Jim Sleeper, Salon

The notion that an "apparently inebriated" Rudy Giuliani gave Donald Trump a decisive reason to ignore other advisers and declare victory on election night 2020 has been hyped ever since House select committee vice-chair Liz Cheney mentioned it last week during a hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection. But as I showed in the New Republic last week and will now amplify here, Cheney and the committee's many witnesses, as well as some terrific journalism from the past 20 years, have demonstrated that Giuliani and Trump were working together long before 2020 — with more than a little "help" from millions of us — to turn the rule of law into a shield and sword for their distortions of the rule of law itself. They've been doing it together since at least 1989, although not as nakedly and brutally as since Trump became president.

In 2007, as Giuliani prepared to run his own (losing) presidential race in 2008, I warned in the Philadelphia Inquirer and other venues that anyone who'd pushed the limits of his mayoral prerogatives as fanatically as Rudy had done would be an imperious, overreaching president. Even in the 1980s, when he was the leading federal prosecutor in New York, some of his prosecutions had been overzealous and vengeful, and had failed. But at least he'd had to obey juries and federal judges back then. Had he been elected president in 2008, he would have appointed many of those very judges and U.S. attorneys.

But it wasn't until Giuliani took up the cudgels for his old frenemy Trump's presidential campaign in 2016 that I began to worry seriously that the rule of law might give way to the rage and myopia that the demagoguery of Giuliani, Trump and Rupert Murdoch was pumping into the hearts and minds of tens of millions of the rest of us.

Even now, Giuliani's wild charges about a "rigged" 2020 election — one that he himself has tried to rig retroactively — still grip millions of Americans. So does his raging about "the Biden crime family," and so have his apparently drunken rants, including one at a 9/11 memorial dinner last year about Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, whom he assailed for closing the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan: "I wanted to grab his stars and shove it down his throat and say, 'It's 400 miles from China, a–hole!'" No wonder Rudy's now the butt of barbs by late-night comedians.

All this has gone on in the face of terrific investigative journalism that must be credited for holding the line against Giuliani and Trump: "A Tale of Two Giulianis" by Michael Shnayerson for Vanity Fair in 2008; "Giuliani's Love for His Country is Equal to the Money He Makes," by Tim Shorrock for The Nation in 2015; a magnificent 2019 New York Times profile by the late Jim Dwyer and colleagues; "What Happened to America's Mayor?" by Seth Hettena for Rolling Stone in 2020; and a far-ranging NPR interview of Giuliani by Steve Inskeep and Ryan Lucas. Barton Gellman's devastating pieces for the Atlantic anticipated and analyzed Trump's attempted coup as it was unfolding. Gellman has warned that, indeed, it isn't over.

As revelatory and powerful as the earliest of these pieces were, it wasn't until 2000, when Giuliani neared the end of his tenure as mayor, that the late Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett publicized two discoveries that illuminated Giuliani's earliest misdeeds and uncovered a primal wound that had remained secret even as it was driving his prosecutorial and mayoral excesses.

Giuliani spent much of his public life trying to defeat criminality and chaos — but he could never escape them.

The first discovery, a 1993 "vulnerabilities" report on Giuliani's campaign weaknesses that he'd commissioned for his second run for mayor that year, is summarized in Barrett's book "Rudy!" But not until 2000 was that report, which no one outside Giuliani's inner circle had seen, published in the journal City Limits. It shows that, as an associate attorney general in 1982, Giuliani handled Haitian refugees as cruelly as Trump's anti-immigration scourge Stephen Miller did more recently with other refugees. The report also describes Giuliani's inflammatory rhetoric at an openly racist rally by police officers against then-Mayor David Dinkins outside City Hall in 1993. And it details Giuliani's maniacal overreaching in prosecutions that failed, in one case because jurors were appalled by his "gutter tactics."

On 9/11, Giuliani sublimated all this darkness into his calm, firm defiance of terror from the skies. But his earlier (and later) methods are explained by Barrett's and his research assistant Adam Fifield's discovery of a family secret that you can read about in my recent New Republic article. It suggests that Rudy has spent his public life chasing criminality and chaos because he's still trying to escape their influence on his own past, even as he's intimately entangled in them and therefore, in some ways, "at home" in them.

Giuliani's post-9/11 ventures in "security" consulting and business improvement — described by the journalists whose articles I've credited above — have been awash in corrupt associates and sleazy clients, from pushers of opioids in America to business elites in El Salvador whose predecessors encouraged mass executions of insurgents.

Given the toxic results of Giuliani's alliance, it's time to stop Giuliani as decisively as it is time to stop the Proud Boys or other overt anti-government rebels. But it's also time to ask what happened to the American people that made it possible for so many to believe everything Giuliani and Trump tell them.

In 2020, Giuliani told NPR, "A lot of the information I originally got about Ukraine" came from John McCain, who remained a close friend "even after I ran against him," referring to the 2008 Republican primaries. But Giuliani still hasn't learned what McCain told Senate colleagues while voting courageously (and, in that instance, decisively) against the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act: "Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible … and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement. It doesn't depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than 'winning.'"

Such is the temper of our times and our condition that Giuliani's love-hate pathologies have melded with those of Trump and millions of stressed, stupefied Americans to foment the kind of crusade whose vengeance sometimes achieves a fleeting brilliance before imploding on its own obsessions and lies, as Joseph McCarthy's, Sarah Palin's or Glenn Beck's crusades did before them. Such crusades won't be so fleeting if they become a stampede of stressed, dispossessed and enraged people willing to trample on what remains of liberal democracy

I have previously argued in Salon that corporate commercial speech has been doing more damage to our private and public lives than we've acknowledged. I've also argued, as Chris Hedges did better than anyone in his takedown of the late Michael Jackson's public persona, that commercial speech endangers us not because it's malevolent or conspiratorial but because it's civically mindless.

How can we mobilize democratic antibodies against this? That requires answers I will be struggling to present. But first we need to acknowledge that Giuliani and Trump and people like them are important symptoms and carriers of this disorder, but not its cause.

As Vladimir Putin wrested Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, I wrote that although peace-loving liberal democrats must arm themselves and fight sometimes, the Crimea seizure was not such a time and that more serious threats to liberal democracy were coming from much closer to home. The 2008 financial meltdown and the accelerating pace of public massacres in American public and private spaces were only two instances of the implosion of a civic-republican culture without which a liberal democracy lies open to demagoguery, thuggery and grand theft.

Some Americans live only to fight threats from abroad, distant from our internal crises; they beat drums for war against external enemies: armchair warriors such as Leon Wieseltier and Robert Kagan line up with Kagan's brother Frederick, a professor at West Point, and with other would-be combatants — "Second Amendment people" or uniformed militarists craving what they envision as a clear, decisive defeat of democracy's enemies.

In 2014, I dismissed that view out of hand. I doubted even deeply researched, sober warnings from the historian Timothy Snyder that Putin's Russia was a fascist dictatorship intent on shutting down a lot more than the independence of Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

But while the drumbeaters have been relentless, and sometimes a bit over the top, there are times to acknowledge that just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, neoconservative publicists and historians fixated on Eastern Europe's "Bloodlands," as one of Snyder's books calls them, are right at certain moments.

So what time is it right now? And whose clock is telling it reliably?

Barely a year before 9/11, Donald Kagan, a Yale historian of ancient empires and wars, and his son Frederick, the West Point professor, published "While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today," warning that "the collapse of an international system… will bring attacks on the American homeland" and that "the United States must begin to gird itself for the next round of conflict."

Typical of neoconservative drumbeating though this was — critics dismissed it as just another re-enactment of Winston Churchill's wise but ignored warning against appeasing Hitler in 1938 at Munich — 9/11 reinforced the Kagans' dark summons. Two of the Kagans, along with Wieseltier and dozens of other would-be warriors signed a public letter to President George W. Bush from the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, urging that "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack … the eradication of terrorism … must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein." They even championed the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan as a good and necessary fight.

History has discredited such responses, which were sometimes as gratuitously destructive, corrupt and ineffective as Russia's incursions in Afghanistan and Syria, and now in Ukraine. Yet like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 did vindicate the drumbeaters' conviction that there are times when humanists must join with power-wielders and even with war profiteers to crush enemies who are willing to die for their convictions and rage. Are we willing to die for anything worth defending against them? At certain times, it's a compelling challenge.

But even now, it's the wrong question if the willingness to die and kill overwhelms sounder strategic judgments. Our punitive, supposedly corrective wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like Russia's in the latter, ended up posing a different challenge, one that the Vietnam War had shown us: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Vietnam combat veteran John Kerry asked the U.S. Senate in 1971, as the war still raged.

Proud though I am of my father's service in World War II, when even stopped clocks were right about the fascist threat, I became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and would have gone to prison or Canada had the first option been denied. That war, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, needn't and shouldn't have been fought.

Is Ukraine different? Would risking a war between Russia and the West unleash a Götterdämmerung even more devastating than the Great War of 1914 and the Second World War, which ended partly because Americans alone possessed and used a nuclear weapon?

In 2014, I considered that Snyder might be more right than wrong to insist that Ukraine was pivotal to the West's prospects. It's clearer now than it was then that Putin is determined to do more than restore Russia's sphere of influence. His invasion of Ukraine is even worse than our grabbing Texas from Mexico in 1846 or Puerto Rico from the Spanish Empire in 1898. The philosopher Jason Stanley argues that Russia's intentions are genocidal, in that they truly mean to erase Ukrainian peoplehood, culture and language. Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping evidently mean to replace the whole post-World War II order.

But here comes the hard part for Americans, who have been the progenitors and managers of that postwar order. Our neoliberal, global capitalist order is now a wrecking ball whose casino-like financing and degrading consumerism are fomenting climate crisis and deepening inequalities, forced migrations, cultural implosions and rampant fraud and violence. Absent a pretty dramatic reconfiguration, our "order" is no longer legitimate or sustainable on terms that any of us can continue to live in.

One certainly needn't idealize Ukraine (as I warned against doing during the first week of Putin's invasion) to recognize that this is one of those times when the stopped clocks are right, if only because our own hypocrisies and cruelties have weakened our immune system against threats from beyond.

Snyder's most recent argument that Putin's intentions are as intolerable as his brutality is profound but intensively linguistic and somewhat arcane. Perhaps this three-minute video of Putin entering the Kremlin is worth a thousand such words of warning. A society that seeds and suborns the postures and faces of Putin's guards and elite nomenklatura, packed like sheep on either side of his swagger, is a failing, kleptocratic state running on oil, militarism, imperialism, cyber-theft and pure fascism. It will have to be defeated sooner or later — and not only by Ukraine, because his fascism is viral in killing truth and public trust wherever it enters our rapidly globalizing lives.

We have a two-front "war" to fight, both against brutal fascism abroad and the plutocratic, neoliberal version metastasizing right here at home.

I don't know if the deeply flawed West can defeat this danger through a mix of sanctions and deft military strategies. World War II was ended and "won" only because Americans had the most terrible weapon and used it. This time, it's Putin who's threatening to use such weaponry. Even if he doesn't, the West will have to sacrifice a lot for a long time to stop him. It will have to face down — as France has just done, barely, and without effectively correcting its own neoliberal turn — the fascism that has been metastasizing not only in its own right wing but also in America's Republican Party.

We have a two-front "war" to fight, not only against fascism from abroad but also against domestic drumbeaters and stopped clocks that have given our own sins too much cover and have made our challenges seem only one-sided.

Our predicament bears some analogy to that of 1939, when the Bushes, Lamonts and other Americans were still doing business with Hitler and Mussolini instead of recognizing that they would have to be stopped. Putin must be defeated, and Xi contained, even though our own centuries-old financial and corporatist world order generated their resentments and resistance — and even if defeating them makes Western plutocrats and their duped mobs fatter and happier. A similarly tragic reality confronted Americans at the onset of World War II, which elevated propagandists for plutocracy like Henry Luce and imperialists like Churchill even as it crushed Hitler and the other Axis powers.

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot observed, and it's hard indeed for most of us to face these two incompatible truths at once:

"They" are truly evil in humanist, liberal-democratic terms, yet "we" are corrupt and brutal enough to have generated some of the evils they embody. And "we" have no choice now but to stand up against what our own flawed system helped to create, because these enemies would destroy us even more quickly and brutally than we're already doing by disrupting and dissolving our own civic-cultural and institutional lives.

Staunch, unremitting opposition to Putin's fascism and Xi's totalitarian state capitalism is part of Eliot's "very much reality" that we'll have to bear, at the sacrifice of our own moral conceits and material comforts.

Financial Times columnist Chris Giles writes that "the quickest and cheapest way to reduce dependence on Russia is simply to use less gas. If ever there was a win-win outcome for the energy trouble of our time, this is it. Lowering the temperature of our buildings in winter, from 20C to 18C across Europe would reduce energy use by between 20 and 25 percent." Giles calls for emergency appeals plus price incentives that would make it more expensive to connect to gas and electricity grids but would offer double discounts to current users for every unit of energy they conserve compared to last year.

I favor challenging and reconfiguring the very corporate-capitalist system within which such measures could be taken, by nationalizing or otherwise severely constraining American oil companies that now pursue their shareholders' profits über alles. At the risk of flirting with "state capitalism" — as the New Deal and the World War II regimen certainly did — we have no choice but to defeat and/or contain what Putin and Xi, his likely overlord, intend for all of us.

Although I participated in the countercultural "revolutions," antiwar protests and racial conflicts of the 1960s, it wasn't until August 2016 that I had my first truly unnerving intimations of a full-blown American civil war: Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump told a rally that if Hillary Clinton "gets to pick her judges, judicial appointments, nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people — maybe there is. I don't know."

By June 1, 2020, Trump's seeming afterthought about "Second Amendment people" had metastasized into something truly scary. He and combat-fatigues-clad Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with Attorney General William Barr, strode from the White House to Lafayette Park, where a peaceful demonstration had been dispersed brutally by National Guard troops.

Trump's insistence only days earlier that the U.S. Army itself should be sent against the protesters — a demand echoed by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in a now-infamous New York Times op-ed — reminded me of Julius Caesar leading Roman legions illegally across the river Rubicon from Gaul into Italy in 49 B.C. to subdue Rome's own citizens and, with them, their republic.

Kenosha, Wisconsin's closest approximation to the Rubicon is the tiny Pike River, which flows from Petrifying Springs into Lake Michigan. Its closest approximation to a military crackdown was the police mobilization against violent protests after a police officer shot and paralyzed an unarmed young Black man in August of last year. Those police failed to challenge Kyle Rittenhouse, the illegally armed, 17-year-old "Second Amendment person" who shot three men, killing two of them.

And when a Kenosha County jury failed to convict Rittenhouse on even a misdemeanor, sending what the parents of Anthony Huber — one of the men Rittenhouse killed — characterized as "the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street," I couldn't help but wonder what, if anything, will stop armed "Second Amendment people" from showing up near polling places a year from now, as a Republican National Ballot Security Task Force" has done intermittently since 1981, although without brandishing guns.

More unnervingly and urgently, I wonder why a jury of ordinary citizens, along with thousands of others who approved and even celebrated the Rittenhouse verdict are walking themselves across a Rubicon to deliver the message I've just cited, even though they haven't been "demagogued" into doing it by a Caesar or driven to do it by a military force.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow has noted that Rittenhouse was the same age as Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Black youth shot dead in Florida by George Zimmerman, who considered himself a "protector" of his neighborhood and who was acquitted of murder. Blow notes that although Trayvon Martin "was thugified" by Zimmerman and the judicial process, Rittenhouse was "infantilized" by the defense argument that a 17-year-old may be excused for misjudging dangers that he himself has provoked illegally. It's hard to imagine a similar jury accepting similar excuses for a young Black man with an assault rifle, even if he never fired it.

I've contended for years that swift, dark undercurrents are degrading and stupefying Americans in ways that most of us try not to acknowledge. More of us than ever before are normalizing our adaptations to daily variants of force and fraud in the commercial groping and goosing of our private lives and public spaces; in nihilistic entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment; in the "gladiatorialization: and corruption of sports; in home-security precautions against the prospect of armed invasion; in casino-like financing of unproductive economic activities, such as the predatory lending that tricks millions out of their homes; and in a huge, ever-expanding prison industry created to deter or punish the broken, violent victims of all these come-ons, even as schools in the "nicest," "safest," neighborhoods operate in fear of gunmen who, from Columbine to Sandy Hook and beyond, have been students or residents there themselves.

Stressed by this republican derangement, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves. All those vials, syringes, home-security systems and shootings reflect the insinuation of what Edward Gibbon, the historian of ancient Rome, called "a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire" until Roman citizens "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army."

Is it really so surprising that some of the stressed and dispossessed, too ill to bear their sicknesses or their cures, demand to be lied to instead, with simple but compelling fantasies that direct them toward saviors and scapegoats — into cries for strongmen to cross a Rubicon or two and for "Second Amendment people" to take our streets?