We May Not See Dictatorship Coming

Laura Ingraham is right.

Right like “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” But still.

The queen of the Fox News’ blond maniac crew said the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was not an attack on Donald Trump, but “on you,” meaning her audience. That was correct.

Then she launched into some extra-crazy Deep State stuff and sounded, as usual, like she neglected her medications.

But she was right, right in a way that no one in her position should want to be right. Right in a way that she may not even understand. She was right because Trump is not the main problem. He's a reflection of the problem. He feeds on it like it was a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Trump is an authoritarian who has no interest in democracy. He is a soulless husk who will do anything to satisfy his childish cravings, including lying to millions to get their help. Including sacrificing the U.S. system of government.

He's not keen on destroying our governmental structure because he thinks it’s bad. He thinks — he knows — that most of the people who voted for him think it's bad. 

More and more of them have been thinking that since the 1960s. That's because they have been told, over and over, that there is a great deal to fear in our government and the American way of life in general.

They have been warned it’s a government that caters to homosexuals, ever since the days when that was what gay people were called. And one that bows to tort lawyers. Atheists. Slutty single women. Negroes. Jews. Arabs. Child molesters. Illegal immigrants. Labor leaders. Elites. Eggheads. Socialists. The Deep State. All the usual suspects who will destroy America if you let them. And now they say it's happened, and the only way out is a desperate attempt to take the country back.

When you're told repeatedly that everything is out of control, you might be receptive to backing up somebody who promises to kick ass.

And encourages you to lace up your steel-toed boots, too.

According to the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, there are apparently quite a few loyal followers of The Orange King willing to respond violently to recent assertions by him and his pals. They now believe that when the FBI exercised a search warrant to claw back top secret documents Trump stole, the feds proved to be enemies of their kind of people. 

In a joint bulletin Friday, the agencies reported “multiple articulated threats and calls for the targeted killing of judicial, law enforcement, and government officials associated with the Palm Beach search, including the federal judge who approved the Palm Beach search warrant.”

One dude already tried to invade the Cincinnati FBI headquarters and got himself killed trying to exact revenge for the GOP claims of federal misconduct. 

There may always be a core of Americans who are enthusiastic about life under authoritarians because we have many citizens whose religion works that way: Christian fundamentalists. 

Bob Altemeyer, an expert on authoritarianism, wrote in 2006 that religious fundamentalists “are highly likely to be authoritarian followers. They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs.”

Pretty rough, huh?  But it may explain something you may have wondered about: How can devout Christians go along with such unChrist-like political ideals like Trump’s? Because they’re used to being led around, used to dogmatic messages from the pulpit. That's Altemeyer’s take, anyway.

And they were told long ago that they were the bulwark against the nation's flood of sin, so anybody powerful who says he's on their side is their kind of guy. God's guy.

Christian conservatives are pandered to by conservative politicians partly because there would not be a conservative movement, as currently constituted, without authority-loving Americans.

So no abortions. No rights for trans folks. No gay marriage. No civil rights.

I'm not saying that all fundamentalists and evangelicals are authoritarians. A lot of them aren't. But a lot of them are.

So are the jamokes who resent that there are emission-based performance restrictions on cars, that Mexicans have American jobs, that most people disagree that AR-15s are for home use, that statues of Jeff Davis were razed and that Barack Obama was ever president. We need a strongman to fix all that! As long as the libs are powerful, and want to occasionally change things, the system is sick to death.

And then there are some irreligious youngish folk who grew up with very little parental authority, and now crave it, maybe because they’re unfamiliar with being bossed around.

It’s not as much fun as they think.

Authoritarianism isn't confined to the U.S., of course, and foreign fascists are finding it increasingly comfortable in America. It reminds them of home.

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, recently welcomed Viktor Orban, the dictator of the Hungarian kleptocracy. He arrived for a speech in Texas a couple of weeks after he told a crowd in Romania that he wouldn't allow his country to have “race mixing.” His closest advisor quit over what she called his “pure Nazi” rhetoric, but the CPAC crowd liked him a lot.

The Donald and The Viktor

Attendees of America’s biggest conservative get-together roared in approval when he intoned that the Hungarian constitution’s 2020 amendment guaranteed leaders are “obliged to protect the Christian character of Hungary … Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage and the union of one man and one woman.”

He added, “The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our children alone. Full stop, end of discussion.”

Orban had warned Hungarians for decades that immigration would ruin their nation. He had a wall built to keep out Middle Eastern refugees in the 2015 “immigration crisis,” despite reports that refugees were mostly passing through on their way to Germany, and most Hungarians went months between sightings of any refugee at all. Nevertheless, Hungarians got all stirred up: in 2016, 82 percent of them believed refugees were a national burden.

Orban has apparently mastered the Things-Are-Very-Scary-But-I'll-Save-You playbook. Naturally, he and Donald (“Only I can fix it'') Trump consider each other to be the cat’s pajamas. 

Current American authoritarianism isn’t being driven just by Trump. Another aficionado is Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and all-around ridiculously wealthy dude.

Thiel, who amassed many billions of dollars from various schemes, apparently wants leeway to do even better. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote 13 years ago. By “freedom” he meant freedom to make big dough.

Peter Thiele

His dreams of doing without the niceties of the Constitution probably wouldn’t mean as much if he hadn’t had the early run of Trump's White House, and contributed generously to 16 GOP Senate and House candidates running this year, likely more than anybody else. 

His favorite is Blake Masters, the wacky winner in the recent Arizona Senate primary race. Masters’ other undemocratic mentors include hobbit-loving monarchist Curtis Yarvin and the late Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed his nation through a My Way or the Highway strategy.

Masters is a charmer who has positively quoted Hermann Goering and the Unabomber in speeches.

His campaign has reportedly received at least $10 million total from Thiel.

Another recipient of Thiel’s largesse is GOP Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, who has reportedly received a total of $15 million. Like Masters, he’s a former employee of Thiel. And he’s also a fan of Yarvin, who memorably remarked, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

First-term Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is another Thiele fave. Hawley’s the sweetheart who saluted the Jan. 6 invaders with a power-to-the-people raised fist, then found himself running away from them. More recently, he has backed Trump's anti-NATO nonsense by opposing aid to Ukraine, and was the only member of his chamber to vote against admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO.

He has another four years in the Senate if he can stay out of prison.

Those of us who are uncomfortable with authoritarianism have to pay close attention because the people who like it aren't likely to warn us when it’s getting close to taking over, privacy expert Robert G. Vaughn wrote in 2000. 

He said that “democratic  governments are marked by significant restrictions on the ability of government to acquire information about its citizens and by ready access by citizens to information about the activities of government.” 

But that's not what our fascist friends want.

 “Authoritarian governments are identified by ready government access to information about the activities of citizens and by extensive limitations on the ability of citizens to obtain information about the government.”