Fearing the Voters

 

By David K. Shipler 

            A paradox of dictatorship is its vulnerability. The pinnacle of power feels precarious. The people must not be allowed to gather force.

            In full-blown dictatorships, such as China and the Soviet Union, the autocracy is preserved by outright oppression: sham elections, imprisonments, political assassinations. In democracies evolving into autocracies, such as the United States, the methodology is more complex. Alternative power centers—the press, the judiciary, the legislature, the universities—are undermined and tamed, often by twisting legal tools into political weapons.

A key target is the voting process.

So it is that Donald Trump attempts to rule the United States, with the upcoming midterm elections a special project of manipulation and intimidation.

In a term less than half over, he has already grown the executive branch into a semi-dictatorship. Practically alone, he decides how taxes are spent, how wars are fought, how foreign trade is conducted, how allies are treated, what scientific research is pursued, which opponents are prosecuted. He tries to decree what history is taught, what data is collected, what genders exist, what vaccines are administered, what art portrays, whom law firms defend, what vocabulary is banned. Even in the private sector, the noble aspirations of diversity, equity, and inclusion are forbidden under penalty of funding loss and investigation. 

Trump rarely defers to Congress or the courts. He evades both the legislature’s budgets and many rulings by federal district judges. His Republican majority in Congress is cowed, and his Republicans on appeals courts and the Supreme Court usually acquiesce. As a result, in the face of the Trumpists’ zealotry, the Framers’ ingenious mechanism of checks and balances among government’s three branches has sputtered practically to a halt.

And now comes an election. It is a danger point for the fearful at the top. Their totalitarian mindset, which seeks ideological conformity throughout society, risks repudiation. Trump’s aura of power, wielded with mafia-like threats, confronts the curse of obsolescence. A dirty fight is in the offing.

Although bullies like Trump are also cowards, he has surrounded himself with acolytes who worship his authoritarianism, who are ruthless and contemptuous of democratic norms. How American constitutional culture produced such people is a confounding question, but now that they govern, they have tasted blood and are poised to slash the electoral process with every available means. Do not expect retreat from merciless characters who are backed into a corner.

They began immediately in Trump’s second term. His Justice Department dropped ongoing lawsuits challenging restrictive election laws that worked against Black voters. The department’s voting-rights unit was decimated, from about thirty officials to fewer than ten. Security protections against Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hacking and internet deception were downgraded or demolished: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency gutted, the FBI task force to counter foreign influence dismantled, the system of intelligence-sharing with local and state officials on cyber threats terminated.

Trump now seeks to intimidate local election workers by threatening criminal prosecutions if any ineligible voters cast ballots, although hardly any such fraud has been identified. He calls for federal control of elections whose conduct the Constitution explicitly assigns to the states.

Like a massive drone attack, some of his weapons get through while some are repelled by the corroded shield of checks and balances. His executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote was blocked by a judge, and his attempt to curtail mail-in ballots (used by more Democrats than Republicans) has been stymied in the courts. Nor has he been able to get Congress to pass his proposed law mandating those and other restrictions.

His Justice Department has sued 30 states for personal details on their registered voters; judges have dismissed 26 of the suits, while 16 Republican-led states have complied by providing driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, and other information on individuals. He wanted the Postal Service to refuse to deliver any ballots in states that did not comply with his data demand, but a preliminary injunction against the draconian step was upheld by the Supreme Court.

Trump’s campaign to sow distrust in elections has continued unabated. Adherents of his lie that he won in 2020 now populate the highest reaches of his administration, from attorneys general Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche to head of the civil rights division Harmeet Dhillon to FBI director Kash Patel. Driven by Trump’s obsession to prove his fantasy of victory, officials slavishly mobilize prosecutorial powers: The FBI seized ballots from 2020 in two Georgia and Arizona jurisdictions. The Justice Department is seeking the names of all 2020 election officials in Fulton County, Georgia. And anyone who wants to be nominated for a federal judgeship must not speak the truth and say that Joe Biden was duly elected.

The purpose is not just to rewrite the past but to lay the groundwork for the future, one that opens the public’s minds to false claims of vote-rigging and election corruption. Barrages of Trumpist lawsuits are inevitable following narrow Republican defeats in House races next month. Both parties are enlisting battalions of lawyers for protracted court cases that will probably rise to a Supreme Court that has been Trump-friendly on most election issues. Close election results tied up in court challenges could delay seating newly-elected Democrats.

            In a nightmare scenario sketched by the conservative former appeals court judge Michael Luttig, “even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3,” he writes in The New Republic. House Speaker Mike Johnson could orchestrate a refusal to seat Democratic members, Luttig warns. He outlines the procedure Johnson might use, noting that the Constitution makes each house “the Judge of the elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” He calls it Trump’s “final unlawful rampage,” which would ultimately be settled by a Supreme Court that has facilitated Trump, granted him broad immunity from prosecution, and permitted most of his swaggering lawlessness.

            This Court has already assaulted the electoral system by neutering the venerable 1965 Voting Rights Act, which broke down many obstacles to Blacks’ political representation. Since many more Blacks vote Democratic than Republican, the Republicans in state legislatures and the courts have worked assiduously to restore their power to discriminate by gerrymandering and other means.

In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the law’s longstanding provision requiring states and districts with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear with the Justice Department any change in its voting laws and procedures.

Then last April, the Court dealt the act a fatal blow by ruling that it was no longer enough to document the discriminatory effect of a districting map. Now, intent would have to be shown, a virtually impossible proof when legislators are canny enough not to say so out loud. Several states rushed to redistrict in favor of Republicans, with California and Virginia doing so to favor Democrats. (The new Virginia map was thrown out by the state’s supreme court on a procedural technicality, leaving the Republicans with a net gain thanks to the Republican-dominated Supreme Court.)

Dire predictions are being made. Trump might declare a state of emergency and seize ballots and voting machines. Trump might deploy troops to polling places. He might station ICE agents there, intimidating even US citizens whose complexions are not snowy white. After all, being detained by ICE, even mistakenly, has been less than delightful.

Whether all these methods, taken together, will undermine the integrity of the elections is the question. Whether they are a dry run for the 2028 presidential election is the larger question. They are forms of defensive aggression, prompted by fear at the top of the voters at the bottom.

 Experts who have studied transitions from democracy to autocracy see what Steven Levitsky of Harvard calls “competitive authoritarianism” taking shape in the US—where an opposition exists but cannot overcome a rigged system to gain political power. Does that describe the United States? A tentative answer—but not the final one—will come on November 3 and its aftermath.     

The New America: Fortress on a Hill

 

By David K. Shipler 

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

--John Winthrop, 1630 

            The stirring phrase “city upon a hill” was coined not as a description of the United States but as an aspiration, a challenge, applied to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop in a sermon probably delivered at sea, before arriving in New England. Since then, as quoted by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it has morphed into a mirage of self-adulation—not a hope but a supposed achievement.

             “I've spoken of the shining city all my political life,” Reagan declared in his farewell address: “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. . . . And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

            You want to weep when you read these words today. Even putting aside Reagan’s own failures to keep that beacon bright (he opposed the monumental civil rights acts, for example, and slandered the poor on welfare), the metaphor imagined the best of a complicated America. It was accepted globally, though not unanimously, as modeling democratic freedom and economic opportunity. Millions from around the world have struggled to climb up to this shining city on a hill.

Now it is becoming a fortress. In merely one year, President Trump and his minions have recast the model. It is no longer a robust democracy but a semi-dictatorship fueled by a cult of personality supported by a critical mass of Americans. No longer is the rule of law its bedrock. No longer can the public’s discontent be reliably translated into political change. No longer does free speech flourish under a government that regards dissent as punishable. No longer do its officials or many of its private institutions embrace that essential American idea: the din of many ideas. No longer is it entirely safe for “the people peaceably to assemble . . . for a redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment provides. Whatever harmony the country enjoyed among “people of all kinds” has dissolved into discord under a government driven by the ideology of white supremacy.    

America's March Toward Autocracy: Phase Three

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Having demolished much of the best scientific research supported by the federal government, ignored congressional acts that created and funded agencies, harassed the private sector into accepting racial discrimination, bullied media corporations into self-censorship, erased historical truths, distorted government fact-gathering, sent masked agents to grab immigrants, deployed hapless national guard onto peaceful streets, and severely damaged the rule of law and the constitutional separation of powers, Donald Trump and his collaborators now turn their draconian radicalism against the country’s system of free elections.

            This is Phase Three in the demise of democracy. Whether the Trumpists succeed remains an open question, but they are laying the groundwork for what experts who have studied dictatorships term “competitive authoritarianism.” It means that elections are held but are manipulated so the opposition party has little or no chance of coming to power, as in Hungary and Turkey.

            The elements of the effort are these:

Political prosecutions of opposition (Democratic) figures. Trump is mobilizing a complicit Justice Department to take revenge on critics by inflating minor or imagined infractions into criminal charges. The efforts against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James have been blocked so far by a federal district court judge and two grand juries of citizens honest enough to refuse to indict James, who won a major business fraud case against Trump. But the James case might be revived, and other prosecutions are in the offing.

            In what The New York Times calls “a nebulous and far-reaching” federal investigation, former officials involved in bringing criminal cases against Trump are being subpoenaed, with a grand jury empaneled in southern Florida to consider conspiracy charges. Prosecutors of the January 6 rioters are also in jeopardy. Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California, who led the first impeachment prosecution of Trump, is under investigation. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, is being investigated by the Pentagon for his part in a video by six Democratic lawmakers reminding military personnel that they can and must refuse illegal orders. He could theoretically be recalled to active duty and court-martialed under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President,” and other officials.

American Fear

 

By David K. Shipler 

There is nothing sadder than fear.

                                     --Isabel Allende 

     A new divide is plaguing America: sharp disagreements over how to resist the authoritarian juggernaut in Washington. Speak and fight forcefully? Thread your way between principle and pragmatism? Capitulate to the rising autocracy? Or keep your head down to present less of a target?

            All those tactics are being used by a citizenry devoid of the skills needed to keep alive a dying democracy. By and large, Americans don’t see what’s coming. Only a few have experienced dictatorships (abroad) and fewer still have lived under governments with totalitarian aspirations.

In modern America, the native-born have not been seized in the streets for their political views and imprisoned by masked agents without recourse. University and school curricula have not been dictated by Washington. Science, art, and literature have not been censored. Government officials tasked with impartiality have not been routinely screened for political loyalty to a lone leader. A central ideology has not been dispensed beyond government into civil society at large, enforced by existential threats to private organizations that do not comply.

The country has enjoyed a happy, complacent spirit of assumptions about the permanence of the constitutional system. That is now being swept away by the Trump maelstrom, its place taken by an unfamiliar fear—cleverly implanted by the president and his apparatchiks.

What opposition has developed has been fragmented and too far from unanimous to rescue a failing democracy that has already descended into a semi-dictatorship. The United States is now governed largely by the whims of a single man. His daily impulses disrupt global markets, end vital research, halt life-giving aid to children, turn workers jobless, impair education, promote white supremacy, and still dissenting voices.

He has cowed huge law firms, rich corporations, major foundations, news organizations, and prominent universities—some of each—by imposing financial fear in various forms. A few imagine that they can buy the favor of the bully. They must have lived a charmed life of never having encountered a bully, a mafia boss, a dictator.

The charmed life of the United States has ended.

America's Gathering Storm

 

By David K. Shipler 

              It’s too bad that Supreme Court justices and other government leaders aren’t required to live for two or three years in some dictatorship before they take office in the United States. Better yet, in one of the countries that have used democracy to undermine democracy. Then perhaps they would recognize the signs of a gathering storm, when the friction of the air seems to change and the wind turns ominous.

              The Supreme Court and the Republican Party are laying the ground for autocracy. They are corrupting the constitutional interplay among the three branches of government, among the shared and competing interests in a complex society, and therefore among the rulers and the ruled.

              The Republicans have abdicated the key role that political parties must play in every free society—filtering out extremist demagogues. And the radical right on the Supreme Court has now granted broad immunity to presidents who commit crimes with “official acts.” This junction of political and judicial mischief could not come at a more perilous time, with a Republican authoritarian poised to return to the presidency carrying a coherent ideological blueprint he did not have in hand his first time around. He would commit felonies against democracy virtually unfettered. This is the perfect storm.

The Next Trump

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Whether Donald Trump runs again in 2024 or fades from politics, his enigmatic hold on tens of millions of Americans will be a lesson to the next demagogue. Much will be learned from Trump’s successes in manipulating huge swaths of the public, and also from his failures to translate his autocratic desires into practical power.

                Just the fact that 72 percent of Republicans tell pollsters that they believe Trump’s discredited claim that he won the 2020 election is a mark of his perverse success in selling the Big Lie. His outsized personality, his ridiculous assertions, his coarse and insulting talent for channeling resentments felt by masses of alienated citizens placed him so far above reproach in so many minds that his obvious corruption and damage to the country’s reputation and national security made no impact on the committed. After four years of falsehoods, incompetence, and immorality, he won eleven million more votes than in 2016 (up from 63 to 74 million).

                He has deftly played the dual role of tough guy and victim, of swaggering bully and persecuted prey. This is a skillful embodiment of the wishes and fears of the millions, mostly white working class, who feel marginalized and dishonored while yearning for the wealth and strength that Trump appears to possess. He has given them the dignity that many feel they have been denied by the liberal, urban, multiethnic society that their country is becoming.

Despite his serial fabrications, his lack of moral boundaries made him seem authentic and unscripted. He was a paradox: an outsider but a pampered part of the corporate elite, a non-politician whose every move was politically calculated for his own benefit, a drainer of the “swamp” who wallowed in corrupt self-dealing. He was right when he said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters.  

But because Trump did not understand government and antagonized authoritative agencies, he was often stymied as he tried to rule dictatorially, above the law. He crudely attacked the intelligence agencies, the military, the FBI, and other power centers, precisely those that an autocrat would need to muster under his control. His impatience and incompetence stymied many of his efforts to shortcut the due process built into the regulatory system.

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.