Democracy Died This Weekend. I Don't Know if It Can Come Back

 

When I read this article on how Hitler undermined democracy in just 53 days, I was actually mildly reassured.  Hitler's actions did not look like anything Trump could duplicate.  Hitler had his band of Brown Shirts ready to enforce his will.  Trump has his Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, but they were suppressed during the Biden Administration and will not reconstitute over night.  Germany made it possible for the federal government to move in and take over state police ministries.  US police power is much too diffuse to allow such a thing.  And then there was the Reichstag Fire -- so convenient to Hitler that many people suspected that the Nazis were behind it.  Current historians believe that the Nazis were not involved in the fire, though obviously they exploited the occasion.  It was the fire that made Hitler's seizure of power possible.  So I suppose if our Capitol burns down, anything is possible, but it seems unlikely.

In any event, I never believed the Trump was Hitler.  Putin, Erdogan, Orban, or even Venezuela's Hugo Chavez seemed like more likely role models.  And all of them took time to subvert democracy and establish a dictatorship.

Traditionally, the way anti-democratic parties have subverted democracy has been to take over the power ministries -- army and police -- and subvert them.  Hence the anxiety (which I share) over appointing Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, Matt Gaetz (or Pam Bondi, though she is somewhat less scary) as Attorney General, and Kash Patel as Director of the FBI.  I am still fearful in this regard, but it will take time -- time for Trump to overreach and resistance to build.

This was not my biggest fear, mostly because of the extremely diffuse nature of police power in the US and the strong tradition against the use of military force for law enforcement.  My bigger fear of was of using the administrative state to shut down the opposition.  For instance, Congressional Republicans could summon lobbyists and tell them that if their clients did not cease all contributions to Democratic parties, candidates, and non-profits by a certain date, no bill they proposed would be considered.  This is legal, so far as I can tell, and was a reason I considered it important for Democrats to control at least one house of Congress.  The Trump Administration could tell all federal contractors that if they donated to any Democratic party, candidate, or non-profit, their contract would be terminated.  I anticipated contractors challenging this as a violation of various federal procurement statutes, Trump challenging the statutes as an unconstitutional infringement on his power, and today's Supreme Court as ruling in his favor.  I also foresaw the IRS withdrawing the tax exempt status of every liberal or left wing non-profit, effectively shutting them down.  And I foresaw them next targeting companies that advertised in unfriendly media, and donations to college funds, although I though this last would generate too much pushback to succeed. 

Well, the Administration is young, but so far I see no signs of this.  (I really hope no one with power in Trumpland reads my blog or it might give them ideas!).

I also recognized that the diffuse nature of our political power had a serious weakness -- money.  I foresaw the Trump Administration using the threat of loss of funds to bring defiant state and local governments into line and thought that they should prioritize planning for such a contingency.

What I did not foresee is what has actually happened -- coup by a small number of computer engineers  taking over the Office of Personnel Management seize control of the Treasury Department payments system and gain power to shut off any government funding they wish or lock any government employees out of the system.  It sounds like a science fiction movie about an evil computer taking over the world.  In this case, it is an evil computer operator taking over the government.