Clarence Lusane, For Trump and DeSantis, Different Paths, the Same Destination

How strange! Once upon a time, the men who wrote the Constitution were only worried about how young a president could be. They set a bottom age limit of 35 but never considered a top limit of any sort. How things have changed! When I was boy, the oldest president ever — and that was almost 200 years into the “American Century” — was Dwight D. Eisenhower who, on leaving office in 1961, had just turned a staggering 70. In doing so, he had outlasted Andrew Jackson, who left the presidency at age 69. Later in my life, Ronald Reagan, after his second term, was almost 78 (my age now).

Joe Biden, on taking the oath of office in January 2021, was already a record-breaking 78. Were he to win again in 2024, he would take that oath at 82 (unlike the youthful Donald Trump, who would be nearly 79). How strange then that no significant younger Democrat is challenging the president even as Ron DeSantis, a mere 44, is taking “our” former president on a trip to the GOP version of hell — without as yet, as TomDispatch regular Clarence Lusane, author of the riveting Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy, notes today, much luck. Before you consider Lusane’s cogent thoughts on the mad Republican contest to turn this country into an authoritarian hell on earth, let me just fret a little about a Democratic candidate already older than creaky old me.

Joe Biden clearly has no intention of not running a second time — he’s already announced — and so is preparing to potentially set an oldest-yet record that may never be broken. It seems to matter little to him that a large majority of American voters, according to the latest polling, would like anything but a Biden-Trump repeat.

And honestly, facing the increasingly authoritarian Republican right that’s Lusane’s focus today, it scares this old guy to imagine scenarios in which Biden’s age could effectively hand this country and democracy itself over to the all-too-dangerous Donald Trump or another younger Republican intent on taking us into an authoritarian hell. Just a single Biden health crisis (especially if the U.S. economy were also to undergo one) and we could all be heading for genuine nightmare territory. Tom

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis

Two Peas in a (White Nationalist) Pod

He appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who shocked the nation with rulings that dramatically took away rights. He sided with the racists who used “states’ rights” to push through undemocratic policies locally. And he’s the only American president who lost a reelection bid but returned to office in the following election.

Yes, I’m thinking of former New York governor and Democrat Grover Cleveland who first won the presidency in 1884, lost his reelection bid in 1888, only to successfully regain the presidency in 1892 against then-incumbent Benjamin Harrison.

In 2024, Donald Trump hopes to repeat that history in all its ugliness by becoming the second former president to recapture the White House. And mind you, the consequences of that second Cleveland administration were devastating. Three of his Supreme Court appointees — Melville W. Fuller, Rufus W. Peckham, and Edward D. White — were part of the majority in the crucial and devastating 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that would sanction racial segregation across the nation and so solidify an American apartheid system that didn’t end legally until the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

In a similar vein, it’s hard to imagine how destructive a second Trump administration would be, given his first time in office. In virtually every area of public policy, the Trump administration proved a setback for women, people of color, working-class communities, LGBTQ individuals, environmental advocates, and those fighting to expand human and democratic rights. His three hyper-conservative Supreme Court appointees helped overturn Roe v. Wade, taking away abortion rights for millions without hesitation, while there have also been significant setbacks in the areas of gun safety, religious freedom, workers’ rights, and more.

But in truth, it’s not the policymaking that Donald Trump truly longs for. Above all, he clearly misses the corruption, cruelty, and sense of power that came with his presidency. His dream of an authoritarian state in which he can punish his enemies endlessly without accountability (while enriching himself and his family) was thwarted in 2020 when voters rejected his candidacy. The bitterness of that loss still eats at his very being and drives his current presidential bid. As he himself stated, in a second term he seeks “retribution” against one and all.

For those still in the Republican Party, Trump is once again the overwhelming early favorite. While 61% of Americans don’t want him as president again — 89% of Democrats and 64% of independents — a whopping 76% of Republicans are Trumpian to the core, according to a March 2023 Marist poll. If impeachments, a slew of coming indictments, and a conviction for libel don’t deter his GOP supporters — indeed, they seem to have had the opposite effect — then it’s easy to see Trump winning the nomination in a landslide.

Yet, in a number of ways, as the Republican Party continues to move ever more to the right, MAGA has already evolved beyond him. Despite the media oxygen he continues to consume, the current moment is less about him than most of us believe. Just as Cleveland reflected the growing racial retrenchment of the white South in the late 1800s, Trump embodies the growing entrenchment of an ever more extremist wing of American politics.

As hyper-MAGA losing Pennsylvania senatorial candidate Kathy Barnette correctly stated, “MAGA does not belong to President Trump.” In referring to the ascendant far-right wing of the Republican Party last year, she claimed that “our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s values.” Rather it was “President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.” What she neglected to add was that his conversion was completely transactional: he needed their support, and they needed his.

Once committed, Trump leaned fully into the politics of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism that still animate the base of the party and its most prominent leaders at the local, state, and federal levels. Before, during, and since his presidency, he’s hurled racist invective at every category of black Americans — black women, black women journalists, black athletes, black elected officials, black appointed officials, black law-enforcement officers, black election workers, black prosecutors, black youth, black countries, black historic figures, black activists, black-dominated cities, and black political leaders. In rallies and speeches, he regularly refers to any black person who holds him to account as a “racist,” tapping into the prejudices of his base, a crew who nominally contend that racism no longer exists.

Trump — and the most horrendous member of Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — have championed the January 6th violent insurrectionists. Only recently in a CNN town hall, he promised to pardon “a large portion” of them, if reelected, to the cheers of his supporters who conveniently ignore the fact that he didn’t pardon them in his last two weeks as president.

It should be noted that, in his time in office, he failed to keep any of the major promises he made on the campaign trail, including building that border wall, ending Obamacare, passing an infrastructure bill, and lowering the cost of prescription drugs. His one signature piece of legislation proved to be a tax cut that transferred billions of dollars to the already super-rich. His other big achievement, of course, was to stack the Supreme Court with those three ultra-conservative justices who have taken away rights, including the 50-year-old national right to an abortion.

Despite an impulse to hide the most draconian aspects of the GOP policy agenda, it can be glimpsed via Republican initiatives in Congress and those of governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures. At the moment, their far-right trek towards authoritarianism remains largely in sync with Trump’s political and personal aspirations for power.

The DeSantis Dilemma

There is remarkably little difference between Trump and his main challengers for the presidential nomination when it comes to the politics and policies of the contemporary Republican Party. Take Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

For much of the last year, the mainstream media focused its attention on a potential cage match between a resurgent Trump and the now politically deflating DeSantis. It was the undisciplined populist versus the inflexible ideologue, the former president’s ability to articulate the most dangerous far-right ideas against DeSantis’s proven ability to actually implement them.

For many on the left and in the progressive world, the debate has been over which of them would be worse, which would be quicker to destroy the country. Would DeSantis’s less chaotic approach ultimately be worse than that of the scandal-magnet Trump? Would a growing list of potential indictments benefit or harm Trump? Who would prevail in the battle of the brands — Make America Great Again (MAGA) or Make Florida America (MFA)?

In the end, the differences between the two of them are likely to prove superficial indeed. In the areas where Americans would be most severely affected, there’s hardly a fly’s hair of separation between them. Beyond the fact that both are mercurial, petty, narcissistic bigots, as well as textbook definitions of toxic masculinity, it’s in the realm of politics and public policy where they might take somewhat different roads that, unfortunately, would head this country toward the very same destination: an undemocratic, authoritarian state whose foundational creed would be racism and unrelenting bigotry.

A dive into the policy wasteland of both reveals a distinctly unsurprising convergence. DeSantis has become infamous for the anti-woke initiatives that have roiled Florida’s education system from elementary school to college. Books have been (figuratively and perhaps literally) burned, teachers fired, school boards overthrown, and — from English and history to math and social science — curriculums revamped to fit a right-wing agenda. Almost singlehandedly, the governor has pushed through “anti-woke” policies and signed legislation aimed at reconstructing the state’s education system from top to bottom.

It should be recalled, however, that Trump was no slouch when it came to attacking wokeness. On September 4, 2020, he ordered the White House Office of Management and Budget to issue a memorandum that directed federal agencies “to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda” that might suggest the United States is a racist country. The goal was to cut funding and cancel contracts related to programs or training supposedly employing such concepts.

In September 2020, with only two months left in office, in a move likely meant to counter the actions of DeSantis, Trump launched a “1776 Commission” whose purpose was to develop a curriculum that would promote a “patriotic education” about race and the nation’s history. This was a pathetic effort to refute the New York Times’s “1619 Project” that argued slavery and racism were central to the birth of the nation, a theory that has driven conservatives into a frenzied state of panic.

Cynically, that commission issued its “1776 Report” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — January 18, 2021 — only two days before Trump left office in humiliation. It would be soundly criticized for its host of inaccuracies, its right-wing ideological bent, and even plagiarism that whitewashed American history, its founders, and their racism. A second Trump administration would undoubtedly go all in to put DeSantis in the shade by presenting a distinctly falsified, though politically useful version of that history.

Suppressing the Vote and Cheering Street Violence

DeSantis’s ideological opposition to abortion is in sync with Trump’s transactional one. While some GOP big names are calling for a national ban, both DeSantis and Trump are trying to find a sweet spot where they can build support, especially among evangelical extremists, while still retaining some possibility of winning educated white suburban women. Unlikely as that is, in a distinctly cowardly move, DeSantis signed his extreme Florida anti-abortion law late on a Thursday night behind closed doors, while Trump continues to fume and worry (legitimately) about paying the cost for losing women voters in a general election.

DeSantis loves to highlight the work of his Gestapo-like election police unit as his contribution to enforcing “voter integrity.” Established in 2022, the unit operates out of Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security (OECS) and includes a statewide prosecutor. It will undoubtedly shock no one that most of those arrested in its initial months were overwhelmingly people of color. Virtually all of them were dealing with a confusing election system that had restored voting rights to some but not all ex-felons. (That system had, in fact, actually issued voter ID cards to former felons who weren’t eligible.) DeSantis proudly praised the arrests, no matter that most of them were later tossed out of court. In fact, local prosecutors refused hundreds of OECS referrals.

In terms of voting rights, though, has DeSantis topped Trump’s effort to throw out millions of black votes, attack black election workers, and have his Justice Department support every voter-suppression policy passed by GOP state legislatures? Not yet, he hasn’t. And don’t forget that Trump also created an ill-fated, disingenuous Presidential Commission on Election Integrity within months of taking office in 2017. Its real purpose was to collect state election data and weaponize it against Democratic voters. That effort, however, proved so clumsily fraudulent that even Republican-controlled states refused to submit information and the Commission was dissolved within seven months. Six years later, with the clear aim of suppressing Democratic and black voters, Trump has been calling for same-day-only in-person voting with paper ballots.

And finally, don’t forget how both Trump and DeSantis (as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbott) have brazenly celebrated the street violence perpetrated by armed white men. Trump hosted Kyle Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago in November 2021. Rittenhouse had shot and killed Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, while wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, during racial-justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. He became a cause célèbre of the far-right media and the MAGA movement and was eventually found not guilty, leading to Trump’s invitation. The former president has also loudly pledged to pardon charged or convicted violent January 6th insurrectionists.

Not to be outdone, DeSantis recently praised Daniel Penny who killed Jordan Neely, a slim, young black man having a mental health crisis on a New York City subway car. Penny, a trained ex-Marine, applied a chokehold for many minutes. Neely’s death was ruled a homicide and Penny has now been arrested for it. Far-right Republicans were quick to issue statements of solidarity and to support fundraising for his legal case. DeSantis referred to Penny as a “good Samaritan” and shared a link to his fundraising page, while somehow associating the incident with that number one billionaire scoundrel for conservatives, George Soros.

By their behavior and words, Trump and DeSantis provide a permission zone for white nationalist violence.

In the end, the two of them aren’t so much highlighting their differences as competing to see who can be the most extreme, issue by issue. As Trump made clear in his recent CNN town hall — functionally, a Trump rally — he has no intention of tacking towards the middle. Quite the opposite, as he heads for Election Day 2024, his hurricane of lies will only grow more extreme, shameless, and dangerous, while the GOP base cheers him on.

DeSantis has, so far, been reduced to running against Trump on the issue of “electability.” He claims Trump can’t win in a general election – possibly true (if the economy doesn’t go into recession) – and is calling on GOP voters to put aside their Trumpian passions and be more practical. Essentially, this is the same argument being made by other soon-to-be also-rans like former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Trump Vice President Mike Pence, and Senator Tim Scott. They all cower when it comes to really going after Trump, becoming instead the political equivalents of passive-aggressive 13-year-olds. Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who may join the race and has gone from frenemy to all-out never-Trumper, has shown little divergence from the former president’s most basic policies.

Trump Misses the Corruption, Cruelty, and Power

What distinguishes DeSantis from the rest of the pack and aligns him more fully with The Donald is that they both have an urge to be cruel for no other reason than that they can be. Few political leaders have ever been quite as thin-skinned as Trump. His pettiness is legendary, while it clearly gives him pleasure to inflict pain on others. DeSantis has a similar personality. His treatment of immigrants, the way he describes LGBTQ individuals, and his press releases and speeches against any perceived opponent are filled to the brim with invective and venom.

DeSantis’s Make Florida America, or MFA, is a genuine threat and his own version of a MAGA move. A Trump or DeSantis administration would ensure at least four long years of brutal retaliation and murderous policies through the prism of white nationalist Great Replacement rhetoric.

Sadly, the problem isn’t just Trump — or rather it’s not only Trump — or DeSantis either. The horror of our moment is the way the base of the contemporary Republican Party has come to embrace the most extreme views and policies around.

So, here’s a final question for this difficult moment: In a forest of fascism, does it matter which tree is the tallest?

Clarence Lusane: Will Nikki Haley's Candidacy Flag?

Imagine this: in the 1830s, the U.S. government spent the equivalent of what today would be a trillion dollars to expel just about every last indigenous person — man, woman, and child — from their homelands in this country's south and southeast. As historian Claudio Saunt so vividly reminds us in Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, they were forcibly sent west of the Mississippi River (mainly to today’s Oklahoma) on what came to be known as the "trail of tears." And the lands that had once been theirs were then almost singularly transformed into part of a southern empire of slavery, devoted to raising cotton (nearly 160 million pounds of it annually on those formerly indigenous lands by 1850). It was one of the major acts of appropriation — of theft, to be clearer — in history and part of the grim story of the formation of what would in February 1861 become the Confederacy.

And that, in turn, is just part of what the Confederate flag that, until 2015, flew over the capitol of then-Governor Nikki Haley's South Carolina stood for and could someday, as TomDispatch regular Clarence Lusane, author of the not-to-be-missed book Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy, reminds us today, fly over… well, the White House. Yes, it sounds beyond extreme, but face it, we're living in an increasingly extreme land. If just about any version of the Trumpublican Party were to win again in 2024 — and don't for a second rule it out — we could find ourselves in a modern version of the Confederacy.

With that in mind, let Lusane take you into the bizarre extremity of the MAGA (and diet-MAGA) Republican world that could someday, if things go truly badly, be the world for all of us. Tom

Make Republicans Great Again? Nikki Haley's Diet-MAGA Problem

In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in subsequent interviews. This "achievement" remains a critical part of her story about why she aspires to become president. Given the weakness of the South Carolina governorship, Haley doesn't have a lot to show for her time in office or, for that matter, defending President Donald Trump as his ambassador at the United Nations.

Still, even her claim to that is problematic on multiple levels. First, she and other state Republicans like Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott had ignored decades of resistance to that flag by African Americans and their local allies. And unlike Haley and crew, those protesters, of course, never bought into the "Lost Cause" rhetoric of the Confederacy, the historical revisionism filled with intentional mythology that has long suggested the stars and bars are nothing but a benign neutral symbol of "our" past.

Haley bought into that very tale when she claimed that flag symbolized "service, sacrifice, and heritage" and was essentially devoid of harmful racist significance until "hijacked" by white supremacist murderer Dylann Roof in his mass shooting at a church in Charleston in 2015. In fact, scholars Spencer Piston and Logan Strother found that white southern support for the Confederate flag had long been associated with racist intolerance.

For African Americans and racial-justice advocates, it's always been painfully clear that the Confederate flag remained a white supremacist message the state's racial hierarchy sought to defend at all costs. That flag at the state capitol was installed in 1961, exactly 100 years after the start of the Civil War, as freedom riders, sit-ins, and civil rights rallies were steamrolling the white racial hegemony of southern life. It would enjoy a privileged position first atop the capitol itself and then on a flagpole adjacent to it for decades.

The horrific 2015 massacre of eight black worshipers and their parson at the legendary "Mother" Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by the Confederate flag-loving Roof, and the fearless action 10 days later by Bree Newsome, who climbed that flagpole and physically took down the stars and bars — only to be arrested and see it raised again — finally spurred Governor Haley and state officials to remove it. Deflecting blame for the racist symbolism of the flag onto Roof was a way of defending generations of white nationalist support for it, allowing Haley to claim hero status for its removal. Still, in 2023, it remains beyond disingenuous for her to eternally praise herself because "we" got rid of that flag.

An Ever More Extreme Republican Party

No less dishonest has been Haley's reshaping of her own record on the issue. As the PBS Newshour noted, "For years, Haley had resisted calls to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds, even casting a rival's push for its removal as a desperate stunt." Embarrassingly, CNN uncovered a 2010 interview in which she defended not just the flag, but Confederate History Month and the Lost Cause ideology that went with it.

In a recently surfaced interview with the Palmetto Patriots (a far-right group with links to brazen white nationalists), when asked about the controversy surrounding that flag, she responded, "I will work and talk to them about the heritage and how this is not something that is racist." She also supported "Confederate History Month," adding outrageously enough, "Yes, it's part of a traditional — you know, it’s part of tradition. And so, when you look at that, if you have the same as you have Black History Month and you have Confederate History Month and all of those." Equating Black History Month with Confederate History Month is not only contemptuous, but previews the kind of pandering, lowest-common-denominator politics a future Haley administration in Washington would undoubtedly embody.

No less problematic, one of those Palmetto Patriots interviewers she so happily chatted with was a virulent racist, Robert Slimp. He also had been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the white nationalist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the latter one of the groups that Roof claimed had inspired him through videos on its website of "black-on-white" crime. There is no record of Haley denouncing Slimp, though there is a record of her being forced to purge a member of her 2013 reelection steering committee who had ties to CCC.

Worse yet, Haley seems to believe that she can succeed in a run for the presidency because she — and only she — can navigate the turbulent waters of the MAGAfication that’s seized the Republican Party by the throat. She clearly thinks that her candidacy could appeal to both the far-right white nationalist wing of the Republican Party and the we-don’t-want-too-much-overt-racism "moderates" among Republican and independent voters. The battle inside the GOP, to the degree that it exists in 2023, is no longer between Trump supporters and anti-Trump forces. That fight ended long ago with a clear loser, the almost nonexistent anti-Trump crew (as opposed to the candidates that want to out-Trump the former president).

No, the war in 2023 is between what might be thought of as ultra-MAGA and diet-MAGA Republicans. Ultra-MAGAism has not only pollinated much of the party but is rapidly moving past Trump himself. The tenets of MAGAism — voter suppression, election denialism, Great Replacement paranoia, white victimization, undemocratic governance, full-spectrum bigotry, the threat (and reality) of political violence, and Christian nationalism — have been embraced, enhanced, and enlarged across the nation and, indeed, other parts of the globe.

Trumpism, led by Trump himself, has effectively mobilized white Christian nationalist forces, uniting the right and reconfiguring, not to say redefining, what constitutes acceptable political behavior in America. In fact, his corruption, blatant abuse of power, obstruction of justice, naked nepotism, malignant narcissism, and ultimate untrustworthiness make him an increasing liability to the very authoritarian project he put at the center of contemporary Republican politics.

Although diet-MAGA has the same objectives and vantage point, it differs in its strategy for achieving those goals. Its proponents correctly recognize that the majority of American voters increasingly abhor Trumpism, as every national election and many state elections have shown since he first won in 2016.

In the last dozen years, victories by Democrats have ushered in a sea change in political governance at the state level. In 2023, the 17 states where Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature and the governor's seat have more than 140 million Americans (42% of the country’s population) compared to about 131 million in the 22 states fully under Republican control. This represents a giant leap from 2018, in the middle of the Trump administration, when Democrats had full control over just seven states with a population of only about 64 million compared to the 155 million in GOP states.

The most clear-eyed, though cowardly, Republican leaders understand these dynamics. But diet-MAGA itself continues to lose ground. Some of Trump's biggest failures like Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz have indeed vanished into the political holes from which they emerged. However, others remain MAGA warriors and, in some instances, are being rewarded despite historic defeats and even rejection by Trump himself.

For example, in Michigan on February 18th, the state Republican Party selected MAGA fanatic and election denier Kristina Karamo as its new chair. From denying she lost her own election as Michigan’s secretary of state (by a whopping 14 points) to blaming Antifa for the January 6th uprising, she checks all the boxes for MAGA fever. Notably, however, she also defeated the candidate Trump himself endorsed, Mathew DePerno, another denier, but apparently not quite strident enough for the Michigan party. The GOP, in other words, is not becoming less extremist as it heads toward the cliff. It's pressing its foot on the gas pedal as hard as it can.

"I Don't Want to Go Back to the Days Before Trump"

Into this fray comes Haley who — it’s already clear — can't find the right rhetoric or spin to convince current GOP voters that she's the elixir needed to heal the party's electoral wounds. She's already attacked the elders of the party although there's no indication that will win her any support from its "youth" wing. She's zigged and zagged when it comes to her view of Donald Trump, knowing that it's as hard to win without his support as it is with it. She denounced Trump — lightly — immediately after the January 6th insurrection and months later went all Kevin-McCarthyite, as she pledged fealty to the former president, stating, "We need him in the Republican Party. I don't want us to go back to the days before Trump."

Tactically, Haley skipped any mention of the removal of the Confederate flag in her campaign announcement for an obvious reason: it's viewed as a negative move by a significant sector of the MAGA base, especially in her home state. She has little hope of winning South Carolina’s Republican voters without leaning into the states' rights and "perseverance of southern heritage" gospel that tolerates no "wokeness" when it comes to Confederate flags.

She took a big step toward bulking up her far-right credibility by having controversial conspiracist Reverend John Hagee provide the opening prayer at her campaign launch. Hagee is a notorious repeat offender when it comes to antisemitism, homophobia, and all-around bigotry. Haley made it clear that he was not there by accident when she offered this comment: "To Pastor Hagee, I still say I want to be you when I grow up." It will be difficult to make a case for her not being so out there when she found one of this country's most notorious out-there ministers to be at her side.

On the other hand, with little to sell and desperate to convince the nation that the Republican Party is about more than divisiveness, she wants to hold that lowered flag in her quiver, too, so that, after winning the nomination, she can pivot ever so slightly toward a vanishing middle. While this will win her few if any black votes, she understands the necessity of playing a game of anti-racist posturing to reach anxious white GOP and swing voters uncomfortable with the party's overt intolerance.

"Toleration," Haley-Style

Spoiler alert. Haley's Machiavellian maneuvering notwithstanding, count on one thing: she won't be able to beat either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, even in South Carolina. Admittedly, it's still a year before any primary voting begins, but she has yet to make her way out of polling's low single digits. In a recent Morning Consult poll, for instance, she was at 6%, which, on the bright side, was six times higher than an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that had her languishing at 1%.

The Haley campaign (and some journalists) believe that, at a time of war in Europe and Chinese spy balloons, her foreign policy experience as a former U.N. ambassador will work to her benefit. In fact, this is unlikely to help her any more than it will another potential 2024 candidate, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Being on the Trump foreign-policy team and so linked to his disastrous international profile should be the first item scrubbed from both their résumés. In addition, the American public rarely votes on foreign-policy concerns. While some GOP voters prioritize China or international terrorism as their top issues, the rest of the country does not.

Even if Trump's own candidacy were to collapse due to indictments, fear of a humiliating loss, or physical or mental health issues, Haley is unlikely to survive a slew of Republican primaries where she’ll be vying for the same voters with former Vice President Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Pompeo, and perhaps even South Carolina Senator Tim Scott.

The race politics of the GOP have only become rawer and more aggressive with each election. Trump is increasingly hysterical about projecting himself as a victim of anti-white bias, while calling out "radical, vicious, racist prosecutors." He's taken particular aim at black elected officials investigating multiple allegations about him, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, former chair of the House January 6th Committee Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), and Atlanta-based District Attorney Fani Willis. At the January 2022 rally in Texas where he made that charge, he also dog-whistled that a goal of his in 2024 would be to "take back that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white."

Other denizens of Trumpworld are also playing the anti-white card. His former speechwriter Stephen Miller, who launched an "alternative" to the ACLU called America First Legal, ran ads in last year's election season that opened with "When did racism against white people become OK?"

Haley, who is a woman of color, has tolerated such racist forays and so much more. She never condemned Trump or offered an apology for his vile statements including, while she was U.N. ambassador, his reference to nations in Africa and Latin America as "sh*thole" countries.

When Trump's immigration policy harkened back to the overt racism of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act by calling for a total ban on Muslims entering the United States and he tried to implement that once in office, where was global expert Haley? Where was she when Trump was launching racist and misogynist attacks on women of color, whether elected officials or journalists? Again and again, she absolved Trump of any responsibility for the toxic racist and political environment that defined his presidency.

And in those years, she was exactly where she undoubtedly will be when the dust settles on the 2024 race — nowhere to be seen.

Clarence Lusane: The Nightmare of Republican Voter Suppression

Elections? What are those?

Our previous president was almost unimaginably deep into voter suppression. After all, a Georgia grand jury has, among other things, been investigating his direct involvement in a wild scheme to create his very own slate of bogus “electors” in that state who would — giant surprise! — vote for The Donald for president, even after he’d been declared the loser of the 2020 election. And that was but one of the states where he and his crew tried to create slates of fake electors who would be (or so they came to believe) recognized as the real thing by Vice President Pence on January 6th.

That, in turn, was but one way in which a Republican Party with an urge for ultimate domination at both the state and federal levels, not to say outright autocracy, has been trying to stack the deck in its favor for years. That was particularly true in states across the country where they held power and focused on suppressing the right of Black voters to go to the polls. As newly elected Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock put it in his first Senate speech two months after the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve ever seen since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow in new clothes.”

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that most Republican laws to suppress votes were passed, according to the Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington, “in precisely those states that became the focus of Trump’s Stop the Steal campaign to block the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.” And as a Brennan Center report found in 2022, “Representatives from the whitest districts in the most racially diverse states were the most likely to sponsor anti-voter bills.”

Today, Clarence Lusane, author of the recently published book Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy, a penetrating look at the legacies of slavery and white supremacy in this country, considers what that ongoing record of suppressing the Black vote means as 2023 begins. Tom

The Votes That Weren’t Cast: Racial Justice, Voting Rights, and Authoritarianism

The fundamental right to vote has been a core value of Black politics since the colonial era — and so has the effort to suppress that vote right up to the present moment. In fact, the history of the suppression of Black voters is a first-rate horror story that as yet shows no sign of ending.

While Democrats and progressives justifiably celebrated the humbling defeat of some of the most notorious election-denying Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms, the GOP campaign to quell and marginalize Black voters has only continued with an all-too-striking vigor. In 2023, attacks on voting rights are melding with the increasingly authoritarian thrust of a Republican Party ever more aligned with far-right extremists and outright white supremacists.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the insurrection of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington was also an assault on minority voters. In the post-election weeks of 2020, insurrection-loving and disgraced President Donald Trump and his allies sought to discard votes in swing-state cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Those were all places with large Black, Latino, or Native American populations. It was no accident then that the overwhelmingly white mob at the Capitol didn’t hesitate to hurl racist language, including the “N” word, at Black police officers as that mob invaded the building.

For years, Republican lawmakers at the state level had proposed — and where possible implemented — voter suppression laws and policies whose impacts were sharply felt in communities of color nationwide. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “At least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting,” laws invariably generated by Republican legislators. These included bills to limit early voting, restrict voting by mail, and even deny the provision of water to voters waiting for hours in long lines, something almost universally experienced in Black and poor communities.

While normally pretending that such laws were not raced-based but focused on — the phrases sound so positive and sensible — “voter integrity” or “election security,” on occasion GOP leaders and officials have revealed their real purpose. A recent example was Republican Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell, one of three GOP appointees on the six-person commission that oversees that state’s elections. He openly bragged that the “well thought out multi-faceted plan” of the Republicans had resulted in a dramatic drop in Black voters in the 2022 midterm elections, including in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, which is about 40% African American. He wrote: “We can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

How Far Might Voter Suppression Go?

You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, rather than develop policies attractive to voters of color, the GOP and conservatives generally have chosen the path of voter suppression, intimidation, and gaming the system. And if anything, those attempts are still on the rise. In 2023, less than a month into the new year, according to the Guardian, Republicans across the country have proposed dozens of voter-suppression and election-administration-interference bills in multiple states.

Republican state legislators in Texas alone filed 14 bills on January 10th, including ones that would raise penalties for “illegal” voting, whether committed knowingly or not. More ominously, one Texas proposal would fund the creation of an election police force exclusively dedicated to catching those who violate voting or election laws. That unit would be similar to the draconian election-police unit created in Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida as part of what is functionally becoming a regime dedicated to a version of right-wing terror. Symbolically enough, for instance, Black ex-felons were disproportionately targeted by DeSantis. Although the campaign was launched with great fanfare, only a few generally confused ex-felons were arrested and most of them had been given misinformation by state officials about their eligibility to vote and were convinced that they had the right to do so.

But DeSantis never really wanted to stop the virtually nonexistent crime of voter impersonation or fraud. His goal, and that of the GOP nationally, has been to strike fear into the hearts of potential non-Republican voters to ensure election victories for his party.

In states like Alabama, Mississippi, and 20 others where the GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion, intimidating voter-tracking police squads could be the next play in an ongoing effort to undemocratically control elections. Such policing efforts would without question disproportionately target communities of color.

While the expected midterm “red wave” of Republican victories didn’t occur nationally in 2022, the same can’t be said for the South. As documented by the Institute for Southern Studies’ Facing South, the GOP actually outperformed expectations, expanding its hold on multiple state legislatures in the region. Prior to the election, analysts had predicted that the Republicans might gain 40 seats across the South; in fact, they gained at least 55. Not only did they take control of at least 25 state legislative chambers — the lone exception, Virginia’s state senate where Democrats retained a two-seat majority — but they also built or maintained supermajorities in legislative chambers in Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia. This means that even if a Democratic governor is in office, Republican legislators can pass extremist bills into law despite a gubernatorial veto.

None of this is spontaneous, nor is it random. Tens of millions of dollars or more from super-rich conservative donors and right-wing foundations have poured into voter-suppression and election-manipulation efforts. Heritage Action for America, a conservative legislative-writing group linked to the Heritage Foundation, spent upwards of $24 million in 2021 and 2022 in key swing states to help Republicans write bills that would restrict voting, targeting Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, and Texas. Consider it anything but a coincidence that the language in voter-suppression bills in those states and elsewhere sounded eerily familiar. As the Guardian reported, at least 11 voter suppression bills in at least eight states were due, in part or whole, to advocacy and organizing by Heritage Action. A New York Times investigation found that in Georgia, “Of the 68 bills pertaining to voting, at least 23 had similar language or were firmly rooted in the principles laid out in the Heritage group’s letter” that offered outlines and details for how to limit voting access.

Contemporary voter suppression efforts, however, go significantly beyond just trying to prevent people from voting or making it harder for them to do so. Credit that, at least in part, to the determination of so many Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans to vote despite restrictions imposed by the states. Consequently, Republican legislators now seek to control — that is, manipulate — election administration, too. Their tactics include the harassment of election workers, far-right activists seeking positions as election officials, and various other potentially far-reaching legal maneuvers.

In fact, in recent voting, attacks on election workers, officials, and volunteers have become so prevalent that a new national organization, the Election Officials Legal Defense Network (EOLDN), was formed to protect them. EOLDN provides attorneys and other kinds of assistance to such officials when they find themselves under attack.

Meanwhile, a flood of far-right activists has applied for positions or volunteered to work on elections. Neo-fascist Steven Bannon and other extremist influencers have typically called for such activists to take over local election boards with the express purpose of helping Republicans and conservatives win power.

Finally, GOP leaders in multiple states have been pushing an “independent state legislature” doctrine that argues such bodies have the ultimate power to determine election outcomes. They contend that governors, state supreme courts, and even the U.S. Supreme Court have no jurisdiction over non-federal elections. Their fanciful and erroneous reading of Article 1, Section 4 and Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution suggests that state legislatures can not only overturn the will of voters in a given election but select electors of their choice in a presidential contest, no matter the will of the voters.

In past decisions, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia indicated that they were at least open to such a reading. A firm decision on this matter may occur in that court’s current session in the case of Moore v. Harper. Court watchers are split on whether the court’s conservative majority might indeed embrace that “doctrine” in full, in part, or at all in ruling on that case later this year.

Missed Chances

Much of this dynamic of voter suppression is the result of the failure of congressional Democrats to carry two voting rights bills across the finish line. Black activists are all too aware that the Democrats blew the opportunity to pass such legislation during the last two years when they controlled both chambers of Congress, even if by the slimmest of margins in the Senate. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA) and the For the People Act (FtPA) were each game-changing bills that would, in many ways, have blunted the massive efforts of Republicans at the state level to institute voter restrictions and other policies that result in the disproportionate disenfranchisement of African Americans, Latinos, young people, and working-class voters generally, all of whom tend to vote Democratic.

The JLVRAA would have restored the power of the Voting Rights Act to prevent the very passage of voter suppression laws taken away by the Supreme Court in 2013 in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. The FtPA would have banned partisan gerrymandering, expanded voting rights, and even supported statehood for Washington, D.C. Those bills were aimed specifically at countering the hundreds of voter-suppression proposals in Republican-controlled state legislatures.

In its final report, the January 6th committee actually blew a chance to highlight the attacks on Black voting rights. That report’s full-scale focus on the role of Donald Trump, who certainly was the key instigator of the insurrectionary events at the Capitol and its chief potential beneficiary, ended up obscuring the role of racism and white nationalism in the stop-the-steal movement that accompanied it and was so crucial to Republican election deniers. It should be remembered, though, that Trump’s central argument and the biggest lie of all was that Black, Latino, and Native American votes should be thrown out in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other urban areas in states like Arizona and Nevada where he was rejected by overwhelming numbers.

Unfortunately, the January 6th report didn’t sufficiently identify white supremacy as a driver of the “stop the steal” movement. Despite the prominence of certain Black faces among the Trump camp, including conservative organizer Ali Alexander, Trump campaign aid Katrina Pierson, and former Georgia legislator Vernon Jones, January 6th, in fact, represented the culmination of months of attacks on Black campaign workers, especially in Atlanta and Detroit. President Trump explicitly fired up white nationalists by name-checking and endangering individual African American election workers as spoilers of his alleged victory.

The movement in some democratic states to follow Trump’s autocratic playbook is now also metastasizing globally. In Brazil, on January 8th, thousands of followers of the defeated far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro attacked government buildings in Brasilia. Newly elected President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva has had to confront a surging wave of election deniers in the early days of his administration. And it’s important to note that Lula’s voters were disproportionately from the north and northeastern regions of Brazil, areas with deep concentrations of Black and indigenous communities.

In the United Kingdom, in 2022, the Conservative Party pushed through legislation that requires photo identification to vote in future elections beginning in May 2023. As with Republican legislation in Texas, student IDs will not suffice, creating a new obstacle for a constituency that tends to vote for the Labour Party. In a country where many working-class people don’t have drivers’ licenses and the state does not easily provide acceptable IDs, voter suppression is operative.

A democracy agenda that recognizes the racial elements of voter suppression and election denial is sorely needed. At the federal level, President Biden and Congressional Democrats should prioritize keeping the issue alive, while forcing Republicans to divulge their undemocratic hand, until the Democrats (hopefully) fully take back Congress in 2024.

At the state level, Democrats who have momentum from their victories in 2022 need to consolidate and strengthen voting-access laws and policies. In Michigan, for example, where the GOP had for years used its control of the state legislature to pass outlandish, racist laws that generated significant harm for Black communities, the recent Democratic sweep should mean a new voting day.

Former President Trump and the rest of his crew, as well as state versions of the same, are sadly enough in a significant, if grim, American tradition. Isn’t it time to focus more energy on how to stop their urge to suppress the Black vote?

Clarence Lusane: The Decline of Democracy

Phew! In the recent midterms, election deniers running nationwide for the post of secretary of state to oversee future elections not only lost across the board but did even worse than losers running for other state posts. And that’s certainly something to be thankful for.

Still, think about this: if I had mentioned the phrase “election denier” after the 2018 midterms, you wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what I was talking about. Now — can there be any question? — it’s part of the language and our political universe. After all, there were almost 300 (yes, you read that right!) election deniers running for office in 2022. So, give Donald Trump credit. If he’s done nothing else — and he’s done all too much else — he’s certainly lodged that term in our brains and our politics for, assumedly, forever and a day.

In other words, you can be relieved that the Republicans wavered instead of (red) waving in the recent elections and only captured the House of Representatives by a relatively slim margin. Still, whatever happens with his latest bid for the White House, thanks to The Donald, there can be no question that we’re in a new, potentially far more ominous political world. Today, in his first TomDispatch piece, Clarence Lusane, author of the just-published book Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy (next in line by my bedside for late night reading), considers just where, in the future, our former president might be taking us — or, put another way, how, win or lose personally, he intends to Trump us. There may be no more crucial question for this country than the one Lusane raises today. Yes, democracy does indeed seem to be on the decline, but is this really a prelude to a new all-American version of authoritarianism, or worse? Check him out and see what you think. Tom

Prelude to Authoritarianism? The MAGAfication of America

Just in case you didn’t notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation’s two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party-dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election. While voters did stop some of the most high-profile election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump true believers from taking office, all too many won seats at the congressional, state, and local levels.

Count on one thing: this movement isn’t going away. It won’t be defeated in a single election cycle and don’t think the authoritarian threat isn’t real either. After all, it now forms the basis for the politics of the Republican Party and so is targeting every facet of public life. No one committed to constitutional democracy should rest easy while the network of right-wing activists, funders, media, judges, and political leaders work so tirelessly to gain yet more power and implement a thoroughly undemocratic agenda.

This deeply rooted movement has surged from the margins of our political system to become the defining core of the GOP. In the post-World War II era, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964, from President Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, President Ronald Reagan, and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in its current Trumpian iteration, Republicans have long targeted democratic norms as impediments to establishing a neoliberal, race-based version of all-American authoritarianism. And that movement has been far too weakly opposed by far too many Democratic Party leaders and even some progressives. Don’t think of this phenomenon as right-wing conservativism either, but as a more dangerous, even violent movement whose ultimate aim is to overthrow liberal democracy. The American version of this type of electoral authoritarianism, anchored in Christian nationalist populism, has at its historic core a white nationalist pushback against the struggle for racial justice.

Liberal Democracy for Some, Racial Authoritarianism for Others

Liberal democracy had failed generations of African Americans and other people of color, as, of course, it did Native Americans massacred or driven from their ancestral lands. It failed African Americans and Latinos forced to work on chain gangs or lynched (without the perpetrators suffering the slightest punishment). It failed Asian Americans who were brutally sent to internment camps during World War II and Asians often explicitly excluded from immigration rosters.

The benefits of liberal democracy — rule of law, government accountability, the separation of powers, and the like — that were extended to most whites existed alongside a racial authoritarianism that denied fundamental rights and protections to tens of millions of Americans. The Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s defeated the longstanding, all-too-legal regime of racist segregationists and undemocratic, even if sometimes constitutional, authority. For the first time since the end of the Reconstruction era, when there was a concerted effort to extend voting rights, offer financial assistance, and create educational opportunities for those newly freed from slavery, it appeared that the nation was again ready to reckon with its racial past and present.

Yet, all too sadly, the proponents of autocratic governance did anything but disappear. In the twenty-first century, their efforts are manifest in the governing style and ethos of the Republican Party, its base, and the extremist organizations that go with it, as well as the far-right media, think tanks, and foundations that accompany them. At every level, from local school boards and city councils to Congress and the White House, authoritarianism and its obligatory racism continue to drive the GOP political agenda.

The violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, was just the high (or, depending on your views, low) point in a long-planned, multi-dimensional, hyper-conservative, white nationalist coup attempt engineered by President Donald Trump, his supporters, and members of the Republican Party. It was neither the beginning nor the end of that effort, just its most violent public expression — to date, at least. After all, Trump’s efforts to delegitimize elections were first put on display when he claimed that Barack Obama had actually lost the popular vote and so stolen the 2012 election, that it had all been a “total sham.”

During the 2016 presidential debates, Trump alone stated that he would not commit himself to support any other candidate as the party’s nominee, since — a recurring theme for him — he could only lose if the election were rigged or someone cheated. He correctly grasped that there would be no consequences to such norm-breaking behavior and falsely stated that he had only lost the Iowa caucus to Senator Ted Cruz because “he stole it.” After losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College in 2016, Trump incessantly complained that he would have won the popular vote, too, if the “millions” of illegal voters who cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton hadn’t been counted.

Donald Trump decisively lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, 74.2 million to 81.2 million in the popular vote and 232 to 306 in the Electoral College, leaving only one path to victory (other than insurrection) — finding a way to discount millions of black votes in key swing-state cities. From birtherism and Islamophobia to anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric, racism had propelled Trump’s ascendancy and his political future would be determined by the degree to which he and his allies could invalidate votes in the disproportionately Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, and Latino and Native American votes in Arizona and Nevada.

The GOP effort to disqualify Black, Latino, and Native American votes was a plot to create an illegitimate government, an unholy scheme that took an inescapably violent turn and led to an outcome for which the former president has yet to be held accountable. Sadly enough, the forces of authoritarianism were anything but dispatched by their defeat on January 6th. If anything, they were emboldened by the failure so far to hold responsible most of the agents who maneuvered the event into motion.

Democracy, Authoritarianism, or Fascism?

The last decade has exposed a severely wounded American democratic experiment. Consider it Donald Trump’s contribution to have revealed how spectacularly the guardrails of liberal democracy can fail if the breaking of laws, rules, and norms goes unchallenged or is sacrificed on the altar of narrow political gains. The most mendacious, cruel, mentally unstable, thin-skinned, vengeful, incompetent, narcissistic, bigoted individual ever elected to the presidency was neither an accident, nor an aberration. He was the inevitable outcome of decades of Republican pandering to anti-democratic forces and white nationalist sentiments.

Scholars have long debated the distinction between fascism and authoritarianism. Fascist states create an all-engulfing power that rules over every facet of political and social life. Elections are abolished; mass arrests occur without habeas corpus; all opposition media are shut down; freedoms of speech and assembly are curtailed; courts, if allowed to exist at all, rubber-stamp undemocratic state policies; while the military or brown shirts of some sort enforce an unjust, arbitrary legal system. Political parties are outlawed and opponents are jailed, tortured, or killed. Political violence is normalized, or at least tolerated, by a significant portion of society. There is little pretense of constitutional adherence or the constitution is formally suspended.

On the other hand, authoritarian states acknowledge constitutional authority, even if they also regularly ignore it. Limited freedoms continue to exist. Elections are held, though generally with predetermined outcomes. Political enemies aren’t allowed to compete for power. Nationalist ideology diverts attention from the real levers and venues of that power. Political attacks against alien “others” are frequent, while public displays of racism and ethnocentrism are common. Most critically, some enjoy a degree of democratic norms while accepting that others are denied them completely. During the slave and Jim Crow eras in this country — periods of racial authoritarianism affecting millions of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans — most whites in the South (and perhaps a majority outside of it) either tolerated or embraced the disavowal of democracy.

Under the right confluence of forces — a weakened system of checks and balances, populist rhetoric that taps into fears and perceived injustices, an anemic and divided opposition, deep social or racial divides, distrust of science and scientists, rampant anti-intellectualism, unpunished corporate and political malfeasance, and popularly accepted charges of mainstream media bias — a true authoritarian could indeed come to power in this country. And as history has shown, that could just be a prelude to full-blown fascism.

The warning signs could not be clearer.

While, in many ways, Trump’s administration was more of a kakistocracy — that is, “government by the worst and most unscrupulous people,” as scholar Norm Ornstein put it — from day one to the last nano-seconds of its tenure, his autocratic tendencies were all too often on display. His authoritarian appetites generated an unprecedented library of books issuing distress signals about the dangers to come.

Timothy Snyder’s 2017 bestseller On Tyranny was, for instance, a brief but remarkably astute early work on the subject. The Yale history professor provided a striking overview of tyranny meant to dispel myths about how autocrats or populists come to and stay in power. Although published in 2017, the work made no mention of Donald Trump. It was, however, clearly addressing the rise to power of his MAGA right and soberly warning the nation to stop him before it was too late.

As Snyder wrote of the institutions of our democracy, they “do not protect themselves… The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions — even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” He particularly cautioned against efforts to link the police and military to partisan politics, as Trump first did in 2020 when his administration had peaceful protesters attacked by the police and National Guard in Lafayette Square across from the White House so that the president could take a stroll to a local church. He similarly warned about letting private security forces, often with violent tendencies (as when Trump’s security team would eject demonstrators from his political rallies) gain quasi-official or official status.

The period 2015 to 2020 certainly represented the MAGAfication of the United States and launched this country on a potential path toward future authoritarian rule by the GOP.

The Vulnerabilities of Democracy

Journalists have also been indispensable in exposing the democratic vulnerabilities of the United States. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen has, for instance, been prolific and laser-focused in calling out the hazards of creeping authoritarianism and of Trump’s “performing fascism.” She writes that while he may not himself have fully grasped the concept of fascism, “In his intuition, power is autocratic; it affirms the superiority of one nation and one race; it asserts total domination; and it mercilessly suppresses all opposition.”

While Trump is too lazy, self-interested, and intellectually undisciplined to be a coherent ideologue, he surrounded himself with and took counsel from those who were, including far-right zealots and Trump aides Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller. Bannon functioned as Trump’s Goebbels-ish propagandist, having cut his white nationalist teeth as founder and executive chair of the extremist Breitbart News media operation. In 2018, he told a gathering of European far-right politicians, fascists, and neo-Nazis, “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”

Someone who knows the former president better than most, his niece Mary Trump, all too tellingly wrote that her uncle “is an instinctive fascist who is limited by his inability to see beyond himself.” For her, there is no question the title fits. As she put it, “[A]rguing about whether or not to call Donald a fascist is the new version of the media’s years-long struggle to figure out if they should call his lies, lies. What’s more relevant now is whether the media — and the Democrats — will extend the label of fascism to the Republican Party itself.”

Mainstreaming Extremism and Democracy’s Decline

Given these developments, some scholars and researchers argue that the nation’s democratic descent may already have gone too far to be fully stopped. In its Democracy Report 2020: Autocratization Surges — Resistance Grows

✎ EditSign, the Varieties of Democracy (VDem) Project, which assesses the democratic health of nations globally, summarized the first three years of Trump’s presidency this way: “[Democracy] has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy.” Referring to its Liberal Democracy Index scale, it added, “The United States of America declines substantially on the LDI from 0.86 in 2010 to 0.73 in 2020, in part as a consequence of President Trump’s repeated attacks on the media, opposition politicians, and the substantial weakening of the legislature’s de facto checks and balances on executive power.”

These findings were echoed in The Global State of Democracy 2021, a report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance that argued, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”

The failure of Donald Trump’s eternally “stolen election” coup attempt and the presidency of Joe Biden may have put off the further development of an authoritarian state, but don’t be fooled. Neither the failure of the January 6th insurrection nor the disappointments suffered in the midterm elections have deterred the ambitions of the GOP’s fanatics. The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, however slim, will undoubtedly unleash a further tsunami of extremist actions not just against the Democrats, but the American people.

Purges of Democrats from House committees, McCarthyite-style hearings and investigations, and an all-out effort to rig the system to declare whoever emerges as the GOP’s 2024 presidential candidate the preemptive winner will mark their attempt to rule. Such actions will be duplicated — and worse — in states with Republican governors and legislatures, as officials there bend to the autocratic urges of their minority but fervent white base voters. They will be supported by a network of far-right media, donors, activists, and Trump-appointed judges and justices.

In response, defending the interests of working people, communities of color, LGBTQ individuals and families, and other vulnerable sectors of this society will mean alliances between progressives, liberals, and, in some instances, disaffected and distraught anti-Trump, pro-democracy Republicans. There are too many historical examples of authoritarian and fascist takeovers while the opposition remained split and in conflict not to form such political alliances. Nothing is more urgent at this moment than the complete political defeat of an anti-democratic movement that is, all too sadly, still on the march.