Authoritarianism, American Style

 

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.