How "My Way or the Highway" Is Destroying Democracy Almost Everywhere

“[Expect possible] U.S. ideological divisions, democratic erosion, and domestic unrest escalate, plunging the country into civil war.” 

Canadian governmental policy report, spring 2014, entitled Disruptions on the Horizon.

“Like, people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that, to return our country to a place of godliness.” 

Secret recording of controversial Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito, reported in the June 10th NY Times.

It’s happening everywhere. Populist candidates are increasingly getting elected in traditional democracies, embracing “us” vs “them” racial, ethnic purity, religious or gender values. As the world faces increases de facto civil wars (as in the recent election in Mexico, where gangs and cartels killed candidates who threatened their control) or regional conflicts and as climate change has rendered vast tracts of arable land fallow, there has been a parallel rise in migration globally. Poorer migrants are running from both ultra-violence in their homelands or the loss of even their subsistence existence. They’re mostly not running because each is individually being persecuted, the traditional meaning of an asylum-seeker, but they are running for their lives.

And the richer nations, where such migrants naturally gravitate, are closing their borders, electing rightwing representatives and leaders in record numbers, effectively circling their wagons to “keep them out.” This despite the fact that these richer nations were the economic growth beneficiaries of the pollution belching factories, the appliance-driven households, and the ubiquitous fossil fuel dependent aircraft, shipping and vehicles… that were and continue to be the principal causes of that farm destroying climate change.

We are also battling each other for dwindling resources. The Middle East would not be remotely as concerning if oil and gas were not at stake. If the massive fertile fields of grain and other crops that defined Ukraine for centuries were less productive – traditionally generating a disproportionate level of agricultural exports – I suspect Russia would never have coveted and invaded that nation. China lusts after super productive Taiwan and super-resource-rich regions in and around the South China Sea… with acquisition on her mind.

For some, like Hungary, it’s ethnic and cultural purity. For China, it reaches into ancient history to concoct its entitlement to the above-noted regional assets. I wonder if Greece should use Alexander the Great or Italy should use ancient Rome to expand today? But many nations in Europe are becoming the new homeland for ethnic, racial and religious minorities… lots and lots of them. The UK Brexited from the European Union to stop workers crossing open EU borders to find work in the UK. Populist explosions all across Europe – now including a litany of elections with rapidly rising rightwing results in Hungary, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Austria and now looking increasingly like France (where President Macron has called a snap election hoping that the population will come to their senses and not elect an isolationist reactionary government).

Yet EU rules favor allowing migration, require granting asylum (also a UN rule), even as elections for EU representatives show a strong rightwing aversion to such statutes and treaties. Everywhere, strongmen are rising, racism and ethnic/religious purity have been legitimized, and the bastions of democracy are fighting for their lives. People are forgetting the lesson of autocracy over the years, the necessary violence and repression needed to keep the people in line once they wake up.

China may have pulled a billion people out of poverty in the post-Mao era, but as soon as the new Mao did away with term limits, purged his opponents, restructured his economy, President Xi Jinping’s centralized control raised repression to a new level, materially altered a once thriving economy to cater to his whims and produced massive unemployment, a serious reduction in factory output, a major real estate collapse and a parallel unraveling of the Chinese banking sector. Has Russia prospered under elected Putin’s iron boot? You tell me.

Centralized power works efficiently, for sure. One of the first elements of democracy – a functioning and powerful independent judicial system – is almost always the first area a rising autocrat takes apart. So that efficiency may continue, but without the checks and balances that a viable and independent represents, the nation and its economy only work if that strongman makes good decisions. As so many societies have learned the hard way, if that strongman makes bad decisions – surrounded with “yes” loyalists – the lack of those checks and balance unravels the entire nation. Look at Israel as Netanyahu attacked his judiciary. That’s first and most important check and balance to go.

That strongmen attacking the very institutions that supply those checks and balances should send a powerful red alert to the entire electorate. Hair-brain schemes, promises that defy reality, and identifying blameless people to blame are part and parcel of that national unraveling. According to some pretty reputable economists (as reported by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria), the United States – with a worker shortage directly related to an under replacement-value population contraction – is losing GDP value at $5 trillion/year with its immigration policy. The UK, without that EU structure and open travel, watched its post-Brexit economy plunge to be one of lowest performing all of Europe, like taking a decade or more to recover.

So now we come to the populist surge in the United States. The Trump years were not the glorious success that Trump claims. In almost every economic category, Biden is vastly more successful. Like most dictators-in-waiting, Trump promises to disassemble the DOJ, its law enforcement arm and take over the courts to impose his will. He enabled existing populist judges – like “2.4 million in gifts from partisan donors” Clarence Thomas and religious fundamentalist Trumper Samuel Alito – to eschew the ethics that are mandatory for every other federal judge and vote for guns and autocratic personal control by adding three more rightwing jurists to the Court.

So, what does that autocratic control, with courts sidelined, look like in a country with more civilian guns than people, with rightwing militia carrying those guns (and lots of AR-15-like firearms) and a military arresting the autocrat’s opponents? You tell me.

I’m Peter Dekom, for those people who knowingly or unknowingly favor a new populist autocracy, prepare to relearn those well-established lesson of history… stand back and stand by.