Teetering on the Precipice of Dictatorship
The United States of America is quickly becoming a dictatorship.
The United States of America is quickly becoming a dictatorship.
Wait…what? you’re thinking. North Korea is a dictatorship. Afghanistan. Not us. Not the United States!
While we may not have devolved into a repressive Orwellian dystopia the likes of which we pretty much universally categorize North Korea, the United States crossed the Rubicon last week when FBI agents arrested federal judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly “misdirecting federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, allowing the subject — an illegal alien — to evade arrest.”
Flouting multiple court orders was just the beginning. In apprehending a judge while performing her duties providing legally required due process to an undocumented immigrant, the fascist regime currently taking a blowtorch to the Constitution is attempting to send the message to judges and lawyers they dare not even think about following this thing called the “rule of law” if it in any way flies in the face of political ideology.
While Hannah Dugan is the first, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt today informed the press that arresting Supreme Court justices is not off the table.
Dictatorships require the elimination of four things: the government, the press, the courts, and the people.
The republican-majority House and Senate have been completely cowed. Republican lawmakers, state and federal, have abdicated their commitment to the oaths they took for fear of MAGA brown shirts doxing them and their families, attacking their homes, or — heaven forbid-- primarying them, which may result in them losing their seats like former reps Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who both lost their re-elections to MAGA sycophants.
So the government is gone.
Next, the press.
While not completely in Goebbels territory yet, the corporate media (owned, of course, by wealthy business executives drooling over the prospect of another massive tax cut) is dancing around the emergency facing our country’s constitutional survival for fear it may lose access to the White House, which a month ago declared it and it alone — not the White House Correspondents’ Corporation — will decide which press organizations and reporters will be admitted into the presidential press pool.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC started bending the knee right after the election. ABC followed suit with a $15 million settlement when it likely would have survived a court battle and emerged a hero. 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens just resigned as Paramount Global started pushing back on some of the program’s segments critical of the White House.
The press is teetering.
What’s left?
Us.
The people.
We’re in the streets and will continue to be more frequently as the weather continues to warm.
We are the last line of defense. If we get complacent or the regime figures out a way to quash protest — which is likely if the courts go — we will be in full-on dictatorship.
The benchmark survey Bright Line Watch recently rated the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero for complete dictatorship to 100 for a perfect democracy. Following the November election, scholars issued a rating of 67. Now, 100 days into the felon’s second term, we’re at 55.
Government professor Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, explained:
We’ve slid into some form of authoritarianism. It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.
Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele added, “We are on a very fast slide into what’s called competitive authoritarianism,” which means we democratically elected a leader who is chipping away at checks and balances.
This is not the time for apathy.