Totalitarian Creep: Authoritarians Poison Public Discourse, Destroy Democratic Institutions, and Use the Status Quo as Cover While Consolidating Power
“I think it’s a joke, I guess,” said Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas. “I don’t know how else to interpret it.”
A joke.
The President of the United States of America floating the possibility of delaying an election.
Of course, the usual pundits and media figures dismissed it as well. They pointed to the Constitution, to laws, to precedent, saying Donald Trump didn’t have the authority and that it could never happen. As has been the case for the past four years, people obsessed with the status quo and still blinded by the myth of American Exceptionalism and the inherent merit of the office of the presidency have continued to give Trump the benefit of the doubt even when he so obviously does not deserve it.
In Trump’s tenure he has destroyed one democratic institution after another. It is his inherent nature to do so. His corruption is so deep and so natural that he cannot help but infect everything around him. He has turned the federal government into a clearinghouse for blatant corruption. He has embraced fascism and authoritarianism around the world. In handling a generational pandemic, he has played politics and carried out an abominable genocide that is almost too horrific to even contemplate. Meanwhile, even Fox News, the Republican Party, and the American Right are struggling to understand the monster they have unleashed upon the world.
What mainstream pundits, analysts, and politicians fail to understand is that our rules, our laws, and our Constitution are constructs that are anything but immutable. They’re agreed upon and only as strong as our willingness to follow them and fight for them. Trump has made clear in four years what political scientists and philosophers have been trying to warn about their entire lives. All it takes to corrupt and destroy our institutions is bad faith, an actor who behaves without duty or conscience.
Trump is not a planner or a schemer or a conspirator. There is no written down roadmap to authoritarianism. This is his inclination, his instinct. As a born-and-bred authoritarian his attacks on democratic institutions are natural and an offshoot of his narcissistic, insecure, damaged personality. He is able to find the weak spots of our institutions because he flails about in desperate search for advantages and his own safety.
This truth, coupled with a radicalized base that is prepped and salivating at the thought of violence, not to mention a rise in far-right extremism, could create a perfect storm within the country that would overwhelm our institutions, destroy precedent, shred the law, and override the Constitution. This has happened in one nation after another. It is not enough to stand to the side and expect the United States to deflect these threats like an immune system.
The myth of American Exceptionalism that has given Trump so much cover and allowed people of conscience to look the other way can very well be our undoing. The threat is very real and every one of these missives from Trump only makes the possibility of disaster more and more possible. This is how it happens. It floats into the discourse, poisons the conversation, festers into reality, and gains power as people who know better say nothing and rest on their laurels.
There’s nothing funny about this.
This isn’t a joke.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
