P.G. Smith Author

I really don’t like projecting doom. Ordinarily I am no Casandra, but lately I feel like our democracy is teetering on a dangerous precipice.

There are many books that illustrate the warning signs I want to discuss today. Here are a few novels I recommend: Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America, and I Married a Communist; Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here; or Peter Ross Range, The Unfathomable Ascent. And of course, there are many, many non-fiction accounts of how democracy gets undermined and overturned.

If you read these books, it is clear that certain warning signs are present in every case. I want to talk about those red flags because we are witnessing them right now, right here, in the flesh, in our own country, the land of the free, that couldn’t possibly ever be a dictatorship–could it? No!!

1. Consolidation of Power. This is an absolute prerequisite to authoritarian power. Every good dictator must consolidate all power into one office embodied in himself.

In the US power is explicitly divided into three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. The theory (as we all learn in fifth grade) is that each branch is supposed to balance and check the other two branches. In addition, the First Amendment creates the fourth estate of a free press to block the power of government to restrict access to independent information by the public. Our founding fathers did not leave the distribution of power to chance. They had just fought a war against an absolute monarch and didn’t want anything like that to happen here.

So, how are these structural safeguards holding up lately? Our president has complete control over Congress–so complete that he has usurped their power at will and later ha them validate his actions. He has also taken control of the DOJ, FBI, CIA, ICE, and DHS. All heads of these departments answer directly to him. There is no independence. The Attorney General has described herself as “his lawyer.”

He has replaced all military officials with generals and lesser officials who will obey his orders without question. He may not yet control all the courts, but courts as such, have no enforcement mechanism, so he regularly disregards their orders with impunity.

Clearly, step one is complete. Despite our lovely words on paper, nominally followed, all those who hold high offices in all branches of government directly answer to one man. It’s a done deal.

2. Control of Elections. Once power is consolidated, elections must be controlled to ensure that total consolidated power will continue in perpetuity.

I don’t know how you felt about all this consolidation (and usurpation) of power, or if you paid any attention to it. We are all busy with our lives, after all. I didn’t like it, but I figures we voted for it, so we are stuck with it until the next election. At least in 2026, if most of us don’t like what Congress is doing, we can vote them out and put in people who will be independent. That’s how democracy works, right?

Because of this view, the recent explicit gerrymandering of Texas hit me very hard. It demonstrates that the president, with the cooperation of some state governments, has moved on to stage two, intent on rigging as many voter districts as possible. As I noted in my last post, seven deep red states are considering doing the same as Texas to ensure a Republican majority and the continued absolute power of the president. Five blue states are now responding by considering their own gerrymanders to counter the other side.

It’s hard to say how this will come out or what anyone can do about it. I won’t speculate here. I will only say that if we cannot vote people out of office, we no longer have a democracy and cannot call ourselves a free country. Most countries have elections today–China, Russia, Hungary, El Salvador. They just don’t mean anything. If our elections are rigged, we will be the same as any other dictatorship.

3. Silencing Opposition/Controlling Information. If power is consolidated and elections are fixed in advance, there is one final factor to secure: what people can say about it. Critics and protesters must be neutralized.

The US is the flagship of free speech, the touchstone, the gold standard. The US protects every sort of speech it is possible to protect, short of actual violence. (Violence in books and movies is totally protected, along with pornography an explicit sexual content of any imaginable sort.)

This expansive standard has been limited over the past 50 years by a doctrine called hate speech. Legally, this has been very sparingly applied, but culturally the consequences have been more widespread, and highly controversial. And what is the ground for objecting to it? It limits free speech. Our commitment to this norm is deep and solid. Our usual response to speech that angers or offends us is not to restrict it, but to drown it out. We respond to speech with more speech. Could anything undermine this commitment? I find it hard to imagine.

Yet there are warning signs. Universities have been threatened with defunding unless they meet the president’s demands about what they teach and to whom. Their curricula should be consistent with his objectives–which is to say, not critical of them. More indirectly, but with the president’s blessing, some state governments have engaged in setting curricula and purging libraries and reading lists. The rationale is that children should not be taught historical events that might undermine their patriotism and faith in the pure goodness or exceptionalism of America. This is thought control of the worst sort, indoctrination worthy of China or Russia.

Foreign students have had their green cards or student visas summarily revoked and then arrested as illegal aliens! Their crimes? Participating in peaceful protests or writing opinions in their student newspapers. How’s that for a chilling effect on any other potential protester or critic?

Just last week John Bolton, a prominent conservative critic of the president had his home raided by the FBI and DOJ on very vague grounds. Steven Colbert, a famous comedian and caustic critic of Trump was forced out of his popular late-night show by financial threats made against CBS. Bolton and Colbert will not be silenced because they are too famous and powerful, but how many other less powerful writers and entertainers will be? The point of such actions is to demonstrate that it is dangerous to your career and wellbeing to criticize the president, and to chill criticism. These are all clear warning signs of intent to control what we are free to say and what our children may learn. Those are not good signs.

So that’s how it looks to me. It doesn’t look good. Is anyone else worried about this? And those of you who are not, could you tell me why you are not? What am I missing? Am I over-reacting? Isn’t this just like what happened in Hungary and Turkey not so long ago? Shouldn’t we all be talking about this? Can’t we find some common ground? Surely, we all want free and fair elections–don’t we? I’d love to hear your calm and thoughtful views.