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HAITI TODAY, AMERICA TOMORROW? – WHEN DEMOCRACIES DIE, MOBS TAKE
OVER  
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John Feffer
April 18, 2024
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ Don’t make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti’s with a
“primitive” stage of political development or only with countries
on the geopolitical margins. What’s happening there today could
prefigure the future of the United States, too. _

Former president Donald Trump speaking at the 2017 Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.
(Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 /
Flickr),

 

Haiti has descended into chaos. It’s had no president or parliament
— and no elections either –for eight long years. Its unelected
prime minister Ariel Henry resigned recently when gang violence at the
airport in Port-au-Prince made it impossible for him to return to the
country after a trip
[[link removed]] to
Guyana.

Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by
colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators,
and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also
suffered an almost Biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A
coup deposed its first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, not once but twice — in 1991 and again in 2004. An
earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands
[[link removed]], leaving 1.5 million
Haitians homeless, out of a population of less than 10 million. In the
wake of that earthquake, nearly a million people contracted cholera,
the worst outbreak [[link removed]] in
history, courtesy
[[link removed]] of
a contingent of U.N. peacekeepers. To round out the catastrophes, in
2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall, pushing Haiti back even
further.

And now the country has been overrun by gangs that emerged as
practically the only groups capable of providing services, however
meager, to Haiti’s long-suffering population. People have become the
country’s largest export. Anyone who has money, connections, or
sufficient courage has fled, even if those who somehow made it to the
United States were all too often deported back into the maelstrom.
Haiti doesn’t have the three things that might prevent the sort of
vacuum into which gangs so eagerly rush: robust democratic governance,
a strong civil society, and a sufficiently uncorrupt constabulary. As
a result, it’s returned to what political theorist Thomas Hobbes
once called a “war of all against all” in which violence and the
urge for power prevail, as fist takes precedence over gavel — the
perfect environment for gangs to flourish.

Political scientists often label places like Haiti “failed
states.” With the breakdown of order, everything from political
institutions to border controls disintegrates. In a comparable
fashion, clans contested for power in Somalia in the 1990s and
paramilitaries battled each other in the Democratic Republic of Congo
during its repeated wars, while rebels and jihadis targeted the Syrian
government beginning in 2011. In the end, such diverse groups seem to
boil down to one thing: guys with guns.

In Haiti, the gangocracy is organized along the classic lines of
criminal enterprises like the gangs that ruled New York City in the
mid-nineteenth century (immortalized in the film _The Gangs of New
York_) or the Chinese _tongs_ that warred over San Franciscan turf
in the years after the Civil War (featured in the current Netflix
series _Warrior_). The two major Haitian gangs in the capital city
Port-au-Prince, GPep and the G9 Family, have similarly hierarchical
structures, roots in particular neighborhoods, and flamboyant leaders
like the former police officer and current G9 head Jimmy
“Barbecue” Chérizier
[[link removed]].

But gangs aren’t simply criminal syndicates. The Haitian gangs have
close connections
[[link removed]] to
political parties and align themselves with business interests (or run
businesses of their own). Sometimes such gangs even begin as
anti-gangs, neighborhood self-defense groups meant to help locals
survive in an era of lawlessness.

Their mischaracterization resembles the overly narrow understanding of
“terrorists.” Hamas, for instance, is on the U.S. terrorism list,
but it’s not just a bunch of guys with guns and a predilection for
violence. It’s also been a political party, a government, and a
service organization that provided
[[link removed]] food,
health care, and other necessities to underserved communities in Gaza.

Don’t make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti’s with a
“primitive” stage of political development or only with countries
on the geopolitical margins. What’s happening there today could
prefigure the future of the United States, too. In place of the
Biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S.
might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald
Trump to go up in similar flames.

GANGS R U.S.

Today, Americans associate “gangs” with the Crips and Bloods, who
developed a murderous rivalry in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s or,
more recently, Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, a gang of
young Salvadoran transplants to Los Angeles initially focused on
protecting its members from other gangs.

But shouldn’t we be more catholic in our definitions? After all,
what are right-wing paramilitary forces, from the Three Percenters
[[link removed]] to
the Proud Boys [[link removed]], if
not gangs? They have their rituals, worldviews, indifference to the
rule of law, even their own “Barbecues.” The gangs associated with
far-right ideology and white supremacy today could claim a lineage
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back to the European settlers of this continent who routinely engaged
in the extrajudicial murder of indigenous peoples while expanding
westward, or the vigilante mobs that administered “rough justice”
to “disobedient” slaves before the Civil War, or even the Ku Klux
Klan. As for real-world impact, the Crips or MS-13 never had the
audacity to force their way into the U.S. Capitol and trash the place,
as Donald Trump’s informal gang did on January 6, 2021.

But why stop there? The Pinkerton detective agency once functioned
like a gang
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attacks on the labor movement. The Central Intelligence Agency
developed distinctly gang-like behavior overseas with
its assassinations
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coups, and outright criminal activities
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And what about all the deaths associated with corporate gangs
like Philip Morris
[[link removed]] and ExxonMobil
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These institutions of “normal” society have had a much higher kill
count and a more debilitating effect on the rule of law than the
institutions of organized crime.
 

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BUY THE BOOK
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When it comes to gang-like activities, much depends on geopolitics.
The emergence of the “Washington consensus” and the birth of
neoliberalism in the 1970s was an inflection point when it came to
encouraging gang-like behavior. Previously, at least in advanced
industrial countries, the state had been gradually assuming ever
greater economic responsibility through the New Deal and its
successors in the U.S. and the development of Europe’s market
socialism. Neoliberalism, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in
England and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, sought to
roll back the power of the state through the defunding, deregulation,
and privatization of government services.

That sustained attack on state functions ensured an increase in
poverty
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painful budget crises for institutions like school systems and
hospitals, while corporate misconduct proliferated
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In poorer countries, where states were already more fragile, the
impact was far more devastating.

In Haiti, after the state borrowed money in the 1970s and 1980s
to feed corruption and sustain autocracy
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the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed subsequent democratic
governments to privilege the free market
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while opening ever more quickly to the global economy. Sensing
opportunity, non-governmental organizations streamed into Haiti
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provide food, housing, and health care, everything a cash-strapped
government couldn’t do. The succession of catastrophes — coups, an
earthquake, cholera, hurricanes — only strengthened the humanitarian
sector but at the expense of effective government. In this century,
the situation had become so dire that all too many parents were
giving
[[link removed]] their
children up to orphanages run by foreign charities. In other words,
the road to Haiti’s hell was, in part, paved by good intentions.

Or take the case of Jamaica where, from the late 1970s on, similar IMF
programs translated into disaster, especially in the capital,
Kingston. Here, too, the state lost power as gang leaders, known as
“dons,” expanded their territories. As Michelle Munroe and Damion
Blake put it in _Third World Quarterly_
[[link removed]]:
“Neoliberal policies not only paralyzed the state’s capacity to
control and contain violence in the streets of Kingston, these changes
also made dons and the gangs they command more lethal and powerful.”

_Dons and the gangs they command_: that language could soon seem all
too eerily appropriate for the United States.

AMERICAN BLOODBATH

America’s ultimate Don is all too clear about what he expects come
November, should he lose. “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to
be a bloodbath,” he told
[[link removed]] one
of his rallies. According to that scenario, the crew that owes
allegiance to Donald Trump — the right-wing militias, diehard
conspiracy theorists, open-carry gun enthusiasts — will rise up in
gang-like fashion in the face of another “stolen election.”

That, however, is an example of Trump’s magical thinking. The
January 6th “insurrection” revealed the limits of his influence.
What happened in Washington that day never came close to a _coup
d’état_, thanks to the actions of the police and the National
Guard, nor was it repeated, even in the reddest of states.

The real bloodbath would take place if Trump won the election. After
all, he’s already promised violence as an organizing principle for
his second term. As David Remnick has written
[[link removed]] in _The
New Yorker_, Trump  

“makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his lawlessness, his will
to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises it, and, most
disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is no
question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an
instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to
perverse action.”

Trump has also promised a thorough purge of his enemies in the
government and beyond, as well as the weaponization of the Justice
Department
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wage war on all MAGA opponents. As in his first term, he would destroy
as many federal agencies as possible. Meanwhile, he would promote
drilling _über alles_ and roll back every Biden administration
effort to create an industrial policy to guide the United States away
from fossil fuels.

What Trump proposes is fundamentally different from the now shopworn
Republican strategy of reducing the federal government to the size of
something that can be “drowned in the bathtub” (as anti-tax
activist Grover Norquist once so memorably put it
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in favor of “states’ rights.” Trump has nothing but contempt for
the politics that advance such a perspective. Like the gang leader he
is, he’d rather concentrate federal power in his own hands as an
instrument of personal vengeance emphasizing loyalty above all.
Instead of the empowerment of state legislatures, Trump prefers chaos,
for in fraught times people look to autocratic leaders.

When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is
distinctly the Barbecue type. He admires leaders who slaughter people
indiscriminately
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the Philippines), change the constitution
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times to bypass legislative and judicial opposition (Viktor Orbán of
Hungary), or kill their political opponents
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they might live (Vladimir Putin of Russia). He likes the bad boys who
have transformed their parties into gangs and their countries into
fiefdoms. In short, he’s the ultimate gang leader.

Of course, he won’t do it alone. There are plenty of true believers
and opportunists to staff his administration and implement his whims,
but that’s not enough. As his first term revealed, the guardrails of
democracy — opposition politicians, bureaucrats, even certain
Republicans who continue to have qualms – can still prevent the
country from tumbling over a cliff.

This time around, Trump and those backing him hope to disable enough
of the political infrastructure to create the space for non-state
actors to do his work for him. In The Donald’s first term, the
“deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Trumpophile Steve
Bannon so infamously put it
[[link removed]],
was a strategy meant to empower actors like corporations and religious
institutions to grab power for themselves. Next time around, he’s
likely to surround himself with advisors pulled from the think-tank
crowd that produced the nightmarish Project 2025
[[link removed]] blueprint in order to “free” all
MAGA-oriented non-state and (often) anti-state actors to do their
damnedest.

But even ruthless think tanks, corporations, and apocalyptic preachers
aren’t likely to go far enough for Donald Trump, since they also
remain the bedrock of America’s more traditional right wing, the
coalition that put Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush into the White
House. Trump needs genuine mayhem-makers. By removing restrictions on
firearms
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he aims to deputize every American citizen in his camp to MAGAfy the
United States.

Trump’s repeated exhortations to violence — “lock her up,”
“punch him in the face,” “be there, will be wild” — may well
take a more specific form in a second term. Like McCarthyites at the
height of the Cold War, Trumpists have imagined “Marxists” under
every bed, even in the Pentagon
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It’s not far-fetched to think that the reelected president might
issue a coded call to his supporters to round them all up and dispatch
them in some grim fashion.

Trump often accuses his opponents of exactly the sins — attempting
to steal elections, having distinctly senior moments — of which he
is supremely guilty. In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about
witch-hunts
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Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this
November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the
1950s look like a garden party.

AFTER AUTOCRACY

Haiti has no government, much less a strong-armed autocrat like Donald
Trump. So, it might seem ludicrous to compare the crisis there with
the prospective “bloodbath” Trump promises here. But remember:
Haiti suffered under two ruthless dictators from 1957 to 1986: Papa
Doc Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc. Between them, they ensured that
Haiti would never easily establish democratic institutions.

Donald Trump is nearly 78 years old. He doesn’t have a long
political future. Yes, were he to win in November, he would surely do
what he could to destroy democracy. Still, the true nightmare scenario
is likely to come later, as climate change sends yet more migrants
surging toward U.S. borders, generates more fires that sweep across
the land, and heats politics to the boiling point. That’s when
future versions of the gangs Trump has encouraged to “stand back and
stand by,” the insurrectionists he’s promised to amnesty, and the
loyalists who have shared images
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Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck could assault the
citadels of power in an attempt to destroy once and for all the rule
of law that Trump has spent his life undermining.

Cue the ominous music: from sea to shining sea, the war of all against
all may be just around the corner.

_[JOHN FEFFER, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]], is the
author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands
[[link removed]] and the
director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy
Studies. Frostlands
[[link removed]],
a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of
his Splinterlands series, and the final novel in the trilogy
is Songlands
[[link removed]].
He has also written Right Across the World: The Global Networking of
the Far-Right and the Left Response
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_Copyright 2024 John Feffer. Cross-posted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
[[link removed]]._

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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[[link removed]]. Check out the newest Dispatch
Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
[[link removed]] (the
final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
[[link removed]], and
Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
[[link removed]],
as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
[[link removed]], John
Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
[[link removed]], and
Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
[[link removed]]._

* Haiti
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* democracy
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* mob rule
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* gangs
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* Donald Trump
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* Climate Change
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* Neoliberalism
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* poverty
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* economic inequality
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* January 6
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* Jan 6
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* Capitol Siege
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* MAGA
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* Make America Great Again
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* Project 2025
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* autocracy
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