Authoritarianism is up for re-election in America!

Americans who think the coming election is their last chance to save the republic from authoritarianism — Americans, until recently, like me — are almost certainly wrong. Authoritarianism is already here, and what Americans will decide in November is whether it will grow more deeply entrenched.
According to a new report, the US is undergoing “substantial autocratisation” — so much so that only one in five similarly damaged democracies has been able to reverse such decline. President Donald Trump’s administration is consuming democratic capacity at about the same pace that wildfire has been destroying the West. The White House has been a source of lies since Trump’s presidency began. Since his impeachment and acquittal by Senate Republicans, his transgressions have grown more aggressive, while being more aggressively supported by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security — together the equivalent of a mighty Security Ministry — both of which are controlled by men who share Trump’s disregard for rule of law.
Under the direction of Attorney General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, the state has assumed the form of unidentified men in unmarked vehicles, a hallmark of anti-democratic regimes. Whistle-blowers and protest resignations have become recurring features of both departments. These admirable acts of conscience seek to bring attention to systemic abuses — the corruption of intelligence for political purposes at Homeland Security, and the corruption of law, including favors for friends and vengeance for opponents, at Justice.
But declarations of conscience are not a substitute for rule of law; they are merely proof of its absence. And people of good faith are no match for large bureaucracies severed from ethical norms and lawful rigor.
Fear of fascism was once a luxury political good in the US, a fringe obsession rendered trivial by the enduring realities of a stable democracy. The authoritarian drive of the American president — and of the
nation’s chief law enforcement officer, with the complicity of most of the Republican Party — has altered that.
In a sign of just how self-aware the assault on democracy is, allies of the president now equate opposition to Trump with the “colour revolutions” that swept the post-Soviet sphere. In this understanding of the political moment, Trump is cast in the role of a corrupt, Russian-backed dictator. The forces countering him are the masses who take to the streets clamouring for democracy, accountability and rule of law.
The mass action of a popular election, in the midst of a pandemic that Trump allows to rage, is where these opposing forces will meet in November. It’s entirely unclear how that will play out. In recent weeks, Barr has been a source of falsehoods about voting security, which seem designed to serve as a basis for Trump doing exactly what he has threatened to do: Dispute the results of an election that he is on track to lose. Trump has implied that he will deploy force, and encourage armed supporters to do the same, to cling to power.
As political analyst Ronald Brownstein points out, Trump conceives himself president of Americans in red states, waging war against those in blue states. (To Trump, blue state lives trade at a discount.) It’s an unapologetically fascist vision, but it’s not Trump’s alone. Walter Shaub, a former government ethics watchdog who was driven from office under Trump, notes that the operative question for the MAGA base is not: Are you better off than you were four years ago? It is: Are your enemies worse off?
A colour revolution did, in fact, sweep the US this year. Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests may well be the largest popular protest movement in American history. Researchers have concluded that somewhere between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd by police officers. Additional protests in hundreds of cities and small towns accompanied a subsequent wave of damning evidence of police brutality.
After weeks of attacks on BLM by Trump and Barr, public support for the movement has declined, with most of the decline, predictably, taking place among Republicans. Yet in a survey this month by Pew Research Center, 55% of American adults still say they strongly or somewhat support the Black Lives Matter movement.
Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s about the same share that consistently voices disapproval of Trump’s presidency.
Barr has made it clear that he shares Trump’s view that this American majority should be neutered. BLM is “not interested in Black lives, they’re interested in props,” Barr said in remarks last week. “A small number of Blacks were killed by police during conflict with police — usually less than a dozen a year — who they can use as props to achieve a much broader political agenda.”
In a previous interview with the virulent right-wing propagandist Mark Levin, Barr suggested what this “broader political agenda” entailed. He described Black Lives Matter as “a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism. They’re essentially Bolsheviks.”

—Bloomberg

Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and US domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was
executive editor of the Week. He was
previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist