This is a "Made In America" American Spring. Quite different from the Arab Spring. Its participants are not the masses. They are the billionaires. Its ethos is not democracy; it is the gradual destruction of democratic institutions, with the freedom of the press, a constitutional right under the First Amendment, as a primary target.
As in the Arab Spring, there is no recognizable spokesman. Though Trump is the President, who gushes out daily with "alternative facts" (meaning falsehoods), the White House staff spins what the Donald says. This is while the Cabinet reshapes those utterances in various forms. In the meantime, the civil service (two millions of them in various departments) ignores those directions, or at best, kills them by a deliberate slow motion.
In the midst of this chaotic American Spring, the masses (65% of the American public no longer trusts the man in the White House) use the weekends to fill the American equivalents of Tahrir Square. A movement which resists Trump's espousal of Putin's style of leadership, his Muslim ban, his wall at the Mexican border, his attacks on the judiciary, his non-divulgence of his taxes, and his assault on the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care).
There are variables between the American Spring and the Arab Spring. But they share in one primary quality: One does not know their final outcome. The fragmentation (in the Arab world, it is called "sectarianism") in America is the real "creative chaos" which Washington had used as descriptive of the attempts to effect change in the Middle East. However, in the American Spring, it is a constitutionally induced chaos. Here is why.
In the American Constitution, there is a "supremacy clause" -the Tenth Amendment. For its importance to understanding the American Spring, it merits quoting: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." So it was difficult for me, when lecturing at the Cairo University School of Law, the pearl of Arab legal education, to explain to my students that "the American federal government is a government of limited powers."
Here we have to bear in mind that the masses of the American Spring draw their power not only from "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" (The First Amendment to the Constitution). The practical source is the state which controls the police (not federalized in America), the education (controlled largely by local school boards), state legislatures, state taxation, state licensing of businesses and corporations, state election of non Article III judges. Huge powers. By contrast, the federal government, among other things, controls: foreign policy, foreign and interstate commerce, immigration, coinage of money, post offices, promotion of intellectual property, and war declarations.
This is a very broad and thus incomplete comparison between state powers and federal powers. But guess what? In the American Spring, stimulated by the election of Trump in consequence of this period of American rage, the State flags are flying high: The mayors of many cities and the governors of a dozen American states have ordered their police forces not to cooperate with the feds in certain activities; sanctuary cities are resisting Trump's draconian methods of deportation; Times Square (the new American Tahrir Square) is proclaiming "We Are All Muslims Too."
Allies of the masses in the American Spring are: the federal judiciary, the free press, the constitutional provisions on the separation between church and state, the civil service below the billionaires who now compose the cabinet, the on-going investigations in Russia's intervention in the American presidential elections.
Add to the above, the 17 American intelligence and security services about which Trump had frothed at the mouth in petulant anger. They, when confronted by a President about whom impeachment is already publicly discussed after only four weeks of his administration (called Trump Inc.) are opting for selective briefs to Trump. These are tailored to protect America from leaks to its adversaries.
In his book "The Art of Intelligence," Henry Crumpton who spent his life in the CIA's Clandestine Service, manifests the huge gulf between "The Art of Intelligence" and Trump's "The Art of the Deal!" Trump's "America Uber Alles" is relying on megaphones from Trump Towers. The masses are relying on resistance from the ground up.
Commenting upon the chaotic national scene in the Trump era, Daniel Gross sounded the alarm in the New Yorker magazine. Under the title of "The German National Anthem and 'America First'" he said: "Political language, when misused, can turn healthy patriotism into toxic nationalism." And the New York Times Magazine of February 12, festooned its cover with one word: RESIST.
NOTE: New blog postings will resume on a monthly basis until my new book is ready for the press this Fall. Its title: "War On Jihadism Ideologically: The New Islamic Religious Revolution"
