EDITORIAL: WORLD’S OLDEST AND LARGEST “DEMOCRACIES”: ENABLING GENOCIDE, ADVANCING TO FASCISM
Vinod Mubayi
When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the premier intellectuals of the neoliberal order, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the ‘end of history.’ By this he meant that, contrary to the claims of Marxian analysts, there existed no alternative any more to liberal democracy as the only future socio-political order and capitalism as the only economic system. However, this prediction of the future appears to have been short lived. The world’s oldest democracy, the U.S., and the world’s largest democracy, India, are fast descending into authoritarian regimes. The road to fascism, shown by the experience of Europe a century ago, is just a few short steps away.
Before elaborating on their current political trajectory, it is necessary at the outset to judge how the oldest and largest democracies are responding to the central moral issue of our time: the genocide of the Palestinian population of Gaza and, what appears increasingly likely, the decimation and possible erasure of the Palestinians in the West Bank by the sadistic Zionist Israeli regime. To say that these democracies are failing the moral test would be a considerable understatement.
The U.S. for many decades has functioned as Israel’s enabler, supplying it with billions of dollars of financial and military aid and unstinting diplomatic support that has helped Israel to emerge as an unrivalled regional military power and function in the resource rich Middle East as an arm of the global U.S. military empire, “America’s land-based aircraft carrier in the Middle East” as the quip has it. Given this multi-decade reality and the role Israeli lobbying institutions such as AIPAC (America Israel Public Affairs Committee) plays in U.S. domestic politics, it is hardly a surprise that no U.S. administration, Democrat or Republican, has been able to label Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide. While polls show that Israel is losing support among perhaps even a majority of the American public due to the murderous and sadistic actions of the Israeli military against Palestinians and the extreme fascist statements of Israeli government leaders broadcast daily in the media, this is not the case with the American ruling elite, where a large majority of legislators, all key government officials, as well as business leaders continue to fully support Israel.
Meanwhile, India, that historically supported the Palestine cause, has moved much closer to Israel especially since the BJP under Prime Minister Modi with its right-wing Hindu nationalist policies called Hindutva came to power in 2014. This is due to several reasons. Partly, because of a shared Islamophobia that, in Israel’s case, operated to first eject a majority Muslim Palestinian population from its historic homeland in the 1948 Nakba, although Palestinian Christians also suffered the same fate, while in India that is currently ruled by the Hindutva regime it is used to demonize the Muslim minority as an electoral strategy. Increasing collaboration in the military and security industries is another crucial factor. Modi’s favorite crony capitalist, Adani, operates military equipment manufacturing industries in collaboration with Elbit of Israel and has also taken a major share in the operation of the port of Haifa in Israel. Besides, the Modi regime has been a major user of Israeli spyware such as the Pegasus software used to infiltrate the cell phones and computers of those opposed to the regime. Isra-tech.net, an Israeli platform, boasts of the “deepening defense and security alliance between Israel and India, from battlefield collaborations to cutting-edge technology transfers” and chronicles in some detail the “joint military exercises and counterterrorism cooperation” that have “built a robust and dynamic collaboration” between the two countries. To this one can add the friendship between Modi and Netanyahu who have become each other’s BFF over the last few years. While India repeats in a formulaic fashion its support of a two-state solution at the UN and other forums, its recent welcome to the outrightly genocidal Israeli leader Smotrich visiting New Delhi to sign trade deals and the planned visits in the near future of Netanyahu and other Israeli government ministers suggest a different reality. On the issue of Palestinian genocide the Modi regime’s spine is more like a limp noodle.
Civics 101 teaches us about the checks and balances that exist among the three branches of constitutional democratic governance: an executive whose head is elected by the people, a legislature also elected by the people in periodic elections, and a judiciary that interprets laws enacted by the legislature. The fragility of this system is now being demonstrated all too clearly in both the oldest and largest democracies.
In the U.S., the legislature is controlled by the same Republican party that is in power in the executive branch. This legislature has essentially ceased to function. Legislators belonging to the majority party vie with one another to proclaim their undying loyalty to the President, the Supreme Leader. They are too timid or too intimidated to defend even their own constitutional prerogatives, like the Congressional power to declare War while Trump, without a shred of evidence sends the military to bomb fishing vessels on the high seas bordering Latin America and kill their occupants who he has labeled drug dealers.
With the legislature dysfunctional the remaining check on arbitrary executive power is the judiciary. While lower levels of the federal judiciary have mounted some valiant rearguard actions to try to restrain some of the patently unlawful actions of the executive, it is the apex judicial body, the Supreme Court, three of whose members were appointed by Trump in his first term, which appears to be paving the way for unchecked authoritarian rule. The Supreme Court did this in fact in July 2024, several months before the November 2024 election that elected Trump after he was convicted on 34 counts of financial fraud in a New York State court. By granting Trump immunity from prosecution the Supreme Court basically converted the President of a democratic republic into a monarch unrestrained by law that applies to every other citizen.
When Trump won the 2024 election and the Republican party gained control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, two legs of the triad of checks and balances that theoretically sustains a constitutional democracy had become non-functional. There were thus little in the way of barriers to the torrent of dubious actions by which Trump began his presidency, many of which he or his cohorts would likely not have embarked upon or pursued further if the legislature and top judiciary were doing their jobs. While several elements of the lower judiciary have tried to throw sand into the gears of the fascist machine, the apex court that has acted as Trump’s cheerleader for some time now has continued to reverse many of the lower court rulings.
The list of fascist actions perpetrated by the Trump administration continues to grow. Unlike other authoritarian regimes that tried to conceal their more arbitrary and patently lawless assaults on their people, Trump instead broadcasts them loudly and publicly on his social media accounts.
Concern about the autocratic trajectory of Trump’s regime has now reached the mainstream print media. The Editorial Board of the liberal New York Times (NYT) has recently (October 31 issue) articulated the following twelve-point summary of the way Trump is trying to implement an authoritarian form of government.
1) Trump and his allies have impinged on free speech to a degree that the federal government has not since perhaps the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, 2) Trump’s Justice Department has become an enforcer of his personal interests, targeting people for legally dubious reasons while creating a culture in which his allies can act with impunity, 3) Trump is turning the legislature into a rubber stamp for executive decisions and rubbishing the constitution that gives Congress the power of the purse, 4) Trump is willing to use the military for domestic control and has threatened to expand that use, through the invocation of the Insurrection Act with troops beyond the National Guard, 5) Repeatedly defying the lower levels of the federal judiciary sometimes with the complicity of the Supreme Court, 6) Manufacturing emergencies to sidestep Congress and justify the killing of foreign civilians in international waters, in defiance of U.S. and international law. 7) Vilifying marginalized groups such as recent immigrants, transgender persons, and people of color generally while promoting white supremacy, 8) Attacking freedom of the press and attempting to control the news media, 9) Attacking universities and higher education by cutting federal funds for research, 10) Creating a cult of personality by identifying himself with the federal government a la the Bourbon kings of 18th century France who said “l’etat c’est moi” [I am the State], 11) Using the office of the president for personal enrichment and glorying in his administration’s culture of corruption, 12) Manipulating the law and using the power of the executive to entrench Republican party hold on government in addition to floating the idea of a 3rd term in defiance of the constitution.
In the NYT’s words “Authoritarian takeovers in the modern era often do not start with a military coup. They instead involve an elected leader who uses the powers of the office to consolidate authority and make political opposition more difficult, if not impossible.”
Modi’s India shares many of the same characteristics of the autocratic trajectory outlined above that are also shared with other wannabe authoritarians such as Orban of Hungary and Erdogan of Turkey. The subversion of supposedly independent agencies of the Indian state such as the Enforcement Directorate or the Election Commission of India (ECI) to suit the regime’s partisan power and political interests, the intimidation and bribing of various levels of the judiciary, the attacks on independent news media and on academia and academicians whose views do not comport with those of the regime, the imprisonment without trial of dissenters and human rights activists under draconian laws on patently false charges for many years, the vilification and demonization of religious minorities and marginalized groups such as tribals and Dalits often for electoral purposes, and the falsification of history to suit the regime Hindutva narrative and polarize the electorate on the basis of religious identity. These features of the Modi regime have been documented in detail in the editorial column of the Bulletin going back to 2014.
The most serious charge leveled against the Modi regime at present is one of electoral rigging with the help of a complaisant ECI to deny opposition parties election victory through fraudulent manipulation of electoral rolls in various states as well as post-election vote counting. Given that electoral victory is the means of conferring legitimacy to the ruler, an elected leader using the powers of his office to deny the political opposition any chance to rule is the hallmark of authoritarian one-party rule that establishes the groundwork for fascism.
Trump’s authoritarianism is not limited to the U.S. alone since America is the head of a global empire for many decades so what the U.S. government does resonates across the world. By denying the phenomenon of climate change completely and implementing an utterly reckless policy of promoting the unlimited extraction and use of fossil fuels, the Trump administration is putting the entire planet at the risk of irreversible, catastrophic change. Trump’s mega-billionaire pals, the Musks, Bezoses, Zuckerbergs, etc., who have hugely benefited from the only piece of legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, his Republican party cohorts in Congress have been able to pass, seem to show no concern for what science has been telling us for the past four or five decades. All of us need to pay urgent attention to where unrestricted neoliberal capitalism in tandem with authoritarian fascism is taking the world to.
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