Trump, The Autocrat, Continued

November’s election has very high stakes: the nature and, indeed, the continued existence of the American republic, at least in the form that we’ve known it for the past century. Around the world, the United States under a second Trump presidency would cease to be seen as a leading democracy, or as a leader of anything at all.

As noted in the prior installment, the shrill sirens of Progressivist alarmism just do not pass the litmus test of intellectual integrity and common sense reasoning. It behooves to cite another polemic, simply for the sheer stupidity of its arguments.

And if you think none of this can happen in America, please read the history of Hungary or Venezuela, stable democracies that were destroyed by extremist autocrats.

Beyond the typical wearying histrionics, the prized phrase, which provoked disdain and dismissal of this screed, was “stable democracies.” I confess to only having general knowledge of the history of Hungary and even less with regard to Venezuela. However, “stable” is not a characterization that I would ascribe to either polity.

Hungary was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918), and before that, a Kingdom in its own right, although part of the Hapsburg Empire. Following WW1 and the collapse of the Hapsburg dynasty, independent Hungary was first a short-lived democracy, soon overthrown by the Communists, which was soon overthrown by a de facto monarchy (military regent) from 1921–46. Soviet Russia held it thereafter until 1990. Thus, at most, Hungary has been a democracy for 33 years in the last five+ centuries, hardly a society with a democratic tradition and established mindset.

The status of “stable” for any political construct, I contend, requires not only an arbitrary number of years, although it should not be less than a century. One enters a grey area with anything less than that. It should have proven ability to endure and overcome serious internal stresses and external threats, such as the first Civil War for America.

More importantly, the political regime has acquired an overwhelming degree of moral legitimacy among the populace. This was sorely missing in the Weimar Republic (1919–33) and in 1990s Russia. In the case of America, republican-democratic forms of governance were already widely accepted by the populace from its founding, mostly because of prior experience during the colonial period.

It is not that America cannot fall into despotism. It is that fragile polities, which have not proven their mettle, serve as poor comparisons. For America, I have always used the Roman Republic, which achieved a remarkable level of civic cohesion and peace from the establishment of the Twelve Tables (c. 449 BCE) to the assassination of Tiberius Gracchi (133 BCE), a cohesion and peace, much remarked and admired by the Greek, Polybius. Because the Republic had acquired such legitimacy, it required another century before it was fully overthrown.

In the case of Venezuela and most South American countries which achieved independence from Spain circa 1820s with the furtive assistance of the U.S., the democracies therein have not really been stable, being periodically inundated with military coups. The root of that instability and, indeed, a primary cause of the decline and fall of free civic polities is extreme levels of economic disparity such as in the Greek city states and the late Roman Republic.

In the case of contemporary America, extreme economic disparity does not (again) show its ugly head until the Clinton years. The dynamics of disparity may have preceded Clinton. But under and after Clinton, the policies, both at the Fed and by the federal government, quickly exacerbated this dynamic. The partisan claim that Trump poses the threat to democracy is simple-minded and facile polemic. The self-anointed tribune and protector of the common people is a symptom and sign of class schism.

The Gated Community Phenomenon

My wife and I travelled to Alpharetta, Georgia in the early 2000s, meeting up with a friend of my wife’s, who I had met back in Israel in 1979. We were all guest workers at the Laromme Hotel, south of Eilat. I confess, I had a secret academic motivation. Just as many visit Mennonite and Amish communities to gawk at their quaint lifestyle, I went to gawk at a gated community and the mindset of those who dwell therein.

There might have been gated communities in Canada at that time, albeit in undisclosed locations. But even to the present day, while I believe that there exists many of these monstrosities, it is deemed so gauche and antisocial to live in one of them, let alone boast about it.

As expected, although most gated communities in America are not the armed fortresses of South America, this “barbarians at the gates” mindset pervades, as depicted in Elysium (2013). This phenomenon serves as an incontrovertible sign and symptom of socioeconomic class schism which has historically enervated and destroyed every other free civic polity.

Rule of Law and Autocracy

The other striking statement in the historian/journalist’s screed, relating to a fetish fantasy on how to save the Democratic Party from humiliating defeat this November, (advertised as saving America from autocracy), takes its advice from a primer on How to Establish an Autocracy.

The delegates to the Democratic National Convention don’t need to sleepwalk into catastrophe. They can demand that Biden release them from their pledge to support him. They can tear up the rule book, just like political parties do in other countries, and carry out a cold-blooded analysis.

I have already posited elsewhere that if Americans can hate and treat each other like they presently do, what chance has a foreigner? Consequently, I forlornly suggest that the Canadian government should exact a $100 surcharge per person on all tourist visits to the U.S. and eliminate all fees to other safer destinations, the surcharge effectively serving as legal and extraction insurance (i.e. civic forfeiture).

Moreover, if Americans can violate the Constitution at whim, such as Obama’s pen and phone, the latter device, Trump exchanged for a bullhorn, or Biden’s imperial edicts forgiving student debt, albeit without congressional consent, conveniently proclaimed before every election, why will Americans not violate international treaties at whim?

But if one democratic faction of supposed friends, colleagues, and ideological allies is even willing “to tear up the rule book” or suspend them, in whole or in part, whenever immediate, self-interest exigencies require it, God help us all.

In Imperial Rome and Byzantium, “the sovereign is not bound by the laws” (princeps legibus solutus est, Ulpian, early 3^rd century CE). Oh, the IRONY!