The Future is Autocracy

As of this writing, the November 5 election is still a few days away.  And it's not looking great for the republic.  I'll stand by my original predictions, but if anything, I'm even more bearish about Harris's chances based on the tea leaves.  The biggest tea leaf of all is from the state of Nevada, the only state in the country that, because of unique geography, gives us meaningful data related to early voting.  Registered Republicans are outnumbering Democrats by nearly 5% there in early voting.  There's no precedent for this in a Presidential cycle and spells probable disaster for Harris.  And Nevada is one of the only swing states I predicted to go for Harris!  It's very hard to believe the Democrats' problems are gonna be contained entirely within Nevada state lines.

But let's say that Kamala Harris manages to land the inside straight and squeak out a narrow victory next week.  Trump has hinted at a "secret plan" hatched with the Speaker of the House to steal it from her.  All it would take is a Republican Governor or legislature from a state Harris won refusing to submit their slate of electors by the December 11 deadline.  Mike Johnson could insist the electoral votes be processed without delay even without every state having submitted them.  With fewer than 270 electoral votes for either candidate, the election would be punted to the House of Representatives and Trump would win.  

Trump couldn't do this in 2020 because Nancy Pelosi was Speaker, but there's no reason whatsoever to believe our republic's guardrails would hold and he wouldn't get away with it this time.  Does anybody really believe either Johnson or Trump's Supreme Court supermajority would hesitate to stave off a homegrown junta if that was their only path to power?  In effect, Harris probably needs a victory of at least 290 electoral votes to avoid having her victory stripped from her by the kind of maneuver one would expect in a place like Senegal.

Of course, the odds are that Trump won't even have to cheat to win.  His victory would constitute the quickest and easiest route to an autocratic future.  "If Trump was gonna behave like Hitler, why didn't we see it in his first term?" is the inevitable half-witted, context-free counterpoint lobbed at us by his groupies, hilariously attempting to airbrush from history his ruthless attempts to overturn an election he lost and to incite a mob to stampede the Capitol with the objective of murdering Trump's own Vice-President.  But I'll play along and give two very obvious answers to their ignorant inquiry.

First, Trump knew he had to face the public for re-election in his first term, which imposed some limitations on his instincts to proceed with a host of broadly unpopular measures.  Facing the voters will no longer be a moderating force on Trump in a second term. 

Second, and most important, Trump did not yet have license for unlimited criminality without consequence in his first term.  As of July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court granted him that license by decreeing that Presidents can never be prosecuted for any "official act" undertaken during their Presidential term.  Even if the country avoids a second Trump term, this court ruling fast-tracks us to the inevitability of authoritarianism down the road and I can predict with unwavering certitude that it will go down as the worst Supreme Court ruling in American history.

Beyond that, Trump is a sociopath....and mentally ill people aren't known for self-corrective behavior as they approach their sunset years or when they're bequeathed a position of power.  Trump's behavior on the campaign trail illuminates the extent of his sociopathy, specifically the cheap thrill that he clearly gets by pushing boundaries to see what he can get away with.  He knows that his groupies will twist themselves into pretzels defending his every overheated utterance, and he enjoys watching the spectacle.  This was abundantly clear nine years ago when Trump bragged he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters.  Recall that 30 years ago, O.J. Simpson had bragged for years that he could murder Nicole and get away it....and then he murdered Nicole and got away with it.  

This is what sociopaths do.  If Trump promises the country he's gonna behave like a dictator, believe him!  If Trump repeatedly speculates on how his groupies won't abandon him no matter what he does, expect that he has every intention of following through, watching said groupies continue to defend his rising tide of autocratic behavior while cosplaying with copies of the U.S. Constitution in their hand every step of the way.

Trump's malignant narcissism is an extreme case of the most dangerous possible person to lead a country, but it's also not unique.  Aspiring autocrats tend to be ambitious, which is why history books are so full of diabolical strongmen who seize control of governments and do terrible things.  Trump's rise proves that the United States is not immune to the allure of the worst kind of autocratic personality, but it wouldn't even require someone as cartoonish as Trump to spiral our democracy into something more sinister.  If Harris manages to win decisively and become the 47th President, we're still gonna be uniquely vulnerable to the wiles of a budding madman based on electoral realignment patterns.

At one level, I think it's a positive development that so many young people are choosing to bypass the racket that is contemporary higher education after watching it foist a lifetime of debt on the generation before them with dubious benefits.  At least in the short term, I think it's a net positive for Gen Zers to vote with their feet and force these colleges and universities to clean up their business models, but the political trend visible with young adults, especially young men, eschewing higher education is alarming.  It's reasonable to argue that college professors and administrators had too heavy of a hand in filling their heads with propaganda in the past, but even less reliable news sources have occupied that informational vacuum in our fragmented, digitized world.  We have a generation of young men whose idea of "news" are TikTok headlines and random bros with podcasts who think they have the world figured out from their parents' basements.  

Furthermore, colleges teach critical thinking skills, or at least they're supposed to.  It's no accident that the Trump realignment breaks down so precisely along education lines.  The more education one has, the more likely they are to understand the complexity of geopolitical matters....and the less likely they'll be to embrace simplistic solutions such as massive tariffs, border walls, and pulling out of NATO.  And the less education one has, the more likely they'll be to buy into a con man's assurance of his business prowess because he played a successful businessman on a TV show 20 years ago.  Watching man-on-the-street interviews of noncollege voters this cycle and seeing how many people accept autocracy as a small price to pay for hypothetically cheaper cartons of eggs has convinced me we have a problem bigger than Trump, and that our vulnerability is assured of deepening amidst a void of either higher education or a shared media environment.

The same generation of young people, especially men, appears to be singularly motivated by standing in strident opposition to absolutely anything they consider representative of "the elite".  Earlier this year, I was getting an oil change and listened as a cluster of 20-something mechanics casually muse "since we can't drink Bud Light anymore...." as though a boycott of the brand over its ad campaign featuring a transgender influencer was being undertaken as part of a collective tribal backlash that didn't even require any sort of critical reflection.  "Owning the libs" is no longer just a hobby, it's a lifestyle....maybe even a religion.  This makes them putty in the hands of any demagogic autocrat.

The Democrats' astonishingly narrow-minded conceit of the last 10 years that rising racial and ethnic diversity ensured a more favorable political and cultural environment for them are poised to get a crushing reality check, whether it happens next week or when Trump's heir apparent runs down the road.  Neither the color of one's skin nor the country of origin of one's ancestors insulates them from the deceptions of autocrats with the misinformation landscape and polarized culture we're stuck with now.  And while I probably shouldn't read so much into the results of the Nickelodeon Kids' Poll released last week, keep in mind that nearly 50% of today's schoolchildren are nonwhite, and Harris managed only a paltry 52-48 victory over Trump.  The logic of the Trump-supporting children:  he's funny, tough, and they understand his ideas.  Doesn't sound much different than the logic of the adults who support him, amirite?  And perhaps a good warning sign of the consequences of arrested development.

That leads me to the most pernicious assumption of autocracy apologists....the notion that America will persevere either way because, well because we're America!  It's a pretty safe bet that the electorates of other nations who turned over their keys to the hands of an omnipotent autocrat were confident everything would be okay for them too.  And it's a pretty safe bet that the lieutenants and underlings of previous budding autocrats never expected they could be easily compelled to ride their coattails in pursuit of power and prevent them from fighting for democratic principles they had long defended. We've already witnessed how nearly every member of the Republican Party has allowed themselves to be co-opted into Trump's toxic orbit with almost zero resistance.  Lust for power will have the same corrupting influence on the supposed good actors needed to stand in the way of any future autocrat just as we've seen for the last nine years with Trump.

Specifically, the willingness to hand over the country to an unapologetically malignant madman even amidst favorable fundamentals for the incumbent party heightens my alarm about how much more vulnerable we'd be if the country really was in a precarious situation.  So even if Kamala Harris stitches together a win with an unwieldy and incoherent 1976-style coalition next week, there's no doubt in my mind that our 1980 revolution awaits us, and it will be an autocratic one.  The only question is whether this election is our 1976 moment....or if the last election was.