from the these-fucking-assholes dept
Anyone paying attention to the first Trump term (and who wasn’t?) saw the latent threat to democracy buried only slightly beneath the bluster and spray-on tan. Here was a man who spent years building a mythology that presented him as the ultimate deal maker, when the reality showed he was just a guy who spent his dad’s money to get a bit richer, leaving behind him a long, slimy trail of bankruptcies, lawsuit settlements, and countless sexual harassment allegations.
After he and his MAGA death cult delivered hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths during the COVID pandemic by fighting mask mandates and touting everything from bleach to horse de-wormers as possible cures (anything but a vaccine!), he finished up his first term by claiming the election was stolen and standing idly by while his supporters assaulted cops and raided the Capitol building.
Many of us felt this wouldn’t happen twice. Surely no one would fall for this a second time, not after it had been made abundantly clear Donald Trump mistook being president as being king, and resented everything about the system that had elevated him because this system made him replaceable.
But it did happen again. And this time it’s much, much worse. Trump may not have learned anything (he still seems to feel he’s more king than president), but the people around him certainly did. If the system not only guarantees you’re replaceable every 2-4 years, but is built from the ground up to rein in the Executive Office so it doesn’t become a throne room, then the system itself must go.
Hence the creation of DOGE, a government agency that’s predicated on the lie that it’s there to reduce fraud and waste, rather than just eliminate anything and anyone that stands in the way of the president and his desires. Hence the executive order carpet-bombing by Trump, which is has been carried out solely for the purpose of creating so many battlefronts that it’s impossible for opponents to rally forces effectively.
But even if you’re one of those self-deluding people who think electing Trump was better for the economy or the only way to address the so-called “border crisis,” you can only lie to yourself for so long. You need to admit you prefer living in a cheap American knockoff of long-established autocratic superpowers and that you don’t really care about “freedom” because that term is going to become a historical relic in the near future.
It’s not just the vibes, though. It’s also the data. It’s the collation of people’s ideals, as self-identified by survey and poll respondents, as well as the perceptions of what’s going on here in the US by people living elsewhere in the world. This current iteration of the Republican party has blown past the extremes displayed by far-right groups in European countries. It’s now so far out of the accepted boundaries for “free world” nations that it’s becoming the very thing so many US military veterans fought against over the past 100+ years.
The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has taken a long look at the data and arrived at a truly disturbing conclusion:
Every five to 10 years, the World Values Survey asks hundreds of questions of people in dozens of countries, in an attempt to quantify differences in the culture, norms and beliefs of people in different societies.
Usually, analysis is done at national level, but by drilling down to different political parties in the latest raw data, I find that on everything from attitudes towards international co-operation, to appetite for an autocratic leadership style, through to trust in institutions and inward- vs outward-looking mindset, Trump’s America is a stark outlier from western Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere. In many cases, the Maga mindset is much closer to that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Yes, many of us will find this conclusion obvious. But the fact that it’s easily observable by people who haven’t been MAGA-blinded doesn’t mean it will be easy to reset to the norms after Trump leaves office (if he ever does…). The decline towards autocracy actually began in earnest shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, as you can see in Burn-Murdoch’s graph. Barring a slight uptick back to the center during Barack Obama’s first term, American ideals have been in a steady, if slightly-slower decline since 2012.
The marked difference here is how fast this descent is. And the fact that it’s so readily apparent from the administration’s overt attack on the other two branches of government makes it clear that the point of no return is probably reachable within the next four years. There’s no irony in the fact that the party that claims it values freedom above all else is moving quickly to curtail it. Instead, it’s just Trump and his loyalists saying the quiet part out loud through mandates, actions, and assuring the autocrats this party emulates that the Republican party has got their back, even if it means subjecting millions of people to decades of oppression or tanking the same economy they promised they’d revive.
It would be easy to sit back and let the MAGA faithful discover the awfulness of what they’ve unleashed. Unfortunately for those who aren’t in that group, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be the first against the wall.
Filed Under: china, constitutional rights, donald trump, freedom, maga, russia, turkey
