Yes, I should have been clearer - I wasn’t disagreeing with your point about dictators. My train of thought was - half the country keeps voting for the Republicans even when it’s against their economic interest and the Republicans deliver nothing. So if an authoritarian Republican would-be dictator actually delivered substantive economic benefit to the masses, democracy might be in trouble.
If Trump had the political skills that the average small town mayor has, we wouldn’t be having this conversation yet. Trump could easily have won this election legally if he had shown an ounce of sense.
For an American president winning a second term legally is easier than stealing an election. If you’re not competent enough to do the first, you’re certainly not competent enough to do the second.
That’s because looking at voting or any other decision for that matter thru the idea that humans act rationally in their economic self-interest or health self interest, etc. is overly simplistic. Folks behave according to a set of motives and not all of them are rational. Maybe not even the majority.
It can be pretty much any charismatic republican now. Trump tested the waters for them. They’ve been riling up their base through dog whistles and somewhat vaguely plausible lies for years, and when Trump came on the scene as a political candidate, they thought he was going to sink them. He was saying the quiet part out loud. They thought they couldn’t get away with that - that if they were too open with their hateful, shitty, racist agenda, they’d get push back, so they had to be more subtle about it. Imply it. There were a lot of them - like pre-2016 Lindsay Graham - who thought Trump was going to sink the party by just being out and open about their stupid, anti-science, anti-everyone but the rich, xenophobic beliefs and policies.
And then it didn’t happen. That pushback never came. The republicans embraced this new direct level of demagoguery and openly saying the quiet parts out loud. They loved it. They loved that they could be openly hateful now instead of being ostracized and shamed. It turns out that the previous republicans had overestimated the decency of conservatives in America, and hey, they can just be out in the open with our hate and corruption and their base is totally into that.
Now they know that. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. The Republican cult has already shown that they are willing to ignore reality and believe whatever they’re told. There’s no need for holding back. No subtlety, no moderation, no pretending to be anything else. They can appeal to the same worst of humanity that Trump did.
The next guy just has to inspire them and be able to come up with a plan beyond tweeting whatever dumb shit comes to mind.
It could be – it doesn’t have to be, but it could be. I say that because for as much as there is to be negative about, there is an equally positive development in that there are a lot of people who have been alarmed into action. I think that even in good times, when there is relative peace, prosperity and stability, there are threats, not the least of which is that we can be oblivious to the dangers. By the same token, we may miss the reasons for optimism, such as the fact that we’ve had a record number of new voter registrations and voter turnout in the most recent presidential election not seen since 1908 – that is absolutely good.
What worries me is that there is a tremendous opportunity for these record numbers of new voters to observe that nothing happens, that nothing changes, that the country is confronted with an increasing number of very complex problems, and that the government isn’t up to the task of finding a solution. If that happens, we could have a sharp decline in confidence that democracy and civic engagement matters. And that, in turn, would be disastrous. The danger I see is that we could have a situation in which the people themselves give up, and tolerate authoritarianism, and even consider it a viable alternative to what exists now. Radicalism could become more attractive, and it could become mainstream - even more mainstream than it is now on the right.
Trump is widely hailed by the masses for creating lots of good manufacturing jobs. He didn’t really, but he claimed he did and was believed.
Trump is widely hailed by the masses for ending the Obama Recession, something that never existed, and causing the S&P & Dow to skyrocket. He didn’t really, but he claimed he did and was believed.
Trump is widely hailed by the masses for eliminating illegal immigration. He didn’t really, but he claimed he did and was believed.
Trump is widely hailed by the masses for hugely dropping hteir taxes, mostly by increasing a couple’s standard deduction from 6K to 24K. He didn’t really, instead they just renamed a few K of exemptions to be inside the standard deduction and presto-chango; it looks like a giant tax cut. And yes, there was a real, albeit very small, actual tax cut there for the workers. But he claimed he got them $18K per family and was believed.
It appears it’s much easier to convince the masses than it is to deliver them the goods. It’s certainly cheaper for the plutocrats that way.
They might improve the standard of living for a while…until their incompetence catches up with them. The problem with running an authoritarian regime is that you make enemies, and when you make enemies, you can’t trust people, so you hire people on the basis of whether they are loyal, not whether they are good at their jobs. This is exactly what happened in Turkey and Venezuela.
They also learned that conservative voters don’t care about democratic norms nearly as much as they care about obtaining and maintaining power at any cost. They’ll hold onto archaic election structures and suppress opposition voting without apology.
One facet to consider is that our system was created to thwart the actions of skilled politicians. A smarter Trump could better manipulate the strings of power but would immediately meet with barriers. The current coup attempt is blocked at the lowest level by a legal wall of courts.
An orderly attack against an orderly system is not the best strategy. The system is ill prepared for a random attack. That is what we observe with Trump. The system has no way to respond to the unthinkable. In example:
Any politician who attacked the heroism of John McCain would fail
A President who deliberately misled the nation into a disastrous failure would be removed from office
A President who overtly attempted to overturn the results of an election would immediately be restrained
Turns out not to be true. Our system is designed to restrain the clever but not the clueless. An example is Ted Cruz. He has political associates and political enemies. There are system obligations and system constraints on his actions. He could not prevail against Trump in the primary because Trump has none. A clueless Trump can promise to meet every need and counter every objection. He has an answer for everything (perhaps a non-answer). Skill and intelligence would only slow him down.
Our celebrity obsessed society is vulnerable to another Trump. A contender with the oratory of William Jennings Bryan, the politics of Huey P. Long and the intellect of Donald J. Trump would be a formidable candidate.
The biggest thing Trump lacked was an inner circle of people he could trust that would act as a cohesive unit. The closest he found to loyalists were people like Barr that he recruited relatively late in his presidency. It’s also now clear that there is no one in his camp who isn’t planning on surviving in politics after Trump is gone. No one is ride-or-die.
I also think that while his erratic, poorly planned acts of disruption were in some ways beneficial to him because they kept a surreal veneer around his real destructive actions, he needed to have some more foresight of how things would work in some areas. I think the big issue he had is he was never able to get a completely loyalist court system, and he was also never able to normalize the idea of openly defying the courts. He was able to stack the court with Federalist Society conservatives, but not really loyalists to him personally who are going to help him remain in power. Part of his loyalist problem goes to my prior point - I don’t know what a Trump loyalist judge even looks like - Trump doesn’t seem to have any loyalists that aren’t dependent on him to keep their jobs.
The main alternative to stacking the judiciary with loyalists would be making an example out of publicly defying some big court decision that wasn’t directly related to deciding an election outcome. He frequently slow-walked compliance to rulings, looked for loopholes, refiled challenges over and over again, but he never proudly defied a ruling. The problem with his strategy is that who gets to be President on January 20th isn’t something you can monkey with. You have to comply with the law, openly defy it, or screw with the electoral college. Trump had an opening that I was very concerned about with the original “citizenship question” lawsuit - his admin. was ordered to reprint the question and the people contracted to print it complied. Trump needed to make sure he was in complete control of how the ballots got printed so he could make a big public show of defying the ruling. That would have given himself and all his allies in the political system more cover to either refuse to certify election results in November and/or refuse to step down from office in spite of the results.
One other thing I definitely think the next figure with dictatorial aspirations will do is try to undermine local election processes. Right now county clerks are an extremely boring position (I couldn’t name my clerk and I’m pretty sure they ran unopposed) and poll workers are just random people who are retired or have free time. If you bombard both of those positions with right wing stooges all around the country, I’m not convinced there is a powerful enough countervailing force to protect elections in this country.
There also is always the third alternative where you stack military brass with loyalists and actually successfully declare martial law, but after seeing Trump take a wrecking ball to our system, I’m now fairly confident that our military bureaucracy is much tougher to undermine than our political system.
Good point. To a great degree the system is based on that those involved have internalized “I’m not supposed to do that” and it constrains even the most devious of them because they care about their legitimacy. Someone like Trump and his devotees, OTOH, view “legitimacy” as being able to say, “I’m not supposed to do that? Well, who’s going to grab me and physically FORCE me otherwise?”
That seems to have been his biggest shortcoming. If it were up to him he would have the entire Civil Service and officer corps become at-will employees of the President himself – which has been a key factor in the enablement of cases like Turkey or Venezuela, to allow a thorough purging of anyone who’s not submissive.
Yes, the fundamental decentralization of the republic helped a lot at this point – POTUS cannot command a county clerk or a state attorney; he can’t replace the commissioners of NYPD or Las Vegas Metro with someone he can directly order who to arrest. (*)
But you point out an important vulnerability and it is that it would be damn easy in one or two years for the races for county clerks across the land to feature a bunch of “MAGA 4EVER” candidates who’ll promise to “count ballots the RIGHT way, IYKWIM”
The Faction that for now follows Trump may now seek out a combination of measures for centralization of elections procedures plus jurisdictional legislation to tie the hands of courts when it comes to election results, and have elections adjudication be officially taken over by the political branches.
(* OTOH, that same decentralization enabled that a large number of our states functioned as de-facto one-party ethnosupremacist illiberal republics for a large chunk of their history, with nobody bothering to invoke the 14th Amendment penalties for disenfranchisement. So things can swing both ways.)
County clerk is a part time job most everywhere.
In most places Team R is already winning these elections. MAGA clerks aren’t going to get elected in places where they aren’t. Plus we have laws and stuff and you’re asking part time employees to commit felonies for something that likely won’t work. Doesn’t really seem like a viable plan.
I think the biggest obstacle to Trump’s power grab was that we had institutions that, while weakening, still worked. We still do have the guardrails of democracy, but they’re getting weaker and weaker.
The biggest obstacle to Trump’s power grab was Trump himself. His only loyalty is to Donald Trump and he lacks the imagination to see that other people aren’t going to have the same blind devotion to serving Donald Trump that he has. A real leader, good or evil, needs to convince his followers that they’re serving a bigger cause.
You’ve absolutely got a point: in the end, Trump was just too much of a clown to grab excessive power in a system that still had guardrails, and the last few days have been exhibit A.
You allude heavily to the theme of a charismatic strongman like Trump. I think that the initial breakthrough of fascism had to be someone like that, but now that he’s shown the way and broken the norms, any Republican could do it, and I think most of them would. Ted Cruz is one who worries me. He’d have absolutely no qualms treading Trump’s path, he has experience and connections in government, and by Republican standards, he’s pretty smart. Certainly smarter than Trump. I think Mitt Romney absolutely would engineer a coup in a heartbeat.
Anybody expecting Republicans to do a round of soul-seeking and an abrupt about-face is going to be mighty disappointed. I guarantee you that a main topic on the 2024 campaign trail will be “we must reclaim the stolen 2020 election by any means necessary and pursue drastic measures to ensure it never happens again.” Their sense of victimhood will never do anything but enlarge, and for that reason they’ll pursue even more audacious and outlandish schemes to stay in power.
When I think of “fascism,” I think of ideologues, which Trump is not. Trump is a populist who has formed a political amalgam of different factions or groups.
What concerns me is the potential for a group of fascists to thrust themselves into the political mainstream – something like a Tea Party but with much more of a structure.
I don’t see that happening now, but we’re getting to the point where the conditions could become quite favorable to this kind of movement. If there is a financial crisis that is so grave that it breaks what is left of our welfare state, then we’re in serious trouble.
It may actually be a perfectly viable plan. It’s exactly the plan Conservatives began implementing 25 or so years ago when people such as Jerry Falwell, etc decided to insert their religious beliefs into politics in a big way. They pushed their followers to run for local offices, from school board up, and it worked. I don’t know that anyone tracked how many of these folks moved up or even stayed with politics, but it was very effective at least at the local level. And, given our current political situation, you could argue it worked at a national level.
Going off on a tangent here, and maybe the beginning of another thread, but do you all think that there is an “off ramp” for dictators?
It seems to me that the social contract inevitably has a certain set of problems:
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Within the population, there is a small percentage of people that really want power and will do whatever the fuck they can to a) get it and b) keep it.
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Keeping power means eliminating competition.
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Eliminating competition inevitably means creating enemies
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Once enemies are created, it’s no longer a matter of simply wanting more power because you enjoy the higher standard of living that having power provides; it’s now a matter of needing to stay in power because having power could be the difference between life and death, or at minimum, being a free man (woman) or not. I believe that this has been referred to as the “dictator’s dilemma.”
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In theory, term limits would be one way to confront the dictator’s dilemma in a democracy. The thinking goes, the would-be dictator knows that his power, like his life, will come to an end. Therefore, there’s no incentive to make enemies to grab more power because power will inevitably end. However, as we’ve seen, that the power will end is merely an assumption; that won’t stop people from trying to engage in unconstitutional efforts to overstay their welcome like a bad AirBnB guest.
Constitutions aside, this dictator who comes to power by violating democratic norms and breaks democracy ends up with the dictator’s dilemma, just like the dictator who came to power in an undemocratic system.
What’s needed is some sort of off-ramp to entice the dictator or authoritarian to leave voluntarily, perhaps with the understanding that some price will be paid but it might be a tolerable price – maybe an international agreement among countries to take in an authoritarian in exile.
I look at an oligarchy like Putin’s Russia, and that’s mostly what concerns me about prospects for the US. My worry is more about garden-variety authoritarians, just grifters and thugs that have no interest in governing other than to entrench and protect themselves and their cronies. I believe this is what catalyzes most of what you’re calling fascism. They might recruit an ideology to serve their needs, but they might not need to.
I also wouldn’t call Trump a populist. He does deploy populist rhetoric, but it’s a very specific kind of white-grievance populism that worships white elites. That’s not populism, that’s just white nationalism. All it unites is white people who have money with white people who want money. He just mobilized that impulse to gain more votes than any president in history except Joe Biden.
I really don’t think Trumpism needs much ideological tweaking. It dang nearly got him a second term. White nationalism is here to stay (if it ever even left).