It Never Occurred to Me to Think

 

It Never Occurred to Me to Think

We are living in a time it had never occurred to me to think I would ever see. We Americans say our country is the world’s oldest democracy. We have claimed to be a beacon on a hill for the rest of the world to see and to navigate by. We claim that we have always defended democracy around the world, as slim a hold on the truth as that claim may have. Our country began with this bold declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” I know, of course, that my country has never lived up to the claim in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, much less that all people are. Still, it is revolutionary statement of a vision my country has been trying, in fits and starts, to live into ever since July 4, 1776.

My country’s government is formed by the Constitution of the United States. The country adopted the Constitution in 1789 and amended it shortly thereafter to add the first ten amendments, which are known as the Bill of Rights. It creates a republican system of government in which decisions are made by representatives of the people, or at least of the people who were allowed to vote or select senators, not by hereditary monarchs and their appointed officials. The Constitution establishes a government of divided powers in which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches act as checks on each other’s power. As amended, the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state, freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It guarantees each person’s right to due process of law. It eventually was amended to forbid slavery and to give women the vote, though it took far longer than it should have to include either of those provisions in the document.

There has been only one time in our country’s history when a large number of Americans turned against the country’s system of government. It was when a number of southern states seceded from the union in order to defend their system of race-based slavery. A civil war followed. There have been other anti-democratic movements in the country’s history. There were, for example, a significant number of American Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s. Though they included various members of Congress, the Nazis never came very close to taking over the government. There have always been American communists, especially in the 1930s. They have never posed any kind of real threat to American democracy.

Most Americans today, including my aging generation, grew up in a country that regularly held free and fair elections. We have had elections at every level of government, from local city elections to elections for president of the United States. Polls may have predicted the outcomes of those elections, but we have never known the actual result of any election in advance.

Until around 2016 we have taken the fairness of America’s democratic elections for granted. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes were things that happened in other countries not in ours. We fought World War II against German Nazism and Japanese imperialism. We conducted a decades long “cold war” against communist totalitarianism. We fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam against communist takeovers. The Vietnam war was a colossal disaster that we never should have fought, but at least the enemy was communist not democratic.

Until quite recently, right wing authoritarianism seemed to be a thing of the past. Germany today is staunchly anti-Nazi. Japan still has an emperor, but the country is democratic and peaceful. Left wing totalitarianism is still around. Communist totalitarianism ended in Russia on December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. China remains the world’s largest totalitarian nation by far, but it is (or at least claims to be) communist not fascist. Nominally communist regimes still exist in Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, but they are all minor players on the world stage. There have always been authoritarian regimes in different countries, but until recently it looked like democracy and freedom were spreading across the world.

Then came today’s neo-fascist movements. We see them in control of countries in Russia and in Hungary. In Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has created a right wing authoritarian system of government that has suppressed the civil liberties of all of the people of the country. Viktor Orban has done the same in Hungary. These regimes are neo-fascist not communist. We thought World War II did away with fascism. We were wrong.

So far, no neo-fascist or other authoritarian movement has taken over the government of the United States. But until recent years it had never occurred to me to think that an authoritarian takeover of our federal government was even a remote possibility. Donald Trump and his legion of followers have changed that reality. We now must consider that a Trumpist, MAGA takeover of the United States is a very real possibility.

There is no doubt that Donald Trump is an American fascist. He, like all fascists, does not believe in democracy. Trump leads a movement that has engaged in massive illegal activity in an attempt to undo the result of the free and fair 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost but goes on insisting that he won. They have even engaged in a violent insurrection at the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty to certify the result of that election. Trump calls the insurrectionists patriots. They aren’t. He calls those arrested and held in jail hostages. They aren’t. He says there are fine people among armed white supremacists. There aren’t. He says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, a neo-Nazi statement if ever there were one. They aren’t.

During his term as president Trump tried to turn the US Department of Justice into his personal law firm. He almost succeeded. Attorney General Barr turned against Trump only when Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him became so absurd that no rational person could believe them and the illegality of Trump’s efforts to overturn that election was unmistakable. If he becomes president again, Trump will appoint an attorney general who will enable a politicization of the Department of Justice and let Trump use it to persecute people he considers not to be just political opponents but outright enemies; and for Trump, all opponents are enemies. The Supreme Court justices he appointed have already made it possible for that court to take away a constitutional right for the first time in American history. If Trump becomes president again, every constitutional right we have will be at risk.

Trump believes in democracy only when he wins or his sycophants running for offices other than the presidency do. When he or any MAGA Republican loses, Trump proclaims loud and often that the election was rigged and a Trumpist victory was stolen. In other words, he does not believe in democracy at all. He believes only in his own power. He has said that when he becomes president again he will be a dictator, but, he says, only for one day. We know that he will be as much of a dictator as he can get away with for as long as he is in office.

The Republican Party used to be respectable albeit wrong on many policy issues. It used to be the party of big and small business. It used to represent the shop owners on Main Streets across the country. There used to be decent Republican politicians. There used to be Republican politicians who believed in civil rights. No longer. Now Trump’s MAGA movement has taken over the entire Republican Party, at least at the national level and in many states. Republicans used to believe in democracy. Now they don’t, or at least MAGA Republicans don’t, and they control the entire party. Politicians like Nikki Haley who ran against Trump in early Republican primaries have fallen into line and say they will vote for the man they had excoriated during their campaigns.

Until recently, it had never occurred to me to think that a major American political party would become anti-democratic, but the Republican Party has. How did that happen? It happened the way historian Heather Cox Richardson says authoritarian regimes always gain power. In her book Democracy Awakening, on page xii, she says: “Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind.” That is precisely what has happened in this country.

Until recently in the United States white men were exclusively in charge of essentially everything. They ran the government at every level. They ran the economy. They ran the churches. As recently as the 1960s nearly every member of Congress was a white male. Until Barack Obama was elected in 2008, every American president had been a white male. White men were preferred employees everywhere. They didn’t have to worry much that a woman or a person of color would get a job they had applied for. It was also true that a working class white man with a job in manufacturing or related industry made enough money to give his family a decent way of life. White men were privileged in every aspect of American life. They ran the country, and they knew it.

Now all of that has changed or at least is changing. Women get jobs that earlier in American history only a white man would get. People of color get jobs white men have applied for that they never would have gotten in earlier times. Women and people of color get elected to public offices they have never held before. The faces on TV include many women and people of color. Television advertising features mixed-race couples, something we never saw in earlier decades. People of color make up an ever growing percentage of the American population. There is no doubt that the demographics of this country are changing in ways make a great many white American men uncomfortable at best.

So they turn to Donald Trump as someone who promises them that he will reverse those changes and restore the privileges white American men perceive themselves to be losing. They know that he is a racist, so he will stop the rise of Black Americans. They know that he is an androcentric misogynist so he will stop the rise of women and get them out of the marketplace and back in the home where these men believe they belong. A great many white American men believe that the large number of people crossing our border with Mexico seeking asylum are a threat to them. Most of them are people of color. So Trump promises them he will not only seal the border to keep them out, he will deport the millions of them who are already here.

All of that is music to the ears of people who have lost the positions of privilege they once held. Those Americans by the millions fall for Trump’s authoritarian lies. Most of them are white men, though a great many women follow them into Trump’s arms (both figuratively and literally). These Americans may or may not know that nearly everything Trump says is a lie, but even if they do, they don’t care. He says what they long to hear. Like all authoritarians and totalitarians, Trump uses false analyses of issues and unfulfillable promises as bait to lure the people of the country into his trap. To get them to be willing to sacrifice their liberty in hopes of regaining their lost positions of power and privilege.

We are now in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign. This coming November this country will reelect either President Biden or former president Donald Trump, the man who is certainly guilty of multiple felonies committed in connection with his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Yet in this coming presidential election we face more than a choice between legitimate Democratic and Republican candidates for president. We face a choice between democracy and authoritarianism if not outright totalitarianism. We will decide whether the enormous bloc of white voters who live in fear of losing out will delay this country’s movement in the direction of freedom or not. Whether this country will hold to its democratic traditions or not.

Many of us who see the danger Trump presents wish we had a stronger Democratic candidate for president than Joe Biden. Biden has accomplished much as president, but Biden’s age works against him, though he isn’t that much older than Trump. Because of the crimes against humanity Israel is committing in Gaza and his lukewarm opposition to those crimes, Biden faces losing the votes of both Jewish Americans because he has acted too strongly against Israel and progressive Americans like your humble author because he hasn’t reacted nearly strongly enough. We hear that Biden is losing support among Black and Hispanic Americans. He is a competent but flawed president who may well lose the coming presidential election to the American fascist Donald Trump.

It had never occurred to me to think that such a thing could happen in my country. Sure. We’ve had bad presidents before. The fallen Republican hero Richard Nixon was a terrible president. The Republican hero Ronald Reagan was one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had. We still haven’t recovered from the damage he did to this country. But not even Nixon or Reagan was a fascist in the way Donald Trump is. Russia has no tradition of democracy at all, so Vladimir Putin isn’t hard to explain. America has a democratic tradition nearly 250 years old. I guess I always tacitly assumed that that tradition would shield us from the authoritarianism that is so prominent in the rest of the world both in the past and today. I was wrong. Everyone who made that assumption was wrong.

Will we succumb to the siren song of American fascism? It’s too early to tell. We do know, however, that we face a very real risk of that happening. That we would face such a risk used to be unimaginable. Now it is our national reality. It never occurred to me to think that we would ever face the risk we face today. We all need to think about it now.