Avoiding America’s worst possible future – By Damon Linker (The Week) / Oct 19 2020
Is the United States on the brink of authoritarianism? A shockingly large number of commentators seem to think so. This would appear to suggest that we should take the threat very seriously indeed — except for one crucially important consideration: Those raising alarms can be found on both sides of the political spectrum, with each camp pointing to its ideological opposite as the source of the impending breakdown of democracy and advent of tyranny in America.
That highlights another, deeper problem that threatens a very different, though no less catastrophic, outcome.
The center-left has been making versions of the authoritarian argument from the very start of the Trump administration. In addition to the president’s tendency to talk like a demagogic dictator at campaign rallies and on Twitter, his hesitancy to distance himself from right-wing hate groups, and his pursuit of xenophobic immigration policies, progressives highlight GOP efforts at voter suppression, the counter-majoritarianism of the Electoral College and Senate, and Trump’s own refusal to say he’ll step down from office if he loses his bid for re-election. All of it adds up to a narrative of incipient Republican Party dictatorship.
The right, meanwhile, has its own story of creeping totalitarianism. Some conspiracy-minded conservatives have viewed liberals as would-be tyrants going all the way back to the New Deal, if not before. But such concerns surged into the mainstream with new fervor in the run-up to the 2016 election with the claim that Trump and his supporters were like courageous martyrs storming the cockpit of Flight 93 on September 11, willing to risk everything to avert the existential threat that a Hillary Clinton presidency posed to conservative priorities.
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