Now that the Supreme Court has handed the arsonist the matches, I want to ask:
People in both parties can see authoritarianism on the horizon.
Why are so many Americans drawn to it? Why aren’t enough Americans moved to fight it?
There’s a Project 2025 for authoritarian rule, but there’s no project to reinforce the rule of law.
There’s an impassioned MAGA movement, but there wasn’t much of a resistance movement against Trump.
If enough of the electorate wanted to stop our descent into autocracy, they could do so. Despite its significant flaws, our political system still responds to pressure from below.
Our founding political creed was anti-authoritarian. Why do the authoritarians have this much momentum?
Honestly? Because many Republics and Democracies (not just ours) look to, and admire a strongmen when things feel (legitimately or NOT) out of control.
Dictators and wannabees will always promise a quick, easy fix that requires no sacrifice or effort on the part of those asked to select them for power, most honest politicians aren’t going to do the same.
And Democrats, and former Republicans labeled RINOs have been ringing the alarm bell for years now. But most people won’t look past their personal wedge issue to DO anything about it, or, even if they do, aren’t willing to dirty their own hands by breaking the rules if the other side isn’t provably doing it first.
Frogs in a pot, that’s what many of us are, but a huge chunk of the electorate is, as you worry, happy to turn up the heat, not realizing they’re in the damn pot with the rest of us.
It’s what I refer to as the paradox of democracy. If democracy means giving the people what they want, and what most people want isn’t democracy, what happens? Democracy can force lack of democracy.
“A lady outside the Convention asked Franklin if it was going to be a monarchy or a republic. ‘A republic,’ Franklin was said to reply. ‘If you can keep it.’”
“The fundamental principle of all propaganda was the repetition of effective arguments; but those arguments must not be too refined – there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be the man in the street. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not to the intellect. Truth was unimportant, and entirely subordinate to the tactics and psychology, but convenient lies (“poetic truth”, as he once called them) must always be made credible.”
–Hugh Trevor-Roper, English historian, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, WWII German Propaganda Minister
Straight out of The Demagogue’s Playbook.
Oh, yeah. I think this guy had it right, too:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Add to all this a money-making industry based on telling people what they want to hear–that unimpressive though their lives may be, they are still better than Those Others–and you end up with an electorate that makes decisions that are actually against their own best interest.
The Murdochs proved that they can get very, very rich from lying to large numbers of people. Their methods are now used by so widespread and vigorous an industry that many of their customers are NEVER exposed to facts or to ideas that contradict their supremacist fantasies.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
People often dream of the good dictator. Which is bullshit, and mostly only mean a dictator that does what I (i.e.: they) want. What they never get straight is the matter of succession. It never works on the long term.
But thinking about the long term is too much to ask for, it seems.
The pendulum is swinging back hard: the good times are over.
Which, considering how fucked up the world is in so many respects (climate change, poverty, inequality, third world, Israel/Palestina, Russia/Ukraine, mass extinctions, microplastics… you name it, the list is much longer, but I don’t want to bother you) makes me wonder why it took so long.
Absolutely. None of the methods through which the US (and much of the world) is being brought closer to autocracy are new. As several quotations in the thread show, people have been being fooled by the same old tricks for decades. Centuries, really—but modern media make the task of moving toward authoritarianism that much easier.
Race/religious hatred is nearly always part of the formula.
I also think our collective cultural ADHD is poison.
Germans, by and large – even academics and historians – are loath to weigh in on comparisons between Trump and the leader of the Third Reich. By doing so, they fear, they will weaken the ignominious place in history that the Third Reich holds.
From friends of family who know German historians, though, word is consistent: those who know believe the parallels are undeniable, innumerable, and cause for grave concern.
Trump already had his Beer Hall Putsch. He also famously kept a copy of “My New Order a Collection of Speeches by Adolf Hitler” by his bedside.
And closely related – something I frequently make reference to – is the 1967 Third Wave Experiment.
Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.
And, just to make a point of dissent clear on my part about the title of this thread: the US democracy, when it finally fails, will not be cancelled by popular demand. When it fails it will be cancelled by some vocal, radical minority amidst popular indifference.
People will be watching TikTok or Tinder while books burn.
People believe it can’t happen here, that this is the sort of thing that doesn’t happen in America. It’s why people were in such denial about Jan 6 being a coup attempt - that’s the sort of thing that happens in third world countries, not here, so it must not really be what it looks like.
We’ve been kept so busy just to keep our heads above water that people don’t have the time, resources, or energy to put up a real fight. This is in part by design. People that have some security and time have more willingness and ability to fight for principles.
Things are too comfortable. It takes a lot of commitment and bravery and selflessness to be among the first to rise up and risk your life and your comfort. It’s easier to do when things are completely turned to shit, but things at least feel relatively normal now. The grocery stores are stocked with food, the police aren’t shooting people in the streets. By the time this starts to change it will probably be too late to do anything about it.
No one wants to be the first one to make a move. If we started seeing acts of resistance, more would follow, but it takes a lot of courage to be the first.
Our media is complicit. They frame the terms of the discussion and act like everything is within the norms of politics. The “liberal media” is almost all owned by a few anti-liberal giant corporations. If there were rumblings of a general strike, or effective resistance to this fascist takeover, they would frame it in a way that damages it in the public view and discourages people from joining in.
We’ve been programmed to think that violence is always bad, that it’s never the answer, that it’s never a tool used by a decent person. This, too, is deliberate. Protest and revolutionary movements have been white washed. We believe that civil rights happened because Martin Luther King made nice speeches, and not because people were willing to throw shoes into the gears of society and threaten and commit violence. I’m not saying the peaceful movement wasn’t important - it was - but you need the stick, too. Or at least the threat of the stick.
Related, It’s not really within the mental makeup or values of liberals to take the sort of action thats needed. Old school leftists know that every concession taken from those in power has been through violence or the threat of violence, but liberals simply don’t have it in them. Everything is solved with discussion and good faith action even if your opponents won’t engage in either. It works well enough if they indulge you and society is civil, but what happens when it’s not? They don’t have the guts to do anything about it. They’ll have everything taken away from them with barely a peep.
The people who believe in the myth of America, who make it part of their identity to gloriously fight for freedom or fantasize about fighting off the tyrannical government are on the side of tyranny this time. If a democrat did what the republicans are now doing, these people would indeed engage in violence against the state, but since their guy is doing it they’re cheering it on. If anything, they will engage in violence in support of it (most likely against peaceful protesters). When this happens, the authorities will look that other way and let these goons do their dirty work.
The democratic party is incredibly, unbelievably inept. Their party line of treating Trumpism as though it were politics as usual was a big part of why our institutions and our culture did not really put up a fight. They should’ve been screaming from the rooftops the entire time that this is an encroaching fascist coup, fighting for the public spirit with bullhorns and podiums, using our institutions and legal systems to seek the maximum possible justice against the traitors to our country. Instead, we got a tepid response. They couldn’t even win a messaging war against one of the worst human beings ever to live. Their incompetence is staggering to the point where I have to wonder if it’s designed because it’s hard to believe that one of the major political parties in the most powerful country in the world has the balls and competence of a student council at a random middle school.
Our justice system and our institutions have not taken this threat seriously. Trump should be tried for legit treason for various things, but most obviously the way he requested a list of spies, gave them to Putin, and got them all killed, and the way he stole the most protected documents we have. If this had happened during the Cold War, he would’ve been executed already.
I could probably come up with 10 more, but this is a solid start.
The ink had only just dried on those lofty documents when Daniel Shays and other soldiers who’d fought for them were thanked for their service by being informed that the farms they’d left while fighting would be confiscated for unpaid taxes.
But at least we had those documents. Sharpies and hucksters would come with the vision of “freedom” as the freedom to make a fast buck without interference. Property rights are the only real human rights, don’t you agree? Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Robber Barrons of the 1880’s, the Captains of Industry of the 1920, Masters of the Universe of the 1980’s. Power is the only reality. Lofty Documents are simply contracts, and nobody respects contracts unless they are enforced.
Too many of us neglected that enforcement during the materialism and chest-thumping of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama era of Consumerism Civics, where freedom equaled a McMansion and a Ford F150. We ignore the fact that, in 2024, there are millions of people on earth, authoritarian, anti-authoritarian, and too stupid to know the difference, who’d revel every bit at the collapse of the USA as was done at the collapse of the USSR.
So many bad decisions made in this first 1/4 of the century, made by people who should know better than me because they are inarguably smarter than me. Iraq, Ukraine, Brexit, Gaza, etc. But they’re never as smart as they think they are. The wars they start and the shit they stir never come out shaped anything at all as they’d envisioned.
Slowed him down, maybe. You don’t let him get to take a crack at insurrection, fail, and then let him come back for his revenge tour 4 years later. Nothing about Trump or the MAGA movement is defeated, and the democrat’s terrible, tepid, cowardly response to him is a big reason for that.