Good Old Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman’s been at it a long time, and while lately she’s been driving me kind of crazy with sloppy editing (they always have to cut people off mid sentence when they run out of time at the end of the program), too much introductory talk that should be given to the interviewee, and a too strident tone, this week’s shows reveal how relevant and incisive she continues to be.

This, of course, was the week after the mob of white nationalists and neo-Nazis stormed the Capitol and set off alarm bells that have been ringing for years on deaf ears. The ensuing media frenzy had everyone and his or her uncle trying to put their finger on how this could have happened, too often ending with the sigh, “This isn’t who we are.”

Amy and Juan Gonzalez, her co-anchor, brought together the journalists, sociologists, and historians to contextualize and deconstruct our arrival at this stunningly complex moment. They started off with Allan Nairn, a longtime contributor to Democracy Now who covered the horrendous killings in East Timor along with Amy, who immediately addressed the “This isn’twho we are” meme: “Well, it’s always been the case that the U.S. establishment was willing to use terror and kill civilians overseas, either to do things like seize oil, seize political power, or basically on whim. The presidency of George W. Bush was a prime example of that.”

He also reminded us that as we take on the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol we can't let the establishment use this, as Bush did after 9/11, to further erode our civil rights, first amendment rights, and rationalize even more money for a bloated military budget: "don’t let this Trumpist movement coopt the idea of rebellion. Rebellion against injustice is a good thing. The problem is that they — and the U.S. system is indeed unjust and murderous."

A few days later the Filipino author Walden Bellow, whom I’d never heard of (Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right), succinctly laid out the struggle between the left and right over late state capitalism, or a dying neoliberalism on a global scale. After the global 2008 financial crisis, the Dems failed to take steps to control the banks, save homeowners, and bring outsourced industrial employment back to the U.S. So the neoliberalism model continued to exacerbate economic inequality, and with the eruption of Covid-19, conditions were ripe for the ultra right to exploit them with racism and “dog whistle-type Republican politics that started with Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy.” The white working class could no longer see the Democrats as the party that represented their interests, but only as elites who were giving away what was theirs to minorities: “And let me just say that with respect to Trumpism, you know, that Trump is as much a creature as the creator of that base. There’s this synergy that’s taking place there." While the left was able to mobilize under the campaign of Bernie Sanders, it was never able to sustain a mass movement as the establishment Dems took over, once again.

Finally, Yale historian Timothy Synder was interviewed about the article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine, “The American Abyss: A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.” The white supremacists who invaded the Capitol were emboldened by Trump, who when he speaks about voter fraud essentially means allowing African Americans to vote, and Ted Cruz, who compared what he was trying to do in 2021 with 1877, when Congress essentially initiated a century of Jim Crow, or American apartheid.

Snyder also laid out the make up of the Republican Party and where its future may lay. The largest group is the gamers, the “ones who work the system with the gerrymandering, with the dark money, with the voter suppression, who are in favor of the, quote-unquote, ‘democracy’ that we have in America now, the unfortunately very limited democracy we have, because they know how to work it.” A smaller fraction, the breakers, is represented by the likes of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, “who have understood that one could actually come to power in the United States by entirely nondemocratic means, by way of the mob, by way of throwing an election and lying about it.” And the smallest group is constituted “an honorable few who believe in the rule of law and telling the truth.” Snyder thinks—hopes—that a coalition of the “gamers” and “honorable few” will take back the party. I’m not so sure.

I’ve been somewhat surprised that Amy hasn’t had either Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on her show in a while. Both are frequent Democracy Now guests who recently left their media organizations and joined the new platform Substack. Throughout the Capitol attack fallout their focus remained on where it’s been for the recent past: intense criticism of the Dems for aligning with the cancel culture movement, which they see as an abrogation of first amendment rights (Greenwald was a constitutional lawyer before he became a journalist) and the censorship of far right sites by big tech, which they see as a harbinger of indiscriminate censorship. I don’t know if their absence reflects a judgment by Democracy Now on their journalism or just that they don’t see this focus as their priority right now. I guess we’ll see what the future brings, in more ways than one.