Experiment in democracy tested by right-wing populism
“This is not a drill,” Digby wrote Wednesday. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s essay in the L.A. Times warns what is ahead if the authoritarian cult that the Republican Party has become consolidates power. “It’s really happening and the rest of us have a limited amount of time to turn it around.”
On that cheery note. Thomas B. Edsall reports that Florida governor and Trump 2.0 wannabe Ron DeSantis looks to be reelected as a launch platform for a presidential run. That is “a clear warning to those worried about declining support for democratic institutions and values in the United States.” If that isn’t enough to unnerve you, there’s this:
On taking office, DeSantis told a Hillsdale College gathering in Naples, Fla last February, “The first thing I said to the general counsel was: ‘I want you to give me a binder of all the authorities of the governor. What can I do as a matter of constitutional right without anybody checking me?’ ”
A May study from Hart Research Associates finds that too many Americans for my comfort are prepared to support positions favored by a Republican autocrat. Edsall asked several experts what an America would look like led by a DeSantis backed by Republican congressional majorities.
Arturas Rozenas, a professor of political science at N.Y.U. who studies authoritarian politics, suggested how it might play out:
You take a small step, the consequences of which to democracy are ambiguous — change election laws, voter-registration rules, increase partisan control of the Civil Service, or weaken the independence of the judiciary. Many of the changes will be too gradual to cause a reaction, but in aggregate they will confer enough advantage for the incumbent to make it impossible for the opposition to win.
[…]
Each slice of this ‘authoritarian salami’ would be dressed as a reform toward more democracy, not less. When the Polish government tried to curtail the powers of the Constitutional Court, their argument was that the court is impeding the government’s ability to implement the will of the people — so its powers are undemocratic. Similarly, Hugo Chavez obtained sweeping powers and killed Venezuelan democracy through a series of referendums in the name of popular sovereignty. The paradox is that the procedure of authoritarian takeover will appear quite democratic.
It’s the boiling frog model by another name. The Leader will try to avoid actions that clearly mark “the death of democracy.” He and his allies will move by stealth at first.
And the tipping point? Edsall asks. Rozenas responds:
The point at which “the average person” would start perceiving that their lives are now different would be when it is too late to do anything about it. One day you notice that your kid’s textbook has a picture of the president on the opening page, that the government started a war that you dislike but no one in the media is criticizing it, that the leadership is making one incompetent mistake after another, but it is not removed from office, that Civil Service employers check the historical party registration records to make sure that you are not going to be a ‘difficult’ employee who at some points sympathized with the ‘wrong’ party, that you find yourself in a disagreement with the government that is costly for you to express. At this point, it will be clear that ‘things are different now,’ but by then, it will take heroically more effort than now to do anything about it.
Larry Diamond at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution worries about a Trump presidency in 2025 implementing Schedule F purges of civil servants.
Richard Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A (Election Law Blog), worries that if Trump fails to win again but somehow gets installed as president, “then at that point the United States ceases to be a democracy. Such a move to steal an election would likely be followed by other means of solidifying and maintaining power, such as control over the military and reformulation of election rules so that the regime would be self-perpetuating.”
Street protests would be put down with violence, further stifling dissent and resistance. And if Trump (or someone like him) were to win legitimately, Hasen warns, we’d see more loyalists empowered to implement his whims, only more extreme than in Trump’s first term.
Others Edsall consulted are as concerned, with different emphasis on how an autocratic government might consolidate power.
DeSantis’s re-election bid, along with his future national prospects — along with those of Trump and the politicians who imitate him — will be a test of the direction the United States is poised to take at a time when, to quote the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, “The world’s economic-political order appears to be at an inflection point, with its future direction hanging very much in balance.”
The combination of racial and ethnic tension — and the continuance of economic dislocation unfairly distributed across the nation — has turned the United States into a testing ground for right-wing populism. The anger of the white working and middle classes that Trump and DeSantis capitalize on had its origin in two major developments over the past six decades.
The time to stop it is now. There may not be a later, at least in our lifetimes. Check now to see if the water you’re sitting in is getting hotter.
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