Elected Dictator
What if Americans popularly elected a dictator and no one worried? Granted: it can feel like you’re living under a dictator when the other team’s guy is in charge—especially if you are devoted to a political team. That always struck me as an adequate simplification, even if not satisfying: dictatorship in the American context is in the eye of the beholder. The observation expresses the feeling of unfairness that others are in power and doing things the people disapprove of—“the people” as a stand-in for the person speaking.
At Discourse Magazine, Timothy Sandefur reviews a recent book in the genre of denunciations of Trump/MAGA, an effort to which I am not at all hostile. The lament is familiar: not only was Trump an illegitimate populist, but he heralded the fascistic, authoritarian end of democracy in America, coming about any day now. The reviewed book is Democracy Unmoored by Samuel Issacharoff (2023).
The book examines populist authoritarianism, tracing it back as far as 1945. Sandefur points out that there is no obvious reason to limit the search there, since Franklin D. Roosevelt was himself arguably a populist authoritarian: he broke the two-term tradition and effectively made himself president for life; he set up lawmaking federal agencies by executive decree and appointed their members; he exceeded his constitutional constraints arguing the document was a needlessly restrictive relic of the horse-and-buggy era. The story sounds familiar enough.
Setting aside the identity of America’s first populist authoritarian, Sandefur points out that the populist’s appeal derives from a failure of elected government to safeguard humble law-abiding citizens against the breakdown in civic order:
[Take, for instance] the nationwide riots of 2020, which helped set the stage for the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol Building. In virtually none of his long passages on the breakdown of what he calls “government delivery of social goods” does [Issacharoff] focus on simple law enforcement. Yet history reveals that fascism grows in proportion to government’s failure to protect citizens from theft and assault. Whether it be the Brownshirts of Weimar or the Black Panthers in Oakland, such movements typically start as vigilante groups, gaining popular support by appearing as protectors of the public.
The failure, or refusal, of local officials to take action against riots in Minnesota, Portland, Seattle, Wisconsin, etc.—or even such precursors as the violent protests on Inauguration Day 2017, or the storming of the Capitol during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings—certainly lent credence to populist claims that democratic institutions had broken down and that only a populist strongman could restore justice.
This sounds familiar, too.
Historically, the stock market crash and deep recession during the Hoover administration (1929—1933) might also have represented the breakdown in civic order that fueled FDR’s populist campaign at a time when the southern populist demagogue Huey Long was also considered an alternative. Populists like Long and Roosevelt claimed that they could personally fix such things by force of will and personality, if necessary by setting aside the niceties of America’s traditional governance and the constitutional order. They alone could fix it, we might say.
The fixes since Roosevelt have involved taking power from elected officials and handing it over to the administrative state, where no one can be voted out of office. Over time, this lack of accountability frustrates citizens. Frustrated citizens are more likely to succumb to the appeal of demagogues promising to clean out the Augean stables, drain the swamps, and so on. The elected officials in lower offices don’t matter all that much, after all, since they don’t have any areas of decision making.
It is the office of the presidency that has become to big and powerful, it seems to me. The concentrated power attracts Dark Triad personality types, who are the hardest to constrain at all.
As a birthday bonus, some music for commenter BikerChick:
Happy LX!
The Spanish choir's performance at the 55+ apartment complex was a big hit. All my ladies want to move there now.
Cool video.
Happy Cinco De Mayo Day!
( It is also Space Day and Hoagie Day and Chipolte Day..)
The only news I have is that I have my laptop back and it is way easier to do computer stuff, and it works like a charm...
I stopped reading the comments when the liberals are evil people stuff started, I had to read this crap on mothership and it wound me up, so didn't need a repeat.
And I am tired of being blamed for any bad behaviors anyone even remotely on my side ( which since I am not a dem, I don't really have one, other than being liberal) ever does, while everyone on the right are just angels...
Or hypocrites who out of one side of their mouth say they don't hate libs, then say mean things about them
Sigh