The ‘Trump `28’ movement...
...and the 22nd Amendment
Michael Anton of the Claremont Institute floated the idea of a “Red Caesar”. In his book “The Stakes” he said, “The Sixties are here understood broadly to include all the lefty trends that originated as counter-cultural in that era but now are the culture.”, insinuating that this period was the source of the decline, in the minds of the right, which has broken our nation. You don’t have to scratch very deep to find that what this is coded language for is that Immigration Reform, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Act, School Integration, the end of Jim Crow, the rise of Feminism, anti-war protests and the Stonewall Uprising were degradation of our society. In another of his books, “Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right”, there’s an essay where he makes the argument that our nation has become so bad and broken that elections no longer work and that something else needs to be done to save America. He claims that “The Constitution is all but dead”. He lays out an argument that corruption and diversity has broken our nation to the point that Democracy is failing and needs to be replaced with something else to fix it.
Democracy is demonstrably more integral to the fabric of the founding of America than is the Bible, yet here are people who are calling for abandoning the former and enforcing the latter. “Project 25” outlines the myriad ways in which The Heritage Foundation wants Trump to consolidate power into the Executive Branch in ways which lay the foundation for a “strong man dictatorship” to replace the greatest democracy ever created, and to drag America back to the kind of monarchical power the founders and their ancestors fled Europe and fought a long and bloody war to be free from. They do this while un-ironically wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and waving Gadsden flags.
Now to be certain this isn’t the first time we’ve heard this sort of rhetoric. William Luther Pierce, who took over leadership of the National Socialist White People’s Party (Formerly the American Nazi Party) after George Lincoln Rockwell’s murder in 1967, published and distributed to other racist fascist organizations a manifesto of sorts titled “Prospectus for a National Front” in 1970 in which he stated, “America today, and more specifically the American people, face the most the most serious and deadly menace which has arisen in their entire history. This menace far overshadows that posed by any war we have fought, any economic catastrophe through which we have passed or any previous domestic strife which has torn us, for today we are faced, not just with a threat to our territorial integrity, or to our material possessions, or to our way of life, or even to our own lives, but to something far dearer. Today all that we have ever been and all that we might be, our race itself is threatened.”.
Pierce would go on to found The National Alliance, possibly the largest Nazi organization in post WWII American history and would publish in the pages of it’s newsletter, “Attack!”, a fictional account of a future America that would go on to become the book “The Turner Diaries”, which inspired the founding of the domestic terror group “The Order” and would inspire many terrorist acts including the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma city.
What makes the new incarnation of this rhetoric immediately different is that it’s not being said in documents shared only in fascist circles. It’s being published by right wing think tanks, spoken at school board and city council meetings and on Fox News. It’s being normalized through repetition and parroting by fairly ordinary people with relatively large platforms thanks to the Internet. And now the people desiring to undo democracy argue that because Donald Trump only served a single term before losing the presidency, and working on the assumption he will win again, that the 22nd Amendment should be repealed to permit him to serve more than two terms in office.
You might recall that the origin of the 22nd had to do with the reaction to FDR having been elected to four consecutive terms in the presidency. It was thought that there were grave dangers in having that happen, especially considering the consolidation of power the executive branch assumed to drag us out of the Great Depression and subsequently get us through World War II. Congress crafted an amendment which went through the democratic ratification process with full knowledge that Grover Cleveland had already served two terms in office which were interrupted by a single four year term out of office, and had there been any worries about such a situation they would have been brought up in the process of creating the amendment.
But people who don’t want you to remember that the 45th president vocally admired how foreign leaders had set themselves up to remain in office for as long as they want, and “joked” about serving more than two terms in office in the past, want to undo this part of the Constitution claiming that the post FDR legislature could never have foreseen what’s happening with the 45th president. To be clear, this isn’t about fixing an impediment to future presidents, it’s about putting Trump in office for as many terms as possible. It’s about returning to that which drove people to these shores because it made life in Europe horrible.