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PDA / RALPH NADER ELECTION SUPPORT
8. RACE, CLASS & DEMOCRACY
THE AUTHORITARIAN TEMPLATE: written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

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Peter Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

THE AUTHORITARIAN TEMPLATE:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

I’m an historian of fascism and right-wing authoritarianism all the way up to Putin. When Trump came on the scene, I started looking at my country with great alarm, watching the same stuff happening that I studied abroad. And so I wrote Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present to warn Americans. I kind of predicted that Trump would not leave quietly, because authoritarian-minded people don’t believe in the transfer of power, and leaving office is like psychological death for them. They’re also afraid, of course, of prosecution.

Think about what Trump has managed to do as somebody coming from outside— he domesticated a major party and made it his own personal tool. January Sixth was like a kind of leader-cult rescue operation and why the Congressional hearings are so very important.

The Republican Party has really become a kind of extremist entity. The Washington Post had a study showing that one in five GOP lawmakers at the state and local level have sympathy or affiliations with some kind of extremist beliefs or organizations. Some Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are running for office at the local level.

Unfortunately for us, Trump has the same personality as Mussolini and a lot of the other guys I study. The outcome is different at different periods, so it’d be silly for anyone to say Trump is Hitler. Yet at the same time, it’s very important to recognize that authoritarians like Trump only have allegiance to themselves, and they use and discard everybody in their pursuit of Me, Myself and I. So while it’s unbelievable that Trump risked having his own vice president killed, it’s totally normal in the history of coups and inherent in the logic of coups.

In my political newsletter, Lucid on Substack, I interviewed Representative Swalwell—he emphasized that the essential question is, do you believe in violence or do you believe in the rule of law? The Insurrection showed that the party has embraced violence as a way of doing politics and as a way of solving problems. January Sixth was an attempt both to keep Trump and his people in power and to keep the “wrong people” like Kamala Harris out.

Trump has been able to bring the authoritarian playbook to our country—polarization, hatred, civic strife, of course building on existing racism, radicalization, the Tea Party, creating a crisis, and then saying, “I alone can fix it.” There’s a myth that the strongman leader is “good for business.” So, it’s very important to talk about the way that it’s not good for business and not good for society.

This extends to guns, and I wrote a Washington Post op-ed in 2021 saying gun violence primes us for authoritarianism by creating a culture of fear and suspicion. But talking about guns can be difficult topic because people start with this: “You want to take our guns away.” So It’s important instead to talk about outcomes, very calmly: “is $280 billion a year, which is the cost annually of gun violence, is that good for society?” No, it’s not. Recent polls show that there’s an uptick in low-level violence since January Sixth, there’s an uptick in every single group that suffers hate crimes. Is civil strife good for society? Is this good for the economy?” No, it’s not.

Democracy is also about accepting differences in society, including different opinions, which goes with the principle of mutual tolerance. So far better than “I alone can fix it” is: “We fix it together.” We can do that in town councils and school boards, the sites of everyday governance. Here it’s also important to talk about the denigration of previously respected and beloved figures in our communities like librarians and teachers—this is not the American way.

And it’s been very effectively done, starting with anti-mask and anti-vax crusades as part of the larger picture of trying to ruin public schools. Consider the current Anti-LGBTQ phase where teachers and librarians are being attacked as “groomers.” This is how the GOP is transforming its political culture to prepare for autocracy.

The next point I’ll discuss is freedom. Something that isn’t stressed enough about authoritarianism (or anti-democratic behaviors and policies) is that it’s not just about restricting the rights of people or taking people’s rights away—voting rights, abortion rights, marriage equality. While some people lose rights, other people have their rights expanded, which removes checks on abusive and corrupt behavior—the plunderers win, the exploiters win.

So if you look broadly at what Trump did, he did a hell of a lot in his four years. It’s wrong when people say that he’s incompetent. He was incredibly competent at the things he cared about. His administration, for example, eroded professional ethics in civil service, rolled back environmental regulations so that natural resources could be plundered. Authoritarianism tries to immunize crime. Historically, we’ve had a regional form of authoritarianism with Jim Crow in the South. Now there’s another stage on the national level. The issue of giving shooters, people who run over protesters, and rapists forms of immunity is why accountability must be stressed.

Today, elections are not actually the measure of the difference between democracy and dictatorship, since rulers like Orban in Hungary and Putin in Russia do have elections. They’re just fixed. So it’s important to stress accountability and transparency. Related is the issue of indecency. When you discard the rule of law, it has a ripple effect into workplaces, into schools, into all the places where there are these little Trumps. This imitative bullying and harassing is not good for profit, and it’s not good for the soul. Decency might sound old fashioned, but I still stress it.

The final point is that it’s important to not allow Far Right Republicans to claim patriotism. One of the most disturbing things that Trump did was a kind of emotional retraining of people so that they saw violence as having a positive value and even being patriotic—“saving the nation.” And that’s a continuity with all these strongmen—any violence, whether it’s a coup or fascist takeover, it’s always to save the nation. It’s always patriotic.

Infinitely better is to celebrate the American dream in terms of celebrating the successes as a multiracial democracy, as a society that has allowed immigrants like my dad to prosper. Candidates can cite all the businesses and products that Republicans and swing voters also use every day and that are helmed by immigrants. That celebration of possibility should also include people who were born here but lived in poverty and who in the space of one or two generations enjoyed huge gains in the standard of living for their whole family.

I think stories like that, whether they’re immigrant stories or class-uplift stories, are very important. They require a different kind of narrative to reclaim the concept of patriotism from the right.

Mark Green: Talk about the different kind of language a Democrat can use in the pursuit of votes. Earlier we discussed the phrase “dangerous extremists,” but your analysis includes other phrases that might work to attract the swing voters and Independents who decide elections.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I’ve written three books on fascism, yet I don’t use the word “fascist” very often in describing domestic affairs. I don’t actually call Trump a fascist, even though he’s got tons of fascist things. The reason: it turns off the people you need to reach, and it conjures up an older style of one-party states which doesn’t describe how it works today. “Extremist,” however, is very important, because the January Sixth Insurrection showed everyone what “dangerous extremism” looks like.