Trump’s Path to Dictatorship
– Real Democracy Movement
By the Real Democracy Movement
Dictatorship makes its appearance in all sorts of guises, even through the ballot box, as Americans are likely to find out sooner rather than later. Donald Trump’s decisive victory, courtesy of the Democrats’ lame, arrogant campaign, is the start of a dramatic, historic overturning of the country’s constitution.
Given Republican control of the Senate, and probably the House of Representatives as well, plus the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, the scene is set for Trump to remake the US state in his image.
He intends to accumulate vast new powers for the Oval Office at the expense of other institutions, which were originally designed to produce so-called constitutional “checks and balances”. State officials who stand in the way will be purged. Armed forces will likely be deployed to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.
Black citizens, who largely stayed with the Democrats on polling day, will now fear the loss of hard-won voting and other rights, while women across the United States are certain to lose what’s left of their reproductive rights. Media and other critics will be targets as Trump’s cronies start the search for the “enemy within”, as he called opponents during the election campaign.
Charges against twice-impeached Trump relating to the insurrection in January 2021, when his supporters set out to kill Congressional leaders to stop formal approval of Joe Biden as president, have already been dropped. Trump has promised “retribution” against those who have wronged him and has set up a loyal group of advisers to enforce his demands.
“We’ve already been in a process over the last 10 years of democratic decay,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of .How Democracies Die. “This election will just hasten that decline.” He added:
“The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. People still vote, and elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts” – Daniel Ziblatt
Fascist dictator Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 by way of the ballot box. The Reichstag, the German parliament, then passed enabling legislation that created the notorious Nazi regime. Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said that, while in office between 2016-2020, the president-elect suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”
Just as happened in pre-war Germany, the big corporations have lined up behind the new regime, led by Elon Musk and much of Silicon Valley. They will control the elimination of climate regulations and pave the way for Trump’s trade war plans based on high tariffs against foreign imports. Putin will be encouraged to end the war against Ukraine – on Moscow’s terms, while Trump will stand by if Israel, as seems likely, depopulates northern Gaza and attacks Iran.
Naturally, most Trump supporters are unaware of this agenda. The vast majority of Trump voters were motivated by grievances such as falling living standards, high interest rates and inflation, as exit polls showed. A significant group were also driven by a concocted fear of mass immigration, fuelled by Trump and his even more sinister running mate, J.D. Vance who is but a heartbeat away from the presidency itself.
So how come that Trump — who was impeached twice, convicted of some crimes and charged with others, judged liable for sexual abuse and fined hundreds of millions of dollars in a civil fraud trial — was able to vanquish Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party?
Analysis of the turnout, which was one of the highest of the last 100 years, showed that most of the nation’s 3,000-plus counties swung rightward compared with 2020. The Republican shift appeared across rural border communities in Texas, the wealthy suburbs of Washington, and even normally Democratic counties in New York City.
Despite throwing $1 billion dollars at the campaign, the Democrats had nothing to say to ordinary Americans. Historically a liberal capitalist party, they lost the support of major unions like the Teamsters whose members were drifting towards Trump over issues like the cost-of-living, high interest rates and job insecurity.
“I will say this,” one House Democrat told the Washington Post. “The Democratic Party has a major working-class voter issue. It started a decade ago as a working-class White issue. It’s now gotten even worse and spread across racial lines.” Harris never addressed these issues, just as Hillary Clinton failed to do in 2016 when she was defeated by Trump. So the Democrats came across as an elitist, celebrity-infused party which was entitled to power while Trump tuned into genuine grievances and invented others.
The Biden-Harris support for the far-right Israeli regime’s genocidal war against Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon also turned off a group of younger voters as well as a substantial Muslim minority, who declined to back the Democrats. Trump was allowed to pose as a champion of the oppressed, while Harris came across as the champion of a cultural, prosperous elite. No contest.
In a post-mortem discussion by senior Washington Post columnists, Ruth Marcus said: “I suspect this was more about voters’ anger and unhappiness about their own situations, and about their own perceptions of themselves as victims, including of an elite that disdains them, than it is about Trump himself.
“We are an angry and divided country. A country where too many people are willing to blame immigrants for all sorts of woes. A country that is furious about prices that are not still rising at unacceptable rates but that are too high. A country where too many people somehow find this strongman with his authoritarian impulses attractive as a leader. A country where — and I think we have to consider this as well — too many people are not able to countenance the notion of a Black woman as president.”Ruth Marcus
Scott Jennings, a right-wing CNN political analyst, has called the overwhelming vote for Trump “the revenge of just the regular old working class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to”. In contrast to the Democratic Party, Jennings has his finger on the pulse of the anger felt by working class people who felt ignored by the Harris campaign.
What is happening in the United States is not an isolated process. Italy is ruled by a regime with close ties to fascism, while Hungary is a dictatorship in all but name under Victor Orban. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party-led coalition has collapsed while the neofascist AfD is ready to challenge mainstream parties at next year’s election. In Austria, the far-right, pro-Moscow Freedom Party won 29% of the vote at the recent election.
The widespread rise of populist, authoritarian regimes signals an historic crisis of representative democracy, a concept that first took shape in the US Constitution of 1787. Behind that is a fundamental problem – the inability, let alone the unwillingness, of the present state to deal with pressing issues like poverty, climate chaos and peace.
In the late 20th and early 21st century, neoliberalism found its allies in Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who concluded that corporate-led globalisation was beneficial in every respect. Deregulation on a vast scale set the scene for an unprecedented free rein for financial markets and free-wheeling transnationals. Economic downturns were said to be a thing of the past – until the reality check of the 2008 financial crash put a stop to such nonsense.
So, for example, climate warming has spiralled out of control because the corporations as a whole – not just the oil corporations – resist any serious measures when they lobby at the environment summits to water down agreements. The neoliberal state is a set of institutions that puts markets, low taxation and partnerships with big business above public goods and services.
In the UK, Labour’s embrace of market-shaping investment funds while punishing older people, low paid workers, students, the disabled and those who use public transport, is a case in point. The Reform party under Nigel Farage, a devoted Trumpist, came second in nearly 90 seats, most of them Labour, at the July election. The authoritarians are waiting in the wings here too.
The linked crises of democracy and the state are clearly a danger to our hard-won rights and freedoms. To see only defeat in the Trump electoral victory is to shed tears for the fundamentally broken political and social system that lies behind the anger and frustration of those who fall for far-right demagogy, wherever it rears its ugly head.
A broken system requires bold solutions. So let’s make this shocking result into an opportunity. While defending democratic institutions, we should campaign for a new constitution, a political system that can express the direct will of citizens rather than corporate power. A system of popular assemblies, outlined in our recent manifesto and taken up by speakers at our powerful 2 October event, offers a way forward.
- This article was originally published by the US-based Real Democracy Movement on 7 November 2024.
- The Labour Outlook Editorial Team may not always agree with all of the content we reproduce but are committed to giving left voices a platform to develop, debate, discuss and occasionally disagree.
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