Update 1/9/23
Another reason to seek accountability for January 6. The US has exported the template for others to destroy democracy and replace it with fascism. The best antidote: prosecution of the January 6 insurgents and defeat of the elected officials at the next election to demonstrate such copy cats are a road to failure, not a ticket for success. Bolsonaro supporters invade government buildings in Brazil | The Independent
There are three ways to hold politicians accountable: two failed in the 1940s, but the jury is out in 2023. I just binge-listened to all of the segments dropped to date in Rachel Maddow's podcast ULTRA. Clearly, the Nazi and fascist influences in 1940-1944 brazenly shaped US policies and attacked our democratic form of governance as inferior to fascism and authoritarianism. While they were not held accountable by the judicial system, Pearl Harbor resulted in making them much less potent as the greatest generation rallied to defend our country. The examples in the Maddow podcast sound disturbingly like what we have been experiencing in the Trump era. Even terminology of the 1940'a echoes today. After digesting the ULTRA episodes, a conclusion I reached was that accountability is the essence of American democracy, whose continuation depends on faith in an idea instead of an iron fist imposing it. Faith is a belief that those who govern are accountable to the voters, not to some strong leader. Three ways to hold politicians accountable are internal party discipline, civil and criminal justice, and the ballot box. Success depends upon the education of and effective communication with the public.
Accountability not only stops the abhorrent activity, but it deters others in the future from trying the same stunts, strategies, and tactics for fear of a harmful backlash. The lessons I took from the podcast are three ways to hold bad behavior to account, and two out of the three failed in 1940-1944. The sedition trial of 1944 of those accused of Nazi sympathies ended in a farce and the death by heart attack of the judge. When criminal and civil court action failed, and political parties were torn by division, dissension, hatred, antisemitism, corruption, and misplaced loyalties, the ballot box worked to bring the bad behavior of elected officials to account. Slowly but ultimately, voters became educated about facts and evidence of what happened, and they voted the bad actors out of governance in 1946. Maddow concluded herself: the voters ultimately held the 1940s politicians to account.
If internal party discipline also fails to bring accountability, as Kevin McCarthy's ambitions to become House Speaker caused him to ignore the bad behavior of a new caucus member, the ballot box is also the ultimate tool in the next election cycle. We are not sure who AG Merrick Garland will or will not charge and prosecute for a crime committed around the events of January 6. At least, when civil and criminal judicial action fails to hold politicians accountable, the ballot box can.
The key to action at the ballot box is educating the public about what happened in a credible way with evidence and an understandable presentation. That is the service the January 6 hearings provided. The results of the November 2022 midterms serve as evidence that accountability by ballot box is beginning. The value of the January 6 House hearings is that the public became educated about what happened. In the November midterms, voters held a significant number of politicians accountable by voting for someone else or leaving a ballot line unmarked. It also became clear that Trump's support of many candidates proved to be toxic. There is nothing worse for politicians than losing elections, other than jail time.
However, if democracy is already so damaged and corrupted, the ballot box cannot deliver accountability no matter how educated voters become. So long as America's form of democracy survives, at least voters can do what the judicial system and party peer pressure fail to do to hold those committing bad behavior to account. They can vote freely and fairly. Freedom of speech and press and personal liberties are defined in the Constitutional Amendments and are protected. The rule of law is both the interpreter and enforcer. It is the mechanism that makes those protections work. That is why keeping the democratic system we have in America is so very, very important. It permits and protects the rights and abilities of voters to learn what is or was happening. We can learn from our mistakes in the past and not repeat them.
The neo-fascists and neo-Nazis are always lurking within our country and emerge in the publics' eyes when they think they have a chance to improve on the template to grab power, a template that has its roots and formation in the late 1930s and 1940s. The value of the podcast ULTRA is revealing that neo-fascists do not need Hitler or his operatives to inspire them and show them how to do it. They just copy what they got away with in 1940-1944. down to torch parades, thuggery, violence, antisemitism, white nationalism, and the same vocabulary. Trump green-lighted them, embracing them as part of his loyal supporters, calling them fine people, exhorting them to come to Washington for a wild time, as they dressed in khakis and polo shirts and military gear instead of silver, black, or brown shirts and found the support of politicians in the halls of power and in an oval office.
That is also the greatest weakness of fascism and autocracy. The law to them is what the strong arm says, not what is honored and obeyed in a constitution. Accountability to the people they govern over time is replaced by force and edicts, the autocratic leaders surround themselves with those who only tell them what they want to hear, and the public is only told what the leader wants them to hear. History is rewritten and old books burned or banned so new generations cannot learn from the past. Judgment becomes befuddled by falsehoods and unreality. Putin's attempted takeover of Ukraine was a disaster and a case in point. We know how Hitler underestimated the resistance to his territorial grabs and how that turned out.
Accountability can also be abused and can be a risky political strategy.. When accountability becomes a revenge method, and Congressional hearings take the place of legislating solutions, the GOP House members in swing states could be very vulnerable in 2024. It is a strategy that can backfire, particularly if the GOP gets hung up on social issues, hurting women, LGBTQ, and voter rights. If the GOP tries to call out the January 6 hearings for too much focus on accountability, Democrats can respond that they were able to do both problem-solve and hold hearings with great success when they were in charge. Democrats can charge the GOP with hyping accountability hearings to divert voters' attention from the GOP failure to legislation in a way that benefits their constituents. Democrats can paint the GOP House with a broad brush as the place where good solutions to problems go to die. Taking credit for the gains in 2022 requires dramatization by ribbon cutting and news coverage of stories of people benefitting. The job of Democrats will be to capitalize on this by protecting public policy gains that proved to be popular in 2022 and more so since they will be implemented in the next two years and the results will be seen and felt by voters. usatoday.com: https://www.usatoday.com/
The ULTRA podcast inspired me to do some reflections on why my political views were shaped by both the 1940s and the rise of Trumpism. My lifetime, being born in 1938, spanned the period and the reincarnation of neo-Nazis. I am a child of that and much that happened in between.
https://www.msnbc.com/Rachel-maddow-presents-ultra
Sedition Trial of 1944 | CSUN University Library Digital Collection
The ULTRA podcast inspired me to do some personal reflections. Excuse my indulgence, but this answers some questions of why I write what I write in this blog. It is for the record that will interest mostly my family someday when they ask how I got to be me. I will be 85 in February. Rachel Maddow's podcast is about the bookends of my political thinking life, the 1940s to 2023. The period ULTRA covered took place in my lifetime, though I remember being politically aware as World War II came to its close. My parents openly and freely discussed their views about politics, and I am sure they shaped mine. If anything, dad of the Colorado eastern plains and mother of southwestern Missouri with Iowa and Indiana-rooted parents had experiences that shaped them who spent the rest of their life in Jim Crow ultra evangelical Oklahoma, as dad was a transplanted corporate executive with Bell Telephone. What I remember in my early years post-war II was that Dad hated any extremism, whether it was McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunt or the vestiges of the New Deal that bordered on socialism. Mother came from a political family with her father as a county judge (elsewhere known as a county commissioner) in the time of the influence of the Pendergast machine of Kansas City, from whence Truman ascended. She detested Truman and, before that, Huey Long of Louisiana, the corrupt authoritarian governor of the 1930s. I think she was in revolt against her roots as well. Both of my parents were staunch Presbyterians because they considered their church to be more intellectual, focusing on the basics, than other denominations going off on extreme emotional tangents. Eastern Oklahoma was the bible belt and the prototype of southern culture."To Kill a Mockingbird" described my young life and my neighborhood to a T. Most who had settled in the Muskogee area had their roots in the Southeastern US. The climate and geography were similar to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Appalachia. I was surrounded by those who thought otherwise, and that experience, being culturally disconnected in my youth from those around me, gave me empathy with other minorities, were they black, native American, Catholic, or Jews. I knew how they must be feeling. I was cut from a different cloth, and so were they. No wonder my high school years focused on debate and forensics. I could see two sides to many issues. When I went to Northwestern, a political science major with more hours of study in history, I spent my junior year abroad in post-war Berlin on a Presbyterian-sponsored "exchange" program. I saw firsthand in 1958 how Communism pre-wall brutally consolidated power. My main interest, however, was attempting to discover how in the world educated white people fell for Hitler and fascism. Was it something cultural? I am still puzzled by that since the Germans I got to know personally and up close were little different than those in eastern Oklahoma, certainly even better educated and better "mannered", who had been through economic hell post World War I and the following world depression. They had grasped the Hitler straw as a way out of chaos and economic pain and found a religion to blame, Jews, for their misery. This could have happened in the US, but Roosevelt's New Deal pragmatism that leaned left and addressed the economic pains was an effective deflection from fascist sentiment. He harnessed radio technology to communicate and convince voters why his policies would work. My views over the past 65 years regarding that have not changed. Fascism is always lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to emerge when government policies became unpopular or failed to address immediate fears and needs. My abhorrence of fascism and faith in democracy has also been a constant in my political thought. I considered communism as practiced by Stalin and even Tito of Yugoslavia, inhumane in a failed economic system. In Berlin, I met a medical student from Yugoslavia, and we were married for over 52 years, living in the US since 1961. Since 1972 we were able to visit Yugoslavia, and I saw the impact on people's lives from the ground up. It was oppressive and unfair, based on fear of non-compliance. Putin's style of governance is the same as those old communist leaders since he, too, came from that tradition. He is not a modern leader but a throwback to the past, though without the ideology of Marx, with an outspoken desire to reassemble the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. His invasion of Ukraine wrenched my gut. I admire the spirit of the Ukrainian people in their resistance. I have close friends and family over the years from Germany, Austria, Croatia, and Bosnia, and have shared the joy of their embrace of democracy and economic progress. I have no desire to see Russia try to peel that back from them. A Russian victory in Ukraine would have destabilized the whole region with constant conflict, and not always bloodless ones. American Firsters and their Trumpster followers of the current crop would have permitted that to happen. Biden did not. He saw an opportunity to stop Russian aggression in its tracks without a war with US bloodshed. Hopefully, his policies continue, and in 2022 continued Democratic control of the Senate gives me hope.
