The Dynamics of Democracy and Dictatorship

 

By David K. Shipler 

In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

--Abraham Joshua Heschel 

                The 2020 election and its aftermath have exposed the fragility and resilience of democracy, making this an opportune moment for national introspection by the United States. It is a crisis so serious that it calls for a non-partisan 911-style commission to help Americans wrench free of their myopic politics and look clearly in the mirror. Nothing less than the country’s constitutional freedoms are at stake.

Significantly, both Democrats and Republicans agree on one argument: that the other side is jeopardizing democracy. Each side contends that its opponent is only pretending to support free and fair elections, that either Republicans want to overturn the people’s vote, or Democrats want to win by fraud—take your choice. The antagonists, whether cynical or sincere, still put the ballot box on a pedestal. Democracy is still the lodestar.

But that is where equivalence ends. This is a clash between reality and unreality, a study in the power of manipulation, propaganda, and popular gullibility, which are ingredients of dictatorship. Rarely if ever in U.S. history have so many citizens fallen for such a grotesque fiction as President Trump’s evidence-free claim of a stolen election. Rarely if ever before have election officials been threatened with violence. And rarely if ever before have calls been heard for a new election under martial law, as voiced by a group calling itself “We the People Convention” and supported by retired General Michael Flynn, the pardoned felon who served as national security adviser and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  

Currently, the risks to democracy exist inside minds more than inside institutions. There are systemic problems, obviously, but the process held up well in this difficult election. By contrast, thoughts and beliefs did not.

Trump is blamed, and rightly so. But as his post-election fantasies cast their spell over millions of Americans, the country would do well to consider how autocracies depend on those below the leader. In reality, there is no such thing as “one-man rule.” The most heinous dictators have never had to go it alone. Hitler needed the Goerings, Stalin needed the Berias. They in turn relied on the uniformed and civilian functionaries of the secret police and the sprawling administrative apparatus to arrest, round up, transport to camps, and execute. Autocracy requires the cooperation and labor of millions, including masses of citizens, not just those who are forced and afraid but also those who are spellbound.

                Even authoritarian systems that are less severe, such as the Soviet Union after Stalin, depend on the acquiescence of a population that believes in the cause and its virtue. Between Stalin in 1953 and Gorbachev in 1985, control came not only vertically from the top but also horizontally, from low-level peers who enforced political orthodoxy and punished minor deviance, not always with prison but more typically by denying privileges—a trip abroad, a promotion, better housing. Many Russians internalized the limits, sometimes subconsciously, so that in everyday settings, policing devolved into self-policing and censorship into self-censorship. When broad belief finally flagged, so did the scope of state power.

                How susceptible are Americans? You’d think that our flinty individualism would work against a herd mentality, that the suspicion of government left over from the Revolution of 1776 would still inoculate us. Our anti-collectivism is sometimes taken to the extreme of countering the common good, as in owning guns or resisting masks during the pandemic.

                But the Trump phenomenon has revealed that alongside the recalcitrance runs a yearning for a strong hand at the top, a leader, a hero, a cult figure. For many, the support for Trump goes far beyond what a healthy democracy can tolerate. It veers into idolization, even a conviction among some that he is God’s chosen. That he attracted nine million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 says as much. He was defeated, but millions overlooked or discounted his obvious failures as president, his corruption and contempt for the rule of law, his vilification of opponents as enemies, his cruelties of family separation on the border, and on and on.

                The capacity of a Trump to bend millions of minds should awaken Americans to the possibility that reverence for a leader might one day infiltrate thoroughly enough to promote autocracy in some form. The possibility might seem remote in the wake of a free election that drew more voters than ever before. It might seem unthinkable after honest middle- and low-level election officials—including Republicans—held the line against their party’s false cries of fraud. It might seem precluded by the independent judiciary, whose judges across the political spectrum saw through the tissues of lies that Trump’s lawyers used to paper over his loss.

                We are entitled to be proud but not complacent. We are wise to be worried. We need a thorough truth commission to draw up an apolitical agenda of warnings and remedies in education, legislation, and public discourse. We need every citizen who loves the country, which means every citizen, to make sure that what is happening in 2020 will be the end of an erosion, not the beginning.