Sleepwalking Into Dictatorship
Sleepwalking in a dictatorship is not a tenable option. We do so at our own peril.
Former republican House member Liz Cheney’s book Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning was released Tuesday, and if you haven’t heard yet, she is joining in the growing alarm over the erasure of democracy a potential Trump second term would cause.
First, let’s acknowledge that Cheney is no progressive. During her single term in the House, she voted 93 percent of the time to support Donald Trump’s agenda, including voting against his impeachment in 2019.
As a dyed-in-the-wool republican, she marches in lock step with just about everything the modern-day GOP opposes: unionization, reproductive rights, stricter environmental regulations, expansion of voting rights, Affordable Care Act expansion, Medicare, Social Security, gun safety regulations, and raising taxes on the morbidly rich.
That same Liz Cheney is now hoping President Joe Biden wins another term as her own party has abandoned the Constitution and the country is “sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship”.
Her bravery as vice chair of the January 6th Commission in speaking out against the only president to attempt a coup against the government to stay in power is admirable, as is her assessment of the threat Trump would be should he be handed the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue again.
In an interview with CBS the weekend, Cheney explained:
I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican party, but the Republican party of today has made a choice, and they haven’t chosen the constitution. And so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.
About Trump, she stated:
The tools that he is using are tools that we’ve seen used by authoritarians, fascists, tyrants around the world. The things that he has said and done, in some ways, are so outrageous that we have become numb to them.
What I believe is the cause of our time is that we not become numb, that we understand the warning signs, that we understand the danger, and that we ignore partisan politics to stop him.
Salon Senior Writer, Chauncey DeVega, wrote in his piece “Americans are sleepwalking into a Trump dictatorship”:
His Hitler-like behavior is only going to get worse as next year’s presidential election approaches and the pressure from his criminal and civil trials increases.
The United States has a tendency to ignore warning signs then have to deal with an aftermath as if it were a surprise. This is partly how we elevated Trump to the presidency in 2016.
We must not make this mistake again.
It can happen here, and the warning lights are flashing bright red.
For example, this weekend, Trump ordered his supporters in Iowa to “go into Detroit, Philadelphia, and some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places, and we have to watch those votes….Watch those votes when they come in, when they’re being, you know, shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor.”
Why Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta?
Those are predominantly minority communities. Trump is encouraging his mob to employ old voter suppression tactics, namely white people showing up at polling locations to intimidate Black voters so they’ll be too scared and/or inconvenienced to cast their ballots.
In another speech in Iowa, Trump anointed himself as God’s handpicked candidate when he pronounced:
I think if you had a real election and Jesus came down and God came down and said, ‘I’m going to be the scorekeeper here,’ I think we’d win there [in California], I think we’d win in Illinois, and I think we’d win in New York.
In the same speech, he admitted to be “waging an all-out war on (in) democracy.”
During a Veterans’ Day speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, the twice-impeached, quadruply indicted sexual assaulting slumlord former host of Celebrity Apprentice channeled his inner Hitler when he announced that, if re-elected next year, he would “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”
This is why a piece published last month 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’”.
How about 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.”
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?
It was just 11 months ago when 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.
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 do so at our own peril.