What Kind of Dictatorship Would You Prefer? Does It Matter?

Yes, today is Election Day 2024, in the United States of America.  That means that one part of the campaign for political power is about to end, while a completely unprincipled campaign is about to begin, as Republicans go about installing Donald Trump in the White House in defiance of any vote counts.  There is a very small possibility that we will have a clear outcome in the next day or two, if it turns out that Trump seems to have won under the current rules.  But if Kamala Harris is deemed the winner -- and certainly if there are genuine doubts that require recounts and litigation -- the election will not be over potentially for a very long time, possibly extending beyond January 6 or even January 20, 2025.

 

It is worth noting that when Al Franken won his first (and, it turned out, only full) term as a US Senator from Minnesota in an election that ended on November 4, 2008, his razor-thin victory was not finalized until June 30, 2009, meaning that it took almost eight full months to determine the outcome.  I am not saying that the US presidential election will take that long, but there is every reason to doubt that the usual "due dates" that exist within the system will be in any way binding.

So today might indeed be at least a semi-significant milestone, but the next slog is about to begin.  I continue to believe (as I have been arguing for years now) that the end result of that slog will be an illegitimate second occupation of the Oval Office by Trump.  Again, an unexpected early resolution could play out, but only if Trump is the "legitimate" winner.  Either way, a man who has over the last few weeks fully and finally removed any shred of doubt that he would rule as a fascist dictator will be serving as President-for-Life of the United States.  And after he finally dies, what he leaves behind will not be a healthy constitutional democracy snapping back to life to restore sanity and the rule of law.

My usual caveats about possibly being (and hoping to be) wrong apply, as always, but because today is a key moment where at least some possibilities will be ruled out, it is worth returning to the larger question of what it will (or, more optimistically, would) be like to live under a post-constitutional Trumpian dictatorship.

And to be clear, when I say that Trump is now exposed as a wannabe fascist dictator,  I mean it.  The rest of the world has finally caught up with those of us who have been saying so for years.  Shortly before the 2020 election, Dylan Matthews at Vox wrote an interesting piece asking the question: "Is Trump a Fascist?"  Summarizing input from eight experts on the subject, the sub-headline offered this conclusion: "Call him a kleptocrat, an oligarch, a xenophobe, a racist, even an authoritarian. But he doesn’t quite fit the definition of a fascist."  I strongly disagreed at the time, of course, but clearly even those who were hesitant to use the f-word acknowledged that there was plenty of damning evidence.

 

That article was published on October 23, 2020.  Has anything happened since then that might convince some people that Trump is a fascist (and, to the extent that there is a meaningful difference, a Nazi)?  Is the Pope Catholic?

 

Two of the experts quoted in Matthews's piece have drawn the obvious conclusion.  Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, said in 2020 that "you could ... legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement” that uses "fascist political tactics," but he still felt that the 2017-2021 Trump Administration was not a fascist government.  By December of last year, however, Stanley stated that "[w]e have a classic fascist situation in this country right now."

 

Similarly, the historian Robert Paxton told Matthews in 2020 that "there is still no state management of the economy here (as there was to a degree in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy) … [s]o I still think terms like 'oligarchy' and 'plutocracy' work for Trump, with the added thought that he is close to crossing the line with his toleration of violence."  Two weeks ago, however, a profile of Paxton carried this headline and sub-headline: "Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.  Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now he’s alarmed by what he sees in global politics — including Trumpism."

 

My reaction to that piece was visceral: "Yes, even the doubters are admitting that it is fascism.  Finally.  Thank you!"  And as unwanted as that moment of triumph was, it more than anything raised additional questions about Trumpian fascism, because even soulless dictators are not identical.  That is, even if Trump will be a dictator, we need to know what kind of dictator he will be.

Before I get to that discussion, it is important to note that some people who truly should know better are still in denial about what is in the offing.  At least one anti-Trump conservative pundit recently started to backtrack with an argument that is absurd on its face and can only be read as a effort to be able to say to a future military tribunal that he was not too hard on Dear Leader.  (Opposing Trump "can’t be that obvious or we wouldn’t be where we are," he offers circularly.)  Unless that is merely the standard mental masturbation that the world usually expects from that pundit, it is a surely a too-little-too-late attempt to trim his sails.

More bizarrely, there was this exchange on CNN a few days ago, when the news anchor Jake Tapper offered a softball interview with Seth Meyers about the latter's new standup special.  The last part of the interview took an unexpected turn:

Tapper: I think it's fair to say that you're not a strong supporter of Donald Trump, but let me ask you this: Should he win, as a writer, you're going to have a lot more material; it's entirely possible that late-night ratings, not just for your show but every comedy show -- and also, I should acknowledge, cable news -- will go way up, because there'll be a lot more going on.  Do you ever think about the election personally versus professionally?  Like are you preparing for a Trump victory in any way thinking, "Well at the very least it will be good for our family, financially"?

Meyers: Yeah, I'm very happy to say I'm not looking at this election for my own financial well being, and I'm very disappointed in the people who seem to make that their number one reason for who they're voting for.  Look, I personally would be very tired to go through another four years like we did the first time out.  Your material, when you're a comedian, is always out there, you don't have to have it served to you on a plate.

While the tone of the interview was clearly intended to be lighthearted, Tapper's question was quite serious and sincere.  The pained look on Meyers's face is priceless, and he managed to say, "Are you fucking out of your mind?" without saying those exact words.  I would have preferred that he not say "another four years," because clearly Trump and the Republicans would never be stopped by the Twenty-Second Amendment, but Meyers was understandably focused on deflecting Tapper's inane question.

 

Why do I call the question inane?  Consider Tapper's premise.  Both the comedy world and the cable news world, he surmises, will have all kinds of great material and will make money hand over fist if Trump returns to office.  It would be good for them to have a Hitler-admiring dictator in the White House, because he would be funny and newsworthy.  After months of Trump's threats to shut down news media, and with Tapper's colleagues being physically threatened at Trump's angry rallies, that Tapper could entertain the idea that things would be like they were from 2016-2020 is just astonishing.  His wishful thinking crosses the border into full-on naivete.

 

None of which is to say that there are no imaginable fascist dictatorships that might let people like Tapper and Meyers live and even keep doing what they have been doing.  Even though control of media (and thus control of people's thoughts) is a core element of any fascist governing regime, I suppose one could imagine a dictator who puts on a show of tolerance and allows some restricted level of freedom in news and the arts.  Trump, however, has made it very clear that he is not one of those guys.

Which brings me back to my observation above that, even if Trump will be a dictator, we need to know what kind of dictator he will be.  Early in 2022, I confronted that question here on Dorf on Law in "If You Had to Choose Your Autocrat ... ."  Different dictatorships are obviously not "good" or "bad" -- they are all bad -- and they are not necessarily even "less bad" and "worse" compared to each other, in large part because there are so many areas in which a dictator can do damage.  (Among many others, see the above examples regarding media and the arts.)

 

And of course the fascist policies will fall on groups of people quite differently.  Trump is not likely to bother straight white men (at least those who have never criticized him), but anyone who even looks potentially "foreign" -- including, ironically, Native Americans -- would be subject to the "mass deportation" sweeps that Trump has been promising.  And the LGBTQ+ community (most obviously trans people) would also be a special target for the bigots who are so excited about re-installing Trump in office.

Even so, I offered in my earlier column a deliberately simplified set of comparisons, across countries and centuries, in answer to the "If You Had to Choose Your Autocrat" poser in that column's title. 

Looking at Russian history (the Soviet version), I would rather have lived under Gorbachev than Khrushchev, Khrushkev than Brezhnev, and Brezhnev than Stalin.  Similarly, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the relevant histories, I would rather have lived under:

-- Catherine the Great than Ivan the Terrible,

 

-- Elizabeth I than Henry VIII,

 

-- Louis XVI than Louis XIV, and

 

-- Mussolini than Franco, and Franco than Hitler.

For that matter, I guess that I would rather currently live under Orban than Duterte.

In the thirty-two months since I wrote that column, I have stopped relying on euphemistic words like "autocrat," and I also have been forced by new evidence to make an even darker prediction about what Trump's return to power would do to the country and the world.  Trump looks much, much, MUCH worse now even than I predicted as recently as March 2022.  I pointed out at the beginning of that piece (which I wrote shortly after Russia's invasion of Afghanistan) that Vladimir Putin went from being one horrible kind of dictator to an even worse kind -- essentially the difference between a murderous-but-brilliant Bond villain and an unhinged maniac -- and Trump has now obviously moved further down that same path.

So when it comes to naivete, imagine what Current Me would say to 2022 Me about this: "As a starting point, we can guess that [Trump] would not immediately become a murderous thug, even though he so admires Putin."  I would no longer take that bet.

 

Or this: "Trump's ego and venality are mostly petty, so he would more likely busy himself by 'opening up the libel laws' to shut down criticism, and he would go about the business of making himself as wealthy (through plunder) as he has always claimed to be (through the art of the deal)."  There is still plenty of pettiness, of course, but there is nothing petty about the ways that he has talked about what he would do to the "radical left thugs" who are the targets of his revenge fantasies.

All of which makes my further statements even more cringe-worthy: "He would also surely exact revenge on his enemies, but even that might be limited to settling scores via public denunciations rather than, say, poisoning people in London restaurants."  And I added:

Would there be outright purges and mass killings?  Again, that seems unlikely, even to a pessimist like me.  But just as Putin seems to have spun out of control as he has consolidated absolute power over the years, one never knows what Trump or his chosen successor might eventually begin to do.  At least for some amount of time, however, post-rule of law America would probably be bad but not horrific.

There are more bad predictions in that column, unfortunately, but the point is clear.  There are differing kinds and degrees of dictatorships, and each of us might -- if forced to choose -- prefer one as opposed the others.  But unless something very good and unexpected happens between today and early 2025, the dictatorship that America will get is ugly in the extreme.  The candidates and political party who used Haitian immigrants and their White Republican neighbors' children as pawns in an effort to justify the creation of internment camps are not going to limit themselves to, say, Orban-ism or "light fascism."

 

If my longstanding prediction turns out to be correct, then the entire 2024 election campaign will have been an empty exercise.  Worse, it will have been the time when Trump spiraled into an even more dangerous and angry despot-in-waiting.  What kind of Dictatorship would you prefer?  Unfortunately, dictators do not care about the answer to that question.

Because I somehow still have the tiniest bit of hope rattling around inside my body, I will end with this: Please vote, and vote against the fascists.