathered and glared at protestors, separated from them by police. (Some had expected antifa, thanks to false reports on Facebook—which are easy for provocateurs to generate.) 

If things do escalate to the next level, and people start using the term “civil war” seriously, the chances of Trump’s invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying troops nationwide will grow. To grasp the significance of this step, reflect on that police officer who gratuitously punched the TV cameraman in Lafayette Park without first telling him to move. That officer can rest assured there will be no punishment. Park police, unlike municipal police, answer ultimately to Trump, whose opinion of mainstream journalists is well known—and whose recent deliverance of psychokiller Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher from the clutches of military justice left no doubt about his tolerance for savage behavior on the part of his troops. Now imagine every major city full of those troops, armed men and women who know they can behave brutally with impunity. 

And dispatching, say, the 82nd Airborne to American cities (as nutcase Trump cheerleader Tom Cotton infamously recommended this week) is far from the only authoritarian avenue Trump can explore. He threatened only 10 days ago to “strongly regulate” social media platforms or even “close them down.” 

Spookily, Trump has the ability—and the natural inclination and maybe the incentive—to set the stage for all this, to push crisis to the next level, to make violent conflict between his supporters and his opponents more likely. He’s great at firing up a crowd, and among the crowds he’s expressed sympathy for lately are armed men who occupied Michigan’s capitol building. And his current position in the polls, with only five months before the election, gives him an incentive to stir things up.

And, finally, there is that perennial friend of volatile polarization, the balkanized world of media and social media. As Trump supporters view mashups of looters and violent protestors, progressives view mashups of violent police. Both groups could stand to ponder the fact that, in a world of pervasive smartphones and efficient social media, we are treated every day to videos of some of the worst things done in public by anyone—and that, by definition, those things aren’t typical of the class of people the perpetrators belong to, whether that class is protestors or police, whites or people of color, Trump supporters or Trump opponents. 

Our luck, such as it was, lasted three years. Trump’s incompetence and self-absorption stayed in healthy tension with his authoritarianism. But then came the pandemic. His incompetence, by sowing the seeds of instability, now prepared the ground for a power grab. A Wall Street Journal poll published this weekend found that 80 percent of Americans feel the country is spiraling out of control. 

All that’s required for Trump to have a new and very real shot at destroying American democracy is an even deeper and more pervasive sense of disorder—the kind of thing that contagious violence between Trump opponents and Trump supporters could bring. If you love America, or even if you just hate Trump, it’s in your interest to pause and reflect, to try to judge your adversaries fairly, even charitably, and, after you view the next mashup of misbehavior by one side or the other, to think twice before sharing it. 

To share the above piece, use this link.

The case against eternal damnation

Not long ago I had a conversation on The Wright Show with the renowned Christian scholar David Bentley Hart, who subscribes to the doctrine of universal salvation—which, I’m happy to report, holds that no one suffers eternal damnation. Hart cites a long lineage of support for this idea in Christian thought, and he contends that a close reading of Christian scripture supports it as well. Plus (to oversimplify his argument slightly) there’s the question of what kind of God would want you to suffer forever. Hart is an engaging, witty, and very learned conversationalist, and I learned a lot from him. 

ROBERT WRIGHT: You're a very well-known and prolific theologian. And you've written a book called That All Shalt Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, in which you bring good news to us all. Which is that none of us—not me, not even Sam Harris—is going to hell. That is your view, right? 

DAVID BENTLEY HART: Well, I definitely don't believe in an eternal hell, no.

I prefer to think of myself more as a scholar of religious studies, by the way, than a theologian—and there are a lot of people who would prefer I call myself that, as well.

But yeah, the book is about Christian universalism—about not only its history, but its logic. Principally, it's a philosophical argument that's negative in form. I'm afraid I don't know that it brings good news, but the claim it does make is that the only way [classical Christian claims] can be coherent is in the form of one of the classical universalist construals. It's a somewhat more minimal claim. 

But you're a Christian, so presumably you do believe they're coherent? 

Well, I believe in certain configurations they're coherent, yes. 

Namely yours. 

Or Gregory of Nyssa's, Issac of Nineveh's—there's a long tradition there. That doesn't mean that I'm an apologist for the Christian religion in whatever form it takes. I think there are Christian truths, and there's quite a lot of nonsense that goes under the name of Christianity. So it's not an apologetic project for me. 

Although you did write a book called Atheist Delusions, which presumably took issue with the New Atheists? 

You can read the rest of this dialogue at nonzero.org.

On justsecurity.org, Rebecca Hamilton, a foreign-correspondent-turned-law-professor, writes about the current state of America as it might be rendered by a journalist from another country. Her goal is to challenge, as she puts it in a preface, “the assumed inevitability of an enduring democracy.”

The Washington Post reports that the easing of lockdown in Italy and other European countries has brought less covid contagion than feared. Possible explanations include the effects of summer heat on the virus and “enduring behavioral changes, from hand-washing to mask-wearing.”

In Foreign Policy, Colum Lynch reports that, though Joe Biden seems to be moving the Democratic party to the left on domestic policy, there are no signs of such movement in the realm of foreign policy. To many progressives, Lynch writes, “Biden appears to be a man of the past: an unapologetic champion of American exceptionalism. He backed the resolution authorizing the Iraq War, remains committed to waging an open-ended global war on terrorism with drones and special forces, refuses to condition military aid to Israel to secure its commitment to a Palestinian state, and demonstrates little interest in curbing a U.S. defense budget that has swelled by more than $100 billion under Donald Trump’s presidency.” Plus he’s been “portraying himself as tougher on China than Trump.”

Tricycle has posted a statement about Buddhism and racial justice, along with a reading list of related pieces from the magazine’s archive. One of the pieces is by Rhonda Magee, author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice, whom I interviewed on The Wright Show last year.  

In the Washington Post, social scientists Lara Putnam, Erica Chenoweth, and Jeremy Pressman analyzethe George Floyd protests, quantifying their unprecedented combination of scale and duration and noting other distinctive characteristics. 

If you’ve been waiting for a long and somewhat technical argument that the coronavirus may indeed have originally escaped from a Chinese virology lab, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has got you covered. Which gives me the chance to say two things: (1) This question strikes me as less momentous than many people suggest. Claims that the virus was genetically engineered as a bioweapon have now been pretty definitively dismissed, so the remaining question is whether well-intentioned research meant to prevent future epidemics wound up backfiring. If it did that’s of course worth knowing, but at some level the takehome lesson is the same as in the scenario where the virus entered humans via a “wet market.” Either way there was a critical regulatory failure by the Chinese government that needs to be addressed. (2) If there was indeed a regulatory failure at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then the Trump administration may well be partly to blame, as I explained in a piece in this newsletter earlier this year.   

In The New Atlantis, David Kordahl reviews—with a fair amount of clarity, as these things go— two books about quantum physics, one by physicist and popularizer Sean Carroll and the other by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin. One book buys the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics, and the other book says such plausibility-stretching interpretations are among the reasons to think quantum physics itself is flawed. 

OK, that’s it! Thanks for reading. If you tweet about our content—which is your sacred duty, btw—feel free to namecheck us at @NonzeroNews or namecheck me at @robertwrighter. Oh and speaking of me on Twitter: Here’s my boringly predictable, classically Boomeresque view on the political wisdom of deploying the “defund the police” meme. See you next time. [And thanks, btw, to Patreon patron Aaron McNally, who helped prepare the David Bentley Hart transcript.]

Illustrations by Nikita Petrov.