Playbook Time All the Time

How the political Right works is by now, surely, familiar. (My late lamented friend and colleague Dan Dennett always said that any occurrence of the word ‘surely’ in an argument identifies its weakest point. That’s true, surely.) So: why is Trump talking about a third term? It is – surely again – a nigh impossibility: even ‘top Republicans’ on the Hill are pushing back at the idea, as if the Constitution and the likelihood of a Democrat Congress after next year’s mid-term elections hasn’t already scuppered it. So why is he doing it? Answer: to distract, muddle, keep the media focus on him by continually throwing the crockery around the shop. It’s in the Bannon prescription for how to disrupt and confuse the public conversation. Boris Johnson used it too, though it only worked for a time.

Now look at Marine Le Pen and the usual suspects – Orbán, Gert Wilders, et. al. – all claiming that her conviction in the embezzlement case in Paris was ‘political’. Leave aside the fact that several top politicians in France have been found guilty of corruption in court (Chirac, Sarkozy) in recent years, and note that it is pure playbook to describe as ‘political’ a court finding that goes against you and – irony of ironies for these authoritarians – anti-democratic. Anti-democratic! One would laugh if one were not busy weeping.

Authoritarians do not like the Rule of Law, still less the idea that everyone, no matter how well-known publicly, is equally liable before the law. The US has already given up on that idea – witness Trump, an actually convicted and much-indicted felon, sitting in the White House wielding his big sharpie. At best they like Rule byLaw when they say what the law is. Admittedly, although everyone is equal before the law in your standard democracy, access to the law and its remedies is highly unequal – a matter of money: buying the best legal defence – as is its application and the penal system (hell-hole prisons for some, gardening and weekend visits home for ‘white collar’ internees). But ‘law’ in an authoritarian regime is a whole other animal. Think the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws, think Orbán and Pride for a current example, out of millions.

Remember Livy, Book II of Ab Urbe Condita: how republican Rome replaced ‘rule by men’ with ‘the rule of law’ when it threw out the haughty Tarquins. The world has nonetheless crawled with inheritors of the latter ever since, to its immense cost.

Authoritarian ‘populist’ politicians (who notices the oxymoron anymore?) need to direct attention away from what they are doing to consolidate and wield their power. One is the continual distraction of throwing squibs and bangers in all directions, the other is picking on someone to victimise – viz. internal and external enemies. Immigrants are the current targets. Masked policeman arresting people on the street for holding an opinion? That is being normalised in the US as we speak; once upon a time it was the Stasi and the Gestapo who were villified for it. It is horrifying.

There have been complaints on social media that Dr Who is now ‘Woke’ because the Tardis team actors are both people of colour - Varada Sethu as Belinda Chandra, Dr Who’s assistant, with Ncuti Gatwa as Dr Who. Presumably if Sethu played Dr Who and Gatwa her assistant, the critics would have been able to amplify their attacks with sexism as well as racism, a Full House in poker terms. Ms Sethu responded to the attacks by shrugging them off. ‘Woke just means inclusive, progressive and that you care about people,’ she said. ‘And, as far as I know, the core of Doctor Who is kindness, love and doing the right thing.’ She is absolutely right, no ‘surely’ about it.

Ad break: my Discriminations on the woke wars is published this week, 3 April. My For the People on authoritarian threats to democracy, rights and the rule of law will be published in November; some of the draft material for it has appeared in earlier posts here.