Authoritarian States of America

Fear that authoritarians will take over American politics is not a left wing conspiracy theory spawned, as some right-wingers would have it, by the ACLU, environmentalist, feminists, degrowth anti-capitalists, LGBTQ radicals and the growing “mob” of the “woke.” The danger of autocratic politics lurks in the nature of federalism, or “state’s rights,” itself. This troubling threat has been described by University of Michigan historian Robert Mickey as existing in “pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy,” and often devoted to maintaining white supremacy.

Such corruption of local power can take the form of theocracy, of segregation, of a dictatorial executive, or the punishment of dissent, political censorship of the press, a militarized police with unbridled powers of lethal violence, a brutal culture war or the iron privilege of wealth and corporate licentiousness. Local autocratic rule is a many-headed monster that the Constitution was generally designed to thwart on both national and local levels. It’s been the object of amendments to the Constitution, a myriad of Supreme Court cases and, of course, a civil war. Authoritarianism is not an anomaly in America.

While the federal government has often been corrupted by the hate mongering and scofflaw instincts of authoritarians, it’s been able to preserve itself, sometimes by the merest thread of decency as we learned on January 6, 2021, from suffering the worst of their intentions. What Robert Mickey illuminates in his powerful book, “Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South 1944-1972,” is that our regionally fragmented country has a tendency to develop such “enclaves” of autocratic power and not only in the Deep South.

Take Arizona. In 2010, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill 1070, which made racial profiling a means of establishing probable cause for searches and seizures of people of Hispanic descent. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down parts of the “show-me-your-papers” law, it did not decide that as a whole it was preempted by federal law. SB1070 is still a threat to all Hispanics in Arizona, who can be detained by police on the mere “suspicion” of illegality based on their physical appearance and skin color. Many people in the Southwest now consider Arizona to be an authoritarian segregationist state and refuse to go anywhere near it.

Though for different reasons, Florida is also fast becoming an authoritarian “enclave,” driven by segregationist prejudices and an assault on the freedom of the press. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Stop Woke Act “imposes the strictest rules on college coursework in the U.S.,” according to BestColleges, a postsecondary school ranking site. “Woke” refers to an energized awareness of the history of racism and segregation in our country. The Florida anti-woke act is not only an egregious affront to academic freedom, it makes Florida the only state in the union, so far, to censor university curricula at all, though such censorship is practiced in many public school systems around the country and in Florida, too.

BestColleges quotes the crux of the anti-woke law: “An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” Teaching of topics associated with race, gender and sexuality should be done “in an objective manner without endorsement of concepts,” the law states. professors at the University of Florida are asking if this means they should be neutral about the Holocaust and Holocaust deniers, homophobia and gay bashing, or about Jim Crow terrorism, white supremacy and the KKK.

That a governor and a state legislature should meddle with the content of courses offered by a major American University is behavior worthy of any two-bit dictator or micromanaging destructive Fuhrer. It’s made worse by content censorship in the lower grades. The Parental Rights in Education Act in Florida prevents even “addressing gender or sexual orientation in class,” the Washington Post reports, and forbids “the teaching of critical race theory.”

When you put all that together with Gov. DeSantis’ call for the Supreme Court to revisit one of the defining cases of freedom of the press, the 1964 ruling in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, you get the feeling that Florida politics has caved completely to the autocratic instincts of the far right in America.

In the New York Times case, the Supreme Court decision protects the press from defamation lawsuits brought by politicians. As Ken Bensinger of the Times wrote recently, “the decision set a higher bar for defamation lawsuits involving public figures,” empowering “journalists to investigate and criticize public figures without fear that an unintentional error will result in crippling financial penalties.” A defamation suit must show “actual malice by knowingly using false information or “by recklessly disregarding the truth,” Bensinger wrote.

If it wasn’t so serious and dangerous, Florida’s decent into authoritarian censorship and press manipulation might resemble Charlie Chaplin’s spoof of a crackpot dictator, but unhappily this is all disastrously real.

What’s even more worrying is that local “enclaves of authoritarianism” have a way of metastasizing to neighboring areas, and eventually coming to pervade the nation itself. We have seen such authoritarianism in violent Jim Crow police tactics, and police corruption in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles which spread to many dozens of police forces around the country, victimizing African American, Latinos, Asian Americans and people described for various reasons as being “not normal.” From the perspective of Richard Mickey’s view of racial tensions in America from 1944 to 1972, violent police response to minority liberation movements could well have become institutionalized in cities as disparate as Memphis, Newark, Ferguson, Albuquerque and dozens more.

We know the 1992 police riots in Los Angeles were the direct result of the acquittal of white police officers who had beaten Rodney King, an African American, half to death for a traffic violation. The atrocity was videotaped by a passerby and televised repeatedly day after day for weeks before the officers’ trial. We know as well that Albuquerque has long suffered from authoritarian policing and was found by a Department of Justice investigation in 2014 to have engaged “in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force, including deadly force” that resulted in the killings of more than 50 citizens since 2004. The police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri caused outrage and riots as did the police beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis this year. And they are but a few of many.

The Manhattan Institute estimates that “on-duty police fatally shoot about 1,000 people a year” in this country and “approximately a quarter of those killed are Black.” African Americans “are an even higher percentage of unarmed civilians shot and killed by police (34%),” the Manhattan Institute reports. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to see police bias and violence in “authoritarian enclaves” in major cities in the Deep South as having spread way beyond their local origins.

What happens if the same holds true for the censorship of higher education and the public schools in Florida, for racial profiling legalized as probable cause for searches, seizures and arrests in Arizona? Could those cancers on democracy metastasize too? It doesn’t seem far fetched to imagine that they easily could unless voters of conscience begin to see the winning of local elections as a bulwark against dictatorial tendencies straining against the tattered customs of political decency to create an ever-tightening noose of authoritarian states in America.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Desantis image derived from a photo by Matt Johnson)