Countries' tack to the hard right should be a warning to the US
"We're Americans, after all," so many proclaim. "We're not like those countries." Maybe not yet.
By now we’ve heard the presumptive GOP nominee — the twice-impeached, quadruply indicted sexual assaulting slumlord former host of Celebrity Apprentice — intends to turn the United States into a dictatorship “on day one”.
Former republican House member Liz Cheney is joining in the growing alarm over the erasure of democracy a potential Trump second term would cause in her new book Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. She hopes President Joe Biden wins another term as her own party has abandoned the Constitution and the country is “sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship”.
Now comes Ohio Senator J.D. Vance’s calling for an investigation into Washington Post op-ed writer Robert Kagan for daring to write about Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements of plans to turn the United States into a strong-man Hungarian- or Russian-style dictatorship.
This is why a piece published in The Economist, titled “Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024,” states:
Because MAGA Republicans have been planning his second term for months, Trump 2 would be more organised than Trump 1. True believers would occupy the most important positions. Mr Trump would be unbound in his pursuit of retribution, economic protectionism and theatrically extravagant deals. No wonder the prospect of a second Trump term fills the world’s parliaments and boardrooms with despair.
The greatest threat Mr Trump poses is to his own country. Having won back power because of his election-denial in 2020, he would surely be affirmed in his gut feeling that only losers allow themselves to be bound by the norms, customs and self-sacrifice that make a nation. In pursuing his enemies, Mr Trump will wage war on any institution that stands in his way, including the courts and the Department of Justice.
The Washington Post even ran a story admitting Trump’s rhetoric is identical to Hitler and Mussolini’s.
The Post reported:
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
The Intelligencer headlined a piece “Trump Goes Full Hitler by Calling Political Foes ‘Vermin’”.
The New York Times published a piece titled, “After Calling Foes ‘Vermin,’ Trump Campaign Warns Its Critics Will Be ‘Crushed’”.
From the New York Times: “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans,” the subheading for which reads, “If he regains power, Donald Trump wants not only to revive some of the immigration policies criticized as draconian during his presidency, but expand and toughen them.”
Countries’ right shifts don’t happen by accident, nor do they happen alone. As more democracies backslide toward authoritarian regimes, we are at the unbelievable point where we must ask ourselves if there’s a serious chance ours is next.
Three weeks ago, the republic of Ireland experienced civil unrest over immigration.
Dutch voters recently backed Geert Wilders’ anti-Islamic Freedom party, a chilling sign of how Europe’s democracies are chucking off democracy for far-right populism.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, a self-described fascist, heads Italy’s farthest-right government since World War II.
Finland is tacking right.
So are Austria, Germany, and Belgium.
While France did not elect far-right leader Marine Le Pen the last election, The Guardian reported that “If presidential elections were held today in France, polls suggest Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally — who scored a record 41.46% last time around — would win.” France is so close to going down the fascist road, the French parliament just this week approved a strict new immigration law even Le Pen has claimed an “ideological victory”.
Hungary went authoritarian a few years ago with the election of hard-right prime minister Viktor Orbán, a staunch opponent of Ukraine aid against Russian aggression.
While Spain’s parliamentary election in July did not elicit the results the hard-right Vox party anticipated, the right is gaining ground.
Closer to home, Argentina just elected its own version of Trump, libertarian economist Javier Milei, who promises to “Make Argentina Great Again!” Human rights advocates are warning of violent suppression of anticipated protests over Milei’s economic plan, and the Argentine security minister has threatened protesters would be surveilled with “video, digital or manual means.”
Remember when Trump promised “a complete shutdown of Muslims”?
One week into his presidency, he issued an executive order banning people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.
Remember when he promised to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Accords?
Remember his promise to withdraw us from the Iran Nuclear Deal?
He promised to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Remember when Vladimir Putin told him to threaten to withdraw the US from NATO?
Remember the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, responsible for separating more than 5,000 families for which the Trump administration kept no records?
Just months ago he called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
While Trump was a failure as a president from the perspective of a constitutionally limited democratic republic founded on upholding the rule of law, he was successful in the eyes of autocrats, fascists, and those among us who believe democracy is for suckers.
Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Believe it when Trump and those loyal to him announce their intentions to revoke our freedoms.
It has happened in other countries and it can happen here too.
This should be an “all-hands on deck,” break-glass moment.
In the 1930s, as fascism was consuming Europe — and even threatened to take over here — we elected a president, Franklin Roosevelt, who could have used the presidency’s awesome power at a time of great national weakness to join the authoritarian trend, and flip the United States to an autocracy.
He alluded during his first inaugural address to sweeping governmental reforms he intended to implement:
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
We normally only focus on the “all we have to fear is fear itself” part at the beginning. Rarely do we remember the “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency” part.
Coming from the mouth of an authoritarian like Donald Trump or any of the current republican superstars subsuming the party of prophet Abraham Lincoln, could signal a drastic volte-face from the constitutionally limited democratic republic we have come to take for granted toward a fascist dictatorship.
After all, Germany was the most cultured, progressive nation in Europe before a frustrated painter with a funny mustache whom the political elites dismissed as irrelevant rose to power on a platform of fear, grievance, and scapegoating.
Over the past couple years, we have seen more evidence America is closer to fascism than ever.
Jason Stanley, writing for The Guardian, stated:
The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.
Even Canadians fear the American experiment is on the precipice of ending.
In his new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, Canadian author Stephen Marche warns:
The United States is coming to an end. The question is how.
He isn’t alone.
Cascade Institute executive director Thomas Homer-Dixon begins a Globe & Mail piece titled “ The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare” with a harrowing assertion:
By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.
Agreeing with Liz Cheney is not something we liberals and progressives ever thought of doing, but if she is out there pleading with us to prevent her own party, a president she didn’t even vote to impeach, from re-gaining power, we need to listen.
Sleepwalking into a dictatorship is not a tenable option.
We can prevent it, but only if we mobilize and vote next year by such an overwhelming margin, it makes 2020 look like an off year.
Once democracy is gone, getting it back is not a certainty, and it won’t be the same.
In what might have been the most important speech any American president has had to deliver, President Joe Biden stated in a Sept. 2022 speech:
History tells us blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.
They’re [MAGA republicans] working right now, as I speak, in state after state, to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
America has traditionally regarded itself immune to the fissures that condemn weaker democracies.
We hail ourselves as the exemplar of elections, peaceful transitions of power, and civilized political discourse.
We understand intellectually we are imperfect and have done things for which we should not be proud and for which we must atone, like slavery, segregation, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
We have supervised elections in other countries to ensure honesty and transparency.
While economic interests and hubris have too frequently been behind our decisions more than good intentions, we want democracy to grow across the globe.
Yet here we are, beginning to look more like Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Mauritius, Namibia, Slovenia, and Poland, countries the Global State of Democracy (GSoD Indices) report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance states the United States’ “backsliding” democracy is beginning to resemble.
“We’re Americans, after all,” so many proclaim. “We’re not like those countries.”
But if the republican party and others still loyal to the cult of “the former guy” aren’t stopped legislatively, legally, non-violently the next coup attempt will probably be successful.
We are teetering on the precipice here so much that if we don’t elect Democrats to the congressional majority and keep Joe Biden in the White House in 2024, we could go the way of the aforementioned countries.
The crisis is upon us.
A climate crisis.
An environmental crisis.
A student loan debt crisis.
A housing crisis.
A healthcare crisis.
An economic inequality crisis.
Where it takes us before the next high point depends on showing up, speaking out, and recognizing the momentous period in history we occupy.