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The peril haunting America

Populism, new neo-fascist threat, everywhere, share same emotional symbols vocabulary
and ideologies

Sahibzada Riaz Noor December 07, 2023  

The writer has served as Chief Secretary, K-P. He has an MA Hons from Oxford University and is the author of two books of
English poetry 'The Dragonfly & Other Poems' and 'Bibi Mubarika and Babur’

During an infamous 1939 speech, Hitler dehumanised Jews by calling

them vermins: “This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our
sworn enemies,” he told the Czech foreign minister.

In his recent utterances on Veteran’s Day, former US President Donald

Trump used the term for all opponents. Using Nazi terminology, he
pledged: “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to
you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical
Left, thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country; lie,
steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether
legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”

These words cannot be dismissed as mere asides of a person who many

regard as the next President of the largest democracy in the world,
whose foundations of inalienable human rights, of tolerance, dissent
and separation of powers were laid by men like Jefferson, Madison and
Lincoln.

Donald P Moynihan, Prof of Public Policy, Georgetown University in his

NYT article, Trump Out To Destroy Deep State (Read: Bureaucracy)
writes Trump “plans to utterly transform American government…that
will undermine the quality of... government and... threaten our
democracy.” He goes on to state: “A second Trump administration would
be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing
power has been developed by a constellation of conservative
organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its
Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as
the central value in government employment, processes and
institutions.”

Nearly 20,000 potential candidates are being screened as MAGA

appointees to be appointed in the State, Defence, Judiciary, Immigration,
Taxation, workplace safety and welfare programmes which will lower
performance levels and make government less accountable to the public
and Congress. This menacing plan has several components. The first is to
put Trump loyalists into government positions. History is testament to
the existence of a meritorious, impartial and proficient bureaucracy,
protected by impersonal laws, as a sine quo non against despotism and
as guarantor of peace and economic welfare of the populace.

As a second plank of his design he may reimpose an executive order

called Schedule F which would allow him to convert many of these
officials into political appointees.

Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions

in the US at the federal level. But Schedule F would be the most serious
threat to the civil service since its creation in 1863 which could turn
another 50,000 officials — with deep experience in running major
federal programme — into political appointees who will be open to
political pressure, intimidation and outright dismissal in case of
unacceptable uprightness.

Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance and a

merit-based government personnel system.

Schedule F will also threaten democracy by making civil servants

subservient to a political master rather than to rules of law and the
values enshrined in the Constitution.

When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials

for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived
disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump
loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired
because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.

Prof Moynihan writes: “The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian

blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use
government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies
and force through his policy goals without congressional approval.
Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional
actions.

“We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the
operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how
well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept.
When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to
the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices,
so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if
Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel
legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential
holdouts.
 “American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome. The civil service
system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused
with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is
why Mr. Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the
administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward
Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Mr. Trump has a
chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American
government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on
presidential power.”

Trump, as he gets closer to the 2024 elections, is using language about

opposition, (‘Vermins’ to be crushed once Trump gains power; Gen
Milley, the US JCS, fit to be executed) migrants (are a threat to our race)
and liberals (are a destructive anti-people forces).

Populism, the new neo-fascist threat, everywhere, share the same

emotional symbols vocabulary and ideologies.

The question is:

Is populism rational and evidence-based? Is it people-centred? Does it or

can it improve the livelihoods of the majority of mankind which is
underprivileged?

Or is it a crazy mixture of emotional appeal to societal discontents and

poverty for which, not a rational, efficient solution, is prescribed: the
interests of the rich are protected and a hallucinatory solution is
proffered for the solution of the economic problems of the majority
poor: by making appeals to bringing back billions stolen and thereby
transforming poverty and unemployment into rivers of honey and milk.

The main strategy and plank of populism is to sell impracticable

solutions, a pie in the sky, through well devised psychological use of
social media and other modern techniques of mental manipulation.

But the most serious problem lies in the fact that, like every ideology,
except for a consensus-based democratic paradigm, the actual goal of
populism is the sole, ominous purpose of acquiring power, retaining it,
crushing all democratic opposition and imposing, through
authoritarianism, its own severely intolerant ideology, about whose
fallibility it harbours no doubts.

Democracy on the other hand involves compromise and consensus to

increase the size of the pie and share it in such a way as to retain mutual
acceptance, creating respect, unity and dignity.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 7th, 2023.

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