What the Next US Presidential Election Is (Really) About
It’s Funny To Hear Trump Compare DeSantis to Hitler. But It’s Funny for a Reason.
There are moments when watching democracies in peril becomes farce. Think of any number of dictators in self-styled commandant outfits, or, perhaps the way that Brexit Britain…chose self destruction. Yesterday was just such a moment. Ron DeSantis was finally to announce his bid for Presidency. With a little help from a new friend, the creepy billionaire who bought Twitter. Together, they were going to make an announcement that’d rock the world. Only, first, Twitter melted down. LOL. And then Donald Trump, the gorilla in the room — and that’s an insult to gorillas, our expressive cousins — made his own rebuttal, which was even funnier and weirder than…the spectacle of the world’s richest man helping America’s most disgraceful politicians try and hijack the nation and turn it into the Handmaid’s Tale.
“Hold your horses Elon, the real president is going to say a few words,” Trump said. Or at least an AI Trump voice did. “Devil, I’m going to kick your ass very soon. Hitler you’re already dead, Dick Cheney, it sounds like you’ll be joining Hitler very soon.”
LOLOLOL. Go ahead and laugh, my friends. That is every bit as bizarre and hilarious as it sounds. Did Trump just compare…DeSantis to…Hitler? Did he suggest that Elon Musk’s hanging out with the devil? Ahahah. That’s right, let it all out. De…vicious…licious.
The answer to those questions is: who knows? I mean, I think Trump just called DeSantis Hitler, which is funny on cosmic levels.
But let’s get serious. The 2024 election. What’s it really about? Let’s quickly decipher the above, and then come to the real meat of the issue. Trump’s suggesting that DeSantis is the “real” extremist here. In other words, he’s going to portray himself as moderate. Which makes sense, because most Americans don’t actually support DeSantis’s comic-book-villain-level- authoritarian agenda of book bans and preying on kids and investigating teachers. That’s nice, I guess, for the GOP, too, since it gives them a Good Cop Bad Cop routine, a charade of a feud which, American media being what it is, will make headlines about for…years.
That’s not what the 2024 election is about. Here’s what it is about, and I won’t mince words. Democracy versus autocracy. I mean that in formal terms, and harsh ones, too. There won’t be any coming back from this if America blows it, and America’s a lot — a lot — closer to the edge of losing its democracy, than it really understands.
Let me explain.
Way back in 2017, something happened that barely anyone even remembers. But it was as significant a moment for America as it was for the world. America got demoted. It was demoted from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy.” A profound moment — yet one that still goes unremarked upon. America was then the world’s largest full democracy. And now it isn’t. The world lost a leader, and America gave up something of its future.
What does all that mean, though, really? A full democracy is — the best example left is Canada. If you’re Canadian, thank your lucky stars, or your grandparents, or both. They bequeathed you this great gift. It’s exceedingly rare — less than 10% of the world, closer to around 5% of it, has ever enjoyed living in a full democracy.
A full democracy is just what it sounds like: it’s a place where institutions function, systems work, and democratic norms and values, of truth, justice, equality, and nonviolence are widely held and shared. There aren’t widespread abuses of power, corruption, system breakdowns, institutional dysfunction. In plainer English, problems like abuses of civil of rights, voter suppression, and basic democratic pillars like the rule of law, elections, and basic freedoms being attacked. A full democracy is a peaceful place, and it tends to be a good place. To live, to grow, to grow up, to grow old.
A flawed democracy, on the other hand, is just what it sounds like. One with widespread challenges and problems. Abuses of power. Abuses of rights. Voter suppression. Gerrymandering.
Foundational pillars of democracy come under attack — the rule of law, elections, representative governance, basic freedoms for all — as demagogues rise. And as people are radicalized by demagogues, the democratic values of truth, peace, justice, and equality come under attack, too — and society begins to destabilize. Big Lies, violence, brutality, and supremacy begin to replace them.
Master Compendium Of Trump's Mendacity: Malignant Messiah Lies More Easily Than He Metabolizes. (Or... You Know He's Lying Because His Lips Are Moving.)
That was America during the Trump years, and it’s why indices of democracy — which is how we assess the health of democracies — had to downgrade America. Because it was flagrant, undeniable, obvious. America had stopped being a full democracy — and we can talk about, later, how its time was short, in truth, from the dawn of civil rights in the 70s, to the dawn of the Trump years, in the 2010s.
Now. What do you notice about all that? There’s a deafening silence hidden in all that. America never got upgraded back to where it was. The Trump years ended, but America didn’t become a full democracy again. Why not? Largely because demagogues like DeSantis emerged, who took the Trump agenda to the next level, at the state scale. They led what were effectively coups against democracy. Consisting of far more full-throated attacks on basic rights, elemental freedoms. They criminalized everyone from teachers to doctors to parents. Kids were smeared and bullied. Nobody was safe. They created moral panics over everything from books, which they banned, to names and what people wore. Average soccer moms were radicalized into death-threat shouting fanatics.
Compendium Of Best "Pax-Barbaria" Posts On Cheating (Among American Conservatives And Inside The Republican Party) - As Prelude To The Destruction Of Democracy
This movement spread across America like wildfire, and by now, book bans are rife, smearing whole social groups is commonplace, and criminalizing teachers, parents, kids, and doctors is politics as usual. More than half of society is women, and their basic freedoms went up in smoke, from association to privacy, as a rogue, fanatical Supreme Court decided to set them on fire. Meanwhile, political violence began to spread, as fanatics got the subtext of all these messages demagogues were sending: we want to annihilate these people, we don’t want them to exist, sure would be a shame if someone finished the job, wink wink nudge nudge. LOL…nobody — no political scientist who wants to stay credible — can call any of that resembling a full democracy again.
So. America was demoted during the Trump years. It ceased to be a full democracy. But it never got promoted back to one again. That is because the anti-democratic agenda of Trumpism spread, this time, having been quelled at the very top, from the middle out, and the bottom up, from state-level demagogues and their radicalized foot soldiers, whether AR-15 wielding lunatics shooting up innocents, or soccer moms shouting death threats over a gay character in a Disney movie.
Americans don’t understand that part enough. Things didn’t remotely go back to “normal” after the Trump years. Not just in a casual, everyday sense, but more crucially, in a formal, technical one. America lost its full democracy in 2017, and it never regained it.
What’s at stake during the 2024 election is the next step down. The next step down the ladder. What step is that? For political scientists — good ones, anyways — it’s the transition from democracy to autocracy period. At this next level, you lose even a flawed democracy — and you plunge into autocracy.
What’s true autocracy? Well, let’s go back to what the Jan 6th Committee discovered — and someone, anyone, can you wake up Merrick Garland? It found that there was a “sophisticated, multi-part plan” to overthrow democracy. Right down to throwing out the election results, holding “another” election, under martial law, and declaring Trump the winner. Along the way, a state of emergency would suspend basic freedoms, not to mention any form of checks or balances to such a nakedly anti-democratic, authoritarian procedure.
And that might’ve sounded like sci-fi, even then, until you consider just how many basic freedoms are going up in smoke right now.
True autocracy is what we call in everyday parlance “authoritarianism.” It means that there’s effectively no democracy anymore, except maybe in pockets here and there, if that. There’s a dictator, who sits at the top of society — and he’s usually a demagogue. He — and it’s usually a he — has promoted radicalized foot soldiers into key positions, not just advisors, but into cabinets. He’s eviscerated what was left of a civil service, and replaced that with fanatics. He’s given extremists guns and badges, and given paramilitaries on self-styled crusades — “the Army of the Pure,” “the Sons of the Proud,” — formal power, and shielded them from prosecution. The entire system and mechanism of government has been restructured, reformed, and reshaped — so that it serves not just the whim of the tyrant…
…But more than that, the crusade which was set in motion to destroy democracy. A democracy is seized by creating false enemies and moral panics. Scapegoats, who are existential threats to the “pure” of blood and “true” of faith. A preemptive strike must be launched, to purify society of these enemies. And if that means giving up democracy, so be it.
Compendium Of Pax-Barbaria Posts Concerning Absolutism, Authoritarianism, Fascism And Trumpism
What happens next in a true autocracy? “Lock her up” becomes real. Opponents and critics are rounded up and prosecuted. The impure become second-class citizens, and then unpeople. Basic freedoms are criminalized — and the penalty for them is expropriation, the stripping of assets, the confiscation of resources, the breaking up of families. Just like that — snap — privacy, association, intimacy, communication, expression, movement are freedoms a society no longer has. Parallel, shadow institutions are built to police the loss of these new rights — Stasis, Gestapos. Camps and gulags are built in which to place all these new criminals. (Alan: The United States already has a great percentage of its population behind bars than any society in history - including the Soviet Union at the height of the gulag.)
The United States Of America: "We're #1!!!" - 40 Shameful Categories In Which America Leads The World
Finally, the democratic norms of truth, justice, equality, and peace die. They’re replaced by ever-present Big Lies, about all those scapegoats, being existential enemies. Politics becomes a negative project — it’s consumed only with laws to take away their personhood. Society is riven by violence, massacres, terrorism, bombings. Culture doesn’t really exist anymore — film, music, art, literature are all forbidden, unless, they, too, are hateful enough, with just the right kind of smile of feigned innocence.
George Orwell And Aldous Huxley Describe "The Perfect Dictatorship" (But Don't Worry... It Couldn't Happen Here.)
That’s a lot. That’s what’s at stake in the 2024 election. That doesn’t mean it’ll all happen overnight. Of course it won’t. But what is stake, make no mistake, is the next step down the ladder of political forms — and that’s the Big One. From even a flawed democracy, down into autocracy.
And it’s easy enough to see how it’d happen. Trump manages to seize power again. Pretty quickly, he’s eviscerated the government, restructured it along authoritarian lines. Various states of emergency are declared, to solidify power. Basic electoral processes and mechanisms are corroded and subverted. The next election…isn’t much of one. Then it’s one party rule. Then there’s the DeSantis problem. He’s just 44 years old. He’s going to be around another forty years. Given enough time and enough money backing him? He’s almost sure to inherit the mantle from a Trump.
Everyone should understand those stakes. Too few Americans do. They say they do, and they do, perhaps, in an emotional sense. But they must understand them in a cold, bloodless one, too — a formal, technical one.
Let me add one quick note to explain why I say that.
How is the American politics discussed? It’s both-sided. In media, by columnists, even by the Democrats, LOL. But…think of a scale. Now think of a ladder. The way American politics is discussed is like a scale — both sides equivalent. But what do we know — if you really understood the above? Democracy and autocracy are not equivalent. They don’t hold equal value, just different forms of it. Democracy is above autocracy in every rational and thoughtful political hierarchy that we know of. Decades of research and evidence of every imaginable kind confirm for us that democracy being better than autocracy is an empirical fact.
"John Oliver's Viral Video Is The Best Global Warming Debate You'll Ever See" - With Collateral Material About The Ongoing Normalization Of Socio-Political Idiocy
And yet they’re presented as equivalent, of equal value, over and over again, aren't they? Even though democracy sits far above autocracy in a ladder of political forms. How advanced and sophisticated they really are. How much prosperity and human possibility they’re capable of unlocking and delivering and sparking. How desirable they are for societies. Not in a subjective sense — but in an objective one. It is a fact that democracy is above autocracy in hierarchies of political forms because it leads to vastly better outcomes for societies.
Autocracy tends to end in ruin, poverty, war, disgrace, from which it takes decades, centuries, to recover. Democracy, on the other hand, is capable of solving problems, answering new challenges, and elevating living standards.
There aren’t “two sides” here. There are two levels. Autocracy is beneath democracy. Americans must understand that, and know it well, in a formal sense. Their media and discourse don't make that distinction, almost ever, and the result is a lack of civic engagement, even literacy.
All that’s what’s at stake in the 2024 election.
Is it funny to hear Trump compare Ron DeSantis to Hitler? Sure it is. But it’s funny for a reason. And that reason is that, well, Trump’s not exactly Washington, Mandela, or Lincoln himself is he? Let that joke guide you to the stakes, my friends.
For America, they’ve perhaps never really been bigger.
Umair
May 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment