Could we end up in a Trump dictatorship and not even realize it? This whole time, what has kept me going is the knowledge that—if all else fails and Trump becomes a dictator—I will at least be able to say "I told you so." Once Trump officially suspends the constitution and declares martial law, appointing himself president for life and decreeing the exercise of emergency powers, I could look around and say: there? See? Do you believe me now?
But as we get closer by the day to this nightmare becoming reality, it is all too apparent that there would be no such moment of vindication. The parallel versions of reality would continue. The alternative epistemic universe would continue to have no overlap with our own. If Trump declared himself president-for-life, people would still say: Well, Biden was the real dictator first, by prosecuting Trump (reality check: Biden does not control the activities of the special counsel).
How about if Trump declares martial law, though? What happens when Americans see tanks rolling through their communities and U.S. soldiers pointing their guns at domestic civilians? Would they believe us then, that he really had become a dictator? Still no. Because even this, tragically, is on a continuum with the actions of presidents past. Therefore, it too could be relativized. And there is even existing statutory authority for it that could be spuriously invoked.
Indeed, a column from the Philadelphia Inquirer out yesterday makes a painfully convincing case for how Trump could deploy the Insurrection Act to mobilize the U.S. military to fulfill his mass deportation plans. This in turn, as the columnist—Will Bunch—argues, could be the entering wedge of the full dictatorial turn. And Trump already seems to be laying the spurious legal groundwork to cry "insurrection!": did he not recently declare undocumented immigrants to be "not civilians"?
Such a scenario would give new meaning to the overused lines: "first they came...." Find a pretext to assume emergency powers and direct control over the military; deploy it against civilians peacefully residing on U.S. soil—it's not hard to see how that quickly makes for a dictatorship affecting everyone in the country. It would certainly be denounced on the left as fascistic, militaristic, and dictatorial. I am calling it that already in advance, and I would certainly call it that again if it came to fruition.
But that's not to say the right would admit at last we were right. They would not, even after all this, agree that Trump had become a dictator. Instead, people would still find ways to minimize and relativize it. They would say: Didn't George H.W. Bush invoke the Insurrection Act during the L.A. riots? And he wasn't a dictator. Isn't the Insurrection Act part of our law for a reason? It's a real law, isn't it? You can't say Trump violated the constitution if he's following the law, can you?
And so the madness will never end, "never and never be ended," to quote a poem by Wallace Stevens. Even when Trump is standing at the dais wearing gilded epaulettes, declaring the reign of his glorious new Galactic Empire and saluting his marching soldiers, still we will live in the parallel realities. Still there will be people saying "nothing has actually changed," "this is all normal," "I don't see the difference," "The Democrats already did the same, except worse," etc.
And as the economy dwindles in size due to the mass expulsion of immigrant workers contributing to our economy and our increasing isolation from the civilized world, as it beholds the spectacle of the U.S. military rounding up helpless families and children and loading them into train cars or detention camps, still we will not be able to agree that any of this is a problem. "I feel like this is going great," people will say. "What do you mean, detention camps? Obama built the camps!"
So I won't even have my vindication to look forward to. I won't even have my "I told you so" moment. We will instead be like the people in Hermann Broch's epic novel series of the fin de siècle, The Sleepwalkers: people backing into the future without facing forward; people whose world was falling apart around them without them even noticing the change. Broch, who published his great trilogy on the eve of Hitler's rise, saw somnambulism as the best metaphor for the age.
So it will be with us. We will lose our democracy and not even notice it. We will look around at our feet and say, "now where did I put that? I could swear it was here just a minute ago!" We will sleepwalk our way into dictatorship, because not one of us could imagine the world could actually change that much—and for such a stupid reason. People will not have the foresight to perceive that it is possible to mortgage their country's whole future just because they weren't paying attention.
Trump? Oh right, that guy, people say. Used to be president. Prices were better then. I didn't care for the things he said, but I'm willing to give him another try. That's the absurdity of this election. We might elect someone who's openly campaigning on a pledge to become a fascist dictator, and we might do it not even because people want a fascist dictator—but just because they didn't even check the news often enough to notice what he was saying.
We are the somnambulists of our age. We are the oblivious ones of whom Broch wrote. We are sleepwalking our way into dictatorship.
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