Five questions you must ask yourself before voting in November

We are supposedly five weeks out from the first of two scheduled 2024 presidential debates between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

However, within hours of the two men agreeing to debate, Republican operatives — including daughter-in-law Lara Trump, and co-chair of the Republican National Committee — already began downplaying expectations, griping without evidence that the upcoming debates are “heavily rigged in favor of Biden.”

When Biden challenged Trump to two debates earlier this month, he did so with a well-timed zinger, “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays.” Biden also reminded everyone that Trump had lost both of their debates in 2020 and had not debated since – referring to the 2024 GOP primary debates that Trump completely ghosted.

So it was not surprising that Lara Trump immediately trotted out the Trumpiest of Trump tropes: a not-rigged thing being “rigged.”

Nor is it surprising that Trump, who had been saying on the campaign trail that he would debate Biden “anytime, and anyplace” including outside the Manhattan courthouse where his criminal trial is occurring, that his campaign is already looking for a way out of debating Biden if they can do so without losing face.

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If not, then these debates will become no different from his two previous elections – as well as his first criminal trial and three other indictments – “rigged” conspiracy affairs against him by the Democrats, the media, the deep state, noncitizen voters and space aliens.

We also learned last week that in addition to Supreme Court Justice Thomas’s wife and lawyer, Virginia Thomas,having urged the overturning of the 2020 election, that Justice Samuel Alito’s home — days after the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — flew an upside-down American flag in solidarity with the “Stop the Steal” movement that had been rejected by 60 lower court lawsuits filed by Trump and company.

Of course, a justice taking any position on a political matter of any kind isn’t just a no-no, it’s verboten, it’s anathema to the very raison d'être of any jurist let alone a member of the Supreme Court.

As ex-federal prosecutor Harry Litman articulated when learning about the Alito flag episode, “announcing a position” on any political issue is deeply disturbing. It’s even more so when it is based factually on “a lie, a fiction.” Alito’s “suggestion otherwise is an absolute treachery to confidence in democracy” especially coming from a Supreme Court Justice who would “be hearing cases involving an offshoot of this very set of beliefs and social turmoil.”

Unfortunately, Stop the Steal 2.0 — or the continuation of Stop the Steal 1.0 — is alive and well. And should Trump lose the presidential election in 2024, the Trumpian revolution will continue to thwart American democracy as Republican leaders have already told us they will only accept the election as legitimate if Trump wins.

Like all of Trump’s biggest lies and attacks on democracy and the rule of law, they are being financed and “promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.”

All of this déjà vu is occurring amidst the new propaganda wars being waged globally by autocratic nations against constitutional democracies, their rules of law, transparencies, and accountabilities. Once again in 2024, like in 2020 and 2016, this war of narratives is being driven by Russian disinformation and by colluding members of the Trump campaign.

In addition, assistance this time around is also coming from an even more sycophantic GOP than in 2020 and a Supreme Court that has already weighed in in favor of the insurrectionist-in-chief and presumed Republican nominee.

As Anne Applebaum has written so incisively about the new propaganda war in the June issue of The Atlantic magazine, “Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common ground with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.”

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Having abandoned the Constitution and the rule of law, and having sanctioned that Trump and his ilk are, indeed, above the law, the Supreme Court has irresponsibly left the verdict of the former president’s insurrectionary lawlessness not to a jury of his peers where it belongs — Trump faces 88 felony counts across four criminal trials — but to a voting body politic where the ultimate decision made will have little to do with either the facts or the law.

Worse yet, in April, a New York Times/Siena College survey taken from 1,000 voters across the country found that when asked about the one thing voters remember about Trump’s presidency, “only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to Covid.”

Meanwhile, on the 2024 campaign trail in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Trump has been falsely claiming to Republican officials and supporters alike that he won states which were not even close in 2020.

These are not only lies, but they are part of his “campaign strategy.” For when Trump loses in Minnesota as Republicans have done consecutively since 1976, he will call it another “rigged” vote counting. It is not at all surprising that the corrupt Republicans are not calling Trump out on these lies. But neither are the Democrats who are merely regarding it as another example of Trump the fraudster being himself.

Last and not least of all, Trump and his campaign earlier in the week tried to fundraise off of the false claims that Biden authorized the assassination of the former president during one of the searches for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.

With all of this in mind, I have reduced the 2024 elections to five questions that I believe people should ask themselves and need to answer before casting their votes this fall:

1. Why do you trust one of these two presidential candidates and parties over the other with the keys to the White House?
2. Even if you are not a woman, which of these two presidential candidates and parties are you willing to bet your life on?
3. What kinds of “personality traits” are you looking for in the next commander-in-chief, and what types of human beings are you looking for that will also be in sync with the cabinet selections and the rest of the members of his administration?
4. What exactly are the things that you think you will be gaining should your candidate and party win, and conversely, what exactly are the things that you think you will be losing should your candidate and party be defeated?
5. Why is the well-being or future of American democracy and the rule of law more important than all of the other issues or concerns at stake in this election?

I will now explain why the stuff or substance of the first four questions are subject to whether we become an illiberal democracy or an autocracy, remain a liberal democracy, or become a multicultural democracy.

At least in the short run, the election will decide whether the United States will remain a democratic and constitutional republic as we have known for 250 years. If it does not, it will become an illiberal democracy or an autocracy as in a “new” fascist America.

As Thomas Zimmer from Democracy Americana has revealed in his May 22 substack on the “fascism debates” and Donald Trump, American fascist: The former president “has a fascistic way of describing the problem” as a “country in decline. It is threatened by outsiders – immigrants, invaders who are ‘poisoning the blood’.” The nation is also “threatened by the enemy within: Un-American forces of radical leftism and globalist elites.”

Trump offers a fascistic solution: To MAGA the nation has to be purified from without and the enemies from within purged. Trump has “repeatedly promised to round up and deport 15 million people – a deportation operation of unprecedented scale, explicitly targeting non-white immigrants.”

More explicitly: Should Biden and the Democrats prevail, will the U.S. remain a tyranny of a minority — a representative or democratic kind of tyranny — with its rule of law and constitutional balance of powers striving to call the shots? Or will our government, should Trump and the Republicans win out, become a tyranny of an authoritarian oligarchy?

If Biden is returned to the Oval Office – and despite the enduring Trumpian revolution — then the electorate or the people will have a third option other than a tyranny of a minority or a tyranny of an autocracy. This refers to a yet-unrealized struggle to build a new tyranny: one that's fully democratic – with direct rather than indirect representation of, by, and for people – a multicultural, if not a multiparty, majority to replace our antiquated, dysfunctional and polarized tyranny of a minority.

If voters return Trump to the White House, then the third option will be off the table until the American people rise up against the illiberal democracy — and who knows, if and when, or how long that would take — to overturn the reactionary and repressive tyranny of the autocracy.

Looking back, looking forward

Because the Founding Fathers were concerned about their envisioned democratic republic collapsing, they contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchies and empires.

They knew — as Aristotle had warned — that inequality brings instability. And, as Plato believed, demagogues by exploiting free speech may very well install themselves as tyrants.

Accordingly, the authors of the Constitution sought a document to avoid what the ancient philosophers referred to as tyranny or the usurpation of power by one individual or group or faction or party.

To hopefully avert their birth of a democratic nation from coming to its own demise and going the way of the ancient democracies, our founders came up with a political architecture whose encroachment of power they hoped would be protected by a system of checks and balances and the rule of law.

Similarly, during the Constitutional Convention the founders were determined to prevent what James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.” So they opted for a “tyranny of a minority” constructing a democratic republic exemplified by the establishment of a bicameral congress and an Electoral College as a means of not selecting our president through a direct, one person one vote, majority-take-all.

In addition to the unresolved democratic issues of inequality and instability or of demagogues exploiting free speech, societies both democratic and autocratic have been dealing with the unresolved issues of globalization since the beginning of the 20th century.

Responding to globalization, modern democracies after World War I and World War II came and went in Europe and elsewhere as they dissolved into authoritarian or fascist dictatorships.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, democracies materialized in Eastern Europe, and within a relatively short period of time, severalof these countries, such as Hungary and Russia, reverted back to authoritarianism..

Today, there are also the fascist, communist and authoritarian legacies of the rule by disciplined party elites with monopolies over reason or objective truth.

These elites call all the shots on behalf of the people. Undeterred by the interests of the people, domestic or global, they are always working against democratic rule and on behalf of authoritarian rule. In other words, against the interests of the vast majority of the people and on behalf of the interests of the oligarchical few and their minions.

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Since Trump began colluding with the Russians before the 2016 presidential election and took the sides of other illiberal democracies or dictatorships during and after his administration, he has also succeeded in capturing the entire GOP. Another Trump presidency would bring our system of checks and balances, rule of law and even the Supreme Court to the end of their constitutional ropes, so to speak.

In sum, should Trump and his minions and all of their corruption and lawlessness triumph in the fall, then the United States will have crossed over — temporarily, at best — to the other side and joined forces with our heretofore anti-democratic opponents or enemies with their abundance of human repression and lack of individual freedom.

On the other hand, should Biden and his democratic defenders of law and order, liberty and justice score a victory over Trump this fall, then the American people will have the opportunity – as difficult as it will be – to fix the things that are wrong with our current democracy such as the Electoral College or the Supreme Court, and to deliver a legally reformed and more fully inclusive democratic republic.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.