Forty-Five Blows Against Democracy

How U.S. Military Bases Back Dictators, Autocrats, and Military Regimes

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By David Vine

Much outrage has been expressed in recent weeks over President Donald Trump’s invitation for a White House visit to Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, whose “war on drugs” has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Criticism of Trump was especially intense given his similarly warm public support for other authoritarian rulers like Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sisi (who visited the Oval Office to much praise only weeks earlier), Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who got a congratulatory phone call from President Trump on his recent referendum victory, granting him increasingly unchecked powers), and Thailand’s Prayuth Chan-ocha (who also received a White House invitation).

But here’s the strange thing: the critics generally ignored the far more substantial and long-standing bipartisan support U.S. presidents have offered these and dozens of other repressive regimes over the decades. After all, such autocratic countries share one striking thing in common. They are among at least 45 less-than-democratic nations and territories that today host scores of U.S. military bases, from ones the size of not-so-small American towns to tiny outposts. Together, these bases are homes to tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

To ensure basing access from Central America to Africa, Asia to the Middle East, U.S. officials have repeatedly collaborated with fiercely anti-democratic regimes and militaries implicated in torture, murder, the suppression of democratic rights, the systematic oppression of women and minorities, and numerous other human rights abuses. Forget the recent White House invitations and Trump’s public compliments. For nearly three quarters of a century, the United States has invested tens of billions of dollars in maintaining bases and troops in such repressive states. From Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have, since World War II, regularly shown a preference for maintaining bases in undemocratic and often despotic states, including Spain under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Bahrain under King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and Djibouti under four-term President Ismail Omar Guelleh, to name just four.

Many of the 45 present-day undemocratic U.S. base hosts qualify as fully “authoritarian regimes,” according to the Economist Democracy Index. In such cases, American installations and the troops stationed on them are effectively helping block the spread of democracy in countries like Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

This pattern of daily support for dictatorship and repression around the world should be a national scandal in a country supposedly committed to democracy. It should trouble Americans ranging from religious conservatives and libertarians to leftists -- anyone, in fact, who believes in the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. After all, one of the long-articulated justifications for maintaining military bases abroad has been that the U.S. military’s presence protects and spreads democracy.

Far from bringing democracy to these lands, however, such bases tend to provide legitimacy for and prop up undemocratic regimes of all sorts, while often interfering with genuine efforts to encourage political and democratic reform. The silencing of the critics of human rights abuses in base hosts like Bahrain, which has violently cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators since 2011, has left the United States complicit in these states’ crimes.

During the Cold War, bases in undemocratic countries were often justified as the unfortunate but necessary consequence of confronting the “communist menace” of the Soviet Union. But here’s the curious thing: in the quarter century since the Cold War ended with that empire’s implosion, few of those bases have closed. Today, while a White House visit from an autocrat may generate indignation, the presence of such installations in countries run by repressive or military rulers receives little notice at all.

Befriending Dictators

The 45 nations and territories with little or no democratic rule represent more than half of the roughly 80 countries now hosting U.S. bases (who often lack the power to ask their “guests” to leave).  They are part of a historically unprecedented global network of military installations the United States has built or occupied since World War II.

Today, while there are no foreign bases in the United States, there are around 800 U.S. bases in foreign countries. That number was recently even higher, but it still almost certainly represents a record for any nation or empire in history. More than 70 years after World War II and 64 years after the Korean War, there are, according to the Pentagon, 181 U.S. “base sites” in Germany, 122 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. Hundreds more dot the planet from Aruba to Australia, Belgium to Bulgaria, Colombia to Qatar. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, civilians, and family members occupy these installations. By my conservative estimate, to maintain such a level of bases and troops abroad, U.S. taxpayers spend at least $150 billion annually -- more than the budget of any government agency except the Pentagon itself.

For decades, leaders in Washington have insisted that bases abroad spread our values and democracy -- and that may have been true to some extent in occupied Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II. However, as base expert Catherine Lutz suggests, the subsequent historical record shows that “gaining and maintaining access for U.S. bases has often involved close collaboration with despotic governments.”

The bases in the countries whose leaders President Trump has recently lauded illustrate the broader pattern. The United States has maintained military facilities in the Philippines almost continuously since seizing that archipelago from Spain in 1898. It only granted the colony independence in 1946, conditioned on the local government’s agreement that the U.S. would retain access to more than a dozen installations there.

After independence, a succession of U.S. administrations supported two decades of Ferdinand Marcos’s autocratic rule, ensuring the continued use of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, two of the largest U.S. bases abroad. After the Filipino people finally ousted Marcos in 1986 and then made the U.S. military leave in 1991, the Pentagon quietly returned in 1996. With the help of a “visiting forces agreement” and a growing stream of military exercises and training programs, it began to set up surreptitious, small-scale bases once more. A desire to solidify this renewed base presence, while also checking Chinese influence, undoubtedly drove Trump’s recent White House invitation to Duterte. It came despite the Filipino president’s record of joking about rape, swearing he would be “happy to slaughter” millions of drug addicts just as “Hitler massacred [six] million Jews,” and bragging, “I don’t care about human rights.”

In Turkey, President Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic rule is only the latest episode in a pattern of military coups and undemocratic regimes interrupting periods of democracy. U.S. bases have, however, been a constant presence in the country since 1943. They repeatedly caused controversy and sparked protest -- first throughout the 1960s and 1970s, before the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and more recently after U.S. forces began using them to launch attacks in Syria.

Although Egypt has a relatively small U.S. base presence, its military has enjoyed deep and lucrative ties with the U.S. military since the signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1979. After a 2013 military coup ousted a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government, the Obama administration took months to withhold some forms of military and economic aid, despite more than 1,300 killings by security forces and the arrest of more than 3,500 members of the Brotherhood. According to Human Rights Watch, “Little was said about ongoing abuses,” which have continued to this day.

In Thailand, the U.S. has maintained deep connections with the Thai military, which has carried out 12 coups since 1932. Both countries have been able to deny that they have a basing relationship of any sort, thanks to a rental agreement between a private contractor and U.S. forces at Thailand’s Utapao Naval Air Base. “Because of [contractor] Delta Golf Global,” writes journalist Robert Kaplan, “the U.S. military was here, but it was not here. After all, the Thais did no business with the U.S. Air Force. They dealt only with a private contractor.”

Elsewhere, the record is similar. In monarchical Bahrain, which has had a U.S. military presence since 1949 and now hosts the Navy’s 5th Fleet, the Obama administration offered only the most tepid criticism of the government despite an ongoing, often violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. According to Human Rights Watch and others (including an independent commission of inquiry appointed by the Bahraini king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa), the government has been responsible for widespread abuses including the arbitrary arrest of protesters, ill treatment during detention, torture-related deaths, and growing restrictions on freedoms of speech, association, and assembly. The Trump administration has already signaled its desire to protect the military-to-military ties of the two countries by approving a sale of F-16 fighters to Bahrain without demanding improvements in its human rights record.

And that’s typical of what base expert Chalmers Johnson once called the American “baseworld.” Research by political scientist Kent Calder confirms what’s come to be known as the “dictatorship hypothesis”: “The United States tends to support dictators [and other undemocratic regimes] in nations where it enjoys basing facilities.” Another large-scale study similarly shows that autocratic states have been “consistently attractive” as base sites. “Due to the unpredictability of elections,” it added bluntly, democratic states prove “less attractive in terms [of] sustainability and duration.”

Even within what are technically U.S. borders, democratic rule has regularly proved “less attractive” than preserving colonialism into the twenty-first century. The presence of scores of bases in Puerto Rico and the Pacific island of Guam has been a major motivation for keeping these and other U.S. “territories” -- American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands -- in varying degrees of colonial subordination. Conveniently for military leaders, they have neither full independence nor the full democratic rights that would come with incorporation into the U.S. as states, including voting representation in Congress and the presidential vote.  Installations in at least five of Europe’s remaining colonies have proven equally attractive, as has the base that U.S. troops have forcibly occupied in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since shortly after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Backing Dictators

Authoritarian rulers tend to be well aware of the desire of U.S. officials to maintain the status quo when it comes to bases. As a result, they often capitalize on a base presence to extract benefits or help ensure their own political survival.

The Philippines’ Marcos, former South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee, and more recently Djibouti’s Ismail Omar Guelleh have been typical in the way they used bases to extract economic assistance from Washington, which they then lavished on political allies to shore up their power. Others have relied on such bases to bolster their international prestige and legitimacy or to justify violence against domestic political opponents. After the 1980 Kwangju massacre in which the South Korean government killed hundreds, if not thousands, of pro-democracy demonstrators, strongman General Chun Doo-hwan explicitly cited the presence of U.S. bases and troops to suggest that his actions enjoyed Washington’s support. Whether or not that was true is still a matter of historical debate. What’s clear, however, is that American leaders have regularly muted their criticism of repressive regimes lest they imperil bases in these countries. In addition, such a presence tends to strengthen military, rather than civilian, institutions in countries because of the military-to-military ties, arms sales, and training missions that generally accompany basing agreements.

Meanwhile, opponents of repressive regimes often use the bases as a tool to rally nationalist sentiment, anger, and protest against both ruling elites and the United States. That, in turn, tends to fuel fears in Washington that a transition to democracy might lead to base eviction, often leading to a doubling down on support for undemocratic rulers. The result can be an escalating cycle of opposition and U.S.-backed repression.

Blowback

While some defend the presence of bases in undemocratic countries as necessary to deter “bad actors” and support “U.S. interests” (primarily corporate ones), backing dictators and autocrats frequently leads to harm not just for the citizens of host nations but for U.S. citizens as well. The base build-up in the Middle East has proven the most prominent example of this. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution, which both unfolded in 1979, the Pentagon has built up scores of bases across the Middle East at a cost of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. According to former West Point professor Bradley Bowman, such bases and the troops that go with them have been a “major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization.” Research has similarly revealed a correlation between the bases and al-Qaeda recruitment.

Most catastrophically, outposts in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have helped generate and fuel the radical militancy that has spread throughout the Greater Middle East and led to terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States. The presence of such bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was, after all, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.

With the Trump administration seeking to entrench its renewed base presence in the Philippines and the president commending Duterte and similarly authoritarian leaders in Bahrain and Egypt, Turkey and Thailand, human rights violations are likely to escalate, fueling unknown brutality and baseworld blowback for years to come.  

Beyond the Madness of King Donald

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By Paul Street

President Frankenstein, Donald Trump, has been pretty much the bizarre “insane clown president” (Matt Taibbi’s phrase) that I and many others expected. He’s only shocked me twice: his weird Twitter meltdown alleging that Barack Obama wiretapped his phones and his appallingly timed firing of FBI Director James Comey on grounds that seemed to take us all for complete idiots.

‘Banana Republic’ President

Does Trump’s dismissal of Comey prove that the president is in cahoots with Russia? No, it shows that Trump was incensed with Comey for cooperating with the Senate investigation into alleged ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, for ramping up the FBI’s inquiry into the same matter, for drawing too much media attention and for contradicting Trump’s wacky wiretapping charge.

Lack of outward devotion to the new commander in chief is what got Comey canned. His sin was insufficient fealty to Herr Donald. In a sharp New Yorker essay published one day before the Comey discharge, Evan Osnos reported on an instructive dialogue he had with Jerry Taylor, president of the libertarian Niskanen Center:

It is not a good sign for a beleaguered President when his party gets dragged down, too. From January to April, the number of Americans who had a favorable view of the Republican Party dropped seven points, to forty per cent, according to the Pew Research Center. I asked … Taylor … if he had ever seen so much skepticism so early in a Presidency. “No, nobody has,” he said. “But we’ve never lived in a Third World banana republic. I don’t mean that gratuitously. I mean the reality is he is governing as if he is the President of a Third World country: power is held by family and incompetent loyalists whose main calling card is the fact that Donald Trump can trust them, not whether they have any expertise.” [emphasis added]

Comey was shown the door because he failed to obsequiously kiss the ring of the orange-haired beast, who shows great admiration for authoritarian strong men like Vladimir Putin (Russia), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi (Egypt) and Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkey).

Whatever his motives and intentions, Trump has, if anything, poured fuel on the Russiagate fire. 

Recall that it was the cover-up, not the Watergate burglary itself that undid Richard Nixon—another strange and paranoid authoritarian with a knack for cloistering himself off from reality and surrounding himself with frightened yes men.

The firing certainly looks like a Russia-related cover-up to many, especially to political and media actors who are locked into a neo-McCarthyite Russia witch-hunt. Many top Democrats and corporate news elites are fiercely determined to tar Trump with a Kremlin brush. Now they can probably enlist some key Republicans to join them in calling for an independent special committee or special prosecutor to investigate Russia’s alleged involvement in the 2016 election.

‘Fortress Trump: His Drug is Himself’

Trump fanned the flames further with his preposterous initial claim to have acted because of how Comey reignited the Hillary Clinton email scandal on the eve of the election. As anyone who pays remotely serious attention to U.S. politics knows, candidate Trump praised Comey’s disturbing October surprise, which may have inflicted significant damage on the Clinton campaign. Now Trump is angry at how Comey helped undermine “Crooked Hillary”? It doesn’t wash.

Did Trump really think that Democrats and others would fall for his pretext for firing Comey and not see Comey’s removal as an effort to derail federal investigations into his real and/or alleged Russian connections—and into whatever else might come up in the process? Is he really surprised, as he tells Fox News, that his move sparked a huge backlash? Could he really be that out of it? Seriously?

Yes, it’s quite possible that he is that clueless. Look at what Osnos discovered from his in-depth research on the young Trump presidency:

By this point in George W. Bush’s term, Bush had travelled to twenty-three states and a foreign country. Trump has visited just nine states and has never stayed the night. He inhabits a closed world that one adviser recently described to me as ‘Fortress Trump.’ Rarely venturing beyond the White House and Mar-a-Lago, he measures his fortunes through reports from friends, staff, and a feast of television coverage of himself. Media is Trump’s ‘drug of choice,’ Sam Nunberg, an adviser on his campaign, told me recently. “He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t do drugs. His drug is himself.” 

It’s not clear how fully Trump apprehends the threats to his Presidency. Unlike previous Republican Administrations, Fortress Trump contains no party elder with the stature to check the President’s decisions. “There is no one around him who has the ability to restrain any of his impulses, on any issue ever, for any reason,” Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican consultant, said, adding, “Where is the ‘What the fuck’ chorus?” 

Trump’s insulation from unwelcome information appears to be growing as his challenges mount. His longtime friend Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax Media, talked with him recently at Mar-a-Lago and at the White House. “He tends to not like a lot of negative feedback,” Ruddy told me. Ruddy has noticed that some of Trump’s associates are unwilling to give him news that will upset him. “I don’t think he realizes how fully intimidating he is to many people, because he’s such a large guy and he’s so powerful,” Ruddy went on. “I already sense that a lot of people don’t want to give him bad news about things. I’ve already been approached by several people that’ll say, ‘He’s got to hear this. Could you tell him?’ ”

The madness of would-be king Donald is no small matter. It’s all very Czar Nicholas and Richard Nixon-like.

Malignant Dunning-Kruger Narcissism

It is the on-record opinion of many mental health professionals that Trump exhibits hallmark characteristics of the psychological condition known as “malignant narcissism … characterized by grandiosity, a need for admiration, sadism, and a tendency toward unrealistic fantasies,” Osnos reported.

READ: The Psychopathology of Donald Trump

Malignant narcissists live in bizarre defiance of reality and of anything that doesn’t fit their lavish sense of their own superiority and excellence. They delight in the humiliation and even the crippling and killing of others.

I would add another psychological dimension here: the “Dunning-Kruger effect.” As Wikipedia explains: This is “a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately.”

It’s not just that Trump is stupid. It’s that he thinks he’s really, really smart, something the outside world has certainly been telling him for decades by showering him with absurdly undeserved riches and power. And he’s got nobody around him with the standing or courage to tell him otherwise to check either his folly or his hubristic taste for ruling with sheer impunity.

On this last characteristic, recall Trump’s “locker room” comment: “When you’re a star, they 

let you do it. You can do anything.” Remember also his campaign statement that he could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue “and shoot somebody” and still not lose voters.

Removal Prior to 2020?

Could Trump be removed before the end of his first term either through a 25th Amendment ejection (on grounds of incapacitation) or impeachment (on criminal grounds)? Given Republican control of both the U.S. House and the Senate, I would have put the chances of that at less than 10 percent before the Comey firing.

Now, the chances have gone up significantly, especially if Democrats take back the House in 2018. Trump is counting on keeping enough of his base supporters—people who would let him “do anything,” even shoot somebody in broad daylight—so Republican legislators will not feel compelled to abandon him.

The most likely scenario is that Trump will just limp through three-and-a-half more years as a badly damaged and epically ineffective president and not be put up again in 2020. Look for “deep state” actors from the intelligence agencies he so foolishly antagonized to undermine his waning legitimacy with a steady drumbeat of crippling revelations. The stress of the presidency (for which he is clearly not fit) may elicit a stroke, heart attack or some other health crisis that will finish him off as president. He already shows significant signs of dementia.

For ‘A New Organizing of Institutions’

How excited should we on the left be at the possibility of Trump being removed prior to the next presidential election? It is certainly desirable that we not have a wicked moron and malicious narcissist with his fingers on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. From that perspective, Trump cannot be defenestrated from the Oval Office soon enough. Yes, Mike Pence is a dangerous white nationalist and Christian fascist, but he would be a very weak caretaker for whatever period he occupied the White House.

Of course, Nixon’s forced resignation did nothing to change the dark and neoliberal trajectory of United States history after 1974. Jimmy Carter got four years to advance the corporate and Wall Street agenda and hand the ball off to the monstrous right-winger Ronald Reagan.

The real (democratic-socialist, environmentalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-imperialist) left is no great friend of the FBI and the CIA, the intelligence and police state agencies with which Trump has been tussling. It is not about to hit the streets in support of these repressive agencies or for the dismal dollar Democrats, who have been using the Russiagate ruse to deny their own responsibility for putting a neofascist in the White House and the white nationalist GOP in control of Congress, the Supreme Court and most of the state governments.

For any left movement worthy of the label, Trump should be removed because of his racism, his ecocidalism, his fake-populist arch-plutocracy, his sexism, and his murderous militarism, not because he’s a friend of Russia and has ticked off the FBI, the CIA and the neoliberal masters of the Democratic Party.

All this talk about how Russia supposedly intervened to undermine our supposed great “democracy” is quite childish. You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that U.S. politics and policy have been subject to an “unelected dictatorship of money” over the past three-plus decades. Six years into Obama’s presidency, the liberal political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern) reported the U.S. political system has become “an oligarchy,” where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule.” Examining data from more than 1,800 different policy initiatives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Gilens and Page found that wealthy and well-connected elites consistently steer the direction of the country, regardless of (or even against) the will of the U.S. majority, and regardless of which party holds the White House or Congress.

“The central point that emerges from our research,” Gilens and Page wrote, “is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” As Gilens explained to the liberal online journal Talking Points Memo, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.” (Maybe it’s not “their government”?)

That would be no less true if the “lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary Clinton (as Adolph Reed Jr. described the Democratic presidential nominee last summer) occupied the White House instead of Trump.

Such is the harsh reality of “really existing capitalist democracy” in the U.S.—what Noam Chomsky calls “RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked.’ ”

I was very impressed by this comment from Yasser Louati, talking to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! about the election of the neoliberal investment banker Emmanuel Macron as president of France one week ago: “France does not need an umpteenth new president; it needs a new republic, a new constitution, a new organizing of institutions.”

Much the same can be said about the United States. Political institutions that claim to be “democratic”—offering voters a binary choice between regressive and dissembling neoliberal shills like the Clintons, Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel, on one hand, and neofascist, white nationalists like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Frauke Petry and Donald Trump, on the other hand—do not deserve our respect.

Impeaching or otherwise removing the Clockwork Orangatun won’t alter that basic reality. The United States doesn’t need a new and 46th president as much as it needs a democracy, a new constitution, a new organizing of institutions—including its frankly absurd and plutocratic election and party systems.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to the end of his life with the belief that the real faults in American life lay not so much in men as in the oppressive institutions and social structures that reigned over them. He wrote that “the radical reconstruction of society itself” was “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters. He had no interest, of course, in running for the White House.

There’s also the matter of time, what King called the “fierce urgency of now.” Impeachment or 25th Amendment removal will have to evolve over many months and even years. But we need to be building great social and political movements for King’s project now and cannot be distracted from that endeavor by intra-ruling class power struggles.

The environmental clock telling us to undertake a radical and eco-socialist “reorganizing of institutions” is ticking with each new carbon-warmed day.

If Trump gets dumped, good riddance to him. He’s a despicable ogre.

The ruling class is divided. Good. Let us build the organizations that might carry out the great popular and democratic revolution required to save the social and ecological commons and thus preserve chances for a decent and democratic future. Given capitalism’s systemically inherent war on livable ecology—emerging now as the biggest issue of our or any time—the formation of such a new and united left-wing popular and institutional presence has become a matter of life and death for the species. “The uncomfortable truth,” the Hungarian Marxist philosopher István Mészáros rightly argued 16 years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”

Dancing With the Devil: Trump's Politics of Fascist Collaboration

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By Henry A. Giroux

Donald Trump's election has sparked a heated debate about the past, particularly over whether the Trump administration represents a continuum, if not an echo, of the protean origins of fascism. This is an argument that combines the resources of historical memory with current analyses of the distinctive temper of a new and dangerous historical moment in the United States. For instance, an increasing number of pundits across the ideological spectrum have identified Trump as a fascist or neo-fascist, while resurrecting some of the key messages of an earlier period of fascist politics. On the left/liberal side of politics, this includes writers, such as Chris Hedges, Robert Reich, Cornel West, Drucilla Cornell, Peter Dreier and John Bellamy Foster. Similar arguments have been made on the conservative side by writers, such as Robert Kagan, Jeet Heer, Meg Whitman and Charles Sykes.

Historians of fascism, such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton have argued that Trump is not Hitler but that there are sufficient similarities between them to warrant some concerns about surviving elements of a totalitarian past crystalizing into new forms in the United States. Paxton, in particular, argues that the Trump regime is closer to a plutocracy than to fascism. But, I think Paxton overplays the differences between fascism and Trump's style of authoritarianism, particularly underemphasizing Trump's ultra-nationalism, militarism and his embrace of the neoliberal state which does not suggest the rule of free-market capitalism but a more extreme example of the corporate state or what Mussolini called the corporatist state. In this case, traditional state power has been replaced by the rule of major corporations and the financial elite. At the same time, the social cleansing and state violence inherent in totalitarianism has been amplified under Trump. Both Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, the great historians of totalitarianism, have argued that the conditions that produce authoritarian logics have persisted well after their mid-twentieth century expressions. Wolin, in particular, insisted in 2010 that the United States was evolving into an authoritarian society.

To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

Recently, though, numerous critics have denied the persistence of fascism and totalitarianism. They have argued that Trump is either a sham, right-wing populist, or simply a reactionary Republican. Three notable examples of the latter positions can be found in the work of cultural critic Neal Gabler, who argues that Trump is mostly a self-promoting con artist and pretender president whose greatest crime is to elevate pretense, self-promotion and appearance over substance, all of which proves that he lacks the capacity and will to govern. Andrew O'Hehir claims we have to choose between whether Trump is just a clown or a fascist dictator and in the end seems to pivot more toward the clown argument, though he admits Trump is nonetheless dangerous. A more sophisticated version of this argument can be found in the work of historian Victoria de Grazia, who has argued that Trump bears little direct resemblance to either Hitler or Mussolini and is just a reactionary conservative.

Certainly, Trump is not Hitler, and the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic. But it would be irresponsible to consider Trump to be a either a clown or aberration given his hold on power and the ideologues who support him. What appears indisputable is that Trump's election is part of a sustained effort over the last 40 years on the part of the financial elite to undermine the democratic ethos and highjack the institutions that support it. Consequently, in the midst of the rising tyranny of totalitarian politics, democracy is on life support and its fate appears more uncertain than ever. Such an acknowledgment should make clear that the curse of totalitarianism is not a historical relic and that it is crucial that we learn something about the current political moment by examining how the spread of authoritarianism has become the crisis of our times, albeit in a form suited to the American context.

History, once again, offers us a framework in which a global constellation of authoritarian economic, social  and political forces are coming together that speak to tensions and contradictions animating everyday lives that transcend national boundaries for which there is not yet a comprehensive, coherent and critical language. What has emerged is a climate of precarity, fear, angst, paranoia and incendiary passion. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, it would be wise to resurrect one of the key questions that emerges from her work on totalitarianism, which is whether the events of our time are leading to totalitarian rule.

Whether or not Trump is a fascist in the exact manner of earlier totalitarian leaders somewhat misses the point, because it suggests that fascism is a historically fixed doctrine rather than an ideology that mutates and expresses itself in different forms around a number of commonalities. There is no exact blueprint for fascism, though echoes of its past haunt contemporary politics. As Adam Gopnik observes:

            ... to call [Trump] a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form -- an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and  aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter's come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy's.

The undeniable truth is that Trump is the product of an authoritarian movement and ideology with fascist overtones. In responding to the question of whether or not he believes Trump is a fascist, historian Timothy Snyder makes clear that the real issue is not whether Trump is a literal model of other fascist leaders but whether his approach to governing and the new political order he is producing are fascistic. He writes:

I don't want to dodge your question about whether Trump is a fascist or not. As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism.

Whether he realizes it or not is a different question, but that's what fascists did. They said, 'Don't worry about the facts, don't worry about logic, think instead in terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader and the people.' That's fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we forget, that is fascism.

Another thing that's clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.

And Mr. [Steve] Bannon's preoccupation with the 1930s and his kind of wishful reclamation of Italian and other fascists speaks for itself.

To date, Trump's ascendancy has been compared to the discrete emergence of deeply reactionary nationalisms in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere. I would like to broaden the lens with which we view these incipient events in ways that allow for a deeper historical understanding of the international scope and interplay of critical forces that respond to the shifts and contradictions brought about by a globalizing world increasingly brought to the brink of catastrophe by technological disruption, massive inequities in wealth and power, ecological disaster, mass migrations, relentless permanent warfare and the threat of a nuclear crisis. In the United States, shades of a growing authoritarianism are present in Trump's eroding of civil liberties, the undermining of the separation of church and state, health care policies that reveal an egregious indifference to life and death, his manufactured spectacles of self-promotion, contempt for weakness and dissent, and his attempts to shape the political realm through a process of fear, if not tyranny itself, as Snyder insists in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

History contains dangerous memories and this is particularly true for Trump given the ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply woven into his rhetoric of hate and demonization, his mix of theater and violence, his frenzied defiance of basic laws and his policies supportive of ultra-nationalism and racial cleansing. All the more reason for Trump and his acolytes to treat historical memory as a dangerous ghost that harbors critical tools for understanding how the present has become the past and the past informs the future. Historical memory matters because it serves as a form of moral witnessing, and in doing so becomes a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. We cannot pretend as if the current conditions exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises.

Echoes of Trump's fascist impulses  have been well documented, but what has been overlooked is a sustained analysis of his abuse and disparagement of historical memory, particularly in light of his association with a range of current right-wing dictators and political demagogues across the globe. Trump's ignorance of history was on full display with his misinformed comments about former president Andrew Jackson and nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglas. Trump's comments about Jackson having strong views on the civil war were widely ridiculed, given that Jackson died 16 years before the war started. Trump was also criticized for comments he made during Black History Month when he spoke about Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive, though he died 120 years ago. For the mainstream press, these historical missteps largely reflect Trump's ignorance of American history. But I think there is more at stake than simply ignorance, given the appeal of Trump's comments to white nationalists.

Trump's comments provide a window into his ongoing practice of stepping outside of history so as to deny its relevance for understanding both the economic and political forces that brought him to power and the historical lessons to be drawn, given his egregious embrace of a number of authoritarian elements that resemble the plague of a fascist past. His alleged ignorance is also a cover for enabling a post-truth culture in which dissent is reduced to "fake news," the press is dismissed as the enemy of the people and a mode of totalitarian education is enabled whose purpose, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is "not to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." Trump may appear to be an ignoramus and a clown, but such behavior points to something more profound politically, such as an attack on any viable notion of thoughtfulness and moral agency. His forays into international politics offer another less remarked upon form of fascistic embrace.

There are important lessons to be mined historically regarding how we examine Donald Trump's support from and for a number of ruthless dictators and political demagogues. Trump's endorsements of and by a range of ruthless dictators are well-known and include Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and the [recently defeated] French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party. All of these politicians have been condemned by a number of human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Freedom House. Less has been said about the support Trump has received from controversial right-wing bigots and politicians from around the world, such as Nigel Farage, the former leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party; Matteo Salvini, the right-wing Italian politician who heads the North League [Lega Nord]; Geert Wilders, the founder of the Dutch Party for Freedom; and Viktor Orbán, the reactionary prime minister of Hungary. All of these politicians share a mix of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and transphobia. While the mainstream press and others have expressed moral outrage over these associations, they have refused to examine these relationships within a broader historical context. In an age when totalitarian ideas and tendencies inhabit the everyday experiences of millions of people and create a formative culture for promoting massive human suffering and misery, Trump's affinity for indulging right-wing demagogues becomes an important signpost for recognizing the totalitarian nightmare that marks a terrifying glimpse of the future.

Historical memory suggests that a better template for understanding Trump's embrace of rogue states, dictators and neo-fascist politicians can be found in the reprehensible history of collaboration between individuals and governments, and the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany before and during the Second World War. For instance, one of the darkest periods in French history took place under Marshall Philippe Petain, the head of the Vichy regime, who collaborated with the Nazi regime between 1940 and 1944.

As Helene Fouquet and Gregory Viscusi have noted, the Vichy regime was responsible for "about 76,000 Jews [being] deported from France, only 3,000 of whom returned from the concentration camps.... Twenty-six percent of France's pre-war Jewish population died in the Holocaust." For years, France refused to examine and condemn this shameful period in its history by claiming that the Vichy regime was an aberration, a position that has been recently taken up by Marine Le Pen, the neo-fascist National Front candidate. Not only has Le Pen denied the French government's responsibility for the roundup of Jews sent to concentration camps between 1940 and 1944, she has also used a totalitarian script from the past in appealing to economic nationalism in order "to cover up her fascist principles." During the election [campaign], as Angela Charlton has noted, [now President] Emmanuel Macron repeatedly "paid homage ... to the tens of thousands of French Jews killed in the Holocaust, with a somber, simple message to voters: Never Again," which served as a powerful reminder "of the anti-Semitic past of his rival Marine Le-Pen's far-right National Front party." Of course, such comments should not be read as an extraordinary political intervention for a mediocre neoliberal presidential candidate. These comments should be acknowledged by all candidates.

The deeply horrifying acts of collaboration with twentieth-century fascism were not limited to France and included collaborators in Belgium, Croatia, the IRA [in Ireland], Greece, Holland and other countries. At the same time that millions of people were being killed by the Nazis, many businesses collaborated with them in order to profit from the fascist machinery of death. Business that collaborated with the Nazis included Kodak, which used slave laborers in Germany. Hugo Boss, the clothing company, manufactured clothes for the Nazis. IBM created the punch cards and a sorting system used for identifying Jews and other marginalized people and sending them to the gas chambers. BMW and IG Farben used forced laborers in Germany along with Audi, the giant car company that "used thousands of forced laborers from the concentration camps ... to work in their plant."

The political and moral stain for collaboration with the Nazis was also at work in the United States and was evident in both FDR's and the American business community's initial supportive views of Mussolini. Moreover, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, "In 1937 the State Department described Hitler as a kind of moderate who was holding off the dangerous forces of the left, meaning of the Bolsheviks, the labor movement ... and of the right, namely the extremist Nazis. [They believed] Hitler was kind of in the middle and therefore we should kind of support him." One telling incident of collaboration suggesting America's deeply rooted affinity with fascist principles is visible in the America First movement of the 1930s. America First was the motto of Americans friendly to Nazi ideology and Hitler's Germany. Its most famous spokespersons were Charles Lindbergh and William Randolph Hearst. The movement had a long history of anti-Semitism evident in Lindbergh's claim that American Jews were pushing America into war. Historian Susan Dunn has argued that the phrase, America First, which was appropriated and used by Donald Trump before and after his election, is a "toxic phrase with a putrid history."

The concept of collaboration functions historically to deepen our understanding of Trump's associations with right-wing demagogues as a warning sign that offers up a glimpse of both the contemporary recurrence of fascist overtones from the past and what Richard Falk has called "a pre-fascist moment." Trump's endorsement of right-wing demagogues, such as Duterte, Le Pen and Erdoǧan, in particular, is more than an aberration for a US president: It suggests more ominously his disregard for human rights, the suppression of dissent, human suffering and the principles of democracy itself. Trump's collaboration with dictators and right-wing rogues also suggests something more ominous. As Michael Brenner observes, " ... authoritarian movements and ideology with fascist overtones are back -- in America and in Europe. Not just as a political expletive thrown at opponents, but as a doctrine, as a movement, and -- above all -- as a set of feelings."

It is against this historical backdrop of collaboration that Trump's association with various dictators should be analyzed. The case of Rodrigo Duterte is particularly telling. Warning signs of a "pre-fascist moment" abound in Trump's invitation to Rodrigo Duterte to visit the White House. Duterte has supported and employed the use of death squads both as mayor of Davao and as the president of the Philippines. The New York Times has reported that "more than 7,000 suspected drug users and dealers, witnesses and bystanders -- including children -- have been killed by the police or vigilantes in the Philippines" under Duterte's rule. Moreover, he has supported a nationwide killing machine that includes giving "free license to the police and vigilantes" to kill drug users and pushers while allowing children, innocent bystanders and others to be caught in the indiscriminate violence. He has called former president Obama "the son of a whore," has compared himself to Hitler, has stated that Trump approves of his drug war, and has threatened to assassinate journalists. Duterte's ruthlessness is captured by photographer, Daniel Berehulak, who while working in the Philippines stated that he had "worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa's Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death" but added that what he experienced in the Philippines "felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers' summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes' taking seriously Mr. Duterte's call to "slaughter them all.'"

Trump's support for Duterte may arise out of his admiration for his law-and-order campaign, his hatred of the press, and his utter embrace of one-man rule. It may also have to do with Trump's various business ventures in the Philippines, including ownership of a new "$150 million tower in Manila's financial district." All of these issues represent in more extreme form elements of Trump's own anti-democratic policies and serve as a warning as to how far he might want to push them.

Trump's affinity for what borders on collaboration with overt racists and authoritarians has played out within a global configuration of economic nationalism and right-wing politics among people, such as Le Pen, Erdoǧan, Putin and el-Sisi who look to Trump for support and tacit approval.

Trump's tacit support for Le Pen's failed bid for the presidency of France rests on his sympathies with her anti-immigration policies, her ultra-nationalism and her claim to speak for the people. Like Le Pen, he deflects attention away from real problems, such as rising inequality, a carceral state, human rights violations, racial injustice and climate change, while demonizing and scapegoating marginalized people. Trump wants to join hands with those other right-wing leaders who want to build walls, beef up the security state and enable his white nationalist and white supremacist followers. His affinity for collaboration with Le Pen feeds his own narcissistic impulses, bigotry, hatred of Muslims and what Juan Cole calls "economic patriotism."

At the same time, Trump's disdain for human rights, the critical media and dissent has enamored him to Putin in Russia, Erdoǧan in Turkey and el-Sisi in Egypt. These men are all ideological bedfellows of Trump who harbor a great deal of contempt for the rule of law, the courts and any other check on their power. Erdoǧan, in particular, has not only imposed a state of emergency on his country and then later installed himself as a virtual dictator, but he has also purged and arrested dissidents in the critical media and in academia. After Erdoǧan assumed dictatorial powers through what many believe was a rigged election, Trump congratulated him in a phone call. As Jennifer Williams and Zack Beauchamp have noted, el-Sisi, a brutal military dictator, "overthrew his country's democratically elected president in a 2013 coup, killed more than 800 protesters in a single day, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of dissidents since he took power." Williams and Beauchamp add that Trump's response to his human rights violations and the turning of Egypt into a police state was to publicly announce that he was "very much behind President el-Sisi. He's done a fantastic job in a difficult situation." Trump has also offered to meet with Thailand prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, a junta head who is responsible for jailing dissidents after he took power through a coup. He has also called one of the most brutal dictators in the world, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, "a smart cookie." Ironically, such praise comes at a time when Trump is threatening North Korea with a frightening and terrifying military confrontation.

In his endorsement, support and legitimation of a range of dictators and right-wing extremists, Trump has emulated a period in history of shameless complicity with the ideologies, policies and practices associated with fascism itself. Situating Trump within the historical legacy of collaboration with fascist states and leaders provides a new language for examining how far Trump might go in pushing authoritarian policies, and how historical memory can be used to prevent such practices from being normalized. Trump's collaborationist endorsements offer insights into what the prelude to authoritarianism looks like in contemporary terms by enabling the public to understand how fascism can be normalized by escaping from history.

The politics of collaboration reminds us that the current crisis facing Americans is really about the crisis of memory, justice and democracy and not simply about Trump's poor judgment or aberrant behavior. Historical memory, in this case, is a crucial referent for gaining insights into the violent forces and totalitarian forms emerging under the Trump regime. It also provides a referent for salvaging possibilities for individual and collective resistance against the evolving dynamics of an American-style fascism that poses a dire threat to democracy at home and abroad.