Authoritarianism and Aggression, #3
Notes in a time of crisis, February 26 – March 1, 2025
Cover image from 1966 paperback edition of Elizabeth Wiskemann’s classic study, Europe of the Dictators, 1919-1945.
This post is one of a series, in each of which I have created a compendium of Substack "notes" that I have written this last month that are on the substantial side. All the notes engage the historical moment in which we find ourselves, thus the general theme of authoritarianism and aggression.
The series is introduced in the emailed post called An Age of Authoritarianism and Aggression: Introducing a Series of Crisis Notes.
Usually, my notes are not free-standing but in reaction to a news item, a Substack post, and so on; you can link to the item to which I am responding by clicking on the sub-heading. I am refraining from adding commentary other than the sub-heading.
I am proceeding reverse chronologically. This post — #3 in the series — starts with February 26, 2025, and proceeds to March 1.
March 1: Note commenting on
“The War Trump Chooses”Timothy Snyder has just posted on the wider geopolitical meaning of the thuggery in the White House yesterday. He unpacks the Republican/WH justification for what we witnessed — Trump seeks “peace” (through bullying and humiliation and whatever else, but we are well passed the time when his defenders care about the seemliness or propriety of his reprehensible methods) — and shows the irrationality of this claim. In the process of showing the words and conduct are antithetical to a real peace agenda, Snyder’s analysis then leads to the question — are they just inept/dumb or, rather, does the baseless nature of the justification reveal that other motivations and agendas are really behind the “peace” front? Asked and answered, I would say.
We can set aside as essentially just a terminological issue how much we thus are also being “gaslit” by this justification. But maybe it is more than that and worth a short inquiry.
Gaslighting is typically understood as deliberately being done by the perpetrator of inane or insane words and deeds in order to have people lose their bearings as to truth and doubt their own grasp of reality. In Trump’s world, he is so far into a muddle of lies, believed rationalizations and chronic nonsensical beliefs that unpacking motive is a parlour game where the answer (as to which is the operative mode) may differ from day to day — or actually from sentence to sentence in the same moment in time.
So we might do well to think of “gaslighting in the result” — where Trump and Vance’s motives or beliefs are too mixed or almost beside the point. There can be no doubt that many of us were driven, if only momentarily, into an Alice in the Looking Glass state of mind when we looked on in disbelief at the planned ambush and verbal mugging of Zelenskyy. That effect was its own thing and what the muggers intended specifically for the audience to experience mattered not for what we did experience. Feeling unmoored from a sane world (whether or not we are conscious that gaslighting in the intentional sense may be going on) is a reaction Trump and Vance — or their psyches — want as a pervasive feeling of being those they seek to vanquish. Whether in any given moment they are lying or posturing for a deal or stating their actual beliefs or actually doing nothing but intentional gaslighting, their strategy (if you will) involves a constant mode of mass trolling designed to de-centre and demoralize “the enemy” - us.
March 1: Note commenting on
/ David Sypher’s “Trump Bullied Zelenskyy. Marco Rubio Just Bullied Himself”A helpful piece from a former Republican candidate. It is an important reminder of the craven presence of Marco Rubio in the Trump regime apparatus. This first month, Rubio reminds me of the little boy seated at the kids’ table at a family gathering — who every now and then is put on display by Papa and Mama to show how precocious he is by answering skill-testing trivia questions and to demonstrate how well he parrots his parents’ views.
Not sure if DS is an ex Republican too, but the key point is the need for a movement of sane and decent Republicans (of which there are vanishingly few — any? — left in Congress) or recent Republicans who need to take back their party. It will be hard and slow. It will need bravery and even the willingness to risk threats and possibly violence from the MAGA mob and Trump/Vance targeting. It will likely never happen, but one can hope.
This was shared by DS in a comment on an Adam Kinzinger post, speaking of a major former Congressperson with a voice in the wilderness from the days when Republicans had not yet fully succumbed to mass delusion, worship of stupidity and chicanery, and ideological haze/craze — “not fully” being the operative phrase given how Trumpism did not actually come from nowhere in the Republican realm. From Nixon setting the scene and then from Gingrich on, some of Trump’s worsts had come to dominate, with waxes and wanes, the Republican Party long before he descended that escalator. Others of his worsts have had a firm foothold for years and now are baked into the Republican universe as gospel.
Back to Rubio. When DS mentions Rubio’s main ambition being to keep his job, that may be largely right (that and somehow trying to stay in the game to become president one day). Whether he will be set up and given the axe (with a loose plan likely already in Stephen Miller’s or Vance’s mind and/or gurgling away in Trump’s gut-mind) or whether he will try to get out in front and at some point resign by trying to claim he can’t stand the slime anymore or, more likely, that Trump/Vance have crossed a line (and yesterday with Zelenskyy somehow wasn’t?…), who can say? The game for him is how long he can hold out before the ax falls ahead of polls or markets getting bad enough that he judges he has some chance to jump on any bandwagon of remorse or panic that may take hold of Republicans. The thing is, Marco, virtually all of your Congressional colleagues are so lost — their cravenness matches your own — that your abandon-ship moment will likely never come so by definition the Trump/Vance ax will get you first. Your only shot is to come clean with some sort of an epiphany that you have been sadly, egregiously wrong in your choices and be accepted as part of a Republican resistance. Good luck with that! You’ve burnt your bridges and shown your lack of a moral compass to such an extent that, Dear Marco, there will be schadenfreude all around whatever your lot turns out to be.
February 28: Note commenting on
’s “Power and Powerlessness”Michael Ignatieff has recently come to Substack. This is a terrific development. Spread the word, follow, subscribe and recommend.
I first came to know his work with his wonderful The Needs of Strangers book back in 1987 when I was working on a graduate thesis, and — apart from his support for war on Iraq on humanitarian intervention grounds (later recanted as a mistaken position, to his credit) — most of his work has made major contributions as scholarship that is both erudite and accessible. I think for example of his book Blood and Belonging on the struggle between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism, which deserves a reread in these times.
Ignatieff tried his hand as leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. In fact, he could (under our parliamentary system) have become Prime Minister because it was his choice whether or not to inherit an agreement amongst three parties to ask the Governor General to name the Liberal leader (Stephane Dion at the time of the agreement) as PM after the Harper government so disastrously responded to the 2008 financial crisis. He demurred and rejected pursuing this chance to be PM without an election out of a broader sense that this was not the best way (whether optically or out of some layering of a non-Westminster democratic sensibility onto the situation). It was also the case that the three-party agreement had provoked a prorogation of Parliament during which time the Harper government did a 360 and returned with plans to stimulate the economy in a sane way (setting aside their ideological insanity that had provoked the three-party agreement in the first place). In other words, the opposition parties maximized their role as loyal opposition by shaking a gravely asleep-at-the-switch government out of its delusional torpor that business as usual was a sufficient response to the meltdown.
This showed great integrity on his part. Few Canadians realize the above. They only remember the 2011 general election campaign when the NDP surged in Québec and Ignatieff’s Liberals were crushed, leading to his resignation.
He went on to take up the leadership as president of the Central European University located in Budapest, Hungary. There then followed years of battle for academic freedom and university autonomy against the authoritarian (frankly, fascist-wannabe) leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban — the ‘strongman’ who Trump and Vance idolize and the politician who uses antisemitic tropes in his messaging and campaigning and yet is best buddy with Israel’s Netanyahu. That fight by Ignatieff and his colleagues led in the end to CEU departing Budapest and being centred in Vienna, where he now remains a professor.
Ignatieff is one Canada’s leading public intellectuals. He understands political philosophy, politics and war & diplomacy as a combination like relatively few scholars.
We should welcome his appearance on the scene of Substack writing and analysis. Make his presence known widely!
February 27: Note commenting on Globe and Mail article “The facts on fentanyl and the northern border”
The Globe and Mail did legwork to disprove the Trump figures (using a figure of 43 pounds as the most recent year) on the amount of fentanyl seized at the US border.
It seems that the US record keeping system refers to any seizures anywhere in northern region of US as northern border seizures. Go figure.
Globe reporters talked to the key law enforcement people in areas of seizure and scoured court records for indications of sources — and the overwhelming result was Mexican cartels from Mexico and not even using Canada as waystation (some 5 pounds seized in Detroit were indeed from Canada as transit route and Canadian authorities acknowledge).
Amongst the questions raised:
1) Why did the government of Canada not know this? Why does it take a newspaper to track down these facts?
2) If Canadian government did know this, why did it not make it a centrepiece in its public information and pushback strategy? The answer would seem to be a clear policy of appeasement with these steps: don’t challenge specific amounts but just (feebly) say way less comes to US from Canada than Mexico, then spend 1.3 billion to give him a win, say zero on how drugs flood into Canada from the US so as not to antagonize him further, and hope he finds no new reasons for tariffs (rather forgetting he has already said he would use economic coercion, from tariffs to whatever else falls in that basket, to try to secure our annexation).
And look where this gets you: Trump has just reannounced 25% tariffs specifically on the basis of Canada as a drug source. You give, he takes and then demands more.
The government likely knew their strategy had a limited chance of working and felt they had a duty to try it. I get it.
But we are now over a month in on watching Trump 2.0 on multiple fronts. We have no excuse not to be fully aware of his character perversions on so many dimensions the Matrix could not keep up. We know that kowtowing and obsequious behaviour (that started with the come-pay-tribute-in-my-palace visits to Mar a Lago) please him — not because he believes in their genuineness and then becomes more inclined to make nice, but rather because he revels in the game of toying with people and watching their humiliation. For him, even bringing a Marco Rubio to heel to the point he is now Secretary of State is not a matter of Trump actually believing Rubio has come to live him or is loyal to him in the bootlicking way Trump wants; it is a matter of Trump delighting in showcasing examples of capitulation. It is also admittedly something else too; it is intermingled with the likelihood that he also wants to show he welcomes those who see the light after not initially seeing how right he is on this or that or everything; such welcoming into one’s own fold a former enemy or critic serves as an act of public forgiveness, which, no surprise, also is a common way to ritualistically show magnanimity — and power — in the gangster world.
This mollification strategy of dealing with Trump has to end. Counter with the facts and only implement policies that make sense on their own — including when that means we own up to being asleep at the switch and needing to do so something now that should have been done before regardless of whether Trump demanded it coercively.
February 25: Note commenting on Martin McSweeney’s
’ “Betrayal can provide an opportunity to change the world”The world needs to watch this short but so powerful speech from the Danish Prime Minister at the Ukraine summit, again and again:
Whether or not Europe rallies in a couple short months to respond to the treachery of Trump’s desire to hand Ukraine over to Putin on a dinner plate by replacing the US’ role witj the massive combined strength of a European economy many times that of Russia’s and capable of gearing up to meet the Russia threat if government gets its act together, …well, that will be a defining moment in world history, whether they succeed or fail.
But, Canadians wake up, wake up, wake up. The dynamics over there are almost as crucial for us as for Ukraine.
Europe will be focused on Europe and indeed the Danish PM’s speech only spoke of “Europe”. How could the Danish PM say “Europe and Canada” and not cause one more reason for Trump to paint an even bigger target on our back — so it was wise to it to do so. Canada may even have asked Denmark not to mention Canada, who knows.
But the absence of Canada as part of Europe is real because Europe will have limited to no capacity or and unreliable political will to help rescue Canada if Trump’s annexation threats get super coercive and even turn to military means of various sorts — where Europe will be focused on pushing back Russia and on keeping itself from fracturing from within due to the Trojan horse political forces within European countries like Orban in Hungary.
You all know that Trump is psychologically capable of a military turn, and the real questions may turn out to be what will hold him back in terms of logistics, political forces in the US, and whether or not he and his family will personally profit. Thus, while there is no certainty or even probability of super economic coercion beyond tariffs or of military coercion, it is completely possible depending on unpredictable path-dependent developments. But it will become closer and closer to probable the more Trump feels like he has unleashed forces for Russia to take chunks of neighbours and indeed for China to take Taiwan and yet “what do I get?”.
Nothing I have said about waking up says one thing about what we should or can do, but we must truly start to focus on the possibilities — and jettison the complacency that is part of our culture. What can be expect of NATO (if NATO still exists in a few months)? What help is realistic from Europe or Commonwealth countries like Australia? What contingency plans does government need to have? …These questions are relevant to all situations of extreme coercion coming from the US but especially those of ultimate coercion.
February 26: Note commenting on Philippe Lagasse’s “Time to prepare”
Professor Lagasse has very helpfully present three scenarios that could arise from US economic coercion — including a scenario where Alberta seceding is the first domino to inside-out break-up. I very much recommend reading this — including to help drive further home my stream of “wake up” articles and posts that started with The Line’s publication of my piece on why we needed a government of Canadian unity and resolve the moment Trudeau decided to step down yet elongate his stay as PM (yes, you guessed it, it has something to do with the existential threat represented by the then future Trump regime).
Where Lagasse (sorry, but I can’t do the accent aigu over the e on my handheld) leaves room for more scenarios is the bracketing of military coercion as within the fully possible bag of tactics of Trump — depending on many variables and his path-dependent, unpredictable reactions to each new event in the flow of events.
But these scenarios are enough to grapple with for the moment, all as depressing as they are.
Keep in mind they are three bad scenarios. What our leaders and we do will matter big time, and one could easily write speculative scenarios about how we stave off these possibilities while emerging stronger. But there is no hiding how difficult it will be to achieve the degree of collective resolve, smart leadership and ability to sacrifice (while making sure the less well resourced and otherwise vulnerable are not sideswiped to bear the heaviest burden of our defiance of the US) that will be needed to get us into better-scenario territory.