How to Build an Autocracy in America

As each day passes and we seem more autocratic behavior coming from the current occupant of the White House, I continue to be stunned and terrified by the number of people who show no concern or alarm over what is happening.  First the Muslim ban, now a likely license to discriminate law that will give special rights and preferences to Christian extremists - and the Republican Party just shrugs and allows the Frankenstein monster to careen down the road towards a death of American democracy.  I feel as if I am reliving the history of earl 1930's Germany or an episode of the Twilight Zone, except it is really happening.  Conservative David Frum has a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic that paints a picture of where America may find itself under an defacto autocracy, and not a benevolent one.  Here are excerpts, but read the entire piece:

IT’s 2021, and president donald trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

The president’s critics, meanwhile, have found little hearing for their protests and complaints. A Senate investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign sputtered into inconclusive partisan wrangling. Concerns about Trump’s purported conflicts of interest excited debate in Washington but never drew much attention from the wider American public.

Allegations of fraud and self-dealing in the TrumpWorks program, and elsewhere, have likewise been shrugged off. The president regularly tweets out news of factory openings and big hiring announcements. . . 

The business community learned its lesson early. “You work for me, you don’t criticize me,” the president was reported to have told one major federal contractor, after knocking billions off his company’s stock-market valuation with an angry tweet. Wise business leaders take care to credit Trump’s personal leadership for any good news, and to avoid saying anything that might displease the president or his family.

The media have grown noticeably more friendly to Trump as well. The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner was delayed for more than a year, during which Time Warner’s CNN unit worked ever harder to meet Trump’s definition of fairness. Under the agreement that settled the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Amazon, the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has divested himself of The Washington Post. The paper’s new owner—an investor group based in Slovakia—has closed the printed edition and refocused the paper on municipal politics and lifestyle coverage.

Meanwhile, social media circulate ever-wilder rumors. Some people believe them; others don’t. It’s hard work to ascertain what is true.

Nobody’s repealed the First Amendment, of course, and Americans remain as free to speak their minds as ever—provided they can stomach seeing their timelines fill up with obscene abuse and angry threats from the pro-Trump troll armies that police Facebook and Twitter. Rather than deal with digital thugs, young people increasingly drift to less political media like Snapchat and Instagram.

Trump-critical media do continue to find elite audiences. Their investigations still win Pulitzer Prizes; their reporters accept invitations to anxious conferences about corruption, digital-journalism standards, the end of nato, and the rise of populist authoritarianism.

Yet somehow all of this earnest effort feels less and less relevant to American politics. President Trump communicates with the people directly via his Twitter account, ushering his supporters toward favorable information at Fox News or Breitbart.

People crack jokes about Trump’s National Security Agency listening in on them. They cannot deeply mean it; after all, there’s no less sexting in America today than four years ago. Still, with all the hacks and leaks happening these days—particularly to the politically outspoken—it’s just common sense to be careful what you say in an email or on the phone. When has politics not been a dirty business? When have the rich and powerful not mostly gotten their way? The smart thing to do is tune out the political yammer, mind your own business, enjoy a relatively prosperous time, and leave the questions to the troublemakers.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

No society, not even one as rich and fortunate as the United States has been, is guaranteed a successful future. When early Americans wrote things like “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” they did not do so to provide bromides for future bumper stickers. They lived in a world in which authoritarian rule was the norm, in which rulers habitually claimed the powers and assets of the state as their own personal property.

Larry Diamond, a sociologist at Stanford, has described the past decade as a period of “democratic recession.” Worldwide, the number of democratic states has diminished. Within many of the remaining democracies, the quality of governance has deteriorated.

What has happened in Hungary since 2010 offers an example—and a blueprint for would-be strongmen. Hungary is a member state of the European Union and a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. It has elections and uncensored internet. Yet Hungary is ceasing to be a free country.

The transition has been nonviolent, often not even very dramatic. Opponents of the regime are not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building inspections and tax audits. If they work for the government, or for a company susceptible to government pressure, they risk their jobs by speaking out. Nonetheless, they are free to emigrate anytime they like. Those with money can even take it with them. Day in and day out, the regime works more through inducements than through intimidation. The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s rule over Hungary does depend on elections. These remain open and more or less free—at least in the sense that ballots are counted accurately. Yet they are not quite fair. Electoral rules favor incumbent power-holders in ways both obvious and subtle. Independent media lose advertising under government pressure; government allies own more and more media outlets each year. The government sustains support even in the face of bad news by artfully generating an endless sequence of controversies that leave culturally conservative Hungarians feeling misunderstood and victimized by liberals, foreigners, and Jews.

You could tell a similar story of the slide away from democracy in South Africa under Nelson Mandela’s successors, in Venezuela under the thug-thief Hugo Chávez, or in the Philippines under the murderous Rodrigo Duterte. A comparable transformation has recently begun in Poland, and could come to France should Marine Le Pen, the National Front’s candidate, win the presidency.

[T]he American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency. A British prime minister can lose power in minutes if he or she forfeits the confidence of the majority in Parliament. The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?

Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.

DONALD TRUMP will not set out to build an authoritarian state. His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.

If Congress is quiescent, what can Trump do? A better question, perhaps, is what can’t he do?

Sexual Assaults Still Pervasive In Military Despite - Victims Fear Retaliation

Lieutenant Elle Helmer at the Vietnam War Memorial, is featured in "The Invisible War". (James Helmer/PBS)

With its huge numbers of  military personnel, the Hampton Roads region of Virginia ought to be concerned about the reports of pervasive instances of sexual assault that are taking place within the U. S. military.  (Unless, of course one takes the approach of the City of Norfolk city fathers and just close one's eyes to lawlessness - at least until something really bad happens).  Men and women serving in our military should not be allowed to undergo assaults and be concerned that they have no recourse.  Yet the system is obviously failing them.  Indeed, the number of unreported assaults is increasing apparently because victims (i) feel nothing will be done and (ii) fear that they will experience retaliation if the report the offenses.  One thing that seems clear is that leaving the military to police itself isn't working and perhaps its time that investigations and trials of those accused of assault be moved outside of the military.  It is also telling that most of the assaults are being committed by heterosexual males.   An article in The Daily Beast looks at this horrific situation.  Here are excerpts:

The film, which will be broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens, is a searing examination of military sexual assault, an issue so endemic within the armed forces that a female soldier is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than she is to be killed in combat. Its television premiere comes just as the problem has been receiving more attention from the media and politicians—all the way up to President Obama himself—than perhaps ever before.

It started last Sunday, with the arrest of Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski, the head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention program, on charges of sexual battery after he allegedly groped a woman in a Washington, DC, parking lot. Two days later, the Department of Defense released its annual report on sexual assaults within the ranks, announcing that there were nearly 3,400 reported incidents of sexual assault in 2012 alone, up six percent from 2011. But the report also included the results of a survey—conducted every two years—which found that the actual number of assaults was far greater: an estimated 26,000, up from 19,000 in 2010.

Congressional outrage doesn’t necessarily result in real change—at least, it hasn’t in the past. “I don’t want to appear jaded,” she [Jackie Speier, a Democratic Congresswoman from California] said on Friday, “But going up against the military-industrial complex is not an easy task.” She cited a pattern that extends back decades, where high-profile scandals like those surrounding the Tailhook convention in 1991, the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1996, and, more recently, at Lackland Air Force Base, prompt alarm, followed by Congressional hearings, and, inevitably, promises to enforce a “zero tolerance policy” from the military’s top brass. Yet despite countless pledges to root out the problem once and for all, sexual assaults, according to the Pentagon’s own figures, only continue to escalate.

[T]he percentage of those who chose to report their assaults dropped by some 30 percent—hardly a sign of confidence in the existing system.  The explanation for that, according to many, is a simple one. The report—which this year clocks in at 1,494 pages—found that 62 percent of victims who did report their assaults faced retaliation as a result.

Stories of retaliation, and re-victimization, are ones that director Kirby Dick and his producer Amy Ziering heard repeatedly as they were making The Invisible War. “Every single person that we spoke to, whether they reported it or not, they were all advised by their peers not to report,” Dick says. “Basically you’re risking your career to report.”

Cynthia Smith, a spokeswoman for the DoD, called the film outdated, citing the efforts that Panetta, and now Hagel, have made to address the issue—including a directive to establish Special victims units in each of the branches, and, most recently, the appointment of nine people to a new “Response Systems to Adult Sexual Assault Crimes Panel,” which in July will begin an independent review of the system.

But skeptics fear that such measures will amount to little more than just another set of empty promises. And as for the notion that the film is no longer relevant, Dick’s response was unequivocal. “They’re right, it is outdated,” he said. “The number of sexual assaults has gone up 35 percent since I finished making the film. They’ve lost this invisible war very, very badly.”