The Constitution is more than a #@%* piece of paper, or government can do anything that even a bare and temporary minority can foist upon us. The Founding Fathers chose to impose some permanence on certain norms of politics. Thus it would not be lawful to suppress the opposition or to void the elections of the side that ended up in the minority. The Constitution is a statement of the moral values of the government.
The alternative is that politics is nothing more than power plays, and that at some time the side that wins can entrench itself until the system is extirpated in war or revolution. Thus the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Apartheid-era South Africa, or Ba'athist regimes in Iraq and Syria. With power to entrench the effective majority the regime can alter education and economics at will, and Orwell becomes reality even if his books be banned.
I have no idea of how many Americans would support an authoritarian Leftist regime, which might be a good thing. We are finding out him many Americans support an authoritarian Rightist regime -- just look at the approval ratings for Donald Trump, the most dictatorial or despotic (take your pick) President in American history. With him we have effective government by lobbyists who pull the wires on enough elected legislatures in the federal Congress and most state legislatures.
Demagoguery is the bane of any democracy -- and we Americans have largely been immune to it, either because the government was too weak to have much of a role in the economy or because enough people were wise enough to resist its seduction. But Donald Trump has proved as adept a demagogue as any, even if he has since proved an awful political leader. Much of our defense has been a large Center Left and a large Center Right, both large enough to be present in both main parties, as well as a large middle of the road. But those are largely gone.
Any people that sells out its liberty in the name of economic enhancement will surely lose its freedom -- and will probably find greater poverty than it has ever known before.If we fall for Trump we deserve a Great Depression every bit as severe as that that started the last Crisis. At least the Great Depression forced people to start caring about the plight of others. Our current leadership is clever enough to keep loading the consequences of vile policies upon those that will never vote for that leadership.
I see this threat in an anti-democratic America: we have a heritage of militarism, and that bad systems of all kinds have tended to have a missionary zeal to spread what those systems consider wonderful upon peoples who find such objectionable. Even the Nazis believed that they were doing great good for Humanity as a whole. I can see Donald Trump and those who follow him believing that there can be nothing better than a Gilded Age with authoritarian government or a feudalism with high technology as enforcement of its cruelty.
Evil empires have a way of provoking wars against too many enemies at once or imploding from their own social rot. Let us remember that the Roman Empire, a vile social order from its inception, lasted nearly five centuries despite having fewer resources of treasure and technology than we have.
11:39 PM
