Autocracy Watch
He’s Already a Dictator
Granted, only for the third of the country that’s on the red team
Purples, if you’re wobbling at all, worried about local issues like your high taxes in Texas (** unless you’re in the top 5%), or woke school boards messing with sex ed or the girls swim team, or crime and grime … especially if you’re starting to listen to all that Fox propaganda about Spanko tha Felon taking reasonable positions on green cards for exchange students, or the GOP needing to pump the brakes on abortion, or his (spokesman) saying nice things about Keir Starmer, remember who you’re dealing with.
The only thing that Trump didn’t fail at in his decades as a daddy-made nepo baby was acting, on a scripted reality TV game show. He’s good with a teleprompter, or when given his lines and the ability to call cut for a re-shoot.
Those sorts of performances give no information about what a second term would look like. The insights come from how he and his minions and hatchet men behave, especially in the halls and back rooms of power. When out of sight, or partially so.
If you have any doubts about how he will act, you need only look at what he’s done to the Grand Old Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan and the “Compassionate Conservatism” Bush Yalies. How he has systematically eliminated all opposition, and brought to heel even the other barons … those with independent power bases, whose own ambitions, according to Hamilton, should serve as checks on his autocratic tendencies.
How he has stocked the Party’s leadership with family and flunkies. The riffraff forming his first few inner rings. Gone is even the appearance of building a team based on competence. Now it’s only one thing that matters: blind loyalty/fealty.
The behavior, in a word, of a dictator.
Go ask Mitch McConnell what Trump’s spittle tastes like. Or Bill Barr about the salty tanginess of his scrotum.
The cynics/skeptics out there may shrug. They all play-act, don’t they? Politicos, that is. Hillary Clinton admitting to Wall Street plutocrats she has to have both public and private policy positions. Barack Obama telling Putin’s poodle Medvedev to tell his master to sit tight, that once through the election he, 44, will be able to negotiate more freely.
Sure, democracy requires a certain amount of pandering to the demos, as well as alliance and faction building among the optimates. Elites understand #HowTheWorldWorks.
Absolutely there are back rooms, smoke-filled or -free. Private rounds of golf and Jackson Hole, Davos, Bohemian Grove, Bilderberger, Skull & Bones, OPEC semi-annual, G7, etc… sorts of exclusive conclaves of clubs of elites. Sensible people should appreciate that something as complex as monetary policy requires a degree of competence and knowledge that the populares and their demagogues do not possess. Let’s not have conniptions over a EconCon boondoggle in Wyoming each summer, just ’cause we’re not smart enough … or matter enough … to get an invite.
Renowned Machiavellians like LBJ, Nixon, Pelosi, Byrd, (Dick) Cheney have not been shy about maintaining their grips on power using fear. It’s in the toolkit. They didn’t cross the line into the personality cult stratum, however, where they argue, time after time, that they are above the Law, as does Trump.
Lest you think that his cult strategy is a function of his KGB puppet-hood and general infatuation with all things Russian and autocratic, recall that Kruschev (!) called out Stalin … granted, only once in power after the mustachioed one’s death [emphasis added]:
After Stalin’s death, the Central Committee began to implement a policy of explaining concisely and consistently that it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.
The Louis XIV “L’État, c’est moi”, Caesar/Bonaparte/Hitler/Stalin/Kim style of despotism/tyranny, is precisely the failure mode that the Founders of the USA architected our Constitution to prevent. Let’s give Alexander Hamilton the final word for now, from the very first of the Federalist Papers:
[A] dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us, that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism, than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics the greatest number have begun their career, by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing Demagogues and ending Tyrants.
Ring any bells?
