The path to dictatorship and democracy

Salon readers who are not familiar with the danger of electing Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States for a second time. It is not hyperbole for me or anyone else to write that the upcoming 2024 presidential election will be the most dreadful election since the one of 1860. In that election, and again in 1864, Abraham Lincoln’s victory heralded the end of slavery and the beginning of the Civil War. A victory next fall by the former president would portend the end of American Democracy as we have known it for some 250 years and the instigation of a new illiberal democracy or autocracy.  (I do not imagine that there are more than a handful of)

The GOP’s assault on the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law combined with a Trumpian desire to censor the fourth estate, restructure democratic institutions, and weaponize systems of power are all in sync with a rising wave of anti-democratic and authoritarian movements worldwide.As a kleptocratic and wannabe authoritarian dictator, Donald Trump and the US are not alone in the contemporary world of neoliberal, illiberal, and authoritarian regimes engaged in various geopolitical struggles between competing democratic and autocratic styles of governance. These battles are commonly immersed in nationalist and/or populist movements of xenophobia. Most of the nations involved – democratic or authoritarian — are also trending towards fascism, standardization, and disinformation. During Trump’s recent Veterans Day speech, for example, the Insurrectionist-in-Chief used everyday parlance that echoed those authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930s. 

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, there is President Putin invading Ukraine and promising another Russian Empire. In Brazil, there was former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro elected to office in a landslide in 2018. Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, had surfed the anti-corruption wave promising to put an end to the “old politics” only to be narrowly defeated in 2022 by the progressive and former jailed President Lula da Silva. In Argentina there is right-wing libertarian and newly-elected President Javier Milei, a 53-year-old economist and former TV pundit promising to reduce the size of government and three decades of triple-digit inflation. To most people’s surprise, Milei at least temporarily has broken the hegemony of the nation’s two leading political forces, the Peronists or left of center party and the older conservative party, the Union Civica Radical. In the Netherlands, there is also the newly elected anti-immigrant Geert Wilders promising “to break a few rules, shake up democratic institutions and spread a populist message.”