How America Ends

How America Ends

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have had this thought, and I don’t claim that it’s original to me. Still, the other day something came to me with unusual clarity. I thought: The American republic will not end because it is conquered from the outside by a foreign power. There is no power in the world that can conquer the USA militarily, at least not without being utterly destroyed themselves by American military might. No, it isn’t hostile foreign powers that we need to fear. Rather, the American republic will end as a republic when the American electorate becomes so fearful and so ignorant that it votes into office politicians who will end it. We have a good example of how that happens in the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic in Germany. Hitler didn’t take power by force. He wasn’t put in power by a foreign army. Rather, his Nazi party won so many electoral contests that the President of the country had no option but to appoint Hitler chancellor. He and his thugs then dismantled the republican structure of the country and created a brutal single party dictatorship in its place. That something much like that could happen in the US is the thing we have most to fear. It is in all probability how the American republic will end.

We are not to the point where it is likely to happen anytime soon. Still, we see the beginnings of it happening in the presidential administration of Donald Trump. Trump consistently and vigorously assails two institutions that are essential to the maintenance of any democratic system, namely, a free press and the country’s law enforcement agencies. When the free American press reports the truth about Trump and his minions he screams “fake news.” He threatens to cancel the White House press credentials of media outlets that criticize him. He calls the people of America’s intelligence agencies Nazis. He bellows about corruption in the Department of Justice and the FBI, corruption that simply does not exist. He says that the Mueller investigation into his campaign and administration is a plot by Democrats upset about losing the 2016 presidential election when the truth is that that investigation is led by Republicans. Moreover, recent press reports say that the Department of Justice began investigating Trump before the 2016 election but intentionally made nothing about that investigation public for fear of influencing the election against Trump. No dictator, not even a would-be dictator like Trump, can live with a free press and independent law enforcement agencies. Trump would abolish them both and replace them with toadying servants rather than independent professionals if he could.

He can’t do what he would like to do for three reasons. First, his approval ratings with the American public aren’t high enough. Polling never shows his favorable rating to be above about forty percent at most. That forty percent of Americans support him is itself a chilling statistic and a cause for great concern, but it isn’t enough so that he can really slap restrictions on the press and put sycophantic yes people in charge of the Department of Justice and the FBI. Second, the minority of the American electorate that made him president hasn’t sent enough like-minded fascists to Congress so that Trump could get legislation muzzling the press and castrating the DOJ and FBI passed. Third, though he has appointed several reactionary federal judges and gotten the Senate to confirm them, he hasn’t yet packed the Supreme Court or the other federal courts with his followers to eliminate the federal courts as a barrier to his dictatorial or at least authoritarian desires. So far we have only the beginnings of a reactionary movement that seeks to dismantle American democracy. It isn’t yet strong enough to make its desired results reality.

The movement against democracy in the US isn’t strong enough to do that yet, but the important word in that sentence is “yet.” The movement that would do it has begun among us, and it achieved a result in the last presidential election that no one thought was possible. The election of Donald Trump as president is a result not of an enlightened citizenry voting intelligently, it is a result of fear and anger over a world that is changing before the eyes of those who used to run it. Blue collar, relatively uneducated Americans used to vote for reasonable candidates and reasonable policies. Vast numbers of them no longer do. At least in the presidential election of 2016 a great many of them voted their fear not their hope. They voted their hatred not their commitment to justice. They voted for an impossible return to the past rather than for constructive policies that would actually improve their lives. They voted their racism and their sexism not their commitment to equal rights. These unsophisticated voters who put Trump in office are a fertile field for fascism. In 2016 they voted for a sort of toned down American version of fascism. When will they no longer be satisfied with Trump’s soft fascism and vote instead for a candidate committed to hard fascism, to real European style fascism? There really isn’t any way to know, but the election of Donald Trump puts us all on notice. Fascism is alive and growing among us. If we can’t stop it, it will be how America ends.