Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Out of Chaos and Corruption, a Revelation and a Reckoning

[Nevilledog]

https://lucid.substack.com/p/out-of-chaos-and-corruption-a-revelation

Authoritarianism, at its core, is about restricting or eliminating the rights of the many and giving vast new liberties to the very few. It is about depriving the population of the rights of assembly, free speech, reproductive freedom, and the right to live without state persecution regardless of your race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or gender and sexual identity. It rearranges government so that the rich can become even richer: it removes regulations and other obstacles against plundering and exploiting the workforce, the environment, natural resources, and much more.

Moral deregulation is also essential to the success of authoritarianism, which depends on the normalization of lying, corruption, and forms of violence. Freeing people from the idea that they should respect others as individuals with dignity and autonomy is part of the agenda. So is promoting thievery and cruelty in people by appointing assaulters, grifters, sympathizers with war criminals, and other thuggish individuals to positions of power, holding them up as role models for young people.

The hostile takeover of the United States government we are now living through, with the full collusion of the Republican Party, reflects years of effort by Trump, a convicted felon, to create an environment propitious to smash-and-grab governance. The vehicle for this plunder is Musk, who may be the richest man in the world, but presents as an infantile being puffed up with grandiose fantasies of possession and the domination of everything.

The allure of the Trump-Musk-Peter Thiel partnership is the chance to make the United States a laboratory of freedom from every kind of ethical and professional norm that might restrain behaviors of individuals, political entities, and corporations. For that, you need to replace American democracy with some form of autocratic governance.

*snip*