The Early Stage of Authoritarianism is Upon Us

We are not naming what is happening because it is happening so quickly.

ICE agents in Los Anges. Image via Facebook.

by Julie Roginsky

I was visiting Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial museum, on Monday when I saw a sign with a quote from Meir Weiseltier, an Israeli essayist. It reads, in part:

What was the word “holocaust”

Two years before the Holocaust?

It was a word for a great upheaval

Something with a tremendous din.

The Holocaust was the direct result of a failure of imagination by well-meaning people who could not wrap their minds around the human capacity for harm. And it is an abject lesson for Americans today, who have been trained over so many generations to venerate the strength of our constitution that too many cannot imagine how easily it is tossed aside.

What we are tolerating in our own country as our government dehumanizes millions of people, rips families apart in the name of “border security” and threatens anyone who does not go along with the program also speaks to a lack of imagination about what will come next.

We are not naming what is happening because it is happening so quickly. The mind cannot comprehend that everything we long believed about ourselves — that we are a nation of laws and not men, that we are a constitutional republic, that we cannot possibly elect a despot because “the people” rule here — is crumbling before our eyes.

And yet, what is going on in the United States at this very moment is a sprint towards authoritarianism. Whatever we long considered norms have shattered in just a few months by a president who believes it is his divine right to rule by fiat. No one is stopping him – not the legislative branch, which is in thrall to him; not the judicial branch, which has rolled out the red carpet for him; not the media, which is cowed by him.

Power is all that matters to Donald Trump — that and avenging himself on anyone he believes wronged him. And that “anyone” is the American people, who rejected him at the polls in 2016 by not providing him with a majority of the popular vote and rejecting him again in 2020. Whatever he says publicly, he knows that the election four years ago was not stolen, which means that the American people need to pay for kicking him to the curb.

Local law enforcement has been supplanted, at the request of a president who has been eagerly awaiting this moment since his first term and ensured that no one would stop him from unleashing the military on his own people this time around. Marines who have trained to protect the United States against foreign enemies are now being forced to deploy against their fellow Americans in Los Angeles, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Masked federal agents wearing no identifying insignia are getting into scrums with members of Congress in New Jersey and it is the members of Congress, and not the agents, who are getting indicted as a warning to others.

Ominously, Trump has threatened that anyone protesting his military parade/birthday party in Washington this Saturday will “be met with very big force.” The First Amendment, it seems, is no longer worth the paper it is written on.

Meanwhile, the administration is planning to transfer at least 9,000 citizens of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Ireland, Germany and other allies to Guantánamo Bay without notifying their home countries if our government determines that they are in the country illegally. When we treat our friends this way, how do we expect them to treat us in our time of need?

This, of course, is perfectly acceptable in a country where the Supreme Court has determined that whatever the president does in his official capacity is not illegal. If Trump were to send Seal Team Six to Los Angeles tomorrow against his own constituents, Justice John Roberts has ensured that nothing will come of it. A compliant corporate media will bend over backwards to explain both sides of the ensuing carnage. And obtuse protesters will miss the forest for the trees by wearing keffiyehs and chanting about globalizing the Intifada, rather than organizing themselves into a movement that prioritizes preserving American democracy. Because once democracy is gone, so will their right to wear a keffiyeh or anything else that runs afoul of Trump’s mood.

What does the word “authoritarianism” mean now, as all this is happening? It is a term pundits or academics throw around but it is not something most Americans believe applies to them. And yet what Trump has already gotten away with in the few short months he has been back in power proves that we are on a road from which it will be very hard to get off — the same road that in other countries has led to an abrogation of civil rights, to destruction and even to death.

More Americans should visit Yad Vashem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum so that we no longer suffer from a lack of imagination. Two years before the Holocaust, it was impossible for the human mind to imagine that it could happen — even though the signs all pointed to it soon becoming a reality. Two years ago, it was impossible to imagine that the United States military would be deployed against the very people its servicemen and women have been trained to defend — even though the signs all pointed to it becoming a reality if Trump were to win. Two years from now, it will be impossible to remember that we once believed our democracy would always hold.

Do not turn away from what is happening now. This is not about undocumented migrants, even if you believe they should all be deported. This is about veering off the cliff before our democracy evaporates at the hands of a man with no guardrails around him. The early stage of authoritarianism is upon us and, as has happened so often throughout history, its progress happens slowly — and then all at once. Unless we name it, we will never be able to stop it before it’s too late.

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