My latest SNA VM 64: “It can only end in violence”: On how ignoring the rule of law will mean somebody’s going to get hurt, and in a society that goes to extremes like America does, only extreme blowback is going to make the pendulum swing back.

Posted on February 28, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog. This month’s entry is again based on what’s on my mind these days as I teach courses on the state of American Democracy: How it is being predictably and rapidly dismantled. Here’s my article about consequences of acting lawlessly. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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IT CAN ONLY END IN VIOLENCE

Subtitle: That’s what happens when the rule of law meets a lawless leader

Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 64, February 26, 2025

By Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2025/02/26/visible-minorities-it-can-only-end-in-violence/

We live in extreme times…

Time out for a second, for I have a confession to make. Things are so extreme that columnists like me don’t know where to begin. Do I comment on a small thing within a deluge of events, and risk ignoring the big picture? Or do I go big and realize I’m completely out of my depth, especially measured up to the big-picture columnists successfully rising to the occasion, such as Anne Applebaum, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Reich, or Timothy Snyder?

But writing things out is how columnists make sense of it all, so bear with me as I try. Let me start again:

WE LIVE IN EXTREME TIMES…

We have an American president who has declared himself king (not only rhetorically, but pictorially), while the legislative branch abdicates its oversight powers, and the judiciary grants immunity. Essential services are arbitrarily slashed by an unelected, unapproved, and unmonitored “Department of Government Efficiency.” Civil Servants are fired for something as mundane as taking a DEIA course required under the previous Trump administration (Source: Alex Wagner, “Trumpland” podcast, Feb 13). Even reliable information is under assault, as top-level domains with the formerly trustworthy .gov label (see for example whitehouse.gov and doge.gov) are being degraded into blogs and twitter feeds.

Meanwhile, NATO is dying, with the likely victory of Russia as it absorbs Ukraine then reconstitutes its military. We are regressing to a century where the world was carved into blocs run by regional powers (this time probably China, Russia and the US). This will mean the end of equal sovereignty within a community of nations, as might makes right, and great powers invade at will (China taking Taiwan; the US taking Greenland, Panama, Gaza, even Canada?; and Russia snaffling sovereign countries of the former Soviet empire).

The postwar order of interlocking trade that made the world generally rich and peaceful looks mortally wounded. All thanks to one man, believing his place is secure in the “Great Man theory” of world history, who doesn’t understand the concept of consequences for his actions because he has never faced any in his life. He invokes a turn-of-the-century President (William McKinley) as his template while ignoring that era’s unstable world order, where a few people’s emotions led to stupid public policies, culminating in global conflicts ultimately costing close to 100 million lives.

Why is this happening?

THE ROOT CAUSE: AMERICA’S NATURAL-BORN EXTREMISM

If I could offer one generality that seems to cut through some of the noise, it would be that the Americans were always temperamentally ill-suited to be leaders on the world stage. Pax Americana was fine while it was governed by the educated specialists, trained in useful skills such as international trade, diplomacy, military strategy, and the sobering science behind life and death decisions.

But among governing systems, democracy uniquely gives the public a say in foreign policy. That’s why the policy experts had better make sure the general public knows the basics of what’s going on, or is convinced by the aims of the mission. Or bad things will happen when they go out and vote.

The governing class really dropped the ball on that. The overall culture of secrecy and unaccountability behind America’s military action, both in mandate and budget, was shrouded in “official secrets” and “executive privilege.” That not only made things ripe for unknown unknowns to be filled by internet conspiracy theories, but also ideal for the opportunistic “America First” advocates. Why is America spending so much of our money on weird things overseas when people at home are hurting?

Yes, this political dynamic favoring isolationism could happen anywhere. But here’s where America is particularly susceptible: It not only has the largest economic and military footprint in history (meaning uninformed Americans falling for irresponsible slogans affect the whole world order), but also a long history of taking things to logical extremes.

America was founded in extremism. From the first settlers’ cult-like devotions to superstitions leading to the Salem witch trials, to a system of slavery that overwhelmed entire economies (to the point where, in some places, slaves outnumbered the free population). From a system of coexisting with your indigenous neighbors to a philosophy of “terra nullius” that denied their very existence. Or worse, a system that justified the extremes of war and genocide in order to occupy an entire continent through “Manifest Destiny.”

Yes, these ideologies could be dismissed as excesses of an adolescent nation. But even as the United States turns 250, plenty of extreme ideologies can be found in modern policy debates. Consider these:

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

The belief that the United States is unique in its values, democracy, and development, therefore destined to place a special role on the world stage, has underpinned policies ranging from an economy open to trade deficits (even to the detriment of American workers) to the United States assuming the mantle of de facto world policeman (even if that means Americans dying in military adventurism abroad).

Having been born and raised in America and being trained as an Eagle Scout, I too was once imbued the mindset of how America is special. But after decades living abroad and becoming fluent in another language (America’s brazen monolinguality is a related blind spot), I’ve also developed the skill set of seeing that that other viable world views and systems are possible, and that America isn’t #1 at everything. Revisiting America, I find mine a pretty lonely view.

But here’s the logical extreme: American Exceptionalism doesn’t just mean it’s special or unique. It means America is also somehow an exception to international rules. That given its unique role as keeper of the world order and promoter of the democratic peace, the United States should get special treatment immunizing it from the consequences of its actions. How else does one justify the United States not joining the International Criminal Court, or arrogantly issuing “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” without including itself? If American leaders or soldiers make decisions that result in war crimes, who gets prosecuted at The Hague? Nobody. And what are you going to do about it? It makes international relations even more lawless.

But the biggest blind spot in American Exceptionalism could be American democracy’s undoing: the unfounded belief that authoritarianism couldn’t happen here.

The logic is that America’s amazing democracy wouldn’t allow it. Except that historically America has had many “near-misses” with popular political extremists, including John Adams, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Leland Stanford, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace.

Americans can’t accept that one authoritarian finally got through in 2016 and 2024, and watch agape as Trump and his cronies act in waves of extremes dismantling democratic institutions one by one. So policymakers, media, and voters disbelieve their lying eyes and treat it as politics as normal. This is extreme hubris.

AMERICA AS THE COWBOY IN THE WHITE HAT

Another American extreme is cultural: The conviction that Americans are always the winners and the heroes in the world.

Thanks in part to the dominance of American entertainment in media, coupled with the Americans’ incessant need to feel entertained rather than informed, they aren’t used to seeing themselves as the bad guys (in contrast to, say, the Germans). American-sponsored torture and coups overseas? Fuhgeddaboudit. Show us Rambo blowing up Afghanistan and pass the popcorn.

If Americans ever make it outside the US (most don’t; it wasn’t until 2024 when 51% Americans even got a passport!), they’re astounded to find themselves loathed and targeted abroad. After all, American news media rarely reports on overseas events, and many Americans can’t find a country on a map unless it involves an American military conflict. Then that, of course, goes through a filter embedding the reporters and supporting the troops, so lessons aren’t learned again.

The problem is that Americans have little sense of what’s being done in their name. A public ignorant of that elects extremely ignorant people in their own image, who in turn make irresponsible decisions affecting the lives and governments of people thousands of miles away. And if there is any blowback, we American Heroes have been attacked, so America must retaliate. Pass the popcorn.

EMBEDDED STRUCTURAL EXTREMISM

Finally, we get to the fact that America’s archaic democracy has mechanisms that embed extremism.

Start with the fact that America has an extreme number of elections and jobs elected—the most in the world, in fact. That means even fundamentally nonpartisan jobs (such as sheriffs and judges) become popularity contests. While many dismiss this as true people power in action, American democracy goes to extremes in more important ways:

For example, the “primary system” not only favors extremists choosing candidates, but also the most important election campaigns are now perpetual. American elections are the most expensive in human history, thus easily susceptible to corruption. Yet a Supreme Court stacked with free-speech extremists has consistently short-circuited attempts to rein in campaign finance reform by interpreting free speech in terms of money, which plainly gives the rich and corporations the loudest voices in an election. National politicians are now forced to waste at least half their work time not on policymaking, but on fundraising.

Likewise, extremist candidates picked under extreme conditions end up passing extreme laws (such as banning abortion under all circumstances), and ask politicized judges to take things to their logical extremes.

Follow this logic: New York City Mayor Eric Adams last September was indicted for bribery, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign money. However, the Department of Justice under Trump as of last week wants to drop those charges. Why? The Supreme Court last year granting Trump immunity while in office. The reasoning? Being sued or arrested for a crime is an interference with an elected official’s duties.

Thus Trump is trying to apply his immunity beyond the presidency to the mayoral level. And beyond. The DOJ is also arguing here that all politicians, or even political candidates, should be granted immunity, because being accused of a crime counts as election interference! Run for office and immunize yourself from criminal prosecution? Calling all crooks!

When extremism becomes this normalized, weird theories go from fringe to mainstream. What other country would fall so hard for Milton Friedman’s capitalistic zealotry, i.e., that unfettered market forces magically fix everything so we don’t really need governments? That hokum has evolved from Ronald Reagan’s snake-oil “trickle-down economics” to the current extremist Project 2025.

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

So what happens next?

Extreme moves result in extreme blowback, and that means sometimes violence has to occur before people realize they went too far.

For example, it took extreme laws (the Alien and Sedition Acts, etc.) that nearly destroyed freedom of speech under the fledgling US Constitution before people voted out a stupid President John Adams. However, the United States then swung to another extreme, becoming a one-party state for the next 30 years and enfranchising slavery as an economic and political institution.

It took a horrific Civil War before the United States finally outlawed that slavery. But the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln followed by extreme interpretations of “states rights” ensured that freed slaves still remained disenfranchised for nearly another century.

After 60 years of a “spoils system” embedding political cronyism, it took the assassination of President James Garfield by an enraged job seeker before people realized a politicized civil service was a bad idea.

It took the death of 146 workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and 172 children in the Collinwood School Disaster before people realized that buildings needed safety protocols and fire escapes.

It took the death of President Franklin Roosevelt before people realized that perpetual presidencies were a bad idea, and constitutionally enshrined term limits (a lesson Trumpophiles, recently creating a “Third Term Project and Beyond,” seem to have unlearned).

It took the death of President John F. Kennedy before Civil Rights and Voting Rights were finally passed, thanks to a guilt-ridden election that gave rare supermajorities to one party. (After all, thanks to the filibuster, it takes extreme support for anything to pass the Senate.)

Likewise, I bet somebody gets hurt before things snap back from the extremes in the present Musk-Trump co-presidency.

IT CAN ONLY END IN VIOLENCE

It’s ironic that Trump cites McKinley as his template president, as he too went to extremes. Presiding over a mercantilist tariff regime and stoking wars to annex territories overseas, McKinley saw society polarize into an oligarchic ruling class versus an exploited factory worker class, and the rise of the Communists and the domestic “bomb-throwing anarchists.”

One of those anarchists assassinated McKinley.

The politics of assassination is not sustainable, and it’s completely avoidable. One of the reasons we have the rule of law is not only to temper extremism, but also because a functional society requires justice.

When justice is not served, and people with power act as if they are above the law, people resort to extrajudicial means. If you go to the police after a crime but they do nothing about it, what else can you do? You call the mafia and they break legs.

We have the rule of law so the black market for justice does not thrive. Consequences must happen one way or another. And if lawlessness happens, that probably means violence. A lawless Trump administration means that sooner or later somebody is going to get hurt.

That’s why I don’t think things will end well. Extremes result in counter-extremes. That’s what history teaches us over and over again. Learn it or else.

But America’s exceptional case means that, due to its extremities, it was never designed to sustain a worldwide empire. And now that its expertise is being politicized and removed, this is where the empire collapses. That, or democracy will snap back and real reforms happen.

Either outcome might happen extremely fast. I’ll be here to muddle through with another column then.

ENDS

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HNY 2025: My SNA VM column 63: “Trump’s Weak Mandate”, on how 47’s victory was in fact a narrow one, and arguably not because people support his authoritarianism. More a worldwide election trend against incumbent parties. Don’t fall for 47’s ploy.

Posted on January 20, 2025February 28, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog, and Happy New Year! This column marks a complete departure from my Japan-based opining and more what I’m professionally researching now: The state of democracy in the US and elsewhere. I’m sure there are a lot of other informed venues you can read on this subject, but if you’re interested in my take as a Political Scientist, well here you go. I hope 2025 turns out as well for you as it possibly can, but I’m in the camp where I don’t think it will, and offer some strategies below. Thank you as always for reading and commenting to Debito.org. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Visible Minorities 63: Trump’s Weak Mandate

Subtitle: Trump is reentering the presidency with what has been called an “overwhelming, historic mandate.” That’s not true. In fact, the case is stronger that what happened was less a matter of support for Trump and more a worldwide repudiation of incumbents. Keep reminding people of that.

Shingetsu News Agency, January 20, 2025 by DEBITO ARUDOU in COLUMN
Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2025/01/20/visible-minorities-trumps-weak-mandate/

SNA (Tokyo) — Donald Trump has been sworn in today as the 47th American president, returning to power in what is being built up in politics and media as popular legitimacy for his authoritarianism.

Since November, his supporters have claimed that he was re-elected by “a massive margin” (Vivek Ramaswamy), giving him “an overwhelming mandate” (Spokesman Steven Cheung and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise), as a repudiation of “progressive parties who have lost touch with voters’ concerns” (Editorial, The Observer (UK)).

Sure seems that way. Both chambers of Congress and the corrupted Supreme Court (which granted Trump immunity for anything he does as official duties while in office) are in the hands of the Republicans. In poker, that’s pretty much a royal flush.

But I still say, “Not so fast.” By assuming this victory entitles him to do whatever he wants, because apparently that’s what the voters want, we’re giving him more power than he deserves in a democracy. And his victory was certainly not an “overwhelming mandate” by any measure.

Look at the Statistics: The Senate

Brace yourself for a walk through the political weeds. I’ll simplify the system a bit for those who aren’t familiar with the structure of American politics:

In America’s legislature, the Senate (upper house) has a clear majority for Trump’s Republican Party (GOP) over the leftist Democratic Party (Dems). Out of 100 seats, the balance of the Senate shifted from 51-49 Dem to 53-47 GOP, a loss of four seats for the Dems.

In a two-party system, this matters because control of the chamber means control over the chamber’s rules, agenda-setting, committee assignments, leadership, and confirmation of Trump’s cabinet and judicial nominations.

But it’s not an “overwhelming” majority. This also matters because the US Senate is not majoritarian. You need a supermajority (60 senators) to pass most legislation (thanks to a rule called the filibuster). And since the Senate hasn’t had a supermajority for either party since 1964, it’s still pretty much business as usual in 2025.

Granted, there have been significant holes punched in the filibuster in the past couple of decades (that’s how the Supreme Court, for example, got stacked with Trump justices in his first term), but unless the GOP gets rid of the filibuster (not impossible, but the current form of the rule has been in place for more than a century), the Dems can still easily blockade and force compromises.

Look at the Statistics: The House

The other chamber, the House of Representatives (lower house), is like a regular legislature where you need a simple majority to pass things. But in 2025, the voting margin is even slimmer than it was before the election. Despite all the talk about a “red wave” for Trump, his party actually lost one seat from its pre-election majority to wind up at 220 GOP to 215 Dem.

Yes, that means that the House GOP, like in the Senate, retains control of chamber rules, speakerships, and leadership in committees.

But do the math. In the likely event that all 215 Dems vote as a bloc, that means only three GOP defections will doom a bill.

And since three GOP Congresspeople have resigned their seats to vie for Trump cabinet positions, that means the margin (until those people are replaced by their state governors or special elections, which may take months), is 217-215. One GOP defection dooms the boldest moves for most of Trump’s first 100 days.

And given that Congress usually has somebody resign or die every session, these are the slimmest margins of support for a president in a long time.

Now let’s turn to Trump’s claims of popular support for his programs because he won the election.

Caveats to Trump’s Mandate

Yes, Trump won the popular vote. But not by much. He won by 1.7% more votes than Kamala Harris got. Good for him, but that’s a smaller percentage than the 2.1% of the popular vote Hillary Clinton got more than Trump in 2016 (and Clinton only lost because of the weird US Electoral College).

Source: MSNBC, Nov 7, 2024

It’s also the fourth-smallest margin of victory in the 26 presidential elections over the past century (ahead of Nixon 1968 at 0.7%, Kennedy 1960 at 0.2%, Bush Jr. 2000 at -0.5% (due to another Electoral College-only victory), and Trump again in 2016.

Source: US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

But still, Trump won the popular vote, right? Yes, but not by a majority. Trump got 49.8% of the vote (versus Harris’s 48.3%). That’s a plurality, not a majority.

The point is that any claims of Trump’s “overwhelming” victory are clearly overblown. Turns out that more than half of American voters did not vote for him.

Worldwide Trends in Democracy

Trump’s victory is actually part of a worldwide wave against the incumbent.

Believe it or not, nearly half of the world’s population (3.7 billion people) voted in 2024. And as noted in the Financial Times, almost all democracies decided to vote out the incumbent party, regardless of whether it was on the Left or the Right.

Places like Lithuania, France, and Belgium saw the party in power lose seats by 30% or more. Most famously, the UK Conservative Party lost a whopping 46%!

Source: MSNBC, Nov. 7, 2024

For its part, the United States saw a 7% shift against the incumbents, who happened to be the hapless Democrats. But if you want to turn the frown upside down, that means that on a global scale, the Dems in fact did better than all other leftist parties worldwide (the only exception being Mexico, where the leftist governing party won in a landslide, expanding their support from 54% to 61%).

But of course, that’s not how it’s being spun by the media and political operatives. They keep harping on about how all branches of government are in the hands of one party so Trump can do whatever he wants.

Wrong. Trump’s victory was narrow at best, and not necessarily because voters supported Trump’s policies, but because they wanted a change from the status quo. And in the United States, that means there’s only one other party to vote for.

And that’s why we need more people taking civics classes on how to read elections, so they don’t fall for the spin.

Reading This Election

The fairest conclusion that can be drawn is that the United States is split evenly, a 50-50 country (often seen in two-party, “winner-take-all” electoral systems).

Or more accurately, when considering the 244+ million voting-eligible population of Americans, 31.5% voted for Trump, 30.6% voted for Harris, and 37.7% did not vote at all. The country is split into even thirds.

Source: Ian Carillo, Ph.D.

Now put that through the American election filter where outcomes are measured not by total popular vote, but state-by-state and in mostly “gerrymandered” (uncompetitive) districts drawn by states usually dominated by one political party.

This means that small shifts in the electorate (sometimes only a couple thousand votes) can swing whole states in favor of one presidential candidate or another.

Yes, this worked in Trump’s favor (as the Electoral College famously gives advantages to rural, conservative areas), winning all “swing states” that were competitive in this election. But that means the pendulum can swing back, and probably will do so in two years when all of the House and a third of the Senate go up for election again.

It’s pretty much a law of political gravity that the incumbent president loses seats in Congress (the notable exception being, for the first time since 1934, Biden in 2022). So we can anticipate this happening again in 2026.

But again, this is not an “overwhelming” or “massive” victory for Trump by any measure.

The Point: Do Not Obey in Advance

One of the features of the US executive branch is that it, unlike the fractious Congress, is intensely hierarchical. Once installed, the president has effective control over the US military, foreign policy, border security, military assignations, the nuclear arsenal, and entire budgets (which, yes, have to be approved by Congress, but they have to want to hold the president accountable).

But over the past century, Congress and the Supreme Court have increasingly abdicated their oversight powers in favor of the theory of the “unitary executive.” This has effectively given the man who already occupies the most powerful position in the world even more powers, such as conducting secret activities while immune to the rule of law, discretion over whether to spend budgets earmarked by Congress, hiring or firing apolitical bureaucrats based upon their loyalty to Trump, pardoning people for political gain and enhanced corruption, and whipping members of Congress to do his bidding or face being “primaried” from office.

America’s fabled federal “checks and balances” eroded to an inflection point in 2025. And starting today, Trump is going to leverage all this politics of fear and personal retribution into making government into a transactional business that always profits him, depicting any dissent as enemy action, and doing what he can to whiten up the avenues of power. All while the GOP pretends there’s a coherent conservative ideology behind it all. The rich and powerful now see it clearly and aren’t even hiding the fact they’re lining up to kiss the ring, “paying to play.”

And we’re all supposed to wish it “godspeed” as part of a “honeymoon period,” as if it’s just politics as normal.

The point of this essay is to bear in mind that this election has not given him the mandate to do any of this.

A common adage spouted by cynics is that “people get the leaders they deserve.” However, that fatalism is fatal to democracy, and voter resignation is in fact part of the authoritarian playbook.

Have a read someday of Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s important booklet, On Tyranny. I teach it in my classes. The very first lesson is:

“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

That’s why we’ve heard so much about the “overwhelming mandate.” It’s a ploy to get us out of the way.

It’s our job as defenders of democracy to not enhance Trump’s power by attrition.

A golden rule of the game of chess is that, “If you let your opponent accomplish their goal, you will lose.” So do what you can to thwart.

Of course, I assume that most people will shrug and say, “I haven’t the time or energy to picket outside, call my representative, etc.”

What you can do is what we see people always do when disaster strikes: Send a little money to the helpers.

Fund some civil-society organizations (the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Ballotpedia, Open Secrets, Democracy Docket, Indivisible, etc.) who are keeping track of corruption, lawfare, voting rights, social justice issues, etc. Sending them five bucks will not break the bank. In America, you spend more than that tipping your server for dinner.

The least you can do is pay your journalists, especially local. Take out a paid subscription to a few reliable news agencies. They are doing god’s work.

The End of the Tunnel

Let me try to end this column on a hopeful note without being panglossian.

As a benchmark, American presidents have “the first 100 days” to get as much done as possible. That’s Trump’s momentum to lose, and he has a habit of being capricious enough to blow up his own policies.

And realistically, short of a full descent into autocracy, Trump has two years (actually, eighteen months, given that Congress gears up for re-elections six months prior) before the above-mentioned political gravity sets in and the pendulum probably swings back.

That’s the window for him to do his worst. No doubt he will try. But that’s better to manage mentally than thinking in terms of four more years.

Meanwhile, remind others when you can that Trump’s mandate is overblown. A simple reminder that a majority of Americans didn’t vote for him is probably sufficient in most situations. The belief of invulnerability and inevitability is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let’s do what we can to break that spell.

ENDS

Collated sources and links in a powerpoint:

2024 Election Results and 47’s Mandate

Debito’s SNA Visible Minorities 62: “Electing the Joker” (Dec 10, 2024), on how a trend over the past decades to depict the “villain as hero” in popular culture has influenced politics downstream and made Trump more electable

Posted on December 13, 2024February 28, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Emerging from my busiest semester ever plus a November election, I have a lot on my mind. And it’s about US politics, since that is the data set I’m working with these days. Here’s something you might find interesting about it. Thanks for reading as always. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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SNA VM 62: “Electing the Joker”

People still can’t believe Trump won again. Let’s consider how a shift in American popular culture favoring the villain over the hero might have legitimized it.

By Debito Arudou, Ph.D. Shingetsu News Agency, December 10, 2024

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/12/10/visible-minorities-electing-the-joker/

I read an inspiring column in the New York Times, “The Supervillain is the Hero Now” (Nov 23), by cultural critic A.O. Scott. It surprisingly offered me a plausible theory as to why Trump got re-elected.

Scott’s thesis was that popular culture and politics are linked, in that politics is downstream from culture. That is to say, metaphorically speaking, what condenses in the snowpack of a society’s culture is eventually reflected downstream in the meltwater of its politics.

Suffice it to say, America’s politics have shifted, where it seems that the bad guys triumph, there are no truth or consequences for any actions, and you can do anything as long as you win.

The cause is that American popular culture has justified it—over the past decades, according to Scott, the “villain” of a story is portrayed as the “hero.”

For those who still can’t wrap their head around how Trump won despite all the baggage, this column offers a cultural theory rooted in decades of attitude shift in favor of the bad guys. To the point where being bad has become a sales point.

TRACE THE ARC OF THE ELECTABLE VILLAIN

Let’s start with how villains are of course attracted to politics. In fact, it’s generally seen as part of the job description: people with no patience for politics see politicians as venal, self-serving, and corrupt crooks.

But historically, that in itself hasn’t made them electable. In popular culture, crooks were at least supposed to hide their criminal tendencies during election campaigns, and portray themselves as morally upright with a sense of public duty. But if they were caught with their hand in the till, popular culture served up justice: They lost office, stood trial, and got put behind bars.

As many have noted aloud, if you tried to sell a story of a candidate running for president with the slogan of, “I’m voting for the convicted felon,” no TV or movie producer would have bought it. It would have been too far-fetched and unrealistic.

Not any more. And that’s because we’ve gotten to the point of voting for even the most obvious, cartoony villains in popular culture.

This plot twist has been decades in the making. Consider, for example, in two 1966 episodes of the Adam West “Batman” TV series, cartoon villain The Penguin actually ran for Mayor of Gotham City, having gotten a substantial lead in the polls against the incumbent. Batman, naturally, had no choice but to run against him, and eventually won after The Penguin conveniently got caught showing his true colors as a criminal in public. Justice prevailed.

Now fast forward thirty years and consider the 1994 “Simpsons” episode where cartoon villain Sideshow Bob ran for Mayor of Springfield. What was interesting this time was how sophisticated the nomination process was. The local right-wing talk show radio host (styled after Rush Limbaugh) portrayed Bob (a felon convicted of attempted murder) as a victim of the justice system, got him pardoned, and had him run against (venal, self-serving, and corrupt) Mayor Quimby.

In this case, Bob won the election. Why? He had an ace up his sleeve: charisma. Being an entertainer, Bob approached public policy in an unserious way, making the audience laugh with physical comedy and antics. Being an outsider not behaving “like a politician” was his selling point. And, once elected, he used his mandate to take revenge against his enemies.

(Justice ultimately did yet prevail, but that’s because each Simpsons episode has to reset every week, Bob was again conveniently shown in public to have rigged the election, putting Quimby back in office.)

Nowadays things are different. Villains, even the cartoony ones, win the popularity contests for real. Reality shows such as “Survivor” (which does have elections at the end of every episode) routinely decide not to vote out the villains early (or at all; as of 2020, at least nine seasons have had the sociopathic contestant win—including the wildly successful first season).

This attitude has trickled downstream into real-life politics. Given that US Presidential elections are basically a season of Survivor that lasts for years, the American public has learned to accept, even celebrate, the villain as the hero now. To the point of now being electable not despite, but because they are villains.

TRUMP’S SURPRISING ADVANTAGES IN THIS NEW CULTURAL MILIEU

As Scott notes in his column, the “evil” villain has distinct advantages over the “good” hero. One is that standards of ethical behavior are looser for villains. We expect the “goody-goodies” to follow the rules and political norms to the letter. To the point where one presidential pardon by Joe Biden of his son Hunter (an act plenty of earlier presidents have similarly done) is somehow more outrageous than the huge list of other convicted felons (who have committed egregiously worse crimes than Hunter) pardoned by Trump in his first term.

The reason for this double standard, in my read, is that Biden didn’t adhere to our image of a hero, and villains can get away with more because they’re acting within our expectations of an villain. Being venal, self-serving, and corrupt is what they do, so the hero must do only good things in contrast. Or else there is no truth or justice, the whole system is bad, and we can believe in nothing.

Another advantage villains have is they are simply more interesting than heroes. We can actually live without a hero at the center of a story now. Whole series are devoted exclusively to the villain (two movies about “The Joker” alone since 2019), with immersive TV series that spend years developing classic villain backstories, either humanizing/justifying their character traits, or showing how both hero and villain are not that far apart (witness “Wicked,” “Maleficent”, “Gotham,” “Cruella,” or the multi-movie Star Wars arc about Darth Vader). Even the optimistic “Star Trek” universe is plumbing the lawless “Section 31” loophole, while “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad” have gone out of their way to make us root for the bad guy no matter how evil they become.

This fandom for the “anti-hero” probably started with “The Godfather” series (later rehashed in much more detail as “The Sopranos”), but back then I remember it being scandalous. Not any more. Nihilism is now normal.

The twist is that in a society like America’s that is addicted to entertainment, boredom is somehow worse than bad behavior. People need drama 24/7, and the villain is intrinsic to drama.

Finally, villains have an advantage when it comes to what’s considered “entertaining” with the accelerated media consumption of the Internet. Anything made public needs to be short (or risk being dismissed as “TL;dr”), easily digestible, viral, and optimally funny.

That means a Sideshow Bob-esque character like Trump, with all his loopy dances, puerile humor, and communal grievances, holds the aces in modern political debate. He can in turns, as Scott puts it, “enact both the babyface tropes of wounded innocence and flag-waving wholesomeness and the belligerent, transgressive, over-the-top rantings of the classic [villain],” as illustrated in professional wrestling matches. That comparison is insightful. Just watching wrestlers do their thing gets boring. We positively crave the backstories, slaps, chairs over the head, and bloodletting between a villain and a hero. And the bad-guy character often triumphs.

Trump knows all of this, as he is a huge fan of professional wrestling. And from decades of media events he has mastered holding your attention forever. As presidential historian Jon Meacham put it, “Trump doesn’t see America as a country. He sees it as an audience.”

That craving for drama at all times puts our public servants, especially those wanting to win a popularity contest, at an enormous disadvantage. Public policy, i.e., the ability to use the government to find solutions to collective problems, is actually pretty ho-hum stuff.

But it’s supposed to be. You want the complex planning, detail, and implementation to be as predictable (and undramatic) as possible, or resources get wasted, people get hurt, and government gets blamed for not doing a good job.

Yet if you’re a dry, serious, or complicated candidate or functionary, then boooooriiiiing. To win, you must now put an entertaining spin on policy minutia. Most people simply aren’t talented enough to do that, as it requires comedic timing, an economy of words, an effective use of visuals, and internet savvy.

That means the Class Clown who spent high school disrupting class making people laugh at their desks has a more electable skill set now than the Teacher’s Pet who spent all their years quietly studying and mastering complicated concepts.

Hyperbole? Contrast the tone and content of the Trump and Harris rallies. Which one is closer to the Class Clown? Which one is more televisable? Which one grabs more headlines? Which one brings back more repeat viewers, crowds, and ratings? “Are you not entertained?,” I’m expecting Trump to say someday.

DEMOCRACY FANS NEED TO GET READY

The point of this column is to point out a stone unturned in the political debate: How American culture itself has shifted against the “goody two-shoes” doing the right thing. In my view, the Democratic Party did everything they should have done as the Good Guys to appeal to the American public as they knew it. They lost in part because they just weren’t interesting enough to get out enough votes in their favor, or to stem the wave of voters dissatisfied with the status quo.

But there’s more, and here’s where the brain rot goes very deep: Voters who like sociopathy.

Trump is fortunate enough to be downstream of an American cultural snowmelt that has normalized and celebrated sociopaths as never before. The deluge of shows celebrating villains has created a permission structure for a cult of copycats who want bad because it is bad. The “bad fan,” as Scott puts it, is where “the most passionate members of the audience embrace what they are meant to condemn.”

For the echo-chambers of communities of “bad fans” who found each other via the Internet, what unites them is Trump’s villainy—it’s what they like best about him. The Democrats just aren’t villainous enough—and they better not be, or American democracy is doomed.

The problem is that this simply isn’t politics as usual, and what’s about to happen isn’t just contained within a movie or TV drama anymore. America is about to be run by villains, put there in part by “bad fans.”

I don’t think they know what they’re getting everyone into. Americans have never dealt with an authoritarian like Trump before. (Contrast with the South Koreans, who have, and voted down the recent attempt at a Martial-Law coup within hours.) Americans are convinced their democracy in America is invulnerable, that authoritarianism “couldn’t happen here.”

So they essentially elected The Joker on a whim and a lark. After all, he didn’t destroy American democracy last time around. What’s the worst he can do?

We’re about to find out, because here comes the kakistocracy. The Joker’s minions are much better organized this time, and Republican majorities in all three branches of government (including a Supreme Court that has unprecedentedly granted him immunity) means even less oversight. Something very wicked this way comes.

But the Americans who eventually find they aren’t entertained by all this won’t be able to walk out of the theater partway or change the channel. They’re stuck. The Joker is on them.

Hang on, everyone. It looks like America has to get the authoritarian disease before it comes up with a cure.

ENDS
======================
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My SNA Visible Minorities 61: “An Obituary for Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori”: As Trump is set to take the US Presidency again, let us consider the damage wrought by mixing political machines with family ties (Nov 2, 2024)

Posted on November 6, 2024February 28, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

////////////////////////////////

ALBERTO FUJIMORI, FORMER PRESIDENT OF PERU, DIES

Subtitle: On the eve of a crucial election for the future of democracy in the United States, let’s bid good riddance to another authoritarian, and consider the damage wrought by mixing political machines with family ties.

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 61. November 2, 2024. Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/11/02/visible-minorities-an-obituary-for-former-peruvian-president-alberto-fujimori/

Raise your glass. Another authoritarian is worm food.

I’m trying not to make a habit of writing obituaries, but people who affected policymaking in Japan just keep dying. I’ve done ruminations on the deaths of Shinzo Abe, Shintaro Ishihara, Henry Scott-Stokes, and even on positive influences such as Ivan Hall and Chalmers Johnson. Now it’s Alberto Fujimori’s turn.

Alberto Fujimori, who died last September aged 86, was the President of Peru from 1990 to 2000. He was the first person of Japanese ancestry to assume that office, part of the wave of Japanese immigration to North and South America more than a century ago, assimilating into Peruvian society fully enough to be elected their national leader.

This sounds like a paragon of tolerance and openness to outsiders, but what Fujimori did with that power became a cautionary tale—of how an outsider, once let in, can corrupt everything.

FROM IMMIGRANT BEGINNINGS TO AN OUTSIDER-INSIDER

Allegedly born in Peru (although even that would be later disputed), Fujimori rose from being a well-credentialed agronomist and mathematics lecturer to a university rector at a national university.

Like many people I’ve met with physical science backgrounds, Fujimori had unsophisticated views about the social sciences. A person who preferred solo policymaking behind a laptop rather than the tedious work of meeting and persuading fellow politicians, he found democracy annoying. People were either problems to be solved or obstacles to be removed.

Once he got a taste of power in the rectory (we academics know something about what happens to people pampered in hierarchical university administrations), he learned how to bulldoze through anything that got in his way, including the rule of law.

Running as a long-shot outsider, when Fujjmori found no established party would nominate him, he founded his own party, hiring staffers supported by the CIA. Although he campaigned on anti-corruption and anti-terrorism slogans, Fujimori also pandered to populism, visiting dozens of remote villages in his “Fuijimobile” (a cart pulled by a tractor) cosplaying in Andean garb and advertising himself as “a president like you.” Adopting the moniker of el chino (“the Chinaman”), he played to Peru’s racial politics as a common, hardworking Asian out to stick it to the white ruling elite.

Ultimately, he won an upset victory over the establishment candidate, acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. As is the pattern of demagogues worldwide (obvious examples should come to mind), he got elected not despite, but because he had no experience in national politics, offering a clean break from the past.

Although Peru’s ruling class believed they could co-opt him, they soon found themselves shut out of power. Fujimori largely abandoned his economic proposals for Plan Verde, the American “Project 2025” of its time, designed by the Peruvian military to root out the enemy within. Exploiting the executive-branch loopholes within Peru’s Constitution to rule by decree, within three years he declared Peru’s democracy “a domestic formality—a facade” and instituted a “Fuji-coup,” dissolving congress and the judiciary and creating his own constitution.

Emboldened by a surge of popularity despite the coup, Fujimori became even more authoritarian. His crackdowns on domestic terrorists and leftist opponents targeted tens of thousands of people, including students, journalists, and businesspeople kidnapped and executed by the military. He also embarked on humanitarian disasters such as the forced sterilization of indigenous women, ostensibly because they were suspected of breeding guerrillas, but also were “culturally backward” according to eugenics theory (a favorite of the Mensa crowd blind to the political outcomes of doctrinaire pseudoscience).

For the remainder of Fujimori’s decade in power, corruption freely flowed. By the end of his first term in 1995, Fujimori circumvented Peru’s one-consecutive-term limit to the presidency by getting congress to pass a law saying his first five years in power didn’t count because he wasn’t elected under his own constitution.

Despite all his anti-corruption promises, the rule of law meant nothing unless it furthered his goals. Fujimori would eventually be convicted of human rights abuses and corruption, as would 1500 people in his government.

JAPAN SUPPORTS IT OWN, NO MATTER WHAT

Here’s where Japan comes in: Worldwide observers, human-rights NGOs, and governments were denouncing Fujimori’s antics in real time, yet Japan saw little unsavory. Instead, it celebrated him openly as the hometown boy who made good.

He was the particular darling of Japan’s far-right, feted every time he came to Tokyo by the likes of bigoted Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, as proof that Wajin-blooded people were eugenically superior enough to get elected by foreigners. Fujimori thus leveraged the soft spot of Japan’s insecure fascists—their insatiable craving for international affirmation and recognition as some kind of superlative. Japan enabled his corruption by increasing investments and business opportunities.

This saprophytic relationship was obvious even to Peru’s insurgents. That’s why in 1996 they raided the Japanese ambassador’s residence during a birthday party for Japan’s Emperor and took hostages. After a four-month standoff (covered assiduously by Japan’s media—reporters even snuck inside the compound, which is why Fujimori couldn’t act on his impulse to just rush in and shoot everything up), security forces did finally storm the structure and summarily execute all insurgents on the spot (so brutally that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled it a violation of international law in 2015).

It didn’t matter to Japan. Fujimori continued to cultivate their relationship in case things went sour. By the end of his second term in 2000, things did.

FUJIMORI FLEES INTO JAPAN’S EMBRACE

As Fujimori tried to stand for a third term that was unconstitutional even under his own constitution, his consigliere and CIA agent Vladimir Montesinos got arrested in Panama after video surfaced of him brazenly bribing politicians. So Fujimori fled to Japan after an international summit, famously faxing his resignation from a Tokyo hotel room.

He soon found new digs. Governor Ishihara and far-right novelist Ayako Sono (who famously proposed South-African style apartheid for foreigners in Japan in 2015) put him up as a guest on their properties, and made him the toast of Japan’s ruling elite for years. All this while Interpol put him on their most-wanted list, and Peru demanded Japan extradite him for domestic trial.

Now on the lam, it looked like the law might finally catch up with Fujimori. But here’s the funny thing about demagogues: Outsiders not beholden to the standing power structure get used to bending reality around them—to the point where they figure out how do it in other societies.

Consider Japan’s process to become a Japanese citizen. It’s arduous, of course, and laws explicitly state that dual citizenship is not allowed, moreover people with criminal records or have “voluntarily taken public office in a foreign country” are not allowed to naturalize. Moreover, the process might take years after a series of screenings and difficult paperwork. I know because I’ve done it.

Yet Fujimori was issued a passport mere weeks after defecting. So that kinda laid bare for the rest of us earnest immigrants that Japan won’t follow its own laws if blood and celebrity are involved.

That’s how Japan ignored Peru’s extradition demands because — hey, presto! — Fujimori is a Japanese citizen. True to form of “protecting their own,” like it has done for many Japanese criminals committing crimes overseas (e.g., international child abduction, or even, in the case of Issei Sagawa, cannibalism), Japan granted Fujimori safe haven.

YOU CAN’T KEEP A BAD MAN DOWN

Fujimori could have lived his years in increasing obscurity, but he got bored. So he renewed his Peruvian passport in Tokyo, flew to Chile in 2005, and declared his candidacy for the upcoming Peruvian presidential election in absentia. The fool was promptly placed under house arrest. From Chile, in 2007 he ran for an Upper House seat in Japan in absentia, and lost. He was extradited to Peru shortly afterwards, and in 2009 was convicted in four criminal trials and sentenced to decades in prison.

But the story doesn’t end there.

In came the family. Fujimori’s daughter to Keiko ran for the presidency in 2011, 2016, and 2021 to spring her dad from jail; fortunately she lost each time. So Fujimori’s son Kenji (who also got elected to office) got a pardon from the current president in 2017 after a backroom deal. But in 2018 that pardon was overturned by Peru’s Supreme Court, so back in the clink he went. After a series of flip-flops by future courts, Alberto Fujimori was finally released from jail on humanitarian grounds at the end of 2023, less than a year before he died of cancer.

But the story still doesn’t end there.

LESSONS OF THE FUJIMORI CASE

Pundit Dave Spector once told me that Alberto Fujimori is an accident of birthplace. “If he were born in Canada, he’d be a dentist, not a dictator.”

I don’t disagree, but one more dynamic worth exploring here is what happens when political machines get intertwined with family ties. They embed corruption and make it generational.

Elections in democracies are often a family affair. In fact, they’d better be on board. Photos of the spouse and kids often appear in campaigns to ground someone as “a family man.” The “First Lady” has a storied role. Relatives emerge to capitalize (“Billy Beer,” anyone?), In fact, “I’m doing it for my family” is usually seen as a positive motivation.

But families have weird power outcomes, and we reflexively tend to excuse them as part of the “whole fam damily” thing. But in public positions, this a recipe for people getting jobs and tasks not based upon merit. “Nepo babies” are a thing. You gave that job to your gormless kid because blood is thicker than water, and that’s somehow relatable.

So when governmental leadership structures centralize around families, horrible things happen. The most glaring example is the Kim family in North Korea, who have lived as kings for the better part a century, but plenty of autocracies make sure the right blood remains in power. That’s precisely what kingdoms are, after all.

Yet democracies are demonstrably not immune. For example, generational families make up the lion’s share of Diet members in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. In the Philippines, even after decades of kleptocracy and repression under Ferdinand Marcos, his son Bongbong still got elected president in 2022. Even wife “shoe closet” Imelda — who is still alive!— won multiple elections to the House of Representatives despite all her convictions for corruption.

For its part, the US has had multiple president Adamses, Harrisons, Roosevelts, and Bushes. Canada has their Trudeaus, India their Gandhis. Similar generational leadership can be found in France, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, You get the idea. Once they get power, they “keep it in the family.”

That’s why when rich Japan similarly saw Fujimori as “part of the family,” it opened a sluice gate of money that finessed largesse and forgave excess.

Thus Japan bears a fundamental responsibility in keeping Fujimori in clover and out of jail.

Even after Alberto’s death, Peru remains saddled with the Fujimoris stinking up the place. Alberto’s daughter Keiko, son Kenji, and ex-wife Susana have all had stints in Peru’s legislature. No doubt Keiko is going to make a few more runs at the presidency, since her father’s political machine, according to Transparency International, has embezzled approximately $600 million. In 2004, TI listed Alberto as the ninth most corrupt leader in the world, joining the good company of leaders from the Philippines, Ukraine, Zaire, Nigeria, Malaysia, Serbia, and Haiti—all countries whose populations can ill-afford billions of government dollars being spirited away by political families.

This matters because come November, the United States seems likely to join these ranks. Revelations surface daily about how corrupt the Trump family has been during and after the Trump presidency. If he gets back in, expect even worse grift. Even if he loses, expect his eldest son to remain a kingmaker in the Republican Party.

Still, as of right now, the Trumps are pikers compared to Fujimori. For brutally subverting a democracy for the next generation or two, exploiting another democracy by leveraging their weakness for cultural superiority and racial bloodlines, siphoning off more money than the economies of entire countries, and killing, maiming, and impoverishing hundreds of thousands of people just for the sake of profit, ego, and hair-brained schemes, Alberto Fujimori deserves a special place in hell.

Accident of birth or not, Alberto Fujimori is the Governor Ishihara who actually managed to achieve his goals. And like Ishihara, that’s worth covering in one of my obits.

ENDS
======================
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Debito’s SNA VM 60: “MAGA’s roots in Japan” (Oct 3, 2024), where I argue the GOP’s targeting of non-citizens as “pet-eating illegals” in Springfield OH would be rather quaint in Japan. It’s straight out of the quarter-century-old playbook of the Far-Right “Netto Uyoku”

Posted on October 3, 2024February 28, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

MAGA’S ROOTS IN JAPAN
Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 60, October 3, 2024
Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/10/03/visible-minorities-magas-roots-in-japan/

It’s been called the “silly season” in American politics: The last weeks before the November election, when politicians sling whatever mud comes to mind and hope something sticks. Use the media to define your opponents before they define you. And if innocents get caught in the crossfire, oh well. Too bad. That’s politics.

This season’s most insidious indictment of innocents are the false claims, by candidate Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, that illegal Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. No matter how much debunking has been made by local authorities and the credible media, they have kept on repeating the lies, disrupting services and terrorizing Springfield with Far-Right marches and death threats.

This bad-faith libel is horrifying, but I’m actually rather inured to it. It’s a tactic I’ve seen in Japan for decades, and it’s been imported by America’s Far-Right: Fearmonger about foreigners to generate a social movement.

MAGA, INSPIRED BY JAPAN

As I argued in my concluding chapter of “Embedded Racism”, Second Edition, Japan is fetishized as a template “ethnostate” by the world’s White Supremacists: It keeps itself “pure,” free from immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” It has no official immigration policy, has revolving-door work visa policies designed to stop cheap imported labor from actually settling in Japan, and has a cultural narrative that foreign residents must settle for second-class status, with no expectation of equal treatment or even guarantees of human rights under Japan’s Constitution. If you don’t like it, “go back to wherever you came from.”

This ideology has been openly espoused by even the highest levels of Japan’s government. Even Far-Right ideologue Steve Bannon famously called the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe “Trump before Trump.”

But trying to adapt Japan’s xenophobia is one thing. Japan’s more impressive innovation is exporting tools to rally the Far-Right, as seen in the rise of the fringe in democracies including Brazil, Holland, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States.

The internet exploded in the early 1990s, but by the turn of the century Japan had already perfected communication networks (such as 2-Chan) servicing the Netto Uyoku (Internet Right-Wing). These anonymous bullying communities could target dissenting newspapers and businesses, make public the personal contacts of opponents, and assemble overnight the flag-wavers and bullhorns to terrify whole communities. Particularly foreign communities, including ethnic Korean schools, Brazilian neighborhoods, and recently Kurdish enclaves.

So what’s happening in Springfield is, if anything, a bit quaint. This playbook is a quarter-century old in Japan.

The Uyoku have enjoyed great success in Japan. With the power to shift political narratives and votes, they have killed open-minded policy proposals (such as giving local suffrage to generational permanent residents) with hateful and murderous invective. Entire political platforms dismissed “individual liberties” and “human rights” as “Western concepts” antithetical to Japanese native values. Well-funded by ultraconservatives (such as Nippon Kaigi) long nursing historical grievances over losing a war and an empire, thanks to the revolutions of the Internet they have had enough volume in the media to make the fringe seem mainstream.

They not only undermined Japan’s Left to point of restoring a grandson of a war criminal (Abe) to power, making him the longest-serving Prime Minister in history, they also helped cause the collapse of the largest leftist political party (the Democratic Party of Japan). To this day, there is scant hope of a leftist party ever retaking power.

This much success was astounding to fringes elsewhere, so they wanted in. Japan’s troll website “2-Chan” became “4-Chan” in English, anger-inducing algorithms in online communities steered people towards extremist echo chambers, etc. Further assisted by outside autocracies and their Internet bot-farms, the Far-Right rallied worldwide like never before.

The United States was particularly susceptible. Given that it has more guns than people, a strong historical distrust of government, and an extremely flawed electoral system that can be gamed to favor rural conservative voters, the US’s Far-Right surprised everyone in 2016. They put an opportunistic con man in the presidency whose only qualification was being rich and good at stoking grievance, not to mention being completely devoid of any ideology or moral values beyond winning.

DIFFERENT SOCIETY, DIFFERENT OUTCOME?

We know well where the election of Donald Trump led. A person woefully unequipped to deal with democratic processes or national crises resulted in death, destruction, and insurrection. Other democracies learned from this and disqualified their demagogues from running again. Not the United States, where centuries-old anti-majoritarian flaws embedded within its constitution still allow an insurrectionist and convicted felon to run for office. He has a decent chance of winning again if he continues to command more than 40% of a tribalized electorate.

However, we’re seeing interesting differences between how the US and Japan are dealing with their Uyoku, and that speaks to the strength of America’s civil society.

For example, compare the Springfield case with, for example, the Kurdish or Brazilian areas targeted in Japan.

In both Japan and America, politicians fearmongered for attention, and the conservative press (e.g., Fox and Newsmax in the US, Yomiuri and Fuji-Sankei in Japan) sensationalized the evils that “illegals” commit, bolstered by cherry-picking crime statistics from a compliant police force or a border control agency. Make “foreign crime” into a campaign issue and normalize xenophobia — that’s the Uyoku playbook, and it worked in America too for a stretch.

The difference is that in the US, the liberal voice can be as loud as the conservative. Part of it is due to the strength of the data. You can find government statistics and academic publications, cited by the trustworthy press on a regular basis, that reliably demonstrate how much the foreign workforce contributes to the economy, and how foreigners have crime rates lower than citizens. This creates a stronger narrative that immigrants are a boon, not a bane.

In Japan, however, data of this ilk has been consistently muffled. The press pretty much parrots the police narrative. Most of the statistics you find on foreigners in Japan are couched in crime statistics, because the government (i.e., Ministry of Justice, not a ministry dedicated to immigration) is more interested in tracking and policing them, not supporting them as they assimilate. In the Japanese media, try to find any publication that calls imported laborers “immigrants.” There isn’t even a word for it yet. Which means the default assumption is that foreigners are temporary workers, here to make money off the economy instead of contribute to it.

There’s also the fact that minority voices in the US are much stronger. Reporters and news networks actually go on-site to targeted areas such as Springfield and channel the voices of the discriminated directly into the national conversation. They also megaphone liberal politicians, interest groups, and civil rights experts. Even late-night comedians (the overwhelming majority of whom are liberal, many even immigrants themselves) keep a steady drumbeat exposing how the arguments against immigrants are ludicrous.

In Japan, however, you might get some media reportage on the plight of foreign workers, but most of it is muted through the voices of Japanese spokespeople who aren’t affected by the discrimination themselves. Rarely do you hear the voice of the Non-Japanese person because people reflexively assume a language barrier. At best, you might get the occasional feel-good feature on one brave foreigner with translated platitudes about common humanity, but again, nobody calling him an “immigrant” who now belongs in Japan.

You don’t even have good late-night political comedy in Japan (because sarcasm isn’t really a source of humor in Japanese). Plus I lost my “Just Be Cause” column in The Japan Times (which got more than a million page views during its decades-long run) because of a pro-Abe switch in ownership. Again, these voices get muted. It matters.

HOPE ON THE HORIZON?

For a case in point, contrast Japan’s media narratives with this column in the Daily Beast dated September 25 entitled, “Why I hope Trump’s racist pet-eating lie will cook his goose.”

Its subtitle is “Donald Trump is not a real American,” because, “real Americans stand up against bigotry. Real Americans care about the least among us, not only because we are empathetic humans, but because a generation or two back, most of our families were in exactly the same position.”

The main arguments are about “how profoundly anti-American the Trump/Vance ticket has now become.”

“Anti-American?!” That’s stunning. Can you imagine any mainstream Japanese press opining that somebody discriminating against and libeling foreign residents of Japan is “anti-Japanese?”

Quite the opposite. The corresponding term, “han-Nichi”, is usually reserved for critics who oppose the Uyoku, and it doesn’t get all that much pushback. Thus elements of their bigoted views are often so normalized in Japanese society they are visibly part of the legal structure and national narrative. Read my book “Embedded Racism” for more substantiation.

CAN THINGS REALLY CHANGE?

One can make a solid case that these differences between the US in Japan are a matter of culture, I.e., one society grounded in a narrative of a “nation of immigrants,” and another that sees itself as (despite all evidence to the contrary) as a “monocultural, monoethnic, isolated island nation” (tan’itsu minzoku, shimaguni). After all, Japan only opened up to the world, er, um, nearly two centuries ago.

The problem is that putting things down to culture makes societies look static. That’s untrue. To me, the difference is more legal than cultural. And fortunately, you can reconstruct the cultural through the legal.

For example, the world reconstructed itself to abolish an evil as dire as slavery, once a commonplace feature of prospering societies.

Japan too has reconstructed itself to shed feudalism, imperialism, and suicidal militarism.

How? Because people eventually realized, usually the hard way, that giving legal license to systemic bigotry and hate-based privilege only leads to awful consequences, including genocides, civil wars, and revolutions.

So the racisms of the world, including targeting foreigners for political sport and advantage, must be legislated away. You don’t just wait for the bigots to naturally “come around.” That’s why we have a United Nations treaty against racial discrimination and related intolerance (which Japan too has signed).

However, for nearly three decades now, Japan has violated not only that treaty but also its own constitution (Article 14), refusing to pass a law against racial discrimination. And it has long gotten a free pass for it thanks to geopolitics. The Western powers need Japan plugged into the world economy, anti-communist, and now anti-China. If some foreigners suffer, oh well. That’s politics.

Well, as they say, karma’s a bitch. As seen above, this free pass has allowed Japan to become a fast-breeder reactor of Far-Rightism, with Uyoku-styled networks undermining democracies worldwide.

How Japan treats its non-citizen residents and diverse communities is a bellwether for how future neofascist demagogues in other countries will treat their minority voices and views. Because, again, Japan is their template.

Will the United States, despite its own enormously flawed record (e.g., the legacies of slavery, indigenous genocides, and geopolitical war crimes), detoxify itself from its own demagoguery in its November elections?

There’s a decent chance. It’s happened numerous times in American democracy and civil society.

And if it does, it’s time for the democracies of the world, including Japan, to face the fact that their societies are not static. Majorities change over time, as do their priorities.

The nature of majority rule means that societies in flux (in America’s case, becoming demographically browner), must have governments that respond to this change, not preserving bigotry and White Supremacism just because it’s historical and loud.

It’s the “silly season,” yes, but what’s at stake this election is anything but silly.

My SNA Visible Minorities column 59: “Kamala Harris and Shorter US Elections”, on how the US, as the “arsenal of democracy” has to do something about its wasteful election system; could Harris have inadvertently provided a template? (Sept 2, 2024)

Posted on August 31, 2024February 28, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Kamala Harris and Shorter US Elections

American elections are fun to watch but unnecessarily long and wasteful. Could Kamala Harris be setting a precedent for shortening the election season?

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 59, Sept 2, 2024
Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/09/02/visible-minorities-kamala-harris-and-shorter-us-elections/

SNA (Tokyo) — I love elections. It’s not just that they are the quickest and most effective way for people to select their representatives. It’s also that elections are a fascinating reflection of how leaders are held accountable in a society, and how often the ruling elites feel they have to listen to the public. Put simply, without good elections, you don’t have a democracy.

As a Political Science professor and nerd, I’ve had the great fortune to not only observe democratic elections firsthand in multiple countries, but also the honor to vote in two (first the United States, later Japan). Election days anywhere are like an extra Christmas—or perhaps (Ballot) Boxing Day—where I sit in front of the TV with a stiff drink watching the presents open. Bonus points for how the country’s media visually explains how things work as clearly and concisely as possible, lending legitimacy to the process. (Japan’s TV networks even make elections look cute!)

But I think the United States could do much better. American elections come up woefully short compared to those in, say, Canada, Great Britain, and Japan. Even a logistical mess like India (proudly the world’s largest democracy) is peerless at making polling stations available to its 900 million constituents.

That’s the subject of this month’s column: What the United States gets wrong. As the oldest modern presidential system and the self-styled “arsenal of democracy,” the Americans must do better. It’s not like the Americans haven’t had enough practice. They hold the most elections in the world.

Elections-R-Us

The United States, if anything, has too many elections. Even petty bureaucrats, whose jobs are meritocratically filled by civil servants in other countries, are subject to political popularity contests.

Consider these jobs that would be merely filled by civil servants in other countries: sheriffs, coroners, school board members, transportation district board members, justices and clerks of the peace, public advocates, mine inspectors; commissioners of land, public utilities, railroads, agriculture, insurance, public instruction, etc. I dare American readers to go to www.runforsomething.net, put in their zip code, and see what’s up for grabs near them.

To the astonishment of other democracies, the United States even elects its judges, including state supreme court justices, which unhelpfully politicizes the judiciary. Even election supervisors are elected, and that creates some pretty bad incentive systems. Since state governments decide their own electoral rules and districts, this leads to some normalized rigging in favor of one political party. (That’s a column for another day.)

Now remember that American elections happen at the federal, state, county, city, town, and regional levels. Then throw in the extra “pre-elections” in every state and territory (called Primaries) that choose party candidates for Election Day in November, and take almost a year to run. This is why at any given time, somebody somewhere in the United States is campaigning for public office.

Sounds like democracy, right? But it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

The Wastefulness of Perpetual Campaigning

Since the lion’s share of these offices are two-year terms, that means that right after you assume office you have to plan your re-election.

Naturally, election campaigns cost money, and the higher up you go, the more it costs. Successful campaigns require media investment in message (the “air war”) and in the hiring of staff and coordination of volunteers to get out the vote (the “ground war”). And that’s before we consider the logistical cost of transportation, security, on-site services, and campaign swag at public rallies.

Now add in all the money that gets pumped into the media from organizations and corporations to shift public narratives in their favor, and you find out that US election campaigns are the longest and most expensive in the world.

Successful Congressional candidates each invested on average nearly $3 million in 2022, while Senators spent more than $26 million—multiples of what it cost a generation ago. And that’s before we get to down-ballot races.

Each American election has been more expensive than the previous one, even after accounting for inflation. That’s why reps devote on average a third to half of their work time just on fundraising. That’s an enormous time suck on actual legislating.

But it matters if you don’t. History shows the candidate who spends more usually wins. News outlets routinely measure the popularity of a candidate by the size of their financial “war chests.” It’s a convenient shorthand, but it means an ever-escalating arms race between candidates that sucks in everyone and everything (down to the weekly “please send $5” emails in most Americans’ inboxes).

Squirrel!

Another thing US elections suck away is attention. Like dogs chasing tennis balls served at regular intervals, media devote obsessive airtime to candidates, their rallies, their steps and missteps, and if there’s no drama, they’ll find some. In any election year, we basically have a media blackout on what’s going on in other countries, or on other meaningful issues that aren’t on the campaign ticket. All sorts of shenanigans go on around the world while the Americans are distracted.

Now the distraction is no longer limited to election years. In the age of Trump (who, as a master manipulator of the media cycle, has constantly occupied the American mindspace for a decade now), campaigns have now become perpetual.

Other countries see this as a cautionary tale. So they legally limit their campaign seasons to a few weeks and strictly enforce it.

Consider Japan. If you utter or print a poster saying explicitly “vote for me” outside of the official campaign time, you will likely be disqualified as a future candidate. Having run my ex-wife’s (successful) campaign, I know how strict it is. So the political posters you see outside party offices or supportive businesses are careful just to display a person’s name, political party, and an anodyne slogan. The hint of “vote” is nowhere.

But once the starting gun goes off, you have ten days to two weeks before the election to campaign as much as you like. Put up your posters, get in your sound trucks, have laconic ingénues in white gloves wave at people from the windows, and spout slogans at mega-decibels to your heart’s content. Just keep it all between the hours of 8am and 8pm or again face disqualification.

Japanese politicians look at what their American counterparts go through and shudder.

Nevertheless, We Persisted

Granted, many Americans would have it no other way. They’re proud of the energy behind campaigning, celebrating constitutional freedom of speech and association, while political junkies tune in daily to their favorite networks and reaffirm their tribal identities. It’s perpetual Christmas for them too.

There are merits to this system. I find public debates in the United States a lot more interesting than in other countries, with the average J. Q. Citizen being asked their opinion a lot more with all the polling, corn-dogging at state fairs, and public baby kissing. Moreover, party manifestos are de rigueur with talking points coalescing around “hot-button” issues. “What is this election about?” is a feature you don’t find in, for example, many parliamentary “snap” elections.

Plus, thanks to the extended campaigning, Americans get to know their candidates better than in Japan; the mystique of the American President is fortified worldwide after years of running a gauntlet. On the other hand, politicians in Japan are rarely quizzed in depth on the issues, and can usually get away with shallow “ganbarimasu” sloganeering. “Stay the course… or don’t,” is often the depth of thought behind a Japanese election. Offering an official party manifesto only started this century. Boring.

Yet for all the investment and energy, one could still question whether US elections are all that effective. Even in the best of times, only about two-thirds of the US electorate actually turns out to vote.

That’s why I think the shorter, cheaper, less obsessive campaigns on balance offer more bang for the buck, and are better for a democratic society.

Signs of Change?

Habits that have happened for centuries can be hard to break. The United States has held elections like this since 1796 when political parties first appeared. And since every state has to vote for candidates over the course of a year, it’s hard to believe this system can actually be rejiggered.

But one interesting precedent has just been set: the changing of the candidates at the last minute.

I’m a tiny bit smug that on Saturday, July 19, I wrote on Facebook:

Trump’s closing speech at the Republican National Convention last night clinched it for me.

It’s time for Joe Biden to bow out and let the Democrats select a younger candidate.

The GOP can go into this election saddled with and hijacked by their aging Castro-esque rambling speechifier. The Dems don’t have to be.

It’s a prime opportunity next week to have the Democrats as a political party do what it’s designed to do, and what it’s done umpteen times in the past: Choose somebody to represent the party through a party delegate election.

Call it ‘smoke-filled rooms’ Party Machine politics of yore if you want. I will call it a party reacting to the exigencies of the situation, now realizing that, as I’ve said before, poor old Joe is just all used up after four years in the world’s most demanding job.

Let’s face that reality and make the switch, starting next Monday.

Biden was obviously listening. On that Monday, July 21, he dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

This meant Harris essentially leapfrogged the entire year of primaries yet became the Democratic nominee.

The chattering classes stuck in the past, of course, doubted whether anyone could rally the party behind her within three months. Despite the fact that in other democracies, this takes mere weeks (and in Britain, the transition of administrations only takes one day!).

Yet Harris did exactly that, and in about two weeks. Moreover, this streamlined campaign has managed to completely upend the race.

The American left’s pent-up energy against Trump has produced a social movement with the most energized (and surprisingly watchable) Democratic National Convention in history, and she now leads in almost every national and “battleground state” poll. And if the cynics need more proof, consider the fact that Harris’s campaign has raised the most money in such a short time ever in history.

For now, Harris has flipped the script. If she can pull this off in November, she will have conducted the shortest and most successful underdog presidential campaign in American history.

We’ll see, of course. Two months is an eternity in politics. Look what two weeks did to the Trump campaign, where all his momentum after trouncing Biden in a debate and surviving an assassination attempt essentially vanished.

Could the Harris campaign be a case for a new playbook streamlining the wasteful American political process? Condense all those years of effort into a few months or weeks? Make American election campaigns closer to normal by world standards of democracy?

Probably not, but in a campaign season suddenly running on hope, that would be one of my hopes.

ENDS

debito.org

On Democracy

My latest SNA VM 64: “It can only end in violence”: On how ignoring the rule of law will mean somebody’s going to get hurt, and in a society that goes to extremes like America does, only extreme blowback is going to make the pendulum swing back.

IT CAN ONLY END IN VIOLENCE

Subtitle: That’s what happens when the rule of law meets a lawless leader

Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 64, February 26, 2025

By Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

WE LIVE IN EXTREME TIMES…

THE ROOT CAUSE: AMERICA’S NATURAL-BORN EXTREMISM

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

AMERICA AS THE COWBOY IN THE WHITE HAT

EMBEDDED STRUCTURAL EXTREMISM

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

IT CAN ONLY END IN VIOLENCE

HNY 2025: My SNA VM column 63: “Trump’s Weak Mandate”, on how 47’s victory was in fact a narrow one, and arguably not because people support his authoritarianism. More a worldwide election trend against incumbent parties. Don’t fall for 47’s ploy.

Visible Minorities 63: Trump’s Weak Mandate

Subtitle: Trump is reentering the presidency with what has been called an “overwhelming, historic mandate.” That’s not true. In fact, the case is stronger that what happened was less a matter of support for Trump and more a worldwide repudiation of incumbents. Keep reminding people of that.

Look at the Statistics: The Senate

Look at the Statistics: The House

Caveats to Trump’s Mandate

Worldwide Trends in Democracy

Reading This Election

The Point: Do Not Obey in Advance

The End of the Tunnel

Debito’s SNA Visible Minorities 62: “Electing the Joker” (Dec 10, 2024), on how a trend over the past decades to depict the “villain as hero” in popular culture has influenced politics downstream and made Trump more electable

SNA VM 62: “Electing the Joker”

People still can’t believe Trump won again. Let’s consider how a shift in American popular culture favoring the villain over the hero might have legitimized it.

TRACE THE ARC OF THE ELECTABLE VILLAIN

TRUMP’S SURPRISING ADVANTAGES IN THIS NEW CULTURAL MILIEU

DEMOCRACY FANS NEED TO GET READY

My SNA Visible Minorities 61: “An Obituary for Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori”: As Trump is set to take the US Presidency again, let us consider the damage wrought by mixing political machines with family ties (Nov 2, 2024)

My SNA Visible Minorities column 59: “Kamala Harris and Shorter US Elections”, on how the US, as the “arsenal of democracy” has to do something about its wasteful election system; could Harris have inadvertently provided a template? (Sept 2, 2024)

Kamala Harris and Shorter US Elections

American elections are fun to watch but unnecessarily long and wasteful. Could Kamala Harris be setting a precedent for shortening the election season?

Elections-R-Us

The Wastefulness of Perpetual Campaigning

Squirrel!

Nevertheless, We Persisted

Signs of Change?