I honestly don’t think our democracy can survive another Trump presidency. He tested the absolute limits of our checks and balances three years ago when he attempted a coup and was allowed to walk free, and he’s made it clear that, should he return to power, he will focus all of his efforts on political retribution against his enemies, and that he’ll stock the entire federal government with sycophants who will do whatever he tells them to do without question. There’s a word for this: fascism.
I’ve had many discussions about what our future may hold
with many people, many of whom are diametrically opposed to me when it comes to
politics (and those are the conversations I often find most enjoyable and
engaging, as I like to be challenged in my political beliefs). Most people,
regardless of their political ideologies, agree that we’re in a perilous state
right now (though there is VAST disagreement on the nature of the threat and on
how best to move forward), but I’ve noticed an odd refrain that has emerged
from the right (particularly the MAGA crowd) as of late. When I express
concerns about our democracy, I’m frequently greeted with the rebuttal “we’re
not a ‘democracy’; we’re a ‘constitutional republic’”.
Now, this is *technically* true; we’re not a full democracy,
in that we use representatives instead of putting every single thing to a
popular vote (which would be a logistical nightmare, as we have close to 260
million people that are of voting age). In fact, our government is actually
classified as a “federal presidential constitutional republic”, meaning that we
elect representatives to legislate, a president to lead the country, and have a
constitution to bind them all (the “federal” aspect refers to the fact that
most of the power is consolidated to a central federal government instead of to
state and local governments, unlike our first government, the Articles of
Confederation). I’ve actually made this argument myself a few times over the
years, so when I first heard this rebuttal coming from the hard right, I didn’t
think much of it. After all, it’s just an amusing semantical argument (which,
as an English major, I LOVE) and interesting political point, right?
As I listened more and more to the rhetoric coming from the
hard right, however, I began to wonder if this was something more. The GOP has
become terrifyingly anti-democratic in recent years, and this is reflected in
their constant attacks on governmental norms, government agencies, and even the
rule of law and the Constitution. It is increasingly clear that they’re no
longer a traditional political party, but a dangerous cult, hellbent on
replacing our government with Christofascism. Given all of this, I now wonder
if the “we’re not a democracy” argument is now being used as a form of subtle
mind control and propaganda to desensitize us in order to make it easier to
attack democracy; if we don’t *think* we’re a democracy, then it’s easier for
them to take it away from us.
This sounds weird, and frankly, it probably sounds like a
tin-foil hat conspiracy theory. But there are precedents for this, some of
which are quite recent. For example, look at the way Republicans have referred
to the Democratic Party over the last eight to ten years; instead of saying
“Democratic Party”, they now almost always say “Democrat Party”. At first, it
was dismissed as just a few people misspeaking, but gradually, experts in both
politics and linguistics saw that it was no accident. By removing the last two
letters, they sow in peoples’ subconscious the thought that Democrats aren’t
democratic, that they *oppose* the popular will, and will in fact work to
subvert it. It’s a classic example of subliminal messaging, and by consistently
repeating this language, they build on this seed, feeding it until it blooms
into distrust and disdain for the Democratic Party (this also serves as a classic
example deflection via psychological projection, as Republicans are themselves
guilty of subverting the popular will by ramming through overwhelmingly
unpopular laws and policies over the cries of the people, to say nothing of trying to illegally and forcibly overturn the 2020 election results).
Now, in fairness, this isn’t exactly unusual in politics.
Politicians are skilled in getting people to think what they want, and they can
often do so without stating it at all. The infamous (and racist) “Willie
Horton” ad is a prime example of this; in just thirty seconds, a PAC
successfully implanted the suggestion that Michael Dukakis, the governor of
Massachusetts and Democratic candidate for president at the time, was
personally and directly responsible for a horrific assault and rape committed
by Horton. In reality, he bore no responsibility for these heinous crimes (the
law that allowed Horton’s “weekend pass” release predated him, and he had no
authority to stop the release, per a state Supreme Court ruling; all of this
information was conveniently omitted in the ad), but the creators of the ad
were able to hoodwink people into believing this lie of omission, even though
they never actually stated that Dukakis was in any way responsible.
Sadly, this ad isn’t an outlier; this is now commonplace in
politics, and it’s because it plays on basic human psychology. It’s
disturbingly simple to get people to believe something negative about someone
simply by pointing to some kind of link between them and someone/something bad,
no matter how tenuous or dubious that link may be. But what we’re seeing now
goes beyond so-called “normal” politics (whatever the hell that means),
venturing into tactics used by authoritarians and even cult leaders to help them
accumulate power.
We know from history that the most successful propaganda
campaigns, particularly those used by authoritarian leaders, use tactics like
repetition (there’s a very famous quote about this from a certain Nazi leader,
but I won’t post it because, in the epitome of irony, I got dinged by Facebook
the last time I posted this quote), fearmongering, and cherry-picked
information in order to mislead and confuse people so that they’re more
malleable and therefore more likely to do what the propagandists want. But subliminal
messaging is an equally common tactic in propaganda, and it’s far more
pernicious than the other tactics because it’s so hard to recognize, which is
exactly the point. And it’s often used to coerce people into abandoning core
viewpoints because these viewpoints are the most difficult to get people to
change. People will almost never make such a change willingly or consciously;
instead, seeds of doubt must be sown in their subconscious, then carefully
stoked with the other more overt tactics of propagandism in order to get people
to make such a change.
The importance of democracy to the American way of life is a
prime example of this. We’ve long held our country up to the rest of the world
as a beacon of democracy and freedom. Patriots went to fight in wars against
enemies who wanted to destroy democracy, who wanted to replace it with fascism
and communism. Just take a look at the propaganda WE created during the first
and second World Wars; it’s ALL about “protecting democracy” by “defeating the
evils” of tyranny, imperialism, and fascism (and, fair warning, a good deal of
it is also HIDEOUSLY racist). We fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
Afghanistan, justifying them by stating we fought to protect and promote democracy
and freedom.
Simply put, for over a century, we’ve had it drummed into
our heads via mass media that democracy is as synonymous with America as
baseball and apple pie, which means it’s one of our core values. As such, if
the enemies of democracy, such as fascists, authoritarians, and dictators, want
to change this view, they have to do so carefully. Subliminal messaging is the
only viable option to accomplish this task, and I know this because it has been
done before. Many such “leaders” came to power by using exactly this tactic,
and it very nearly succeeded in this country once; in the 1930s, there was a
movement by fascists and Nazi sympathizers, quite literally funded AND written
by people working for the Nazi regime, in Germany, to replace our government
with a fascist dictatorship. The pamphlets, magazines, articles, books, and
speeches were then funneled through powerful leaders and celebrities, including
several members of Congress and some high-level military officials, both
directly (many gave speeches that were literally written by Nazis) and
indirectly (such as having aides send out pamphlets and copies of speeches around
the country via mail). They played on the fear of communism (which everyone
seemed to think was going to destroy us if we let down our guard for even a
microsecond) and on the ongoing economic depression, linking both to the
age-old racist conspiracy theory about the “secret plot” of Jewish people to
take over the world. Much of their messaging was fairly overt, of course, but a
good amount of it seemed fairly innocuous at first glance, like an average
political mailer or pamphlet. They instead relied on carefully chosen language,
as well as carefully *omitted* language, to make their point and to sow seeds
of doubt and distrust in institutions and in democracy itself.
Sound familiar?
It should. That is EXACTLY what Republicans are doing right
now. But the worst part is that most don’t even realize they’re doing it. Just
as so much of the fascist propaganda sent around the country (often through the
mail for free, through exploitation of a loophole that allowed members of
congress to send mail to constituents without paying for postage, meaning that
taxpayers were literally being forced to subsidize Nazi propaganda) was being
sent by people who didn’t actually know where it came from, what it truly
meant, or what the true goals of its authors were, most of the Republicans
spreading anti-democratic rhetoric now don’t consciously realize what they’re
doing. They don’t realize that they’re playing right into the hands of the
fascists who want to destroy our government and replace it with autocracy. They
don’t realize this language is specifically designed to subconsciously distance
us from democracy in order to make it easier to take it away. They’re just
repeating the things that others have told them because they seem to somehow
fit into their worldview.
I may be totally wrong about this. Frankly, I HOPE I’m
wrong. But I fear that I’m right, and that I’ve stumbled onto something that
may portend terrible darkness in our future. I’ve studied fascism, cults, and
authoritarianism enough that this concerns me (though I am by NO means an
expert on ANY of these subjects), as it’s exactly what we’d expect people who
want to subvert our democracy to do. We know that there are forces, both inside
this country and around the world, that want to destroy our democracy, either
to distract us with chaos, or to actually replace our democracy with something
worse, and that they’ve been at work on this agenda for centuries. We also know
that seemingly innocuous shifts in names are often used to disguise something
worse.
Look at the anti-democratic tendencies we’ve seen from the
Republican Party in just the last 20 to 25 years. They’ve been attacking and
undermining our democratic process for decades now, through things like
gerrymandered districts and voter suppression, in order to make it more and
more difficult for the people to actually have a voice. In many areas, between
rigged maps and voter suppression laws ripped right out of Jim Crow, elections
are literally decided before the ballots are even printed. And, when these
tactics fail, when they still lose, they instantly cry foul, screaming that
Democrats “cheated”, that the election was “rigged”, that there was “massive
voter fraud”. They even went so far as to incite a violent insurrection and
attempt a coup to silence the will of the people.
Given this behavior, it’s only logical they’d want to refer
to us as a “constitutional republic” instead of a democracy, as they can use
that moniker to suggest there’s still some element of actual representation
present, even when they’re virtually assigning our representatives to us. That
actually makes it EASIER for them to attack the democratic process, which is
what the worst among them actually want. They want Christofascism, and they
know that this is antithetical to democracy in any form, so they’ll attack any
and every democratic process as a result. They want a government where the
people have no voice, other than that which is assigned to them, so that no one
can truly oppose them. We’d be no different than the Empire in Star Wars, which
was *technically* a republic, in that it had an Imperial Senate, but it had
little actual power, was filled with imperial sycophants, and could easily be
overruled by the Emperor. Eventually, even this body was dissolved, replaced by
regional governors who were assigned by the Empire.
It’s just another form of fascism, which is ultimately what
the worst elements of the GOP want. They want this country to be morphed and
mutated into a Christofascist state, where the people have NO voice in the
government, where their representatives are assigned to them, where a perverted
form of Christianity is the only faith allowed, and where one leader can simply
rule by fiat because they legislative body is too cowardly and too powerless to
stop them (and if you think I’m exaggerating, go read “Project 2025”, the book
written *by Republican operatives* that details their plans to effectively turn
the Executive Branch into a dictatorship). But we, the American people, are too
attached to democracy to let it go willingly, so they have to sow seeds of
doubt and distrust in our subconscious in order to make us change our minds.
Again, I could be wrong about this, and, truthfully, I hope
I am. But history shows that, without proper vigilance, we stand to lose
EVERYTHING under these circumstances. We should never give into paranoia (we
tried that with communism, and it did NOT end well, if you recall), but we
should be mindful of the language being used by those who seek to undermine our
democracy. Actions speak louder than words, yes, but words, and the lack of
them, can still be very loud and tell us a great deal about peoples’
intentions. And, by that token, we should also be aware that not every single
Republican agrees with the extremists in their party; many vocally oppose them
and the fascism they’re preaching, for which they’ve been excommunicated. But
they’re now the minority of their own party, as the extremist wing of the GOP,
the one that’s preaching Nazi-esque fascism (to the point that their chosen
candidate, Trump, has literally quoted Nazi propaganda multiple times in recent
months), has a stranglehold on the rest of the party, rendering it incapable of
acting against Trump or his MAGA movement; most Republicans have little to no
love for Trump or MAGA, but few are willing to stand up against them. Some are,
and we cannot forget this or demonize them, but we also must be clear that,
when it comes to fighting those who want to destroy our democracy, silence is
complicity; anyone who isn’t clearly and unequivocally standing up to this treasonous
movement is tacitly endorsing them.
We damn near lost our democracy once to fascists, working
both inside the country and from the outside, because we weren’t paying
attention to their tactics. We’re in great danger of that happening once again,
but the difference now is that we know how to recognize these things.
The question is: will we act, before it’s too late?
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