America's March to Autocracy Enters Phase Two

                                                            By David K. Shipler 

            If you gain altitude higher than the daily run of the news and look down from, say, 30,000 feet, you see a logical progression in the demise of American democracy. Step by step, the constitutional structure is being dismantled, and the limits of the public’s acceptance are being tested. In seven months, in the first phase of his project, Donald Trump has caused remarkable damage without encountering successful resistance. Now, a new phase has begun. Let’s call it Phase Two. It contains three main elements:

1)    Getting Americans used to seeing camouflage on the streets by ostentatiously posting national guard troops in the nation’s capital and allowing police to “do whatever the hell they want,” in Trump’s words, with threats of the same in other cities. This is a step toward the militarized state that Trumpists favor.

2)    Hiring right-wing ideologues to fill key mid-level vacancies created by the mass firings from federal agencies. The purge was not so much to save money—little was saved—as to open opportunities for zealots to weaponize government and stifle expertise and debate. Recruitment by the Heritage Foundation has been going on for years. New hires will remake federal law enforcement into a tool of Trump by expanding ICE with politically-vetted agents, possibly from the ranks of white nationalists. The FBI will no longer require a college degree and extensive training for its agents, who will also be subjected to ideological screening.

3)    Subverting elections. Trump has prepared the ground for arrests of Democratic candidates in close races or, at the least, having the Justice Department publicize unproven allegations to damage their reputations. Several elected Democrats, have already been arrested on exaggerated charges during altercations. “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general,” a federal agent on the phone with Washington said of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was attempting an oversight visit to an immigration center in New Jersey. Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver was also arrested while jostled; she was charged excessively with assaulting a federal officer. In addition, Trump wants to control elections, saying he’s going to ban mail-in ballots, citing advice from that champion of democracy, Vladimir Putin. (So far, that power rests with Congress, not the president alone.)

Underlying these and other measures is Trump’s constant stream of hyped-up declarations of emergencies, as if the United States faced perpetual crises: at the border, in energy, in its cities. No doubt his extreme rhetoric falsely picturing bloodthirsty gangs marauding through his country’s significantly nonwhite cities strikes a chord with his white rural base. But, as usual, he manufactures a problem for which the only solution—also fictitious—is his tough hand at the top.

Phase One, initiated immediately after his inauguration January 20, overcame the checks and balances among the three branches of government that the Framers of the Constitution had so ingeniously created to avoid the scenario that is now unfolding 238 years later.

Trump and his comrades swept aside funding duly authorized and appropriated by the legislative branch. They ignored and evaded some orders from the judicial branch restoring government grants and immigrants’ constitutional rights to due process. They took the first steps in imposing their ideological doctrine on civil society by weaponizing federal funding and law enforcement against independent thinking, speech, teaching, and advocacy in universities, museums, theaters, law firms, and corporations.

            The Trumpists have normalized breaches of legal and ethical standards to the point of danger—the danger that the outrages will no longer seem outrageous. The threshold at which shock and opposition are triggered has been raised higher and higher.

Some citizens complain and mobilize to fight back, of course, but not as a broad movement. Americans have grown accustomed to masked ICE agents hauling off peaceful international students and essential foreign workers, locking them up without recourse. Americans are no longer surprised by the purges of websites and archives of historical facts, the removal of books on race and gender from military libraries, the subjection of data to political filtering, the screening of government workers for ideological conformity.

Experts who know their fields are ridiculed and fired. That’s to be expected now. If there are objections, they are raised increasingly in private. The Trumpists scare many Americans away from dissent and into silence, for fear of retribution that could include vigilante violence, perhaps by those January 6 rioters Trump pardoned. The fear extends even to Republican members of Congress. “We are all afraid,” said Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. Many fear speaking out or demonstrating.

Most leading institutions in the United States are also afraid and have been complacent and compliant. Congress is supine, controlled by the Republican Party that Trump hijacked and twisted away from traditional conservatism. District federal judges have tried to restrain the administration, sometimes overreaching, but Trump appointees in appeals courts and the Supreme Court have reversed many of those restraints, unleashing Trump with extraordinary powers to usurp the role of the legislature.

If a leftist president is eventually elected, those powers can be invoked to swing the country wildly in another direction, creating a pendulum of instability akin to the worst authoritarian states in the non-industrialized world.

Americans learned in Phase One how much of their constitutional democracy is voluntary, how much it rests in the values and courage and selflessness of the citizens. As Judge Learned Hand said in 1944: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

Does liberty lie in the hearts of Americans? It is a serious question now. With notable exceptions, leading institutions and citizens have failed to rally for the free society that they say they value. Or, they have resisted only in their own parochial interests, not in the larger interest of the nation at large. Companies, universities, and major media conglomerates try to flatter the mercurial, narcissistic president and cut separate deals rather than negotiate broadly for the preservation of a pluralistic system.

The victims are not uniting. Even Harvard, which mounted a strong court case in the face of Trump’s arbitrary cutoff of funding for valuable research, is on the cusp of a deal that would reward the president’s dictatorial impulses. Some big law firms caved when their largest corporate clients were poised to abandon them, while others are fighting, and pro bono attorneys have organized to help targeted individuals and institutions. Big media conglomerates, which had strong cases against ridiculous libel suits filed by Trump, capitulated and bought him off with huge sums, while other respected news organizations persist in reporting truthfully.

Trump is dividing and conquering. That’s been Phase One.

Phase Two will almost surely see government fabricating statistics or withholding negative numbers, as the Soviet Union did. Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the customary correction of previous job-creation numbers—downward, as it happened. So, who’s going to tell the truth when you can get fired for it? Dictatorships are chronically good-news systems, where only the positive gets passed up the chain of command until the man at the top (it’s always a man) holds power at a pinnacle of ignorance.

Steven Levitsky and other scholars of dying democracies believe the United States is descending into “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elections are held but with such restraints on the opposition that it cannot gain power. That has been the case in Turkey and Hungary, for example, whose leaders have gained effusive praise from Trump.  

As the United States enters Phase Two, then, the question arises: Is this just a bad moment that will pass, or a new chapter in American history? What will Phases Three or Four include?