by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Justice Alito reports German princess gave him $900 concert tickets
Associated Press, September 06, 2024 [via DailyKos]
Justice Samuel Alito reported Friday that he accepted $900 worth of concert tickets from a German princess, but disclosed no trips paid for by other people, according to a new financial disclosure form.
The required annual filing, for which Alito has often sought an extension, doesn’t include details of the event tickets gifted by socialite Gloria von Thurn und Taxis of Germany….
[TW: I begin with seemingly innocuous news item because it bears directly on today’s condition of political culture in USA. The rest of the Associated Press story lists a number of other gifts and courtesies Justice Alito has accepted, and sees nothing else peculiar in the gift by Gloria von Thurn und Taxis.
[Now, Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
[I am not going to write anything more on this Section other than to note its obvious importance as part of the Constitution of a republic in a world dominated and mostly ruled by monarchies and oligarchies. What I want to draw attention to are some of the comments in the DailyKos story:
Sep 06, 2024 at 06:36:03 PM — WTF is a German Princess?
Sep 06, 2024 at 06:40:10 PM —Germany hasn’t been a monarchy for more than 100 years….
Sep 06, 2024 at 06:46:09 PM — Germany still has princesses?
[Ganesh Sitaraman makes the very astute observation in his 2017 book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic that Americans’ historic dislike of monarchies began to disappear after World War Two, when nazism, fascism, and communism came to be perceived as greater threats than oligarchy, and USA elites embraced a “special relationship” with the United Kingdom. To this day, the largest embassy by far in Washington DC is the British.
[But the threats of oligarchy and monarchy did not actually recede; they merely disappeared in the shadows cast by the Cold War. Very few people wondered what had become of the vast fortunes controlled by the former oligarchs of Europe. Perhaps people did not want to ask such potentially embarrassing questions of our new-found anti-communist allies.
[Thurn und Taxis is one of the oldest and nastiest of the European “black nobility.” In the 15th through 18th centuries, the family became one of the richest in the world by operating the postal service used by Europe’s royal families to communicate with each other. In 2017, the family’s net worth was estimated at around $ 2.5 billion, “including the largest privately owned forests in Europe.” Gloria married into the family by wedding Johannes. Their son, Albert, was, at age eight, one of the youngest people ever recorded as a billionaire when Johannes died, leaving Albert sole designated heir of a $3 billion fortune.
[The nephew of Johannes was Max Thurn. He was a major power in the Mont Pelerin Society, serving as secretary from 1976 to 1988. This is the period in which the Mont Pelerin Society’s economic “neoliberalism” became entrenched in power under Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in USA. The past half century of economic “neoliberalism” has pauperized the working class, destroyed the middle class, and enriched only elites, creating the social conditions in which right wing reactionaries thrive.
[It is a tragedy that the USA public and media are largely ignorant of the bloody history of European oligarchs, and fail to make the connection between inherited wealth, the continued existence of oligarchs like Thurn und Taxis, and the collapse of representative democracies around the world. The corruption of US Supreme Court Justice Alito is just a recent case in point.
[The social milieu Justice Alito is apparently comfortable in should certainly be of great public interest, and even, I strongly suggest, of concern to any intelligence agency that seriously understands the importance of maintaining the United States as a republic. Another comment from the DailyKos story:
Sep 07, 2024 at 01:09:34 PM — Back in the 1980’s I spent the afternoon with the “Kiser Apparent” of Germany while working as an archaeologist for the “very rich”. The “Prince” owned catfish farm in Texas. The rich kissed his ass.
[Theorists of civic republicanism warned about the corrupting influence of wealth and luxury. That’s one reason why Section 9 was written. Now consider Donald Trump and who is mentor was:
Aside From The Ones Living In Miami, Brooklyn and WeHo, Will Russians Get To See “The Apprentice?”
Howie Klein, September 07, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Before Trump barged his way into the national consciousness, Roy Cohn was one of the worst villains of any American in our lifetimes— right up there with J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Joseph McCarthy… and on a par with historical miscreants like Jefferson Davis, Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest… A real master of corruption, Cohn built his hideous career by exploiting power, weaponizing fear and perverting the law. From his role as McCarthy’s right-hand man during the Red Scare— ruining countless lives through baseless accusations of communism— to his later years as a ruthless Mafia lawyer, Cohn epitomized everything vile about American greed and runaway ambition. With the exception of a small handful of delusional Republicans, his career is universally seen as a showcase of sociopathic disregard for ethics, and he is seen as a man who thrived on manipulation, blackmail… destruction. Most damning of all, Cohn mentored The Donald, passing along his amoral playbook to a demon who went on to wreak even more havoc on the country. So Cohn’s poisonous influence didn’t end with his death; it metastasized into the very heart of modern American politics.
And now there’s a film! Nick Schager’s preview for the Daily Beast noted that it’s the movie Señor T doesn’t want you to see— and for good reason… a damning film about the making of a monster… “a bona fide supervillain origin story.”As you probably know by now, it’s “an incisive primer on the relationship with Roy Cohn that made the 45th President of the United States who he is today. Which is to say, it lays out the gory details regarding the source of his egomania, greed, ambition, vanity, sociopathy, and heartless rapey-ness, the last of which comes to the fore in a brutal assault of his first wife Ivana.”When they first met, Cohn recognizes him “as a dreamer determined to do whatever it takes to be Rockefeller-grade rich, as well as something of an empty vessel into which he can pour all his evil. Pour he does, gradually taking Trump under his wing and indoctrinating him in the ways of unabashed cutthroat nastiness. To succeed, Cohn instructs, Trump must follow three surefire rules: attack, attack, attack; deny everything and admit nothing; and never acknowledge defeat and always claim victory….
For those advising an attempt to take over the Republican Party. I think candidly that that is even less likely than taking over the Democratic Party.
I live in, and am involved in local politics and environmental activism in, a region that, despite being in a very Blue State, is quite conservative, with some of the towns around here reliably voting for GOP candidates — in Massachusetts — at rates above 60 and 70% (other towns are more reliably Democratic, these differences are fascinating at a sociological level, and quite complicated).
I am in coalition with these conservatives on a critical important local issue where 90 percent of the populace agrees that a corporation is lawless and must be stopped. I grew up with some of them, and know them well, we are of the same small communities (this is also true of the liberals, the left, the non-engaged, the right-wing and left-wing online street fighters, many more — these are smaller towns for Massachusetts, with one exception).
Despite this coalition, or rather because of it, and dealing with them, I think it’s unlikely they are going to be a good candidate for entryism. For one thing, they are viscerally and often just off the wall in their hardcore anti-Communism and 1950s-era redbaiting.
The other thing is that they have as kind of their Ur-Principle the idea that Private Property Is Sacred (this is, as Ur-Principles so often are, is frequently and seemingly without dissonance contradicted by them in the actual practice of their lives). They do not distinguish between the person owning a small cottage and Elon Musk; for them, private property is private property.
A third factor is that fifty years of talk radio, cable news, and now Facebook and other social media have marinated them in a culture of querulous suspicion and anti-reason; they fall for just lunatic conspiracy stuff, and while some of them are just naturally intelligent enough that they fight through this and make real contributions to our local governments, it’s still their native idiom, if that makes sense (like, believing basically every election is stolen; despite the minimizing of certain interlocutors of Trump’s misdeeds, this is a real one, this baseless accusation of fraudulent or stolen elections — this is a corrosive rhetorical move, and one that makes the actual practical life of our bodies politic in the real world more difficult.
Nor is Russiagate apposite here; Russiagate was nonsense, but Hillary Clinton, of whom I am not a fan, did show up to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration; she did acknowledge the vote totals were correct, and that she legitimately lost in the electoral college; this is _categorically_ different than Trump’s conduct in 2020-21).
A fourth factor: they genuinely dislike Difference and a pluralistic and open society; many of them are openly bigoted towards LGBTQ people. We had a Klan presence here in southeastern Massachusetts into the 1950s, and that impulse didn’t just go away. Indeed, my own Town’s High School, from which I graduated 20+ years ago, had a significant problem with what can only be described as anti-Semitic and Nazi-sympathizing public behavior by the football team. We have the local evangelical holy rollers running for School Committee (in Plymouth, Mass.) talking about banning books, in just total disregard for the U.S. and Mass. Constitutions.
They are also obsessed with culture war nonsense. Just, like, obsessed.
The thing I should emphasize: the conservatives are often extremely intelligent, and will see any kind of entryist from a mile away. I should also note I actually quite like many of them at a personal level; I don’t think they are bad people (some are, but not most), just misguided and wrong on many issues (sometimes, they are right, and I take coalition with them where it presents itself; this is natural in the parliamentary environment of Town Meeting societies).
Finally, Republicans have their own Machine which is even worse than the Democratic Machine, which at least has to pretend to some notion of human well-being. The GOP Machine in my experience down here are connected to local business elites and are also canny, and just like, wildly amoral, and won’t give up the party without a fight.
So, taken together, and played out across the country, I think it will be extremely difficult to engage in any kind of Left entryist strategy in the Republican Party.
My own strategy is premised on local politics — I live in a directly democratic Town Meeting form of government, and if I want to write a statute for the Town, I can get myself and nine other inhabitants of the Town together and put it before the Annual Town Meeting. That’s a lot of power, so I exercise what power I am able to in order to advance the goals of the Commonwealth thought that guided the authors of the Massachusetts Constitution, and, at a larger level, the American Revolution.