How a Strongman (No Women Yet) Defies the Rule of Law

In order to rule without legal and social restrictions, throughout modern history, “strongmen” have relied heavily on sets of processes to dismantle and discredit any forces that might oppose them. They have consistently rewarded loyalty over competence and adherence to legal restrictions, increased the frequency of discharging any subordinate who veers even slightly from the “party line,” sending a clear message to the rest of that strongman’s workforce of what is expected, wrested control of mass media while crushing or discrediting media that contradicts their vision, unleashed powerful militant forces to repress dissent and taken apart any apparatus capable of investigating their abuses or bringing their illegal acts into the public light or any forum where their strongman excess can be contained or where they risk removal or incarceration.

It was not the military that brought Adolph Hitler to power in Germany or Benito Mussolini to run Italy… there both were elected and worked their way through a representative government. They both created highly visible enemies, at least in the eyes of their followers. Hitler found Jews, non-whites and foreigners. Although once a socialist himself, Mussolini railed against the weak and unproductive and based his political strategy on empowered racially pure elites at the expense of socialists and bureaucrats. Brown shirts. SS. Hitler Youth. We do know where all this went. From democracy to dictatorship, step by step. Think that cannot happen here?

Each and every step that these dictators walked is evidenced in the path that the Trump administration has followed right here in our American “democracy.” A revolving door of White House staffers, the attack on “MSM” (mainstream media) as purveyors of “fake news” combined with a highly manipulative propaganda machine that dominates social media and favors right wing press, supporting scary right wing white supremacist marches (“fine people”) ready to kill opponents and crush minorities as we saw in Charlottesville (pictured above), the decimation of the DOJ and the FBI – the only properly staffed federal agencies that could effectively investigate Mr. Trump – recently by authorizing a highly inaccurate memo by Republican lackey, Devin Nunes, and refusing to declassify and release the Democratic memo in opposition.

This behavior is both horrifying and fascinating. If not contained, and there are strong signs that the ability to limit these forces are rapidly slipping away, history will probably point to Donald Trump as the architect of the end of the American democracy. It may happen slowly, wending into the future after Donald Trump is gone (from natural causes or from political losses), or shockingly quickly if all the checks and balances that can stop these autocratic realities are successfully dismantled. The fascinating part is explored by two Harvard professors writing an academic tome, as described in the February 10^th Los Angeles Times:

“As scholars who study the death of democracies around the globe, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt saw Donald Trump’s rise to power as an alarming sign of dangerous times ahead… The two professors of government at Harvard University found parallels with fascism in Germany and Italy before World War II and with Latin America’s struggle with dictatorships.

“In the U.S., they argue in their new book, ‘How Democracies Die,’ the threat comes not from a military coup, but from a duly elected leader who, like former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, subverts democratic institutions one step at a time in a steady march to autocracy… It’s an offensive argument to many Trump supporters, who welcome the president’s shattering of tradition in Washington.

“Levitsky, however, said Trump’s latest efforts to undercut the criminal investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia only buttress the case that the president is imperiling U.S. democracy.

[Levitsky:] It’s difficult to think of an elected autocrat who did not try to bring what we call the referees — law enforcement, intelligence and judicial agencies — under their control. These agencies [then] serve as a shield so that the government cannot effectively be investigated or prosecuted.

Law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies and the courts in most democracies are at least supposed to be independent, neutral arbiters. They are not supposed to play on the government’s side. In many politicized, weak or failing democracies, you see governments exert varying degrees of control over the referees…

American democracy is pretty robust. Our democratic institutions are strong. American democracy is therefore not easy to kill, so I’m not one of those people running around crying that fascism is around the corner.

However, this is a guy who prior to being elected clearly showed that he had a weak commitment to basic democratic principles, that he was willing to encourage violence, undermine the credibility of our electoral process, attack the press.

Trump came in talking about locking up his rival, paying the lawyer’s fees of supporters who beat up opposition activists, and so for good reason, opposition groups began to push back. There were marches, rallies, calls for impeachment within days of his swearing-in. So what happens — and we’ve seen this in many other cases, including Turkey, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru — the president then feels besieged and then pushes back harder.

What’s clearly happening, and I consider this threatening, is that Trump’s attacks on core democratic institutions are eroding our citizens’ confidence in those institutions.

What Trump has done, in insisting that our electoral process is rigged, is convince large numbers of Americans that our elections are not free and fair…

[LA Times:] Are Trump’s attacks on the FBI a problem?

[Levitsky:] Yes. Since the post-Nixon reforms, the FBI has been a professional, independent agency. It has been a pretty effective referee for the last couple generations, and Trump is clearly tarnishing that.

He has convinced the bulk of his party and a good chunk of the American electorate that the FBI is conspiring against him and working with the Democratic Party, which of course could be used to justify measures taken to purge its leadership and replace it with allies.”

You cannot say with any precision that this flirtation with an authoritarian form of government will stick. But you clearly see how withdrawing from international treaties and conventions – which are rapidly replaced with new agreements that specifically exclude the United States – might take a very long time to replace. How will the world trust even a new liberal US leader, knowing that our system can easily elect a strongman to reverse that leader’s most sacred pledges? Or that once we have ceded international power and influence to China and Russia, as they build treaties, trade agreements, infrastructure, military facilities and alliances, how difficult it would be for the United States to make a significant comeback. Or how incurring massive deficits to give hard cash to the rich can be reversed to address future socio-economic realities in the United States. As with those incarnations of Germany and Italy, the United States is heavily polarized with some very angry (and well-armed) factions.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I truly wonder exactly how the United States can maintain its democratic style of government and global stature without a ground-up reconfiguration that just might result in our second civil war.