Is America Becoming an Authoritarian State?

The internet was full of questions last week about the state of America as a free country. Christiane Amanpour asked if federal responses to peaceful protests are sowing the seeds of fascism in America. She interviewed a Yale professor who worried that we are. Democratic U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal from Seattle asked Attorney General William Barr when he faced the House last week why the feds take “an aggressive approach to Black Lives Matter protesters” but look the other way when heavily armed white supremacists storm the Michigan state capital, threatening to lynch or behead Governor Gretchen Whitmer for her measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Other people worry that the state of the union, itself, might be starting to come unglued, with partisan gridlock and the profound schisms between regional subcultures around the country, and the ever-deepening hostility between urban and rural values and worldviews, creating unbridgeable chasms.

Some fear we are headed toward a dictatorship peculiar to ourselves. Such an American monster could be built, it seems, around a corporate cult of personality, ingenious banking fraud and securities corruption and institutional racism along with a financial hierarchy that keeps the outward form of our democracy but runs the country like a project of organized crime. The crime boss leader would create through propaganda both political and racial enemies and use them to keep his nefarious powers protected behind a wall of coercion, fear and shameless legal maneuvering. Is that where we’re headed? Is that where we are?

Some think, and I include myself here, that for people of color, America already has the characteristics of an authoritarian state and has had for decades. It operates a propaganda mill identifying people of color with crime and portrays social welfare as a conscious way “to game the system” not as a safety net for those in dire need. It looks the other way in the face of blatant if well-disguised residential red-lining and job discrimination. It takes an egregiously permissive view of police brutality against people of color. It employs paramilitary racist cults to enforce its prejudices, creating an aura of intimidation and anxiety that accompanies a Dickensian bleakness pervading hardworking but impoverished ethnic communities living with unbearable apprehensions and uncertainties. And its prison system is the equivalent of a gulag for people of color.

Prison statistics speak for themselves. In 2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that 58% of the total male prison population in the United States was made up of Black and Hispanic Americans. Black Americans alone accounted for 34% of male prisoners.

Black Lives Matter today, and many other anti-racist groups historically, are simply, directly and courageously trying to make us all aware of this hellish reality in the United States, just as “#MeToo” and LBGT activism are eloquently working to raise consciousnesses about identity and gender violence in America. It may be self-evident and a waste of breath to say this, but it still should be said by all those who can, whatever race, color and gender they may be.

The surreal egoism and class hatred of the Trump administration has brought this all to the fore in ways that were largely dismissed and denied by the mainstream before now. And it extends even to the realms of public health. Of course, Trumpian bigots aren’t interested in stopping the spread of the coronavirus that harms impoverished people of color dramatically more than any other group. Class and race hatred amount to hoods of denial placed by the Republican federal government on the whole scientific and medical enterprise in this country, allowing the deaths of at least 153,000 citizens, most of them people of color, according to the Brookings Institute and the CDC.

Gloomy and sinister as the present moment is, we are still a nation composed of citizens with aspirations for a better life based on equal justice under law, equal opportunity in the marketplace and equal respect in the social world we all share. When people in power aren’t listening, the Constitution gives all of us the right of peaceful assembly to make our grievances known. For armed bullies with police powers to beat up on unarmed, nonviolent demonstrators exercising their right “peaceably to assemble” is an act of political cowardice that is worthy of the ugly word, fascism.

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

(William Barr image by DonkeyHotey. Riot police background by Tony Webster.)