Anti-Trump Anxiety Ignores History

Nat Parry, Consortium News, June 23, 2024 — 

Given the track record of U.S. authoritarianism, it’s not surprising that Democrats’ calls for resisting the incoming Trump dictatorship ring hollow for many Americans.

With President Joe Biden’s poll numbers tanking, American liberals are doubling down on what they apparently consider the best hope for his re-election: a strategy that relies heavily on whipping up fears of a dictatorship led by Donald Trump — warning that he would not only trample constitutional rights but likely imprison his political opponents.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently raised this specter on a podcast called “On with Kara Swisher,” openly fretting that President Trump would throw her in jail if he wins the November election.

“I mean, it sounds nuts,” she said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.” The self-described democratic socialist added that “he’s out of his mind,” pointing out that in 2016, his campaign was marked by frequent calls to “lock her up,” in reference to his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. “This is his motto,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

MSNBC primetime host Rachel Maddow took these concerns a step further, stating that she is worried about Trump using camps to detain his political enemies, not unlike the early versions of concentration camps that Adolf Hitler used in Nazi Germany.

Maddow claimed that Trump “is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people,” pointing out that the camps could be used for both illegal immigrants and high-profile political opponents.

Trump has indeed talked alarmingly about camps for illegal immigrants without due process, vowing that he intends to take aggressive action to carry out mass deportations should he be elected.

He has also at times issued threats to political enemies — particularly those who have pursued legal action against him — hinting that they should expect retribution in a second Trump presidency. He warned on Truth Social, for example, that “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

That he would put not just undocumented migrants into camps but political opponents too is, at the moment, just speculation. Trump has not indicated any intention to engage in large-scale political repression, and it’s doubtful that the U.S. political framework — with its vaunted, even if imperfect, system of checks and balances — would allow such a thing to occur.

To be sure, Trump has some disturbing policies. But many of them, especially his aggressive foreign policy, are in accord with the Democrats, who praised him as “presidential” when he bombed Syria in 2018.

So while these dire warnings of a Trump dictatorship complete with concentration camps may strike some people as over-the-top and somewhat paranoid, they have taken on the air of conventional wisdom in Washington, following nearly a decade of hand wringing over the alleged Trump threat.

As Trump entered the political arena eight years ago, pundits were already raising the alarm about the authoritarian menace he supposedly posed.

Many of these warnings try to emphasize that America has never before faced such a threat and that a concerted effort was needed to counter it, that somehow Trump is an unique evil.

In an article in March 2016 entitled “Donald Trump Poses an Unprecedented Threat to American Democracy,” columnist Jonathan Chait dug up an old interview that Trump gave to Playboy magazine in which he seemed to express admiration for the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

“Many Of These Warnings Emphasized That America Had Never Before Faced Such A Threat And That A Concerted Effort Was Needed To Counter It.”

Disregarding Trump’s qualifying words that the Chinese response to the Tiananmen demonstrations was “vicious” and “horrible,” Chait cited his statement as “evidence of an authentic and long-standing ideology,” one that is “infecting healthy elements of the body politic.”

But although Chait was primarily concerned about Trumpism itself, he also fretted that overreacting to the perceived threat could provide fuel to the descent into authoritarianism. “The perception that Trump poses a threat to democracy legitimizes undemocratic responses — if you believe you are faced with the rise of an American Mussolini, why let liberal norms hold you back?” Chait asked.

More colloquially, if you fight fire with fire, you can still get burned.

Instead of resorting to violence to stop the Trump threat, Chait insisted that he “can and must be defeated through democratic means.”

Any Means Necessary

Events in subsequent years revealed that Chait’s concerns were more prescient than he might have imagined. It would become clear, indeed, that the priority of defeating Trump would embrace, to paraphrase Malcolm X, any means necessary.

It would also fall into a long line of similar periods in U.S. history in which the bipartisan state, in the name of preserving “liberty” and “American values,” veered out of control, repressing speech and demanding “loyalty.”

In Trump’s case, the political establishment employed a wide array of tactics to delegitimize his presidency, including a three-year investigation into alleged collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin to influence the 2016 election — an investigation that conceded in March 2019 that it could not “establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government” — and an impeachment launched over a tactless phone call placed to the newly elected president of Ukraine in 2019.

In addition to these official proceedings, the liberal response to the Trump threat was marred by crackdowns on independent media, often portrayed as efforts to counter disinformation and “fake news.” The demonization of alternative media began in earnest with the blacklisting of some 200 outlets by the shadowy PropOrNot outfit and intensified with Hillary Clinton’s complaints that an “epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda” had cost her the election.

Under increasing pressure, websites were throttled by search engines and shadow-banned by the algorithms of social media companies, culminating in a massive purge of alternative media just before the 2018 midterms, when some 800 anti-establishment accounts and pages were removed from Facebook.

Twitter also engaged in widespread censorship. As was later revealed by reporting of the “Twitter Files,” government agencies such as the F.B.I. exercised direct influence over content moderation at the popular social media platform.

In addition, Democratic partisans engaged in concerted efforts to attack anyone deemed responsible for helping Trump get elected, especially WikiLeaks for revealing Democratic Party corruption in the 2016 campaign, as well as Green Party supporters and others who had refused to vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, often portraying them as disloyal and traitorous.

High levels of political violence also characterized the Trump presidency, with both right-wing groups such as the Proud Boys and left-wing movements such antifa and Black Lives Matter engaging in riots and assaults on those considered to be political enemies.

The intensity of the anti-Trump “resistance” was spurred by the perception that the threat posed by MAGA was unique. If allowed to develop unchecked, many Democrats wholeheartedly believed, it would surely mean the end of American democracy.

“The Intensity Of The Anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ Was Spurred By The Perception That The Threat Posed By MAGA Was Unique.”

As Chait had warned, however, sometimes the responses to perceived threats can be more damaging than the threats themselves. The truth of this was revealed as the cumulative effect of the response to Trump became clear.

While it is debatable whether Trump and his MAGA supporters were ever truly the existential threats to democracy that his detractors claim, some of the responses to this alleged threat have clearly gone too far. The United States Supreme Court has pushed back on some of these efforts, for example, by reversing Colorado’s attempt to remove Trump from the ballot in the state.

With Trump positioning himself — once again — as the billionaire underdog standing up for traditional American values, his supporters tend to view the attacks on him as the sinister machinations of the “deep state,” rather than legitimate efforts to uphold the rule of law.

Even Trump’s recent felony conviction in the Stormy Daniels “hush money” case has had a negligible effect on his popularity, with most Americans — including 81 percent of Republicans — viewing the case as politically motivated.

Typical Of US History

What should also be appreciated is that even if MAGA Republicans are the unrepentant fascists that their detractors claim, the idea that this challenge is something utterly unique — a threat that requires an unprecedented response — is dubious. A cursory examination of American history reveals that from being unprecedented, in fact, anxiety over losing democracy is a defining characteristic of American politics.

Important lessons, in this respect, could be learned from earlier experiences, in particular how concerns over tyranny can at times lead to authoritarian excesses — in effect creating the very conditions that are purportedly being guarded against.

In the early 20th century, many feared that ideologies such as anarchism and socialism threatened to undermine the American way of life. Especially after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a wave of bombings targeting politicians and industrialists in the United States, the U.S. government began viewing anti-capitalist movements as an existential threat to American liberty and launched an all-out crackdown on suspected subversives and radicals, in a campaign that came to be known as the Red Scare.

“In The Early 20th Century, Many Feared That Ideologies Such As Anarchism And Socialism Threatened To Undermine The American Way Of Life.”

Initially seen as a reasonable and legitimate response to a domestic threat, excesses soon became apparent with American citizens persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, deported and sometimes executed often for little more than subscribing to a set of beliefs at odds with the dominant American paradigm and the policies of the U.S. government.

During World War I, Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act and his short-lived Sedition Act criminalized core First Amendment-protected activities, imposing harsh penalties for a wide range of speech that was seen as undermining U.S. war efforts.

American authorities then initially took a more accommodating approach to the rise of Nazism and fascism, gradually coming to see it as a threat that tested American democratic principles. In the 1930s, fascist sympathizers in the U.S. held huge rallies and championed their own leaders such as Virgil Effinger who led the Black Legion paramilitary organization which sought to establish fascism in the United States through revolution.

Americans of German descent established the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, or German American Bund, in 1936. Operating nearly two dozen youth and training camps among 70 regional divisions around the country, the Bund boasted membership in the tens of thousands.

A rally it held in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939, attracted 20,000 members and supporters who denounced alleged Jewish conspiracies and Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The rally was protested by thousands of anti-Nazis, held back by 1,500 New York City police officers.

In response to the growing threat from within, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act in 1940, which required all resident aliens to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Of the nearly 5 million registrants, about 600,000 were Italian nationals, 260,000 were German nationals, and 40,000 were Japanese nationals.

Convinced the Germans in particular were dangerous, Roosevelt urged the Justice Department to intern them all, but Attorney General Francis Biddle balked, hoping to avoid the appearance of “mass internment.” Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, these concerns were largely cast aside.

On the evening of Dec. 7, 1941, resident aliens considered most dangerous were immediately taken into custody, and over the next several months, more than 5,000 Japanese nationals, 3,250 German nationals and 650 Italian nationals were detained as enemy aliens.

Furthermore, on Feb. 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers. Two-thirds of the 125,000 people displaced were U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. As many citizens were thrown into concentration camps, this was far more unconstitutional than Trump’s plans for undocumented immigrants.

Resident aliens who were not taken into custody were subject to curfews and restrictions on their freedom of movement, and were forbidden to possess radios, cameras, and weapons.

Literary Warnings

In this context, many fretted about threats to liberty from both internal subversives and the government. The ACLU’s then national executive director, Roger Baldwin, wrote in an open letter to President Roosevelt that his “unprecedented order is open to grave question on the constitutional grounds of depriving American citizens of their liberty and use of their property without due process of law.”

Baldwin argued that “the protection of our country” can be achieved without “a wholesale invasion of civil rights and without creating a precedent so opposed to democratic principle.”

The anxiety about the rise of authoritarianism and tyranny was also reflected in popular literature and film of the era, providing no shortage of evidence that concerns over democracies devolving into dictatorships have been deep-seated and widespread throughout modern American history.

Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, a sardonic look at whether a Nazi-style dictatorship is possible in the United States, was published in 1935, kicking off a theme in popular culture of the totalitarian threat at home by outlining a detailed and convincing scenario for homegrown fascism taking root in America. Americans were fascinated by his dystopian vision, sending the book to the top of the charts with more than 320,000 sales.

Central to Lewis’ thesis was that if dictatorship were to come, it would assume the guise of defending American values and traditions. Wherever totalitarian ideologies pop up, Lewis observed, they always appeal to traditional notions of national pride and patriotism.

“In America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty,” Lewis wrote.

Lewis also understood control of the media was essential. Much of It Can’t Happen Here is devoted to detailing the systematic co-optation of the newspapers and the dumbing down of journalism. Under fictional political leader Buzz Windrip’s rule, the newspapers “print almost no foreign news, except as regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopia good roads … [b]ut, on the other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic strips.”

While insightful, Lewis’ visions of how democracy dies was somewhat incomplete. To fully appreciate this process, more attention would have to be given to the subtler systems of control in order to understand the nature of totalitarianism developing in traditional democracies.

The 1949 publication of George Orwell’s 1984 filled this void. Depicting a Western nation under absolute government control, perpetuated and empowered by a permanent war against ever-shifting external enemies, 1984 shows how the government can dominate its subjects through thought control. This is enabled by systematic manipulation of the English language and the shameless rewriting of national history to fit the ruling class’s amorphous agenda.

In Orwell’s dystopia, inconvenient facts were thrown down the “memory hole,” and if anyone questioned the government’s new narrative, they were subjected to torture.

Central to the ability of the government to exercise its power was the elimination of nuanced thinking, which it achieved in part through the introduction of a language called “Newspeak.” In this dialect, subtleties were eliminated, even going so far as to redefine the word “bad” as “ungood.” If something was really bad, it was called “doubleplusungood.”

By controlling the language and by manipulating the historical record, the state was able to prevent free-thinking and keep the people under absolute control.

Anti-Americanism

Although it was written as a warning of what might follow a socialist revolution — based loosely on Orwell’s observations of what he saw happening in the Soviet Union — 1984’s enduring value has been the insight it provides into the authoritarian tendencies of any government.

Many Americans over the years have cited Orwell’s warnings as particularly relevant to developments in the United States, which has used subtle means of control of the media to manage narratives and employed ridicule and repression to go after political dissidents deemed out-of-step or “anti-American.”

The very concept of anti-Americanism, critics point out, is drawn directly from the lexicon of totalitarianism. As American dissident Noam Chomsky has argued, combating anti-Americanism assumes that the society and its people are identified with state power, rather than the national culture, and when used as a rhetorical weapon against critics of state policy, it serves only to silence debate and marginalize dissent.

The result is not only a deformed democracy, but often, ruined lives and reputations — which serve in turn as a chilling warning to others.

Truman’s Loyalty Oaths

This was seen when the bipartisan ideology of anti-communism was institutionalized during the Cold War. In 1947, Democratic President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9835, also known as the Loyalty Order, initiating a campaign to stamp out any “infiltration of disloyal persons” in the U.S. government, specifically communists and communist sympathizers.

An internal security campaign was subsequently launched in which 6.6 million Americans would be investigated, with the F.B.I. authorized to investigate federal employees to determine whether enough “derogatory information” about them warranted further review.

Loyalty boards — which lacked procedural safeguards, such as the right to confront critical witnesses — held hearings to determine whether “reasonable doubt” about their loyalty existed, resulting in the dismissal of several hundred individuals.

Several thousand more resigned and thousands more became the target of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies, most prominently the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Although many of the convictions of this period would later be overturned, the message was sent: dissent was tantamount to treason, and would not be tolerated by the state. Countless innocent people suffered loss of employment, ruined careers, and even imprisonment.

Covert Action

Over the next several decades, American democratic principles were further challenged by the excesses of the bipartisan Cold War. Government secrecy and covert action would become the norm, as would disinformation and propaganda, which would have long-term implications both at home and abroad.

The 1953 coup to overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh and the 1954 coup that toppled the Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, for example, provided the blueprint for clandestine activities around the world. The coup against Mossadegh eliminated what was considered a promising progressive democracy in the Middle East, and would set in motion decades of political Islam in the region.

The Iran coup led to the U.S. installation of the shah’s brutal dictatorship, which was overthrown in 1979 in Iran’s Islamic Revolution, leading to a hostage crisis resulting in the 1980 presidential election possibly being undermined by a treasonous dirty trick known as the “October Surprise.” The ensuing decades of U.S.-Iranian relations have been characterized by mutual animosity, a contentious situation that continues through today.

In Guatemala, the C.I.A. effort to overthrow the president, dubbed Operation PBSUCCESS, resulted in a civil war that killed more than 200,000 Guatemalan civilians from 1954 to 1990. The United Nations later found that in the four regions of Guatemala most affected by the violence, “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”

Despite the gruesome human toll, the intervention in Guatemala was considered an unqualified success by U.S. government leaders. According to an official C.I.A. study of the intervention, “its triumph confirmed the belief of many in the Eisenhower administration that covert operations offered a safe, inexpensive substitute for armed force” in dealing with leftist governments.

Those early coups against Iran and Guatemala set in motion decades of U.S. foreign policy characterized by covert action, assassination plots and overt military intervention.

As former State Department employee William Blum documented in his 1995 book Killing Hope, since the end of World War II, the United States has overthrown more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically elected.

Further, it attempted to suppress populist or nationalist movements in 20 countries and interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. All in all, according to Blum’s count, since 1945 the United States has meddled in at least 69 countries.

A New Era

Following the Cold War’s end in the early 1990s, there were renewed hopes that the dark days of covert action and domestic repression were over. It didn’t take long, however, for those hopes to be dashed.

The government largely continued undermining democracy both at home and abroad, with the United States routinely providing military assistance to over 73 percent of the world’s dictatorships according to one count.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — widely seen as blowback for decades of foreign meddling, including the arming and training of the Mujahadeen for their fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan ?— ?ushered in a new wave of democratic backsliding, with the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist threat marked by controversial policies such as the Iraq invasion, indefinite detention, the Patriot Act, mass electronic surveillance, and an extraordinary rendition and torture program run by the C.I.A.

George W. Bush — who once joked that “if this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, so long as I’m the dictator” — seemed intent on ushering in a new style of authoritarian rule. Characterized by novel interpretations of presidential power, including theories promoted by Bush proxies of a “unitary executive” and “presidential power at its absolute apex,” administration policies alarmed liberals and traditional conservatives alike.

Popular Culture References

With anxieties running high during the Bush years, popular culture reflected the concerns of many that the United States was devolving into a new form of dictatorship. The Star Wars prequels, for example, told a story of an interplanetary republic consumed by war, which an opportunistic chancellor cynically used to consolidate power and establish an empire.

In the name of providing security and defending democracy from internal enemies, the elected Chancellor Palpatine worked his way to a position of power, and used his influence to gain more and more authority. With the republic beset by sectarian conflict and secessionist movements, Palpatine took to the floor of the Galactic Senate in Revenge of the Sith and urged the body to grant him permanent emergency powers.

“In order to ensure our security and continuing stability,” Palpatine says, “the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society.” The senators applaud the appeal and subsequently grant him his wish.

Astute observers noted the timeliness of the film’s message and emphasized the relevance of its insight into how and why democracies devolve into authoritarian dictatorships.

The film, which came out several months into Bush’s second term, offered a solid analytical framework for understanding this phenomenon, based on a pattern that has been well-established throughout history, from Rome in the first century to Germany in the 20th, and as some Americans worried, the USA in the 21st.

Indeed, George Lucas’ prequel series was seen by many as a parable of what was happening in the United States since 9/11, and a warning of where the country could end up if it continued to trade civil liberties and constitutional rights for security and safety.

Agence France Presse even called Revenge of the Sith “a galactic jab to US President George W. Bush” while Washington Post columnist Daniel Froomkin wrote that it was “a cautionary tale for our time.” Froomkin argued that at its core, the movie was “a blistering critique of the war in Iraq, a reminder of how democracies can give up their freedoms too easily, and an admonition about the seduction of good people by absolute power.”

New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott also emphasized the film’s relevance to contemporary American politics, particularly its warning of “how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles.” Revenge of the Sith, Scott wrote, is “about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power,” and should rightly be seen as an indictment of political leaders in the United States.

Scott pointed out one scene in particular that seemed to directly challenge the “with-us-or-against-us” mentality that the Bush administration had adopted in the war on terror. “At one point,” Scott wrote, “Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, ‘If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.’” The older and wiser Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobe responds that “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.”

Challenging the with-us-or-against-us mentality of the war on terror was also a central theme in another Bush-era blockbuster, V for Vendetta. In this film, set in Great Britain in the not-too-distant future, at a time when “the former United States” is embroiled in civil war, a freedom fighter/terrorist (depending on one’s perspective) fights back against a totalitarian state, hoping to spark a revolution by assassinating all of the key government leaders and blowing up the Parliament building.

The defining traits of the regime he sought to topple were its total control over information, its use of mass surveillance technology, its systematic use of terror against its population, and its demand for absolute conformity? — ?with the slogan, “Strength through Unity. Unity through Faith.”

Important for both its warnings of how totalitarianism could take hold in a democracy and its seeming endorsement of violence to effect political change (“Violence can be used for good,” says the protagonist V at one point), the film was perhaps most significant for its box office success at a time of heightened fears of terrorism and expectations for fealty to the government.

Its popularity was seen by some as a rejection of the notion that citizens must obediently support government policies and unquestioningly accept official definitions of terrorism.

Correspondingly, the film was denounced by several conservative leaders. For instance, Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, called V for Vendetta “a vile, pro-terrorist piece of neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda filled with radical sexual politics and nasty attacks on religion and Christianity.”

While conservatives attacked the film for being “pro-terrorist” propaganda, other observers pointed out its timeliness and its seeming parallels to modern American society. The Los Angeles Times noted that “with a wealth of new, real-life parallels to draw from in the areas of government surveillance, torture, fear-mongering and media manipulation … you can’t really blame the filmmakers for having a field day referencing current events.”

This included the “black bags” worn by political prisoners of the regime, seen as an allusion to the black bags worn by prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and the yellow-coded curfew alert system that London lives under in the film, which was seen as a reference to the U.S. government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Director James McTeigue confirmed that he hoped to make the film relevant to contemporary audiences, and had taken some liberties with significant adaptations of the graphic novel upon which the screenplay was based.

“We felt the novel was very prescient to how the political climate is at the moment,” McTeigue said. “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say that things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

Americans seemed to identify with this message, sending it to the top of the U.S. box office on its opening day, where it stayed for the remainder of the weekend. Over the next eight months, the film grossed over $70 million in the United States and $62 million abroad.

Its popularity seemed to reflect a worldwide appreciation for the chronic threat of authoritarianism, contradicting the consensus that prevailed in the Western world in the early 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union regarding the inevitable march of democratic progress.

It also recalls that current-day concerns over the “unprecedented” Trump threat are not really unprecedented at all, and, more importantly, are oblivious to the dynamics of authoritarianism — ?particularly the need to protect against the response to a perceived threat becoming the very thing being defended against.

What is particularly curious about our modern discourse is to hear pundits and politicians deplore Donald Trump as a would-be dictator who considers himself as above the law, when he’s the only president to ever be tried and convicted of a crime, despite others, like George W. Bush, initiating an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation.

While several presidents have faced legal troubles, often for far more serious offenses than those that have plagued Trump, none have been convicted in a court of law.

Maybe that’s why the Democrats’ calls for resisting the incoming Trump dictatorship continue to ring hollow among so many Americans.