The Banality of Tyranny
We are the central problem marching ourselves toward authoritarianism
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
- George Washington, 1794 Farewell Address
In a recent discussion turned political, a friend demanded I declare whether I thought the Democratic Party or the Republican Party represented a “greater threat of authoritarianism.” For any smart, educated, reasonable adult, the answer should be obvious, right? The media spent several months in 2016 hyping up Donald Trump in coordination with the Hillary Clinton Campaign1—an era including a gushing appearance on Stephen Colbert that has all been memory-holed—before shifting to the last 8 years characterized by repeated, increasingly emphatic proclamations that “Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.”
Is Trump A Threat?
A torrent of exaggerated and outright manufactured scandals throughout Donald Trump’s presidency have understandably jaded millions of people. No, Trump was not an “illegitimate president.”2 He was legitimately elected under our constitution. No, Trump was not a Kremlin plant.3 If Russian interfered at all, it was not in collusion with Trump, it was the standard kind of interference Russia, China, the US, Israel, and a whole host of other countries routinely engage in (troll farms, narrative stoking, etc.), and there is no indication it tipped the scales, much less decided the outcome. And no, Trump did not refer to neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”4 The media dishonestly cut that soundbite and put it on replay ad nauseam. To this day the claim is impressively sticky.
I will grant all of this because it is true. But if we are acknowledging truths, we must also acknowledge that Trump did sow doubt baselessly about the integrity of numerous state elections (and privately confided he knew the doubt was baseless). Trump did float schemes to swap popularly-elected slates of electors with loyalists to certify the election in his favor. Trump did lean on at least one state election official to change the votes counted. Trump did pressure Vice President Pence, in public and in private, to ignore the electors and certify the election in his favor. And on the day of certification, Trump did give supporters ambiguous calls-to-arms and when the protests turned into an illegal mob he waffled and bid time to see how it would all play out. This ‘wait and see’ approach ensured Trump did nothing overtly illegal to stoke an insurrection, but that he would be ready to reap the benefits if things went ‘his way.’
And yes, the majority of those present on January 6 really were just protesters who got caught up in crowd hysteria and turned into trespassers. But there were also bona fide plots, backed by armed and coordinated militants, to alter the certification. Insurrection or not, January 6 came with the most overt force in service of attempting to directly alter the results of an election the U.S. has seen in my life time.
Our Political Immune System
In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton lays out the founding fathers’ historical accounting of the nature of republics, where they are weakest, and why they fail. Relevant here is a passage early on, from Federalist No. 1, where Hamilton articulates what is, in his view, the greatest threat to a democratic society:
“[A] dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
Our founding fathers were keenly aware of, and crafted a constitution designed to impede the ambitions of flattering would-be tyrants. Our constitutional order has an immune system for this standard line of attack.
This, of course, is never a guarantee, and so cannot excuse being entirely flippant about demagogic attacks. In psychology, there is a model of disorder known as the “Diathesis-Stress Model,” or more plainly as the “Stress-Vulnerability Model.” The model says that a given person has a certain level of vulnerability to a given disorder and that environmental stressors trigger the disorder if they exceed the threshold of vulnerability. In other words: we have a level of a natural resistance, high or low, to disorders that can be overcome by sufficiently strong environmental stressors.
The application of the Diathesis-Stress Model to our constitution and its vulnerability to despotism isn’t hard to see. And critically, just as a more or less healthy person can strengthen or weaken their immune system (or in the case of psychological health, their cognitive resilience) over time with the right or wrong treatment of one’s body, so does our political body strengthen or weaken its inherent resilience to demagoguery.
Populist moments—where the interests and agendas of the elite are so detached from popular interests that the non-elite reach a breaking point and temporarily upend the existing power structure—act both as direct stressors and, when endured chronically or handled poorly, weaken the health and resilience of a republic to future occurrences. In other words: populist moments both test whether the system’s current resilience is sufficient, and risk lowering the system’s future resilience.
We have had one term of Donald Trump in the oval office. Looking through the lens of the Diathesis-Stress Model, we have proven our resilience to demagoguery was greater than the magnitude of the stressor presented by Trump. Joe Biden, a historically unpopular politician (with three failed presidential bids under his belt), defeated Trump in the 2020 General Election, 306 to 232 electoral votes, and by a difference of 6 million popular votes. The election was certified. Dozens of rioters and insurrectionists have been convicted and imprisoned for their role in January 6. In the carefully-chosen words of George W. Bush, “Mission Accomplished.”
And so in order for a resurgent Trump Campaign to present a new credible “threat to democracy,” one of two possibilities would have to be true: (a) the threat (e.g. magnitude of stressor) he presents would need to be increased; or (b) our threshold of resilience would need to be decreased.
It would be imprudent, if not naive, to dismiss Trump as less of a threat than during his first term but, on balance, a full accounting doesn’t suggest the threat he presents has increased. As of July 30, 2024, Trump’s favorability in polling was 43% and his unfavorability was 52%—a net unfavorability of nearly 9%.5 This is slightly up from his all-time low just after the January 6 riots, but is lower than his favorability going into office in 2016 and lower than his favorability the month he lost the 2020 election. Our republic’s immune system is on alert. His attempts to lean on the Georgia Secretary of State are a matter of public record (and are subject to an ongoing court case). January 6 was a salient day in public memory and will color any future conduct that doesn’t pass the smell test.
An argument that has been advanced to suggest he does pose a greater threat is that he has shed the traditional party operatives that shackled him during his first term, replacing them with loyalists, and so he will be less encumbered to wield the power of the executive in a second term. There is truth to this observation, but a cornerstone of our constitutional order’s immune system is the checks that other branches put on each other. Trump will be freer to act within the confines of the White House, but the other edifices of government won’t have gone away.
No, if Trump presents a real threat more likely to overcome our political body than in his first term, it would much more likely be due to option b—our threshold of resilience would need to be decreased.
An Auto-Immune Response
Immune systems are incredible. They are set up with ‘hard coded’ rules—prior, known threats to look out for—but also with the flexibility to learn and identify new threats to the body. And with this system, our bodies successfully fight off and survive in the face of infinite future potential combinations of otherwise lethal infections.
So too with our political body. It was set up with explicit mechanisms to combat anticipated threats such as demagoguery, tyranny of the majority, and authoritarian overreach against individual rights. But the founders designing our government in the 18th century couldn’t have anticipated every form those threats could take. A formulaic list of ‘threats of demagoguery’ could never suffice for long.
And so the tools and exact mechanisms of defense against these threats evolve with time, changing the political body as a consequence. And not all of those potential changes are for the good.
Immune systems can go awry in a few ways. One, they can respond to a harmless stimulus incorrectly believing it to be a threat. Two, they can respond too strongly to a real threat, doing more harm to the body than was justifiable given the risk of harm. And three, they can sustain a runaway immune reaction that does not stop even after the external threat is neutralized, thus causing a chronic and potentially life threatening harm.
Our political body suffers from the same kinds of errant auto-immune disorders. Threats to security are met with kinetic authority, necessarily curbing freedom. This kinetic response can be too strong, too broad in its application, too persistent, or even wholly unnecessary given the misperception of a threat. There is no way, structurally, to prevent these auto-immune issues; it is the cost we pay for a dynamic immune system that needs the capacity to grow and change to meet as-yet unanticipated threats to the political body. The cure must be post hoc, with the political body discerning the need to remediate the errant immune response and acting properly on that discernment.
The problem is, to mix metaphors, there are certain political genies that cannot be put back in the bottle. The term often used to describe the slow decay of democratic societies into weaker, more vulnerable systems is ‘norm erosion.’ Democracies rely on codified laws and uncodified norms to bound the behavior of current and aspiring leaders. This gives us a vigorous immune system that can respond to threats without killing ourselves in the process. Over time, however, norms erode. Once a norm has been eroded, it becomes nearly impossible to reverse course. Politicians will use their political enemy’s past transgressions as justification for their present and future transgressions, which in turn justifies their enemies’ further erosion of norms. Nobody wants to play by a rule that nobody else seems to be playing by.
The Surest Threat to Democracy
Each broken norm weakens the political body, and lowers its tolerance threshold for future stressors. This is an important although perhaps obvious observation: more norm-eroded societies are more vulnerable to authoritarian threats.
The problem is that norm erosions happen in the name of expediency in times of peril. When external threats to security or internal threats to freedom are perceived, the political body wants a fast, strong, and reassuring response. Perversely, potential threats to freedom lead to demands to curtail freedom.
This sheds new light on our earlier calculations of the threat Trump posed and poses to democracy. The auto-immune response to Trump’s presidency is still alive and well. While presidents cannot be completely above the law, and while at least one criminal case pending against Trump (regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election) may have merit and if true would justify prosecuting a former political leader, the case where he was convicted was a different story. A prosecutor who ran for office on the platform of finding and pursuing grounds to prosecute Trump brought a case against him using an election law that is routinely violated (including by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election, before she ultimately settled the violation with the FEC for a large six-figure fine) and was past its statute of limitations for enforcement. This expired election law violation combined with an obscure New York state law in a novel legal way to sidestep the statute of limitations and upgrade the violation to a felony. Political norms have long held that the bar to prosecute a political figure should be high and should not be frivolously ignored. This flimsy of a case should never have been the first criminal prosecution of a former president.
Before that, gaggles of intelligence community officials tripped over themselves to declare true breaking news ‘misinformation,’ causing real and widespread censorship of that true information to minimize that story’s impact on the 2020 election.6 This was only possible because social media platforms, where an uncomfortably high percentage of all political discourse happens today, have back door censorship partnerships with the federal government,7 and the censorship apparatus is explicitly wielded to favor and silence speech based on viewpoint. All of this was the political body’s immune response to the perceived authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump. To prevent authoritarian takeover, it became more authoritarian.
In pursuit of Trump, that auto-immune response has grown the government-media-tech conglomerate into a potent force. Today, reporting on social media discourse has become a near-complete stand-in for traditional media’s interfacing with the public to report on popular opinion. As a result, successfully censoring (or elevating) ideas and stories on social media platforms sculpts the image of the public’s views into a contorted version that is in turn reported by the news media back to the public, thus creating a back propagating system that defines the popular perception of acceptable views.
It’s vertical integration for industrialized thought control.
The latest taste of this well-oiled machine came with the Trump-Biden debate and the ensuing political fallout. In unison, liberal-leaning media (all of the mainstream media minus Fox News) suddenly backed a narrative it had for years labeled as ‘right wing misinformation’ and refused to report on fully and honestly: Joe Biden is mentally unfit. The monolithic machine waged a PR war to force Biden’s resignation in concert with every top Democrat in the party working behind the scenes toward the same goal. When the two-pronged pressure finally produced Biden’s resignation from the 2024 campaign, every outlet and every politician published gushing political eulogies, remarking on his unique bravery and heroism in this political moment. Within days, a candidate who never broke 5% of the vote and never won a single delegate in her 2020 primary was anointed by the media, universally endorsed by the party, and narratives propagated from the media-party machine began to spread through the assembly line of lips eagerly waiting to receive the message to broadcast.
The media seems willing to enter uncharted dystopian territory in its ‘fight against authoritarianism.’ In just this past week, the media has been caught in at least 3 brazen attempts to rewrite history for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign against Trump. First, Axios stealth edited its prior claims that Harris had been Biden’s border czar when the Harris Campaign wanted to pivot away from that messaging, and then actually characterized the border czar claim as Republican disinformation.8 Second, a 2019 GovTrack report card had previously ranked Kamala Harris as “the most liberal Senator” in Congress. After Harris stepped up on the presidential ticket in July, Republican attack ads began to highlight this past distinction to paint her as far left. In response, GovTrack deleted the page from 2019.9 And third, when first running for president in 2020, Kamala repeatedly and unequivocally supported a fracking ban. Now in the 2024 general election, her campaign did not simply change her position—they put out a statement characterizing the ensuing media controversy as “Trump’s lies about fracking bans.” Politico and CNN gave the Harris Campaign a hand in this new tack, both correcting “the Trump Campaign’s allegations” that Harris wanted to ban fracking and failing to mention that, more than mere ‘Republican allegations,’ this was Kamala Harris’s official stated position on fracking until 5 minutes ago.
When the media has a narrative, it presses it.
The government-media-corporate conglomerate that defines popular discourse today can manufacture and propagate any view that benefits its members with blazing speed, efficiency, and effectiveness. And worst of all: many Americans are not only unalarmed, but knowingly and explicitly support all of it. This kind of forceful power-concentrating immune response by a political body is the precise response a factioned society calls for when it feels under threat from another faction.
A word to the wise, however, every power you imbue your faction-controlled government with will come to be used against you by a rival faction when they take power. Their side will demand it, appealing to your prior abuses and “the naivety of playing fair.” Your side will in turn become more alarmed, more threatened, and demand more severe measures. On and on it will go with only a single possible terminus.
Inevitably, maddeningly, we will all be clamoring for it. Whether it’s slowly, gradually through the norm erosion and eventual total corruption of our ruling institutions, or suddenly from a Trumpian figure who finally presents a threat strong enough to overcome the weakened immune system of our corrupted political body, there is one thing I can predict with near-certainty: our full turn to authoritarianism will be met with the support of millions, jubilant in their victory over tyranny.
Clinton repeated this line for years after her 2016 loss, as well as the claim that he “stole” the election from her. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html
This was actually a narrative pushed by the Clinton Campaign, which included the Steel Dossier for which Clinton and the DNC paid a fine as part of an FEC settlement.
The story originally broke in 2020 as an election “October surprise.” Years later, the rest of the news media finally conceded that the story they helped censor was largely true: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post.html
I detailed the factual analysis and legal argument showing a corporate-government censorship partnership in violation of the First Amendment here: https://jurisprudentmag.com/p/the-twitter-files-and-first-amendment