[Note: I tried to insert an image here of the cover of Naomi Klein’s book, “The Shock Doctrine,” but nothing seems to show up.]
From the continuous barrage of propaganda emanating from President Trump and his administration, it seems more and more the case to me that their agenda is to hollow out our constitutional institutions and implement a form of dictatorial, corporate-controlled government in the U.S.
And it is becoming clear from the ongoing chaos of their statements and actions that they are trying to use the time-honored technique of political shock to reduce the nation to a state of helplessness so that they can impose their will as quickly as possible.
But a few things appear to be holding them back. One is our Judicial Branch, which has stopped Trump’s attempt so far to ban at least some people from getting into this country. Trump’s immigration ban would seem to be rather ineffective in any event in achieving its stated purpose of curtailing terrorism. But it might achieve a symbolic effect of closing the laboratory doors, as it were, in order to carry out the shock treatments.
It appears our constitutional institutions are holding up so far under the onslaught. Trump may effectively control two of the three branches of government right now, but it appears he needs all three.
Secondly, the press is finally waking up to at least some of what Trump has been up to, and is starting to question whether he came to power legitimately or was in cahoots with a foreign power. This is apparently so threatening to Trump that he has resorted to the dictator’s usual response of labeling the press as the enemy of the people.
And thirdly, and maybe most importantly, the shock treatments so far haven’t really worked. Many people are indeed terrified by the Trump administration, but they haven’t curled up into the required fetal ball. First there was the Women’s March and then the town hall resistance as thousands of constituents of Republican members of Congress showed they aren’t cowed by what’s been going on. And there has been a steady stream of resistance on social media.
Whether these three elements of resistance will be enough to neutralize Trump and his agenda remain to be seen. But any success in slowing that agenda can be seen as causes for hope.
What about Trump’s agenda, though? Is he really out to become a corporate dictator? It may be difficult to discern that from his statements, which are often contradictory and incoherent. But some around him occasionally paint a clearer picture.
Learning from Pinochet
For instance, there is chief strategist Steven Bannon’s statements that his goal is to “dismantle the administrative state,” and to “destroy all of today’s establishment.”
What Bannon is saying here isn’t all that new, even in the U.S. The destruction of the administrative state implies full implementation of efforts by many previous U.S. administrations to establish three principal legs of the corporate-friendly free-market stool — privatization, deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending. In other words, what Bannon apparently wants is a government completely devoted to corporate-friendly policies.
What is different with Trump and Bannon are the lengths to which they apparently intend to go, and the way in which they intend to achieve their aims. It seems that Bannon intends to bring the country to a state of complete corporatism through a massive destructive effort.
In her book, “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein’s description of the actions of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet sounds remarkably similar to what Trump and Bannon are now planning. In the 1970’s, when Pinochet assumed power in a violent coup, his key economic advisor was University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.
As Klein noted, Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a regimen in Chile that seems familiar now: tax cuts, free trade, and that three-legged stool of massive privatization, deregulation, and cuts in social services.
And Friedman advised Pinochet to accomplish his goal quickly, using surprise and what Friedman termed “shock treatment.” As Friedman stated at the time, “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.”
Pinochet of course used torture and the abductions and disappearances of thousands of people in order to carry out Friedman’s economic program. While Trump also likes to talk about torture, he is obviously not in the position Pinochet was to terrorize this country in that way.
But it does seem that Trump and Bannon have tried to induce a state of shock and confusion and even panic in this country through an unending series of outrageous statements, and through disruptive actions such as detentions of people in airports and deportation raids around the country. All of that has been accompanied by nearly daily announcements of actions to reduce or eliminate regulations on the financial and banking sector, to curb regulations protecting the environment, to roll back transgender rights, and even to gut programs for free school lunches.
Trump and Bannon appear to be trying to sow confusion about their real aims, partly by accusing their perceived enemies of the very same things that they have been doing. Bannon, for instance, has decried the “corporatist” and “globalist” media. But Trump is building a corporatist administration. His own global corporate interests are well known. And consider his cabinet, which is stocked with corporate players from former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson to Goldman Sachs executive Steven Minuchin.
It could be argued that Trump and Bannon are not acting in the corporatist mode because Trump is against free-trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Bannon’s destruction of the administrative state is a corporatist vision, and many of Trump’s past positions and statements have been decidedly pro-corporation.
If Trump is against free-trade agreements, it doesn’t appear to be for the same reasons that many progressives oppose those agreements.
The McGill experiments
In one of the most interesting chapters in her book, Klein recounts the devastating impact on one particular individual of electric shock and sensory deprivation experiments that were begun in the 1950s by Ewen Cameron, a then eminent psychiatrist at McGill University in Montreal. The brutal experimental techniques, many of which were later adopted by the CIA, were intended to break down cognitive functioning in the subjects and make them susceptible to suggestion.
In a related series of psychological experiments at McGill, a Dr. Ronald Hebb, director of psychology there, subjected volunteers to prolonged sensory deprivation during which he played recordings of voices “talking about the existence of ghosts or the dishonesty of science…”
It would seem that the ultimate purpose of these experiments — and of the CIA’s later interrogation techniques, which Trump strongly supports — was to get the subjects to lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lies. The idea was that the mind would be reduced to a tabula rasa or clean slate upon which a new set of truths could be imposed.
It could be argued that that Trump and Bannon are similarly attempting to impose their shock treatments, interspersed with “alternate facts,” on the nation in order to destroy the concept of truth and to impose their version of reality. That new version is Bannon’s corporate controlled government.
It would seem that Trump and Bannon are proceeding along the same political path that Naomi Klein ascribed to Milton Friedman, only Trump and Bannon are prepared to go further down that path than any U.S. administration ever has.
As Klein explained it, Friedman wanted to “dismantle” the “mixed, regulated economy” that created the New Deal in this country following the Great Depression. In trying to carry out that vision to its absurd end, Trump and Bannon are exhibiting Friedman’s “signature desire for unattainable purity, for a clean slate on which to build a reengineered model society.”
In the final analysis, Trump and Bannon are trying to scare the hell out of the country in order to obtain their clean slate; but so far at least, a majority of people in this country aren’t lying down for it.
…given Trump’s corporate background. It reminds me a bit of Truman’s assessment of how Eisenhower would fare given the latter’s military command: “Poor Ike. He’ll sit here (indicating desk in the Oval) and say do this, or do that, and orders will not simply be followed like he’s used to in the military. He will find it very frustrating.” Of course, Ike at least appreciated our system and would not feel very at home in today’s GOP.
Bannon’s is to create some teenage boyhood fantasy of what the USA ought to look like based on odd books he has read. It’s like a kid who wants to take over the school, his parents, all his schoolmates and show them how he will run things based on his superior intelligence. Trump’s is simply all about Trump. He has no ideology, no political reference, no party loyalty. He’s read no books (nor written any), his only real life experience is playing with his daddy’s money and learning how to avoid any responsibility for anything that offers a bad result; instead, taking all the credit for what wins.
With Bannon it’s all about attacking “Them”. With Trump, it’s all about him.
If it was not so dangerous, this would be fun to watch play out.
I think Trump envisions himself as a dictator who sits at the head of a corporate oligarchy. He’s doing it because he likes being the ultimate boss and because he thinks he will enrich himself. Bannon may have a different motivation, but I think his ultimate vision of a corporate oligarchy is similar to Trump’s.
Klein is one of our best political writers today and she endorses the right prescription on how to beat this. Interestingly there is a Putin connection as well. Rapid neoliberal privatization was part of the shock therapy to which she speaks Western institutions like the IMF applied to Russia. Within a decade the Russian people go from being excited about democracy and integration with the West to nick naming it shitocracy. Necessary policies like NATO and the Bosnian interventions also made the Russians feel the West was bullying them in their own backyards. Perfect recipe for Putin.
Now Trump is saying the same neoliberal global elites screwed over our working people, who are also statistically the most skeptical about democracy than at any time in post-Depression America, combine that win a sense of lost pride and you have a potent combination for the kind of nationalism that sept and kept Putin in power.
Like Trump, Putin has no ideology he just shrewdly adapted his pitch to his people to maintain power and enrich himself and his allies. He’s likely personally indifferent to gays or Muslims but recognizes a potent scapegoat to Russian masculinity and Christian culture when he sees one. So the parallels in their domestic politics are frighteningly striking.
is that Putin didn’t have to tear down Russian constitutional institutions in order to become a corporate dictator. There were no real constitutional institutions to tear down, and, as you note, he was able to simply ride a wave of popular discontent with the IMF technocrats in order to get into power. So he never needed to use the shock doctrine.
Trump and Bannon, on the other hand, seem to believe that they must, and can, tear down the constitutional institutions in this country in order to establish their own corporate oligarchy. So, they are trying to shock the country into submission, but it isn’t working, at least so far.
Never forget: the judiciary does not have an army.
Key is getting enough Republicans to conclude that Trump’s ineptitude and erratic nature is a threat to their own reelection. For example, it may soon dawn on more than just Issa that it is not in their interest to be responsible for handling Russia-gate, but would much easier to just toss the hot potato to a special counsel.