Divide. Distract. Consolidate Power

Good morning, friends. Today I want to share with you a summary of a recent interview I watched with philosopher Jason Stanley on an episode of IHIP News with Jennifer Welch. The central subject is Stanley’s assessment of where the Trump administration fits into the historical pattern of authoritarianism and fascism.

Stanley’s basic thesis is that what we’re seeing isn’t mysterious or historically unprecedented. In his view, Trump is following a recognizable authoritarian playbook.

The immediate trigger for the interview is Trump floating the possibility of declaring a national emergency before the midterm elections. Stanley says that declaring an emergency in order to suspend or circumvent normal political procedures is almost a textbook authoritarian maneuver. He compares it to the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire and subsequent emergency powers to dismantle democratic government.

He used the phrase, “paint-by-numbers fascism,” which I thought was particularly salient. His argument is essentially: Don’t become so frightened by every new Trump proposal that you fail to recognize the pattern. We’ve seen this before.

He says the most puzzling thing isn’t what Trump is doing. It’s why so much of the mainstream media continues to normalize it. I couldn’t agree more. There is danger here.

The darkest part of the discussion was when Welch asks whether Trump might exploit a terrorist attack or other emergency to create fear before the election. Stanley is careful here. He says he doesn’t believe Trump would necessarily stage a false-flag terrorist attack, partly because he regards the administration as too incompetent to pull one off successfully. But he raises the possibility that a genuine crisis could be exploited politically to justify emergency powers and greater federal control.

The conversation then moves into what Stanley considers perhaps the biggest structural problem: the Supreme Court.

He argues that America’s democratic problem isn’t simply Donald Trump. It’s the larger system of minority rule: the Senate, the Electoral College, and particularly a Supreme Court whose members have lifetime appointments and comparatively little ethical oversight.

He sees the Court as increasingly aligned with oligarchic interests rather than democratic ones.

Trump isn’t the end of the story. Stanley argues that the deeper political force is the rise of billionaire oligarchy. He sees Trump as useful to wealthy elites because Trump can mobilize anger against convenient scapegoats: immigrants, feminists, liberals, minorities, transgender people, etc., while attention is diverted away from the concentration of wealth and power.

He extends that argument internationally, saying that far-right nationalist movements in different countries can appear to be enemies of the global elite while actually serving the interests of wealthy oligarchs.

Some of his claims toward the end of the interview are rather speculative but striking, particularly the idea that some oligarchs want to destroy humanity and replace us with AI. That really gave me pause and something to think about.

But I must say, it resonated.