A Military Dictatorship in the United States

“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; 

nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” 

Charles De Gaulle

 Funny how true nationalists tend to call themselves “patriots,” or how right-wing business-first advocates label anything that could raise taxes or impose environmental or financial regulation as “creeping socialism.” There is no possible way for a political party that has built its unbending fealty to a dwindling white, socially conservative set of traditionals can continue to win elections or otherwise hold control over nation that is hyper-accelerating into a majority of ethnic, racial and gender diversity without distorting the system. Either by suppressing, even nullifying, voters who disagree with their policies… or by military force. 

We’re already viewed as a “flawed democracy,” not one based on fair representation, by most of the free world. Those descriptive words were first formalized by the prestigious UK periodical, The Economist but have been parroted with great frequency even before the attempted Trumpian autocracy. 

This denigration of the truth of “American democracy” is based on a simple reference to a system of government i. that accords two US Senators to California, with over 39 million residents, and two Senators each as to Wyoming and a few other underpopulated states, with populations under 600 thousand, ii. where rich people/institutions can spend unlimited sums in support of candidates and causes (via the 2010 Citizens United vs FEC Supreme Court decision – considered corruption in many other democracies), iii. where states, empowered by some ambiguous extent by the Constitution, seem to be able to write their own election laws that disenfranchise voters that might challenge the incumbents in power, and iv. where endemic discrimination of minorities seems unending and unstoppable.

But older, socially conservative, white traditional voters are dying off. Replaced with rising generations of younger voters who find intolerance, blind support of mega-wealth and failing to provide a future with sufficient and reasonable access to healthcare, education, a working infrastructure and a solution to the ravages of climate change. Replaced with expanding pockets of non-white, non-traditional voters. Replaced with educated voters who find archaic and inflexible intolerant “blame seeking” to be antithetical to progress and prosperity. But these rising new voters, frustrated with conservative incumbents, face not only both voter suppression and nullification but an increased willingness on the part of a growing segment of America that believe it is time to bear arms and take over the country, by force if necessary.

They totally believe the “Big Lie” that, without any serious proof of voter fraud, holds Donald Trump as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, oddly on the same purportedly fraudulent ballot that also elected the conservatives to Congress. They view the January 6th siege of the Capitol as an orderly and very normal protest, ignoring the death and violence that occurred, view the perpetrators as patriots and believe that true Americans would be most justified in overthrowing the government. Militias and conspiracy theories are their tools of choice. 

To folks who cannot contemplate an overthrow of our government by domestic terrorists, the same domestic terrorists that both Homeland Security and the FBI have described as the “greatest threat” to American democracy, may I suggest that they understand that the belief that it is time to “act” (read: stage a coup) now falls from the mouths of those recently in power: Jonah Goldberg, writing for the June 1st Los Angeles Times, reminds us with this example: “Over Memorial Day weekend, Michael Flynn, [a former US Army general] who briefly served as Donald Trump’s first national security advisor, appeared at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Dallas. During a Q&A session, an audience member said, ‘I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here.’

“What happened in Myanmar was an old-fashioned military coup… Flynn replied, ‘No reason. I mean, it should happen here.’… The crowd cheered both the question and the answer…

“Why aren’t more conservatives and elected Republicans more horrified by this and stuff like it?.. The timing of Flynn’s remarks was darkly fortuitous, and not just because he offered his comments on the eve of Memorial Day, when we honor the men and women who gave their lives defending our Constitution. They also coincided with a current debate about the nature of conservatism, and whether the right’s descent into such conspiracy-mongering paranoia and nationalism is a betrayal of conservatism or the inevitable result of conservative ideas. Some even argue that this is what conservatism was always about.

“It’s certainly true that the Trump era has revealed a lot about how serious — or rather, unserious — some prominent Republicans and conservatives really were about their reverence for the Constitution. But instead of going down various intellectual and historical rabbit holes, I’ll just say that trying to lay this at the feet of conservative ideas is a distraction.

“The core problem afflicting the right — and to a great degree, the country — is the elite surrender to populism. Definitions of populism vary, but for our purposes, it’s best understood as the politics of the mob. The defining emotions of populism and mobs are passion and the twin convictions that ‘we’ are right and ‘we’ have been wronged by ‘them.’” 

While the Cambridge Dictionary defines “populism” as “political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want,” the fact that what one “populist” constituency might want as a denial of the rights of those who disagree with that constituency is the beginning of understanding that terms. Certainly, of late, American populism has elevated one class/race of people over the rest, denial of the right to disagree with that class/race, and the belief that passionate commitments need not be based on truth, facts or require justification before being unleashed.

“Populism is often immune to reason and contemptuous of debate. ‘The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver,’ William Jennings Bryan proclaimed. ‘I will look up the arguments later.’…  Both parties have, at various times, hitched their wagons to populism. Bryan, Andrew Jackson, Huey Long and George Wallace rode the populist tiger, while Franklin Roosevelt and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama harnessed the beast for their purposes.

“Conservatives deserve special criticism for fomenting populism because conservatism is supposed to be temperamentally skeptical of excessive political passion. But that decision has less to do with conservative ideas than with the corruption of prioritizing political power over principle — an error that is inherent to politics and human nature, as the founders understood well. Certainly, on paper, intellectual progressivism provides as much permission for indulging populism as conservatism does.” LA Times. Democracy is far more frail, subject to destruction, than many believe. By way of example, Hitler and Putin initially were elected, purportedly under some form of democracy. But hate speech and finding categories of people to blame allowed these autocrats to rise and plow democracy into the dirt.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the onslaught of social media and hate speech seem to have challenged the sustainability of American democracy more than at any other time in our post-Civil War history.