There's no such thing as "a little bit of dictatorship"

Do you really want to take a chance on another four years of Orange Jesus?

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

• Voltaire

The fear of dictatorship in the air is thick these days, and not without good reason. When the likely Republican nominee for President is a man facing 91 indictments spanning four separate cases, professed an admiration for strongmen, and quoted Adolf Hitler verbatim, one may be right to be concerned.

This is not the first time America has faced the threat of autocracy, of course. I’m currently reading Rachel Maddow’s excellent book, Prequel, which covers the pre-WWII years when many Americans saw nothing wrong with aligning with Hitler’s Germany. Many Americans saw Germany under Hitler as an example of what this country could and should become.

The German government poured considerable resources into propaganda campaigns intended to support the majority of Americans who believed it was in their best interests to remain neutral in European affairs. There was no sense in sacrificing American lives for something that was of no concern to America.

This was, of course, before the Final Solution, the death camps, and the six million murdered Jews, but even then, there were Americans who saw Germany as a model for America. Once Hitler declared war on America, those who held the Führer in high esteem were careful to maintain their own counsel, but they never went away. They simply went silent.

Some Americans remained loyal to the ideas of Hitler if not necessarily the person. They believed in racial purity. They were convinced that Jews were the source of too many of America’s problems. In their heart of hearts, they knew that the only way to “save” America was to “cleanse” the country of “impure” races- Blacks, Jews, and other “foreigners” who only served to “poison the blood” of this country. They believed that America belonged to White Conservative Christian Heterosexuals , and those who weren’t part of that group only detracted from the White majority’s efforts to strengthen and purify the Homeland.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, these beliefs coalesced into groups like the John Birch Society and other ultra-Conservative groups dedicated to ensuring and perpetuating the power and superiority of the White male. It was the responsibility of White women to provide the State with children who could be indoctrinated and initiated into serving the interests of the State- the White Conservative Christian Heterosexual state.

There was no place for weakness and no place for deviance. Men were expected to serve God and country, get married, make babies with their wives, and support them with a job they would stay at throughout their careers and then die in. They would have mortgages, car payments, child-care expenses, and vacations. They’d maintain their house with a white picket fence as they tried to keep up with the Joneses. Eventually, they’d buy a second car and perhaps a boat. They’d throw lavish parties and maintain the pretense of a lifestyle requiring the man to work long hours to afford.

After years of smoking at his desk, drinking at night and on the weekends, and eating copious amounts of well-done red meat, our White Conservative Christian Heterosexual Hero would die far too young, likely of a heart attack and probably at his desk alone while working one of his many 14-16 hour days.

That was the Golden Ring that White Conservative Christian Heterosexual males were busy chasing in a futile effort to maintain the facade of White middle-class superiority. Because while they were doing that, their wives were becoming increasingly lonely, often turning to alcohol, pills, and/or other men (or women) for an opportunity to escape their gilded cage, even if only for a little while.

Meanwhile, their children, for whom Daddy never had enough time, grew up resenting their fathers. Some turned to drugs, some acted out, some became sexually active…or some and/or all of the above.

In time, men began to feel like they were losing control of their world despite their hard work and best efforts to keep things together. They failed to recognize and understand that the system was never designed to help them keep things together. It was never intended to help maintain the mid-20th century Middle American fantasy world that so many lived in.

Many men had grown up in a world where so much was black and white. Things made sense. You knew what was expected of you, when it was expected of you, and what it would take to meet those expectations. You also understood what the rewards would be once you hit that bar. Now, at just the time when they thought they should be receiving their reward, nothing made sense. The rules of the game had changed, but no one had bothered to tell them. They’d never realized they were playing a new game, even as they continued playing by the old rules.

As American men of the mid-20th century approached middle age, they were frustrated to learn that almost nothing was what they believed it would be. The rules they’d played by and the rewards they thought they’d earned…well, they’d long since ceased to exist. Somewhere along the line, all that had changed without warning. No one got the memo.

Now their wives were leaving them, their children hated them, and their jobs- the one place they thought they’d been secure- were beginning to disappear. Suddenly, lifetime careers weren’t so “lifetime” anymore. Jobs were being shipped overseas, where workers were plentiful, disposable, and willing to work for far less.

Many jobs were being replaced by automation. The knowledge that many had gathered over a lifetime of sweat and effort was being rendered meaningless by machines that could do the work of 20 in the time it took one person to perform a task.

Whole regions of the American Midwest were hollowed out, destined to remain economic wastelands for generations. Their factories and workers were suddenly obsolete, as quaint and useless as the Etch-a-Sketches many once played with on Christmas mornings so long ago.

As the 20th century slowly melted away into the 21st and America survived the Y2K meltdown that wasn’t, there began to be heard voices that, at first, few paid much heed to. There were populist voices who told the desolate and the downtrodden that they should blame their condition and the flight of capital on the oligarchs who only cared for one thing- making themselves richer. These modern-day Rockefellers sustained themselves by sucking the lifeblood from dying communities just like theirs. Then they moved on to the next, and so on and so on….

But, instead of Americans coming to hate these oligarchs, a surprising phenomenon occurred. Alexis de Tocqueville once observed (and I’m paraphrasing) that Americans think they’re millionaires looking for a place to happen. So, they have an odd reverence for those who become financially successful.

Even though people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are demonstrably morally reprehensible in many respects, Americans generally hold them in high esteem. In a normal milieu, Americans would hate those so thoroughly consumed by greed and the pursuit of gross self-enrichment, and yet….

When Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan in 2015, he should have been a joke to any morally well-adjusted observer. His performance that day and ever since has been progressively more repulsive, yet his base adores him with a passion that’s equal parts unfathomable and “WTF?”

Even when the Access Hollywood tape came out in 2016, something like that would’ve not just finished but obliterated the chances of anyone else. Donald Trump, however, got a reception akin to, “No one grabs a pussy like Donald Trump!!”

“WTF?” Seriously?

After eight years, including four in the White House, where he was responsible for the COVID-19 deaths of something like three-quarters of a MILLION Americans, his supporters still love him. How is that even possible?

It’s neither a stretch nor an exaggeration to posit that Orange Jesus is the Worst President EVER © by a fair piece. He makes George W. Bush look positively statesmanlike…and yet he appears to have a legitimate shot at winning in November.

It’s beginning to look like those angry, aging, uneducated White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals may be wreaking their revenge upon an America that fucked them over and left them behind. They’ve found someone they believe will stand up for them, and they’re so addicted to Fox News Channel that they don’t know any different.

Unless we can motivate younger, college-age kids to vote, we may well be looking at a version of America imposed upon us by an angry generation of people older than myself who no longer give a shit and want to burn the whole thing down.

I hope I’m wrong. But, being a child of the ‘60s, I know these people. I grew up with them. They’re pissed off. They know what they (think) they know, and if they didn’t hear it on Fox News, they’re not about to even consider reconsidering it.

That ignorance and intransigence may determine our next President…unless we can mobilize enough people to counter their votes.

What’s it going to be, America? How important is your democracy to you?

Remember, no one grabs a pussy like Donald Trump.

(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)