NYT, Jamelle Bouie, 18 Oct 2022: The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has.
The quoted phrase is, of course, the title of a famous 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, on the idea that the fascism of Hitler’s Germany could never happen in the US.
The essay’s point is that it’s been here all along — all the history conservatives want suppressed. When it began to give way to the civil rights era, conservatives began their steady, ever-increasing backlash. MAGA is about the era before civil rights.
The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign.
It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants.
With examples of how freedom and domination are bound together.
This duality is present in our federal Constitution, which proclaims republican liberty at the same time that it has enabled the brutal subjugation of entire peoples within the United States. The Constitution both inspired the democratic vistas of radical antislavery politicians and backstopped the antebellum dream of a transcontinental slave empire.
Considering Donald Trump, and the undermining of the Voting Rights Act,
there’s no reason to think that most elites, and most people, won’t accommodate themselves to the absence of democracy for many of their fellow Americans. After a time, that absence of democracy may become just the regular order of things — a regrettable custom that nonetheless should more or less be left alone because of federalism or limited government. That, in fact, is how many politicians, journalists and intellectuals rationalized autocracy in the South and reconciled it with their belief that the United States was a free country.
And now, to conclude,
As we look to a November in which a number of vocal election deniers are poised to win powerful positions in key swing states, I think that the great degree to which authoritarianism is tied up in the American experience — and the extent to which we’ve been trained not to see it, in accordance with our national myths and sense of exceptionalism — makes it difficult for many Americans to really believe that democracy as we know it could be in serious danger.
In other words, too many Americans still think it can’t happen here, when the truth is that it already has and may well again.
Of course since this history is suppressed, modern conservatives are blissfully unaware of a tradition they are carrying to new heights. It’s the myths and sense of exceptionalism that are most important, to them. Even if it means suppressing the once-oppressed who’ve thought they’ve been moving into the mainstream of American society.
\\\
Links (mostly) without Comments.
Salon, Chris Hedges, 18 Oct 2022: Why the book bans and censorship? Those who rule want to crush knowledge — and freedom, subtitled “The ruling class does not want us to know who we are, or to understand the struggles of those who came before us” (In line with above)
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 18 Oct 2022: Why Marjorie Taylor Greene is becoming “the most powerful woman” in Trump’s GOP, subtitled “In his new book ‘Weapons of Mass Delusion,’ Robert Draper dives into how the Republican party lost its mind”
Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 18 Oct 2022: Democrats Grapple With Strong Chance That GOP Mega-Bozos Will All Win Their Races Because of the Price of Gas. (Another problem with the educational system: many voters have no idea what the government can or can’t do, and blame it — whichever administration is currently in power — indiscriminately for any problems they have in their life. How will Republicans tackle inflation? They can’t say; they have no plan.)
