As I’ve pointed out before on this
blog, almost every business is an authoritarian organization. From small sole
proprietorships to the largest multinational corporations, businesses are
almost exclusively authoritarian in nature, and come in a variety of forms. We
have businesses that we might describe as monarchies, or oligarchies, or
plutocracies, or dictatorships, or totalitarian regimes, or banana republics,
or blundering bureaucracies, or theocracies. Unfortunately, we also have fake
republics and pseudodemocracies. But very, very few businesses in the United
States could be considered economic democratic republics. In essence, at our
founding, we enthroned freedom and democracy in our political sphere, but we
allowed authoritarian institutions to thrive in our economic sphere. The
inevitable result is that the authoritarianism in our economy has now quite
effectively undermined the freedom and democracy of our political system.
Monied interests have polluted our politics to a high degree.
And now the MAGA core of the
Republican Party, which has long been the party of corporate power, has fully
and openly embraced authoritarian rule. As historian Heather Cox Richardson put
it in the July 17, 2023, edition of her “Letters from an American” email:
“A story in the New York Times
today by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman outlined how former
president Donald Trump and his allies are planning to create a dictatorship if
voters return him to power in 2024. The article talks about how Trump and his
loyalists plan to ‘centralize more power in the Oval Office’ by ‘increasing the
president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now
operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from
political interference by the White House.’
“They plan to take control over
independent government agencies and get rid of the nonpartisan civil service,
purging all but Trump loyalists from the U.S. intelligence agencies, the State
Department, and the Defense Department. They plan to start ‘impounding funds,’
that is, ignoring programs Congress has funded if those programs aren’t in line
with Trump’s policies.
“‘What we’re trying to do is
identify the pockets of independence and seize them,’ said Russell T. Vought,
who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and who now advises the
right-wing House Freedom Caucus. They envision a ‘president’ who cannot be
checked by the Congress or the courts.
“Trump’s desire to grab the mechanics
of our government and become a dictator is not new; both scholars and
journalists have called it out since the early years of his administration.
What is new here is the willingness of so-called establishment Republicans to
support this authoritarian power grab.”
Now, none of this should surprise
us. The party that has long favored putting a “businessman” in the White House finally
settled upon the most authoritarian of businessmen—Donald Trump, who has been singularly focused on
tearing down the institutions of democracy. Why? Because democracy is what
prevents him from exercising his authoritarian inclinations. As Cox puts it,
“All the institutions of democracy are designed to support the tenets of
democracy.” Trump and his followers undermine these institutions by claiming
that they are specifically weaponized against them. And yes, in a sense they
are, because these institutions are designed to rein in unaccountable power and
quash corruption. But now the Republican Party, especially certain members and
leaders in the House of Representatives, are falling in line behind Trump’s
outrageous claims. To hear Kevin McCarthy and his right-wing extremist colleague
tell it, the investigations by the FBI and the Department of Justice into
Donald Trump’s crimes is the political “weaponization” of those institutions.
But it was Trump as president who weaponized the Department of Justice against
his opponents. Trump’s modus operandi has always been to accuse those who
oppose him of the very crimes and misdeeds he is guilty of. He turns morality
on its head. And so the “law and order party” is now determined to prevent the
democratic institutions tasked with preserving law and order from doing their
job. Such is the predicament we find ourselves in.
For many years, the Republican
Party, rather than pursuing serious policies to help ordinary Americans, has
framed itself as the anti-Democratic party. It has been far more effective as
the obstructionist opposition and has been almost perfectly impotent when in
power and tasked with the duties of governing. But since Trump took control,
the GOP has become the anti-democratic party, fighting democracy wherever it
dares show itself.
Republicans like to wrap
themselves in the rhetoric of liberty, but it is a very strange form of
liberty. It is liberty from government instead of liberty through government,
which is what the Founders envisioned—a
government, as Lincoln later put it, “of the people, by the people, for the
people.” The current GOP hopes ironically to sever the people from the very
government that can guarantee their freedoms, a government that exists to serve
them, not the wealthy or the corporations that cannot bear to have government
restrict their abuses.
And government is the only real tool
the people have to counter the massive power accumulated by corporations and
power-hungry individuals. To see how far the Republican Party has strayed from
its roots, consider this statement by Teddy Roosevelt: “The people of the United
States have but one instrument which they can efficiently use against the
colossal combinations of business—and
that instrument is the government of the United States. . . . Remember that it
is absolutely impossible to limit the power of these great corporations whose
enormous power constitutes so serious a problem in modern industrial life
except by extending the power of the government. All that these great
corporations ask is that the power of the government shall be limited. . . .
There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power
meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of
governmental power, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people
by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension
of governmental power” (address at the Coliseum, San Francisco, September 14,
1912).
It has been nearly 111 years since
Roosevelt made that statement, but it is far more true today than it ever was
in his day. Republicans decry “big government,” but what they really want is
not small government but big government patterned after their authoritarian
designs. They want government to interfere in people’s lives in specific ways
but not in the schemes of corporations that dirty our air and water, produce
dangerous products, underpay employees, and create unsafe work environments.
They want a government that is large and powerful enough to go after Trump’s
declared enemies while protecting him from the consequences of his own crimes.
If Trump wins the election and his
sycophants are able to do what they are promising to do, we will be several
steps closer to fascism on a scale our parents and grandparents would have
found disgusting. Populism is often the road to authoritarianism, and that path
is plain to see in conservative America today. At least for those who have eyes
to see. Unfortunately, many Americans, including many Mormons, have been
blinded by disinformation and have embraced the lies of a man who has no
morals, no conscience, and no compassion for anyone but himself. Many of them yearn
for an authoritarian leader who will tell them what they want to hear while enriching
himself at the public’s expense and brazenly breaking the institutions that
preserve freedom and democracy in America.
