- by Eileen Whitehead
- The Guardian
- Issue #2146
Published during Trump’s first Presidency, this book is an interesting investigation of the way that fascist dictators can take control. He looks at those men who drew up the American Constitution, especially James Madison, a Founding Father and 4th President of the United States from 1809 to 1817. His was a pivotal role in drafting and promoting the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
MacWilliams quotes Madison:
There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentation of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.
With the current situation MacWilliams states that “authoritarian-minded Americans have been activated by fear-mongering and othering rhetoric” and that powerful democratic “norms and institutions that in theory exist to combat such forces are fraying and threadbare.” He states that under Trump every “legal advancement toward a more perfect union is now on the chopping block” which shows that American democracy and its constitution are not as safe and robust as assumed.
Other chapters look at the development of the United States from Lincoln to Trump outlining the missteps on the way, referring to the treatment of the indigenous peoples with the Indian Removal Act; the racism of the deep south with lynching used by the whites to terrorise black Americans; the Chinese persecutions of the late 19th century under the Chinese Exclusion Act then the Geary Act in 1892, and the Dog Tag Law.
Followed in the 20th century by the Palmer Raids in 1919 led by the US Department of Justice, fueled by a growing fear of communists, anarchists and radicals; the hate radio and deep-state conspiracy theories of the 1930s; then Jo McCarthy’s ‘reds under the bed’ campaign after WW2. In 1939, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, national propaganda director of the German American Bund, addressed 22,000 Americans, “54% of Americans agreed that ‘the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault.” Then followed the internment of American Japanese, revealing the ugly abyss of racism in the country.
MacWilliams’ conclusion is that Trump is not an anomaly in American politics. He calls Trump a direct descendant of McCarthy – on steroids. He sees him as a more dangerous and existential threat to democracy than McCarthy. His last chapter talks of the dangers of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program coming under the Pentagon, which is still in operation. He contends that “fear is a growing factor in American politics” with people uncertain of their future.
“Fear breeds repression: that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government.”
Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927).
