Autocracy American Style

Welcome to the next installment of my “What the Hell is Going On?” collection drawn from my first book and various new essays that I have been sitting on and am now ready to publish. You can read the whole collection.

On January 9, 2021, I did a 45-minute rant on The Cameron Journal Podcast. I had witnessed with horror the insurrection that happened on January 6, 2021, just three days before. The moment could be summarized best by my Russian friend in her thick Moscow accent in between puffs of her elegant cigarette, “How do you not have a dictator? In my country, we have dictator!” 

At any moment, Trump could have simply marched into the capital and ended American democracy. The only reason that didn’t happen was Fox News hosts Rudy Guiliani and others who begged him to get people to go home. Trump preferred to watch the affair happen on his favorite medium: television. Indeed, his inertia and the Secret Service’s refusal to let him walk into an unsecured location kept him from the protestors. The excellent work of those few souls left around him allowed American democracy to continue that day. 

Far from a simple gathering of tourists, Congress was in the middle of a Constitutionally mandated certification of the vote for the Presidency. Despite the unhappiness of the 2016 election, Trump’s election was certified in 2017 with no fanfare by none other than Joe Biden, who was still Vice President for three weeks. Women were standing outside wearing pink hats, but they certainly did not try to seize the capital and stop the process of Trump’s election being certified. No one was hiding Joe Biden from the angry mob like the Secret Service did with Mike Pence. No one was marching shouting to “Hang Joe Biden” for disloyalty to “the cause.” However, this was just one of the outrageous things that happened that day. The lack of security and preparation for that day is still a question. The 1-6 event was telegraphed on social media. Everyone knew that Trump was planning on rallying supporters and continuing his election-denial narrative that had been going on for over two months. The lack of preparation by capitol police and the Democratic leadership was troubling. The frantic phone calls for the National Guard to rescue members of Congress came too late for them to do anything effectively. Fortunately, only one person died in the incident. That being said, the insurrection/coup attempt of 2021 was another moment in a pathway to autocracy. The drum beats of autocracy had begun years before by Trump himself. 

Trump’s inauguration speech in 2017 was described as the “American carnage speech.” In reality, it was the opening salvo of American autocracy. He painted America as a nation in desperate need of revitalization (fair enough). Still, instead of painting a brighter tomorrow for a country fittingly described by Reagan as a “shining city on a hill,” President Trump spoke in a way that made America seem like it was fighting a wolf at the door who could blow down our house of sticks at any moment. 

What is autocracy, and how do you get autocracy?

Autocracy often has the thin veneer of democracy. Unlike a totalitarian dictator of ages past who made all decisions from the top with administration serving those ends, autocracy can often involve a select group of players at the top who end up making all the decisions, usually behind one central leader. For example, Russia still has a parliament (the Duma) and still passes laws. This is often at the behest of Putin and his desires, but it keeps up a veneer of democracy that is important to have a sort of legitimacy. However, rather than having a government that responds to the people or the governed, it only reacts to the needs and desires of the select few at the top who make decisions and force everyone else to go along. Take China, for example; still communist in structure, Xi Jinping is an autocrat. He has eliminated any opposition to his power and has become President for life. He has stacked the Central Committee with loyalists, and the Central Committee can control the agenda for the five-year plans and the party congress that meets to announce those plans every fifth year. Much like how Trump packed his cabinet and staff with loyalists, it is not personal ethics, law, or norms that control behavior; all that matters is loyalty to the great leader. 

Trump envied someone like Putin. He desired the power not restricted by laws, a constitution, or even the voters. This cancer has spread to the entire Republican Party. The new wave of politicians isn’t interested in staying in their political lane or arguing with the voters for their vision of America. Instead, they are using their local and state power to rig the vote so that they can, by stopping certain people from voting, stay in power forever. 

Shockingly, the modern GOP, which has fundamentally controlled both the government and the ideology of the United States for 40 years, would think that it is oppressed. While voters seek natural solutions to their human problems, the GOP offers more. This results in statism. When government is not responsive to the governed and uses the system to suppress change, it only leads to statism and autocracy. An autocrat does not derive power from the people but rather from using the system and violence. Often, this violence and use of the system is ostensibly to “maintain order.” However, it usually has little to do with order and merely suppresses opposition to the established leadership or any organic forces of change. 

We can look to the history of America’s racial politics as a guide. For most of America’s history, white, European-descended people have had all the major positions of power. The system has come down hard whenever there has been a rebellion against that order. This was most obvious during the civil rights era. Police were used to stop protesters against Jim Crow laws, and the system, especially in the South, was dead set against responding to the needs of the people it governed. At the federal level, it is well known that the FBI infiltrated various civil rights groups and, at one point in 1985, bombed a house where the MOVE organization was living and working. They demolished nearly half a block of the neighborhood in Philadelphia. 

Democracy plus Politics equals the Speed of Autocracy Squared

Masha Gessen on Amanpour and Company stated, “You know, social psychologists have studied what makes people want autocracy or at least since Hitler rose to power, and I think that the theory developed Erich Fromm, who is a German social psychologist, is the most illuminating. He had this theory there are times in human history when people feel so dislocated, so economically anxious, and so fearful of the future that it is easier to hand their agency over to an autocrat in exchange for the promise of stability. Autocrats never deliver the promise of stability, but there’s this emotional promise of predictability and stability and the message that you don’t have to think about your future. I will lead you to — into it. I will constrain you enough to make it not so unpredictable and so frightening. And so, Fromm’s theory was that a time of great sort of human movement and a huge number of refugees in the wake of World War I and incredible economic anxiety is what handed power to Hitler. From what little we know about why people voted for Trump, we can apply that theory to the United States. Donald Trump speaks directly about economic anxieties. He speaks directly to anxieties, right? And I’m not sure that Democrats have been as successful at it. If you look at this election’s results, a weird disconnect between policies people seem to like and the politicians they voted for actually testifies to this hypothesis, right? People want to be taken care of. People want, you know, Medicare for All. People want a $15 minimum wage. In Florida, right, they voted for him, and then they voted for these blustering autocrats.”

Masha Gessen is a vital authority on autocracy. Statements like these beg the question, how do you stop autocracy and autocrats to which they answer, “That’s the $64,000 question, right? Is this reversible, right? If the Biden/Harris ticket takes power, and I think it will be right, we will have prevented the autocratic breakthrough. I keep flashing back to Hungary where Viktor Orban, after his first term in office, and Viktor — you know, Hungary was, for a brief period, a thriving liberal democracy. Viktor Orban was elected, voted out of office after one term, spent two terms — two election cycles as the opposition leader- and then swept back in on a super majority and changed the constitution. And that, to me, is one of the biggest reminders — in recent history to not just move on and sweep things under the rug. The preconditions for an autocrat in the United States exist. They existed before Donald Trump came into office. He managed to do an incredible amount of damage to the functioning, the structures, and the credibility of American institutions, and we have to repair the damage. Otherwise, possibly not Donald Trump, possibly one of his kids will be running for office in four years, in eight years, and that vertical of power that Trump has tried to build will be there waiting for them.”

The Insurrection

 It has become famous for the Right to complain that the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was another protest. Increasingly, it has been promoted by Right Wing media outlets that the people have a right, nay, an obligation, to attack the government when the government is “tyrannical” or acting against the interest of the American people. 

The actions of people on 1/6 were not the actions of people seeking a redress of grievances. This was a group of people led by militias who were set on changing the outcome of a fair election. Their goal was to disrupt democratic processes at the behest of someone who had lost an election and, as of this writing, has not admitted that he lost the 2020 election. This is very different than stopping a government-run amok. According to the Constitution of the United States, the government was operating as it should. If the government was not following the Constitution (which one could argue several cases, but that is another essay), then seizing power might argue the Founding Father’s ideas about revolution. 

However, this was not the case. The sad fact is that the United States has suffered its first violent transfer of power in over 200 years of republican (democratic) government. This is not something we should pass on idly. 

The pandemic

It has been decades since Americans have been called upon to collective sacrifice for the greater good. Not since WWII have Americans been asked to make significant life changes for society to continue. The Covid-19 pandemic presented a collective challenge to a culture that has become hyper-individualistic. 

Many of the failures of the pandemic response had more to do with a lack of trust in government and institutions than anything else. People don’t trust a vaccine that seems to have been developed too quickly and with unknown side effects. Masking and social distancing seemed like too much of a bother. Many people watched their economic fortunes melt away with shutdowns of businesses where COVID-19 could quickly spread. The phrase, “My job was made illegal,” was a different way to look at pandemic shutdowns. What’s worse is that shutdowns often weren’t as effective as promised. At the time, I explained that Americans are not used to the government’s interference in their everyday life and essential life functions. Americans don’t interact with the government that often. We tend to only interact with the government when owning a car (license plates, driver’s licenses, traffic tickets) or when a crime has been committed. Those on public assistance will interact with government officials more often, but neither affects our day-to-day lives. The Pandemic changed that almost overnight, and suddenly, the government radically changed life in this country. 

What does this mean for autocracy? 

American exceptionalism

One aspect of autocracy worth talking about is American exceptionalism as a concept. America is a country that is often full of its hubris. Not many countries have books written about them entitled “America: the Indispensable Nation.” Americans take democracy as a given in our system, no matter how messy. We have a strong tradition as the world’s oldest modern democracy, and many Americans don’t even understand the esoteric systems that keep our democracy functioning. Most people didn’t know that the Senate certified the votes of the Electoral College until either in 2000 when Al Gore had to certify his loss, or in 2020, when Mike Pence was certifying his loss on the ticket with Trump. 

American elections have been the world’s envy because they are honest and fair. Until 2020, the United States had enjoyed 240 years of peaceful transfers of power, even during the Civil War. It is this tradition that 2020 was an aberration and a dangerous one. Now, we must face every election with a certain amount of trepidation and fear. This is part of how autocracy begins. 

Cultural Autocracy

It is my idea that the republican party doesn’t exactly want to control government. The Trump years showed how they tried to manipulate and break down the system to reduce the federal government to a mere shell. They even tried dismantling the post office, the only federal agency authorized by the Constitution. Given identity politics and the cultural discourse that has been going on for the past several years, it has become evident that the republican party doesn’t necessarily want just to control the government. Still, they like to control American culture too and use the power of the government to hold the line on demographic changes and the acceptance of other communities (especially the LGBTQIA+ community) in greater society. 

The current conservative movement desires a return to a culture where LGBT folks were kept secret, racial minorities “knew their place” (and certainly did not demand power), and where mainstream culture celebrated the white, European-descended culture only to the exception of anyone else in the country. They desire a return to a time when everyone was held to the Anglo-Saxon ideal, and anyone failing that was simply unsuitable. In my essay, The Death of the White, Christian, Heteronormative Narrative, I realized that this change in the fundamental story of America was what many people were complaining about. It does not matter that America will not be a white majority nation by 2035 or that society has come to accept and even love LGBT people and embrace them in popular films, TV shows, and everyday life. Instead, the modern GOP desires to roll back these changes. This also plays directly into the Christian Nationalist desires of a minority within the Evangelical movement. 

Consequences of Autocracy

One of the most considerable consequences of autocratic governments is that the professional and middle class tend to flee. The aristocracy or the wealthy are far too invested in the system they benefit from, and the poor have no money, so everyone else leaves. In the case of the United States, the brain drain can occur in a few ways. One is the reduction of immigration. To some degree, in 2022, this is already happening. Two is the hollowing out of economies in certain states where policies like anti-abortion laws or anti-homosexuality laws are in place. Significant companies may choose to relocate those offices and those jobs to other places where such laws are not in place. Lastly, some people may leave America to go to different countries, but that has been rare. However, there is a growing American expat community overseas. Digital nomadism may become more popular as people work for US companies but do so from other physical locations. Recently, there was a story about Americans moving to Mexico and driving up rents in Mexico City. This will have a net negative economic effect on the United States and a net negative cultural effect. We need only look at places like Syria, Russia, Egypt, and other countries where autocracy has hollowed out the country. 

Autocracy has a few familiar features that most people don’t associate with the United States or other developed nations. One of the chief things is a lack of freedom, which is ironic in the land of the free, but we can see shades of this already in Governor Ron DeSantis’ war on Disney and on books. 

A hierarchy determines who can live a fulfilling life and who is allowed to be part of society. Autocracy reinforces these hierarchal determinations and codifies them in law. In Germany, during the 1930s, it was the Jews who were excluded. From 1877 to 1965, African Americans were in the American South. In apartheid South Africa, it was the local black population subjugated to a white colonial minority. 

The Real Threat of Trump

Trump has unleashed forces that most on the left don’t understand yet. Although the January 6th coup attempt was unsuccessful, history tells us it was merely practice for the next one. In the wake of that, states have restricted voting rights and given state legislatures power to overturn popular election results and appoint their electors. Twenty-nine states have enacted some such legislation as of the time of this writing in early 2024. 

What are people fighting for? Nothing. It is all about what people are fighting against. As I mentioned in the original essays, America is changing. I wrote Death of the White, Christian, Heteronormative Narrative in 2014. I saw the signs back then. When I wrote Nations and Nationalism, I asked a singular question: do nations and nationalism fit within our modern world? I then tried to show that nations and nationalism can be good but quickly turn dangerous. Thanks to the pandemic, we have seen this play out in real-time. Countries have closed their borders, and barriers have flown up worldwide. People in Europe and America are blaming immigrants. In the US, we have seen the rise of militia groups and others who are often loudly anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-ANTIFA. They reinforce the desire for white people and whiteness as an institution. They are willing, instigated by Donald Trump, to fight for the institution of white supremacy in this country. While the Left is trying to be inclusive, the new Right is becoming incredibly exclusive. Anyone who gets involved must sign on to a specific set of ideas, the chief of whom is white supremacy. 

Republicans like Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are willing and able to say the quiet part out loud. They are not interested in living in a multi-cultural, secular democracy. They are only interested in living in a country where white people are in charge, and everyone else is allowed to live here but certainly is not allowed any sort of power. Social programs are kept limited to make sure that poor people and impoverished people of color are systemically punished for the crime of being poor. 

A Republic…If You Can Keep It

Most political observers will note that the GOP has been policy-less since the Bush administration. The only thing that the GOP ever really gets done is tax cuts for the country-club set of the Republican donor base. During the Trump years, Mitch McConnell and Trump were overt in passing the infamous Trump tax cuts. These tax cuts have been continued under the Biden administration with only a few exceptions. While both parties are beholden to corporate power and greed (see my work on that in this book), the Republican party has spent 40 years advocating for policies that benefit corporate greed and power above all other considerations. The tragedy is that the party opposite hasn’t done more to stop this process. 

The result is the complete degradation of public services. Essential public services are slowly privatized. This has already been a trend throughout the country. In the near-distant past, electric service was a public good and publicly owned. Now, that arrangement is rare. Here in Seattle, where I live, we have municipal power and are shielded from the price shocks that often affect others in places where the electricity is owned by a private company that must make a profit. Water can now also be owned by private companies. Education is a battleground now, too, as more states allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s education at charter schools and even religious schools. 

To keep this system in place, the GOP is systematically working at keeping and maintaining power, not through popularity (they haven’t won the popular vote since 2004) but through creating a system wherein they have a natural advantage in elections. In more overt terms, republicans are creating systems in states where they have outsized control to allow the state legislature to overturn election results. Such laws were quite popular in 2021, 2022, and into 2023. The AP wire wrote a story in 2021 cataloging these laws in Georgia and Iowa. This essentially means that the people’s will means nothing without the consent of the local officials. Given the Republican control of state legislatures, it is easy to see how, in 2024, if the Democrat candidate for president wins where he “isn’t supposed to win” (like Georgia and Arizona in 2020), the state legislature can simply overturn the results, send different electors, and deprive the people of their state of having their say in a consequential election. That’s not any kind of democracy.

Dr. William Horne, a postdoc teaching history at Villanova, tweeted out something vital about where we are in the progress of autocracy and what might come next. He wrote, “Last week, during our last session of my White Backlash graduate course, my students asked me if I thought the U.S. would descend into a civil war during the next decade. I replied that the current situation is much more bleak than that. Here’s why: 1) Nearly a year later, the state has still failed to meaningfully punish those who carried out the deadly 1/6 assault on the Capitol, much less punish its organizers in Trump, Bannon, Guiliani, Christopher Miller, Josh Hawley, etc. Why does this matter? White backlash movements rely on a collaboration between vigilantes & the state. We see this most clearly in the local nature of coup attempts during Reconstruction & Jim Crow. Lawmakers encouraged supremacist violence & legitimized participants. rom the “Liberty Place” & Wilmington coups in the 19th century to the St. Louis, Tulsa, Orangeburg, and Greensboro massacres & suppressionist violence of the 20c, white vigilantes & state actors worked hand-in-hand. This pattern defined the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, during which cops & vigilantes worked together to beat the shit out of protesters since [it was] legitimized in the Rittenhouse verdict. Rather than interrupt this alliance, Dems allowed it to metastasize. 2) Republicans have further rigged an already anti-democratic system to cement white power indefinitely, passing state-level voting restrictions & redistricting following the Wisconsin model of minoritarian rule. Why does this matter? The ethno-nationalism & white supremacy of the GOP are unpopular, & Dems have reasonably relied on that unpopularity to win office & keep the very worst bad actors from winning power. After finding that the piecemeal suppressionist efforts & institutional means of overturning the 2020 election insufficient, Republicans have expanded both. Finally, Republicans are in the midst of an “anti-CRT” campaign making it illegal to criticize white supremacist structures, even historically, in classroom & state agencies, again leaving Dems w/o recourse after GOP sabotage. In short, the system they created is incredibly thorough, designed to prevent fallout from suppression. It mirrors precisely the tactics white supremacists used to create & affirm via SCOTUS an apartheid state from the 1890s through the 1960s in the U.S. This means that unless Dems pass & implement federal legislation (like yesterday, to be honest) addressing this 3-pronged attack on democracy, 2022 or 2024 will likely bring the final death of multiracial democracy.” 

I found this Twitter thread to be a stark warning. What will come of our country as we march toward autocracy, and most importantly, can we stop it? 

The States as Laboratories for Autocracy 

It has long been said that in the US federal system and other federal systems, the states are the “laboratories of democracy.” However, David Pepper argues that states are laboratories for autocracy. The most obvious example of this is voting. By the US Constitution, the states control elections and voting. The Federal government has very few powers to regulate elections. The security of American elections is dependent on layers of local government from the local polling place to the county, voting/legislative district, and ultimately the state Secretary of State who certifies the election and signs off on winners and losers of all the races and most importantly certifies the electors that are sent to the Electoral college to elect the President. 

In a prescient video in January of 2023, David Pepper talks about how many red states, particularly Ohio, are changing the voting laws to disenfranchise voters. This is another chapter in the same playbook from the Jim Crow laws that restricted voting. Although we have made poll taxes and literacy tests unconstitutional, there are plenty of other ways to restrict voting. This can take many forms. In many cases, especially in Ohio, voters must now show a valid form of ID. In Wisconsin, they changed the laws to make it nearly impossible for college students to vote where they go to school, sending them to vote back with their parents in the places they came from, no matter how far. In Kansas, they move around polling places so that poorer areas have fewer places to vote and wealthier areas have more places to vote.

These laws became common after Secretaries of State and other election officials opened voting options for people in 2020. Unsurprisingly, 2020 sported the highest voter participation rate in American history. Many states who required approval to vote absentee waived that requirement. Voting by mail became common. Trump attacked his policy as corrupt, although Washington, Oregon, and Utah voted entirely by mail. People could also register to vote online for the first time. In Pennsylvania, this triggered various lawsuits. It also was an extension of the “Big Lie” purported by Trump and others that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. 

Controlling who votes and who gets elected is vital to an autocratic system. The US elections are the world’s envy for being open, fair, and trustworthy. In Turkey, Russia, Hungary, and elsewhere, elections are not as open, often unfair, and tightly controlled by those already in power. The worst kind of election is one in which those in power have a thumb on the scale to maintain their power. Vladimir Putin has made sure he has no opposition by banning political parties and outright killing his opponents. 

Another way elections are controlled is through the redistricting process. In the US, controlling congressional districts can decide which party maintains a certain number of seats in the US House, and local districts can influence state houses. In Wisconsin, their map has been so gerrymandered that the GOP has a structural advantage until at least 2030 when a new census comes out, and redistricting will occur again. Certain states like Michigan and Pennsylvania had such bad maps that they set up independent commissions to draw districts instead of the state legislature. North Carolina’s district map is still winding its way through the federal court system in 2023. 

A system where the voting districts are unfair, leading to people having “safe” seats that are essentially non-competitive and a restriction on who can vote and where they can vote, leads to elections that aren’t as open and fair as purported. During Federal oversight during Reconstruction, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia elected a black Senator and five US House representatives. Once Federal oversight ended, the voting rules were changed, and all six men were out of office by the next cycle, despite Alabama being a majority-black state. Oversight would return due to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was ended in 2013 by the Supreme Court. That decision opened the door to all sorts of new voting regulations. 

According to David Pepper, he said in a Salon article, “People just don’t understand how bad it is. We’re talking about, for the first time since back before the civil rights era, people whose entire existence in power has been devoid of democracy. They haven’t talked to swing voters; they’ve never worried about the next election. You have an entire generation of people in charge of statehouses who have never experienced democracy like I did when I ran and won my races.” 

However, voting isn’t the only way states can serve as laboratories of autocracy. States can also do this through basic policy. It is not merely structural issues with voting but how states can pick and choose what they do with a disregard for voters because many state legislators are no longer accountable. The banner instance of this is several GOP-controlled states that haven’t bothered to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. 

The March to Autocracy

The American experiment is in a perilous place today. We have a political party that denies elections and is seizing power to change results, and the party opposite is nowhere to be found on the issue. In the two years of unified government, the Democrats failed to pass meaningful legislation. This is how autocracy begins. Globally, the march of autocracy and the struggle between autocracy and democracy will probably be the defining ideological conflict of the 21st century in a way similar to how communism and capitalism faced off in the 20th. The central question is if the American experiment is strong enough to withstand a march to autocracy where other nations have fallen. 

This is a question into whose answer we will have to live. I cannot say if the American experiment can withstand this autocratic attack. History offers us both hope and despair on this point. The US tolerated slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, and other autocratic and fascist policies. It took decades and a bloody war to rid our country of The Peculiar institution. It brought a century of advocacy to stop Jim Crow, and Japanese internment was only stopped by the Supreme Court. This history is helpful because it shows that when we go too far or find that social change is not the best expression of our nation, we can and do change. 

It might seem that autocracy is baked in. It might still seem that we cannot escape this pathway. I know this: America is an exceptional nation, and our history is fraught with difficulty and struggle. I still believe we can accomplish those changes when people rise and demand change. It is hard to think that in a world of corporate statism. But as I have often said, there is no problem we cannot solve; we merely lack the political will to do so.