Word count: 745
Paragraphs: 10
The nation in question is a democracy, a constitutional republic, and has been a 50 / 50 country electorally for some time now, bitterly divided ideologically, left and right. Even though this country wields a lot of influence culturally and economically around the world, increasing inequality at home has caused social unrest. Home prices have skyrocketed and the cost of living has risen precipitously. Young people are reluctant to marry or have children because of diminished prospects. Right-wing political candidates blame immigrants and feminists for the problems and complain about “fake news,” using libel and slander laws to limit the freedom of the press.
In this climate, a right-wing candidate for president won a very close election and then proclaimed martial law to impose his will when things got worse. But the people of this country rose up and took to the streets immediately, broke into the National Assembly to protect their representatives from the military so they could vote against martial law, and the military ultimately refused to attack the people. This was called a “reverse January 6th,” to repel a coup rather than foment one. The people thus very quickly forced the elected autocrat to rescind martial law after the legislature voted to block it, and then called for the autocrat’s resignation.
The order of martial law put all news organizations under military control, and the news media also responded with a united front, refusing to stop publishing the news. They were supported by the people, who remembered the origins of press freedom in their country in the 1980s as they emerged from autocracy.
Yes, the South Korean people did the right thing this week. They decided that their democracy was worth fighting for, and they stood up en masse, stopping an autocrat in his tracks. Will we in the US do this as well, or will we acquiesce?
Meanwhile, back in the US, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated his henchman Kash Patel to be his new director of the FBI. Kashyap Patel grew up on Long Island and went to Pace University School of Law in New York. In April 2017, he became an aide to House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (who Steve Bannon called Trump’s second-strongest ally in Congress) and had a prominent role in the opposition to the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference and collusion with Trump in the 2016 elections. Part of that opposition was the claim that politically motivated FBI agents tried to undermine the Trump presidency.
Nunes is now CEO of the Trump Media & Technology Group and Patel is on its board of directors . In January 2021, Trump awarded Nunes (and also Congressman Jim Jordan) the Presidential Medal of Freedom. No media were allowed to document that ceremony. The Los Angeles Times called Nunes “one of Trump’s most ardent and outlandish defenders in Congress” who “parroted the president’s conspiracy theories” and used his position “to try to undermine [the] investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
Patel believes ardently in the Deep State conspiracy theory and several other conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 vaccines, the 2020 election, and QAnon. On Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast last December, Patel agreed with Bannon that Trump was “dead serious” about seeking revenge against his political enemies once he got back into power:
We will go out and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media ... we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections ... We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators ... Because we're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.
Asked about Trump’s appointments of Gaetz, Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, and Patel to high office in his administration, Hannah Arendt replied: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” She said this presciently and preemptively, in 1951.1 The problem with taking one quote from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in the current environment is that one immediately wishes to quote the entire work.
- I take this quote and its application to Trump’s cabinet appointments from Roger Berkowitz at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in a missive titled “A Carnival of Destruction,” posted on November 17, 2024.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.