This will not end well

So Trump's prospective "border czar" is threatening the Denver mayor with arrest over the mayor's resistance to mass deportations. As an expert on authoritarianism (minor in comparison to Altemeyer or Duckitt, but I do have a few peer review publications to show for it) and an amateur history buff, I don't see how this standoff ends well. Trump's fascist tendencies are on full display - this time by one of his henchmen. Either the federal government goes forward with its mass imprisonment of undocumented residents (and anyone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) and the Denver mayor goes to jail, or the mass deportation happens and the mayor folds like so many others who were supposed to be our bulwarks of democracy. 

The US has devolved to the point that a plurality of its citizens don't seem to be bothered with electing a convicted felon as their president and can't be bothered to care who gets hurt in the process. The US has devolved to the point that one major party has its own de facto militia dedicated to the party's boss. The other major party does not have its own militia, and operates under institutional norms and rules that are supposed to be accepted by all parties. That strikes me as unsustainable for a democracy. The escalation of systemic violence against the most vulnerable - a form of violence, mind you, that has always existed to one degree or another - could conceivably turn into something deadlier, especially if liberals rediscover the long-forgotten Weathermen or Baader-Meinhof Group and question why leftists of any stripe eschewed the use of violence in such a doctrinaire fashion. Note that I don't advocate the left forming its own militias (although there are some leftist militias and gun clubs if you know where to look). I do however believe that others will once facing down the barrel of the federal government.

If American democracy is to survive for the next few years, it will be because people like a city mayor or a state governor stand up and refuse to accept orders barked at them by a power-mad tyrant who just happens to occupy the White House. More importantly, it will be because those officials stood up to the tyrant and masses of concerned citizens made the conscious choice to stand with them. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The GOP's authoritarian turn - more graphics from V-Dem

Image
I wanted to follow up on a previous post about the authoritarian turn that the GOP has taken this century. Both of the following graphics I obtained from a working paper (no longer online, regrettably) by V-Dem in 2020. I seriously doubt the trends have changed. The Guardian had a good summary of the findings. For our purposes I am using the term authoritarianism and illiberalism as synonyms.  This first figure shows two dimensions: economic left/right and illiberalism (authoritarianism). Both dimensions start at 0 and end at 1. A party espousing economic conservatism would appear closer to 1 on the economic dimension. A party espousing authoritarian approach to governing will be closer to 1 on the Illiberalism dimension. Notice that Venezuela's ruling party actually scores a perfect 1 on illiberalism. The GOP appears in orange print and the Democratic Party appears in blue print. Other governing political parties appear in gray, and we get a baseline idea of where autocracies te...
Read more

The US Republican Party is no Longer Conservative: It is Authoritarian (repost)

Image
Note: This post comes from my academic blog and was published a little over three years ago. I am making some minor edits to account for the year we live in, but am otherwise leaving it unchanged in terms of content, given that I would still arrive at the same conclusions based on V-Dem's data analyses described in the following paragraphs.  The data tell the tale. The mass media and still too many of the US intelligentsia refer to the Republican Party (GOP) as conservative, and its politicians and followers as conservatives. I would argue that the party leadership, its politicians, and its activist base abandoned conservatism a long time ago, and took a much more authoritarian turn. And before anyone tries to get too far into the weeds here, I published some research roughly nine years ago (and I am far from alone I suspect) distinguishing at least some very substantial facets of conservatism from authoritarianism. That there are actual conservatives in the US who want n...
Read more

Ozymandias

When I think of our current era and all of its dictators and would-be dictators, there is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley that rings as true now as it did when he wrote it:     I met a traveller from an antique land,     Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone     Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,     Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,     The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;     And on the pedestal, these words appear:     My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;     Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay     Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and ...
Read more