America the authoritarian

As you can tell, I have a theme going on this week.

This particular Bluesky user seems to have lived beneath a rock from 2021-2025. It seems to have forgotten that the Department of Justice was in the process of prosecuting Donald Trump when his allies on the Supreme Court delayed ruling on "presidential immunity" until the very last second, ruling in his favor, and thus too close to the election for Special Counsel Jack Smith to re-do his indictments and bring the case to trial. It seems to have forgotten that the stolen documents case was being handled by another Trump ally, Aileen Cannon, who acted more as his lawyer than as an impartial jurist. It seems to have forgotten that Trump was impeached immediately after January 6, 2021, only for Senate Republicans to exonerate him. It seems to have wanted a summary execution or imprisonment of Donald Trump, regardless of law.

We have a problem with authoritarianism in this country. It appeals to swathes of it; it appeals not only to the right, but the left. The left would aver that they could never be authoritarians; they're the "good guys", only wanting to make life better for the commonwealth. But Votenanocratic's post is not isolated. His beliefs are not relegated to himself. Social media is awash with cries for Democrats to "do something", with that "something" never spelled out, but implied to be extra-legal. The cries of "Democrats didn't arrest Trump on January 21 so they wanted Trump to get away with it all" also ring through the digital corridors. "There should have been a Nuremberg trial a week after Joe Biden took office!" They are oblivious to the fact that it took a year to set up that trial, a year of investigations, a year of making sure that the Nazis received a fair trial. And that year was an acceleration, made possible by the crushing Allied victory. It was, in a sense, "victor's justice", insofar that the victors had total control of the proceedings. It was in no way a show trial, as some of the defendants were exonerated. But the fates of the like of Herman Goering were sealed from the outset.

MAGA wasn't defeated utterly in the 2020 election. It wasn't ground down under Allied bombs. Their homes weren't occupied by American troops. It lost an election. And this was still the United States, where due process means something. The idea that charges could be brought against Trump within a matter of days because "We all saw it on TV" is very fitting for this nation, conditioned to police procedurals where justice is meted out in forty-two minutes. If it can happen on television, why not in "real life"? And of course, police procedurals have an authoritarian subtext. Everything would be fine if we could just get around "legal technicalities". They are barriers to true justice, and must be jettisoned.

I've been playing this clip a lot over the past few days. It bears repeating.

I know. It's shitlib centrism to believe in the rule of law, to believe that it applies to those you hate as much as to those you don't. But when law and custom are done, what is left? What will protect you in your home? What will protect you in your life.

And that is the crux of the problem. Sections of our commonwealth simply do not care. We are in a quasi-civil war, and the prerogatives of war are infecting the way we see this Republic. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; surely we're at the same point, no? Surely Donald Trump deserved the same treatment for his treason? String him up, and utopia will follow.

But then the "rule of law" would end. Law would be whatever the faction in charge decided it was. Judges would be mere lapdogs to power. Legislatures would be unnecessary save as rubber stamps. And we've seen this movie before. It stars every dictatorship of the past one hundred years. It is North Korea. It is China. It is Russia. Our authoritarians yearn for that "clarity". Erase nuance, banish complexity. Purity of essence is all.

We are fighting against a horseshoe which has become a circle. They all want the power to enact their revenge fantasies against a world which has disappointed and failed them. That is the definition of a dystopia. And many are enamored of its possibility. This is our long, twilight struggle, to reify that democracy is not a means, but an end in itself. It is that for which countless millions have fought and died. A quarter of this century has passed; let not democracy pass with it.