Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump that the United States may technically no longer even qualify as a democracy.
Commentary by Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld Saturday, January 13, 2024
President Donald Trump speaks at the the Farm Show Complex and Expo Center in Harrisburg, PAPhoto: Shutterstock
At a recent campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa, Donald Trump argued that “illegal aliens” are “destroying the blood of our country.” He then rejected criticism that his rhetoric echoed Adolf Hitler.
“It’s crazy what’s going on. They’re ruining our country,” Trump said. “And it’s true, they’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country. They don’t like it when I said that.”
The former president’s niece claims he defamed the election workers at least 23 times.
“And I’ve never read Mein Kampf,” said Trump. “Oh, Hitler said that [about destroying the blood of his country]. In a much different way.”
Yes, the difference was that Hitler said it in German.
One month earlier on the campaign trail, the former President channeled Hitler and Mussolini when he vowed: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
The Holocaust did not begin with killing
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is deeply alarmed at the hateful rhetoric at a conference of white nationalists held on November 19 [2016] at the Ronald Reagan Building just blocks from the Museum… The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words. The Museum calls on all American citizens, our religious and civic leaders, and the leadership of all branches of the government to confront racist thinking and divisive hateful speech…”
These words from a press release from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC refer to a white nationalist conference headlined by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who greeted attendees with a tribute to then President-elect Donald Trump. Spencer shouted, “Hail Trump! Hail victory!” from the stage before all in attendance gestured in a traditional Nazi straight-arm salute.
Once identifying as a Democrat, Donald Trump has transformed himself, at the very least, into the mouthpiece of the far-right wing of the Republican Party.
In political terms, a “strongman” is one who leads by force within an overarching authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorial regime. Sometimes the formal head of state and sometimes another political or military leader, the strongman exerts influence and control over the government more than traditional laws or constitutional mandates sanction.
On the right-wing side of the dictatorial strongman’s political spectrum, we find the philosophy and practice of “fascism.” While also deployed as an epithet by some, fascism developed as a form of radical authoritarian nationalism in early-20th-century Europe in response to liberalism and Marxism on the left.
The tenets of fascism
Political scientist Lawrence Britt enumerates 14 tenets of fascism:
1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
4. Rampant sexism
5. Supremacy of the military
6. Controlled mass media
7. Obsession with national security
8. Religion and government are intertwined
9. Corporate power is protected
10. Labor power is suppressed
11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
12. Obsession with crime and punishment
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
14. Fraudulent elections
While many governmental leaders and candidates for public office may push for a number of these tactics while still remaining outside the definition of “fascist,” the cumulative effect increases depending on the severity of and the degree to which they initiate these measures.
How Donald Trump measures up
Let’s look at Donald Trump and his sycophants within the current Republican Party through the lens of Lawrence Britt’s tenets of fascism:
1. Appeals to “nationalism,” presented in the guise of “popularism,” feeding on people’s fears and prejudices, which has already resulted in the segregation of people and nations from one another, and threats and dangers of violence – CHECK!
2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights, and rolling back many of the rights and protections in the name of “anti-wokeness” that minoritized peoples have tirelessly fought for over the past decades: reproductive rights, voting rights, citizenship rights, anti-torture guarantees, rights of unreasonable search and seizure, rights of assembly, disability rights, freedom of religion, marriage equality, the rights of trans people to quality healthcare and gender-affirming procedures – CHECK!
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause by singling out already disenfranchised identity categories as the internal and external enemies of the United States: Muslims and anyone from Muslim-majority countries, Mexicans and all Latinx people, urban “thugs,” the press, Somalis, LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, George Soros (representing an alleged world Jewish financial and political conspiracy), and the ACLU. Then there’s the Democrats, Mike Pence, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, etc. – CHECK!
4. Rampant sexism and toxic misogynistic utterances and allegations primarily against women of color and state prosecutors and legislators opposing the Republican Party’s political agenda, as well as credible charges of sexual harassment against Trump by numerous women – CHECK!
5. Supremacy of the military by perennially proposing exponentially high increases in the budget for the Pentagon, and, for example, under the Trump regime, employing the military for civil projects, like stationing service members on the southern border to engage in duties not directly specified for the military, and even considering instituting martial law rather than leave the White House after the new president had been inaugurated – CHECK!
6. Controlled mass media and threats to employ libel laws to sue the “crooked and lying” media (Lügenpresse, “lying press” popularized by the German Nazis to silence opposition), as well as banning books and other school curricular materials like The 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, and banning any discussions related to the truth (presented age-appropriately) about the “hard” history of the United States, discussions of LGBTQ+ topics, or topics of gender, all in the name of “protecting parental rights” – CHECK!
7. Obsession with national security with continual cries against “Islamic jihadist terrorists” as the number one threat to our nation, rather than the real threat: Domestic terrorists aiming to bring down the so-called “Deep State” – CHECK!
8. Religion and government are intertwined through a tight network of Christian nationalists using selected passages from the Christian Testament as justification for its right-wing stances, as well as through attendance at several Christian prayer vigils and the former president’s appearances at conservative Christian conferences and universities like Liberty University, with calls to “Make America Great Again” giving the subliminal dog whistle of making America white and Protestant again – CHECK!
9. Corporate power is protected through increased deregulation of the energy and corporate business sectors with massive tax cuts and other financial incentives. “I will formulate a rule, which says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated,” Trump once declared. – CHECK!
10. Labor power is suppressed with anti-labor actions to reduce the rights of workers to organize and negotiate collective bargaining agreements; privatization of entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act; advocacy for the abolition of a national minimum wage; and other “socialist” actions – CHECK!
11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts with resentment and attacks on the political, media, and intellectual “elites” to the point of instigating scorn and harassment against the so-called Washington “liberal elite” and demands for an apology from the cast of the Broadway show, Hamilton, for voicing concerns over a Trump presidency with then-Vice President Mike Pence in attendance. – CHECK!
12. Obsession with crime and punishment with calls for “law and order” involving draconian (and possibly unconstitutional) measures of torture and surveillance against groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but certainly not toward what they refer to as “the patriots” of January 6, 2021 who stormed the Capitol. And of course, certainly not toward the ongoing investigations around former President Donald Trump’s alleged payment of an adult actress with campaign funds, his large cache of classified documents he stored at his seaside Florida resort, and his possible involvement in the January 6th insurrection, which some in the Republican Party define as a “legal First Amendment protest.” – CHECK!
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption while in and out of office through using his adult children and son-in-law as close trusted political operatives who met with visiting diplomats and traveled to foreign capitals to negotiate political and business deals, plus continuously unresolved conflict-of-interest issues and “emoluments” breeches between his position as President and his worldwide business interests, with so many probes into corruption it has become a common occurrence. – CHECK!
14. Fraudulent elections assisted by the larger Republican Party and the Supreme Court by gutting the 1965 Voting Rights law, which has resulted in voter suppression campaigns effectively reducing the number of polling stations in primarily minoritized racial communities and limiting days and times for pre-election-day voting. In addition, another fascist ruler, Vladimir Putin, weighed in on Trump’s side to sway the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020 in their (Putin & Trump’s) favor. While often claiming fraud when they lose elections, no such fraud has been found in the states and in the courts to have swayed any election that they claimed was fraudulent – CHECK!
In the wake of the attack on our nation’s capital in January 2021, as well as the precipitous rise of Trump and the GOP’s extremist agenda – along with the party’s ties to right-wing paramilitary militia groups like the Proud Boys, The Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers – we can now ask ourselves: To what extent is the United States still considered a “democracy”?
Are we headed toward civil war?
“This is democracy’s most challenging hour since Fort Sumter,” argued Historian John Meacham in 2022.
Barbara F. Walter, U.S. political scientist and Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, warns in her book, How Civil Wars Start: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe… No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline or headed toward war,” but “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America… you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency: 1. The “pre-insurgency” phase, and 2. The “incipient conflict” phase. Only time will tell whether the final phase is fully activated: The “open insurgency” phase has already begun with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021.
Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set – the one the CIA task force has found to be most reliable in predicting instability and violence – Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.
U.S. democracy has received the Polity Index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone. By the end of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800.
“We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war. “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter states. “A country standing on this threshold – as America is now at +5 – can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”
Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a November 2021 report.
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself,” the report said.
And a 2023 survey found that about 12 million adults believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump as President of the United States.
We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, there is risk of “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare including assassinations and ambushes.”
Benjamin Franklin was one of the nation’s “founders” who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to draft our now-famous founding document. At the age of 81, though a perennial optimist, he had no illusions and thought it impossible to expect any group of people, no matter how wise or brilliant, to create a “perfect production.”
Even “with all its faults,” however, Franklin believed that this Constitution was far superior to any alternative that could possibly emerge.
He had a warning, though. As the story is told, when departing the Constitutional Convention, a group of citizens approached Franklin and asked him what kind of government the delegates had created.
His response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
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