Tag Archives: Dictatorship

They Want a Red (as in Red State) Caesar

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Even though the 2024 election is still 13 months away, we should all be paying attention to the Republican Party’s descent into outright fascism (or to use a more contemporary term, “Trumpism”). Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer explains why: far right “thought leaders” think a dictator should take control in 2025:

The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy…..

To a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.

The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.

… Let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack….

In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.

“Intellectuals play a certain kind of role, especially on the right, in legitimating actions of elites in the party and [the] movement,” Linker told me in a recent interview, adding: “They’re giving people permission to do terrible things,” labeling shameful measures as “acts of virtue”….

America should be having a robust, life-or-death conversation — when TV’s cable talkfest signs on at 6 a.m. until the last words at midnight, on the floors of the House and Senate, in newspaper editorial boards and down at the barber shop and in Starbucks — about whether we really want to end this country’s 247-year uneven experiment in democracy, and whether one man should have the power to override elections, jail his enemies, free his friends, and eviscerate federal agencies.

And yet the elites that far-right extremists claim are “all powerful” seem incapable of grasping these very real threats to constitutional government or a free press. That’s particularly true of the mainstream media and its pacesetters like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which seem determine to “both sides” the descent into dictatorship — with headlines that blame dysfunction on Capitol Hill on “Congress” instead of Republicans, or that place the 80-year-old President Joe Biden’s verbal or actual stumbles on a level pitch with rising GOP fascism.

It’s all the more remarkable since we all know who the actual “Red Caesar” is — even if he is, technically, orange….The 45th president who seems to have already locked down the Republican nomination to become the 47th, has been accused of running a rambling, ideas-free campaign — except that’s not true.

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, [he] has been pretty specific in recent speeches and interviews about the actions he would take if he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025 — such as naming a special prosecutor to go after his political enemies, blowing up civil service protections to fill the government with his acolytes, deploying the military in a massive deportation campaign, and sending troops to “control crime” in Democratic-led cities….

But the media and others struggle to understand how someone like [him] — twice impeached with 91 pending felony indictments, found in New York courtrooms to be both a rapist and a fraudster — has a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House [note: according to polls 13 months before the election]. That requires understanding the role of the right’s No. 1 chaos agent — [Steve] Bannon, who was [T’s] 2016 campaign manager — and his ability to move pawns like the foot soldiers of the McCarthy ouster, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace, across his messy chessboard. Bannon, now a popular podcaster …, understands better than anyone that creating political mayhem is laying the groundwork for a strongman to declare — as [T] did in 2016 — that “I alone can fix it”.

In a 2022 article, a former Bannon associate … wrote that t[Bannon] frequently told him “about the destiny of the United States and the role he sees for chaos and destruction — for ‘craziness’ — in it. The worldview he laid out to me was one where things he might otherwise consider harmful, like the dissolution of our electoral process or the erosion of shared understandings of truth, were to be embraced as fated stages in a process of national rebirth.”

So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.” In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”….

The Guardian’s Wilson noted that Anton, in an essay decrying the power of elite, liberal-minded “experts,” wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965.” What was that year’s landmark event? The passage of the Voting Rights Act, which empowered Black voters and led to the election of thousands of African American office holders.

After the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Republicans could win elections through the backlash politics of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or the demagoguery of 1988′s “Willie Horton ad.” They then turned to tactics like voter suppression or extreme gerrymandering as their electorate shrunk. In 2024, the right sees dictatorship as its final “Hail Mary” pass. And it just might work.

But in thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” In the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.

Our Former President Invites an Odious Comparison

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You’ve probably heard that the first person to mention Hitler or the Nazis automatically loses the argument. That’s not true, of course, but it does suggest that Hitler or Nazi comparisons shouldn’t be made lightly. (This adage is different from Godwin’s Law, which says “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1”.

Yet, these days, with America’s right wing becoming ever more extreme, it’s natural to wonder how far they’ll go. Journalist Brian Beutler names a few names:

We see all around us people clothed in immense power whom we know, to a practical certainty, would have been enthusiastic allies to George Wallace or Jefferson Davis or even Adolf Hitler, and we see many, many more who would quite evidently have made their peace with segregation, or slavery, or genocide as an acceptable moral compromise for maintaining their wealth or social sway. 

It’s a testament to the durable temptation of wickedness—to the fact that “Never Again!” without constant vigilance is a chant of delusion. But it’s also prima facie evidence that we remain insufficiently vigilant, or that a large subset of liberals is in denial about the totalitarian temptation washing over the right. The people would side with us overwhelmingly if they understood the stakes this way, but all too frequently we won’t even tell them. 

Anybody who’s paid to write or speak for a big corporation like The New York Times or a smaller one like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting needs to come across as fair and balanced. That’s a big problem if the subject they’re writing or speaking about, American politics, is no longer balanced at all. What words are appropriate when there is news like this, in this case reported by the Times:

[The former president] and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

[He] and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

[He] intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”.

[He] and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them….

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget [for the former president].

The Times reporters don’t draw the obvious conclusion. In response to the Times article, Ryan Cooper of the American Prospect does:

Donald Trump is plotting to make himself dictator. His plan it to make the federal government his plaything, and many Republican elites are behind him.

When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 1999, he did not become dictator overnight. It took him many years to crush independent media, make the oligarch class dependent on him, and suppress organized political opposition… That process of power consolidation has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine, as the former “hybrid regime” with some tacit limited freedoms has become a full-blown autocracy.

Trump is openly planning something similar, should he win the 2024 election…. Given [his] history, it’s clear that should he become president again, he will try to set up a dictatorship….

When [he] first came to power, he had little idea of how the federal government worked or even what he wanted to do with it, much less how to bend it to his will….

Eventually, [he] figured out how to get what he wanted. The answer was not to conform his acts to the existing system, but to break it. By issuing hundreds of executive orders, threatening those who stood in his way, and above all installing cronies throughout the executive branch and the judiciary, he could break through the procedures and norms that had constrained previous presidents (which turned out to be a lot more feeble than many assumed).

By 2020, Presidential Personnel Office head John McEntee was running a plan to install Trump stooges throughout the federal bureaucracy even over the objections of Trump’s own Cabinet members.

This process culminated in the attempted putsch on January 6, 2021, which as usual was poorly planned and led, yet got alarmingly close to success nonetheless. For the first time in American history, a fascist mob sacked the national legislature and disrupted the process of transferring power—all under the direction of the losing president, who was trying to cling to power through violence….

The Times report is characteristically stuffy about what is going on here. Yet the reporters got enough [of his] cronies on the record to make the stakes abundantly clear. The plan is called Project 2025—a transition project … with the explicit purpose of making the entire government beholden to [the president’s] every whim…. The only way to satisfy his craving for limitless money and power, and to inflict ruthless vengeance against his enemies, is to turn the presidency into a dictatorship.

[He] won’t necessarily succeed, even if he does win the election—it is unwise for a would-be autocrat to cultivate deep unpopularity among the armed forces, just for starters—but that is what he’s determined to do.

The Hitler of 1943? No. The Hitler of 1933? The evidence is clear.