Dictatorship in the U.S.A.?

Having been something of an alarmist myself on the subject of Donald Trump (for good reason, I still think), it’s only fair to note that some have gone further in their alarmism. John Quiggin, who has been mentioned here a few times in the past, has a post yesterday titled “Trump’s dictatorship is a fait accompli,” in which he says that “Trump has announced the dictatorship, and there is no sign of effective resistance,” and that “The models to learn from are those of dissidents in places like China and the Soviet Union.”

This, I think, is going too far. It seems to me that the short-term risk of actual dictatorship in the United States, while much larger than I would like, is still relatively small. Trump will encounter little resistance in building a deeply illiberal administration with some truly awful policies, but converting that into a dictatorship is a longer-term project. Even if it ultimately succeeds – and I’m not convinced that it will, partly because I’m not sure that Trump has the stomach for it – that’s a quite different thing from saying the dictatorship is already here.

Quiggin says “It’s clear that Trump will face no resistance from the Republican party,” but while I’ve been deeply critical of Republican spinelessness, I think this is overstating the case. Senate Republicans have already pushed back by voting against Trump’s choice for Senate leadership, and they seem unlikely to accept his proposal for recess appointments; several of his cabinet-level nominees could well be rejected.

It’s possible Trump could try to bypass Senate approval, and it’s possible the Supreme Court would back him up, but he needs support in Congress in order to govern. To alienate Republican senators so early in the piece would seem a self-defeating strategy. And Republican majorities in the new House and Senate are very small; the defection of a few Republicans would be enough to thwart Trump’s plans.

Converting an established democracy into a dictatorship isn’t easy. It took Mussolini three years, in rather more favorable conditions. Yes, Hitler did it in Germany much more quickly, but he had a lot of advantages that Trump lacks:*

• Trump has no storm troopers, no militia of his own. He can summon a mob, as he did on 6 January 2021, but that’s much more of a blunt instrument. If you’ve read Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here you might remember that Buzz Windrip’s paramilitary force is critical to his overthrow of Congress.
• Germany’s military had no loyalty to the democratic republic; its officers were not Nazis, but they were authoritarian sympathisers who had no interest in defending democracy. No doubt some American officers fit the same description, but by and large they have been trained to defend the constitution.
• America’s constitutional protections are much more robust. That won’t help against armed takeover, but anything short of that can be frustrated by the courts. There are much fewer provisions of the sort that Hitler used to exercise emergency powers.
• The American states are also much more powerful, and most of them (especially the big ones) have Democrat governors and/or legislatures. Germany’s states had already been largely neutered even before Hitler came to power; he was able to sideline them in a way that’s hard to imagine in America.
• America is much larger and more diverse than Germany, making the logistics of controlling dissent much more complicated. If you can gather a mob in Munich you can have it intimidating people in Frankfurt the next day, even with 1930s transport infrastructure, but you can’t summon a mob in Houston and get it to San Francisco the next day, unless you’ve got your own fleet of planes.
• Hitler was a lot smarter than Trump. Because he used them for such evil ends we are often reluctant to admit that he had real talents, but there’s no doubt that he had an ability and a dynamism that Trump completely lacks.

None of this means Trump can’t possibly become a dictator, and there’s some value in being warned of the worst-case outcomes. But we’re not there yet.

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* There are some differences that run the other way, such as America’s executive presidency and the fact that Trump already has the experience of one term in office, but I don’t think they shift the balance much.