Autocracy and democracy are on a collision course

Because of the prevailing power of partisanship and the absence of any genuine bipartisanism, the contemporary U.S. democratic system finds itself well beyond a political stalemate subject to rational compromise.

Ergo, we find ourselves subject to a deepening political crisis that stems from the fact that neither of the two major political parties in the U.S. can obtain a lasting advantage over the other party.

More fundamentally, our constitutional republic finds itself in a crisis of survival, the likes of which the United States has only known once before. And we all know how the Civil War did not really resolve a certain racial predicament in the short or long run.

So as we prepare for the 2024 presidential election and the likely showdown between the incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden and the former incumbent Republican President Donald Trump, it is critical that we — including the mass media — understand how this race for the White House is not about 2020 déjà vu or some kind of do-over. Our public occurrences, both foreign and domestic are far different now than they were then.

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The 2024 contest should have little, if anything, to do with whether people like or dislike Sleepy Joe or Tic Tac Trump. Nor should we trifle with whether someone supports or opposes their real or imagined domestic and international policies that, by the way, seem to be dovetailing and morphing into one and the same.

To be a pragmatic reductionist, there is only one issue at stake in this presidential election: democracy versus autocracy. Unfortunately, after a decade of Trumpism, too many Americans, especially persons who still identify as Republicans, either do not know the differences between the two political systems or they simply do not give a damn.

By the end of the summer 2023, Trump was facing local, state, and federal criminal indictments, including for the alleged crimes of obstructing justice, political conspiracy, and illegal fundraising to name at least three crimes that arose from his unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Nonetheless, his campaign advisors were still trying to play the “law and order” card emphasizing that public safety and law enforcement would be the new administration’s top priority. Earlier that spring, the former president had already begun outlining his vision for a second term in office.

The former commander-in-chief with a “straight face” and no “wink-wink” was pledging to work within the law and to collaborate with state authorities to carry out without any irony his practices of retribution and victimization toward those persons that disagree with him.

Meanwhile, as part of Trump’s authoritarian agenda, he has been vowing that there would be mandatory stop-and-frisk orders by police, the death penalty for drug dealers and criminal charges against whistleblowers. Trump has stated that he intends to deploy the military to fight street crime, break up gangs and deport immigrants.

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Trump has also promised to purge the federal workforce by making it easier to fire career government employees, and he has proposed a new civil service exam where loyalty to him is the only thing that really matters. At the same time, Trump has been proposing to apply governmental power, centralized under his authority, toward a vast range of issues that have long remained outside the scope of federal control, such as cracking down on media links, establishing a “truth and reconciliation commission,” as part of Trump’s plan to shatter the deep state… and to “clean house of all of the warmongers and America-Last globalists…the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex.”

In the real world, most of Trump’s ideas are impractical, self-defeating, illegal, reckless, dangerous or all the above. Some of those ideas are as absurd as they are outlandish. Take the example of when Trump was doing an interview with the Nelk Boys in April 2023. Trump promised that if he were the president of a South American country, he would “dump the prison and mental populations into the United States” — an apparent commentary on what Trump likes to say are Biden’s “open border” policies.

Unfortunately, on the campaign trail, these absurd “talking points” seem to blend seamlessly with MAGA nation’s embrace of conspiracy theories, the distrust of scientific and academic knowledge and the division of people into believers or non-believers in the spirit of the New Gnosticism with its emphasis on self-experience rather than doctrine.

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Moreover, Trump’s articulated vision of a more coercive and punitive agenda — MAGA on steroids — is not only resonating with some of his political rivals for the GOP nomination and with 64 percent of voting Republicans, but also with the community of right-wing political organizations and “think tanks.”

For example, the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Presidential Transition Project, and partner organizations such as the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Center for Renewing America, are all on board the Trump train roaring toward the end of American democracy. So are American First Policy and American First Legal, both with close ties to Trump himself.

As Larry Diamond — a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who studies democracy — has stated about the alt-right movement in America: “We need to take it very seriously” because “we’ve learned about Trump and authoritarian populists like him,” their rhetoric is much more than “idle language and toothless roar.”

Remember back in the late summer of 2016 when Trump’s campaign chairman was Steve Bannon, and Bannon had declaredhimself to be a Leninist out to deconstruct the state and to destroy the conservative establishment?

Well, nearly eight years later, the Trumpian leaders of the Republican Party have all become Bannonists. So has the alt-right SCOTUS majority after its recent overturning decisions such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation (2022) or its anticipated decision later this year to overturn the Chevron doctrine, which established 40 years ago in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that courts should defer to a government agency’s “reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute.”

Should people want to familiarize themselves with the seven basic tactics in the pursuit of authoritarian power – politicizing independent institutions, spreading disinformation, aggrandizing executive power, quashing dissent, marginalizing vulnerable communities, corrupting elections, and stoking violence – please consult Protect Democracy’s “The Authoritarian Playbook.”

If you really care about democracy, knowledge will indeed provide power in defending against the alternative.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, co-founder of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, and the author of Criminology on Trump (2022) whose sequel, Indicting the 45 th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We can Do About the Threat to American Democracy will be published April 1, 2024.