The Warning Is Its Own Punchline
The lamps are going out all over Europe, but they seem to have a habit of doing that. Tom Wolfe was supposed to have said that the dark night of fascism is always descending on America, but it somehow always lands on the wrong continent. Apparently he didn’t actually say that, but the thing he actually wrote about that was kind of like saying that turns out to be relevant to the moment:
It was Wolfe quoting the German novelist Günter Grass, who was hanging out with American dissident intellectuals in the 1960s when he said, "For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here. You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."
I recently mentioned a paste-eating essay in Foreign Affairs by the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, for the important purpose of making fun of it, but I didn’t exhaust the ridiculousness of the thing. The time is right to do that. Levitsky and Way warn that far-right extremists like Donald Trump are going to start using their authoritarian playbook to repress the opposition, leaving the forms of democratic politics in place but hollowing them out from within. Emphasis added, to make this easy:
What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.
Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably.
Yes, imagine a world in which political opposition becomes harder because of a tilting of the playing field.
Meanwhile, let’s check in on the person who was the likely frontrunner for the French presidency:
By the most remarkable coincidence, the presidential frontrunner turned out to have committed financial crimes that were revealed ahead of an election year.
Meanwhile, the AfD — the Alternative for Deutschland, a right-wing populist party that warns against the cultural effects of unchecked mass migration — is suddenly the most popular party in Germany.
Coincidentally, a week later, the German security apparatus has discovered — what timing! — that the AfD is a dangerous extremist organization that must be subjected to surveillance to protect democracy, in a maneuver that suggests that Germany is edging toward an outright ban of its most popular political party. AN OUTRIGHT BAN OF ITS MOST POPULAR POLITICAL PARTY. Jamie Raskin just got an erection that he doesn’t understand, by the way, as he intuits this idea from afar.
Responsible politicians of the respectable German left offered the unfortunate conclusion: “Bundestag Vice-President Andrea Lindholz said that as a designated right-wing extremist group the AfD should not be treated as other parties, especially in parliament.” Merely because the largest number of voters prefer them, they must not be permitted to engage in dangerous acts of governance. Democracy won’t allow it!
The people warning you about the thing are the people doing the thing. “Trump is going to hit you with a stick,” warn the people who are hitting you with a stick. We have to put the opposition in prison, or else they’ll put their opposition in prison.
We’re entering the crushingly obvious stage, when the people doing the thing that they say they’re trying to prevent aren’t really trying that hard to pretend they aren’t doing the exact thing, but an insane narrative apparatus tells you over and over again not to believe your own lying eyes. “Daily bread rations to increase from ten ounces to four ounces, government proudly announces.” What an interesting test of permission structures this is all going to be. Of course, the point of lies that are laugh-out-loud funny in their obviousness is that they degrade and demoralize the people who pretend to believe them.
Beryl Howell today quoted Shakespeare's Henry VI in her permanent 100 page order blocking Trump from barring Perkins Coie from working in federal buildings and also yanking their security clearances. Why it took her a hundred pages I will never know, but I imagine it's related to the same psychosis and delusions of grandeur the authors you quoted are suffering from, colloquially known as severe TDS. The fact that these morons are all cut from the exact same cloth is not lost on me, and I imagine it makes them feel really good to wrap themselves so tightly in their delusions, but they are setting themselves up for a very large fall. It's all lies, and the big ones tend to explode in their faces, almost always at the perfect time.
I’m waiting patiently for good people to say “Enough!”