What Trump’s Victory Means for Democracy

There is an old adage in political science: Dictators always lie about the past, but they always tell the truth about the future.

It sounds strange, but spiring authoritarians are usually quite open about the horrific things they plan to do. I know there has been what I’m going to call…an “unusual” volume of Hitler talk this campaign. But just once more, for the sake of nostalgia, Hitler was quite open about his plans for what became the Holocaust. Hell, he wrote an entire book about it, with, funnily enough, Mein Kampf being the only book Donald Trump’s first wife recalls him ever reading.

Others, such as Lenin and Stalin and Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, etc. were also quite candid about their disdain for democracy and the rule of law.

This all seems very counter-intuitive. Why would you actually tell people you were going to take away their rights, their voice and control of their own lives? That would seem to make Dukakis’s decision to wear a giant army helmet while riding a tank look like a stroke of genius.

But here is the ugly truth. While there are a few exceptions involving special circumstances, generally speaking, these autocrats and dictators are popular. Many of them, including Hitler, were democratically elected, AFTER promising all the violence and oppression they eventually brought with them.

While liberal Democrats like me find the idea of bending society to the capricious whim of one individual to be odious, human history suggests that I am not in the majority. Kings and sultans and emperors and Fuhrers are far more numerous and long-lasting than Presidents or Prime-Ministers.

I don’t pretend to understand all of the psychology behind this. But I think it has to do with safety and predictability. Dictators promise to keep you safe, not only from foreign enemies, that’s a given. But more importantly, from domestic adversaries. At the end of the day, you are far more likely to feel threatened by those who want you to pay different tax rates, or send your kids to different kinds of schools, or those you see on the street who don’t look or talk or act like you, than by the abstraction of a foreign invasion.

Democracy has had a good run in America. But recently, I think we can all admit that it’s become extremely messy, contentious and paralysed. Almost nothing gets done anymore and the daily on-line and in-person vitriol seems a high price to pay for such puny progress. I mean, we can’t even decide what dead general should be sitting on a bronze horse in front of the local government building anymore, let alone solve big problems like stagnant wages, lack of opportunity or dangerous schools.

And of course, the worst part of democracy for many people is that sometimes, you lose. This means that someone who the TV commercials tell you is a lazy, stupid, corrupt Communist who hates America and is coming for your kids gets to make decisions about your life. Who needs that?

That’s why I think that this election was, at it’s core, an embrace of a more ordered system where “shit gets done and people I don’t like get fucked with. And what do I care about the niceties of democracy? What good has all of that done me? I’m living in a shithole, I can’t pay my bills, and I can’t understand the cashier at the grocery store because she doesn’t speak English. And if I don’t refer to the lunch lady as “they”, I might lose my job”.

I don’t see the world this way. But maybe that’s why people I vote for keep losing elections.

Without re-litigating everything, Donald Trump has made no secret about what he’s all about. He sent a violent mob to the capitol to overturn the last presidential election. He has openly called for using the military to go after his enemies, he said he wants to shut down newspapers and news networks that print stories he finds unflattering. He plans to be a dictator on day one and warns (promises?) that it’s going to be “nasty” and “bloody”. You can’t accuse Trump of sugar-coating it.

And the fact is that Trump comes into office with far fewer constraints than most democratically-elected wanna-be autocrats do. Our institutions are already weakened to the point of near collapse. The Supreme Court has said he can never be punished for any crime he commits “in his role as President”.

Some talk about the theoretical checks and balances of our system, but those are largely a mirage. When Trump orders Hillary arrested or Saturday Night Live taken off the air, who is going to stand up to him? Lindsey Graham? Josh Hawley? Speaker Johnson? Sam Alito? Who is going to resign rather than implement an illegal order? Steve Bannon? Steven Miller? General Flynn? JD Vance? Is there any line that can’t be crossed? Will anything be more sacred than Donald Trump’s latest wish?

Since this is the day after the election, I haven’t had the luxury of time to reflect deeply. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that things are going to get very dark, very fast. And we can’t say that Donald Trump is breaking his promises when this happens. It is exactly what the voters asked for.