How Trump May Destroy American Democracy

 

How Trump May Destroy American Democracy

In the history of the world, few democratic political systems have survived for long. We Americans live in the longest surviving one. Our constitutional form of government was created in 1789, when the current US Constitution went into effect. The US Constitution does not establish a pure democracy. It establishes a representative republican form of government. It originally didn’t have the people electing senators. The states appointed them. It did not guarantee the vote to women. It said a Black person was only three-fifths of a person. Originally, it lacked the guarantees of civil rights added to it in the first ten amendments. Still, it created what has become the world’s longest lasting democracy. Americans have long held democracy as one of the nation’s core values. Even when Black people and women couldn’t vote either because of the law or the practice of the states, we considered ourselves to be democratic. And indeed, we long have been far more democratic than most nations that have existed over the course of human history and have been that longer than any other nation ever was.

Most formerly democratic governments have died in a relatively short period of time. The experience of the nations of western Europe and Japan since the end of World War II may be an exception to that pattern of the failure of democracies. When we look at a couple of democratic countries in the decades before that war, however, we see two examples of how democracies die. Those countries are Italy and Germany. After World War I, both of those countries had democratic governments. By 1933, both had become completely undemocratic fascist dictatorships.

They didn’t become fascist by the same process. In Italy, democracy fell to armed force. Benito Mussolini started a political movement he called fascist. The term refers to the symbol of bound sticks with an ex head protruding from them that came from ancient Rome. Mussolini used it in an effort to tie his movement to what had been, at least as he saw it, the glory of that ancient empire of the Italian peninsula. Mussolini forced the capitulation of the Italian government when he marched on Rome with an armed mob. Italian democracy fell not to the will of the people expressed in a free election. It fell to physical violence.

It was different in Germany. After World War I, the German government was what we call the Weimar Republic. It was a constitutional, democratic government. It held relatively free and fair elections. Yet it was beset by an unending series of crises. There was the economic crisis of inflation, in which German paper money literally was not worth the paper it was printed on. There was a strong communist movement in the country. Russia had become communist after 1917. Many Germans looked to communist Russia as a model of ideal national development. There was also a strong reaction against communism and the possibility that Germany would become communist. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were among the most apparent representatives of this reaction. Hitler preached German supremacy over all other peoples. He said he could restore Germany to its pre-World War I glory, and he blamed both the communists and the Jews for Germany’s loss in that war and the country’s subsequent decline, never mind that his claims that they were were nothing but lies.

Hitler tried once to seize power by force. In 1923 the Nazis tried to seize power in the German state of Bavaria through violent attack. They thought that if they could take over Bavaria the rest of Germany would join them. They failed. The authorities put down what is called “the beer hall putsch” with relative ease. Hitler was arrested and spent a couple of years in prison. When his attempt to seize power by force failed, after he was released from prison, Hitler worked to turn the Nazi party into one that sought to come to power through the democratic processes of the Weimar Republic.

The Nazis suffered a humiliating defeat in the German national election of 1928. But then the worldwide economic crash of 1929 revived their prospects for seizing power. They scored a major political victory in the election of 1932. Under the Weimar constitution, the country’s president appointed its chancellor, in effect the country’s prime minister. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor in early 1933. His doing so was perfectly constitutional. In effect if not in form, the German people elected Hitler as chancellor in 1932, and he came to power in early 1933. His coming to power was perfectly legal. Yes, the Nazis also had their violent thugs, who committed acts of violence mostly on perceived communists and Jews. But Hitler did not seize power by force the way Mussolini did. He used Germany’s democratic institutions to come to power. Once in power, he promptly destroyed those institutions and created his fascist dictatorship, which was anything but democratic.

Thus we have two different models for how democracies die. They can die because some person or group displaces them by force as happened in Italy in the 1920s. The more important point for us Americans, I think, is that democracies can and sometimes do vote themselves out of existence. Hitler and the Nazis were, in effect, voted into power, but no one could really be in doubt about their intention to destroy democracy. German democracy didn’t survive for even one year under Hitler.

Democracy, you see, has a fundamental vulnerability. It allows the people to vote. It does not limited for whom they can vote. In a democracy the people are free to vote for politicians who support democracy and have a broad range of political opinions and policies. They are also free to vote for politicians whose primary goal is to destroy democracy and put themselves into unchallengeable power. Such politicians use whatever their country’s economic and social issues are to whip up support for an undemocratic solution to those problems, all the while probably claiming that only they can preserve their nation’s democracy.

The threat to democracy from military cabals or other organized, violent movements is often (though not always) easy to spot. Mussolini made no secret of what he intended to do once his violent supporters had seized power. Not so with democratic threats to democracy. It is easy for would-be fascist dictators to veil their intentions behind the claim that they are actually defending the democracy they intend to destroy. We are living with a prime example of how that phenomenon works in America today. It is the movement we have come to call MAGA, the reactionary populist movement created and led by former president Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is an American fascist. Some of us realized that he was a fascist when he was elected president in 2016, but his fascism was somewhat less obvious then than it is now. He ran for president as the candidate of what, up until that time, had been one of America’s two established, respectable political parties, a party he has now turned into his own cult of personality. He won the Republican nomination for president through the legal processes of the Republican Party. He either convinced a great many people that the policies of Democratic president Barack Obama were destroying the country or at least tapped into the fear a great many Americans had that such was the case. He played on the people’s fear, a classic fascist tactic. Though he got some help in his campaign from the Russian fascist Vladimir Putin, Trump came to power in perfectly legal ways.

Trump, of course, lost his bid for reelection in 2020. His anti-democratic commitment then came to the fore. He lied and lied and lied that he had actually won the 2020 presidential election and that nefarious forces, invariably Democratic, had stolen his victory from him. He tried first to overturn the result of that election through legal means. When that failed, he turned to illegal means. Finally, on January 6, 2021, he turned to violent means in a last, desperate attempt to stop Congress from certifying the victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 election. He is now running for president again. As far as we know, he is using only legal means to do so. Yet we have every reason to fear that, if he can, he will, in the future, do one of two things. If he loses the 2024 election, he may organize an attempt to seize power in Washington, DC, by force. He has used force before. He has in his base groups of violent extremists who are more than willing to seize power through violence. He may, in other words, attempt to destroy American democracy in much the same way as Mussolini destroyed Italian democracy.

He has made it clear that, if he wins the 2024 presidential election, he will destroy American democracy the way Hitler destroyed German democracy. He makes no bones about his desire to turn the United States into a presidential dictatorship. He neither understands the American constitution nor has any interest in ruling under to it. He has said he will turn the US Department of Justice into a political arm of the White House. Controlling the institutions that function to preserve the rule of law is a classic fascist tactic. He tried to use the Justice Department for his political ends when he tried to overturn the result of the 2020 election. He succeeded in doing so only in part, but given another chance, he will do everything he can to succeed completely. When he was president Trump stacked the federal judiciary with ideological supporters, many if not most of whom had no qualifications for being federal judges. If he is ever president again, he will do everything he can to turn the entire federal court system into his lap dog committed not to the rule of law but only to him.

Trump doesn’t believe in the rule of law. He believes only in the rule of Trump just as Hitler believed only in the rule of Hitler. As long as he lives and is mentally and physically able, Trump will do everything he can to destroy American democracy. He will do it by democratic means if he can. I and a great many other people fear that he will do it by force if he can’t. The United States has never faced a threat to its democratic way of governance like the one Donald Trump presents. He has millions of insecure, fearful supporters who will, I fear, do anything to put him back in power. He misleads them with lie after lie about how he can make things better for them. They aren’t sophisticated enough to see through his lies. If we don’t defeat him at the polls, we are in big trouble. Even if we do, we may be in bigger trouble as he tries to seize power by force. I pray that it will not come to that, but we must all be aware that it could. May we have the courage to stop it from happening or to overcome it if it does.