You would not enjoy living in an autocracy

This seems like something we should talk about?

In just the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump has told Time magazine he would deploy the military to deport 11 million Americans, allow Republican-governed states to monitor the pregnancy status of their citizens and prosecute women for getting abortions, and pardon supporters who participated in the deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. He has defended his statement that he would like to be a dictator by saying “I think a lot of people like” the comment. He has threatened violence if he loses another election, and he has issued threats to witnesses and jurors in his criminal case that are considerably less subtle than his gold-plated toilets. He has, via his lawyers, told the Supreme Court that he should be able to order the assassination of political rivals with impunity.¹ Trump’s attorney general said on national television that as president Trump lost his temper and talked about executing opponents. And that’s just a small sampling from just the past few weeks. The bigger picture may be even more chilling: Trump routinely speaks in the language of history’s most reviled demagogues and dictators, promising to “drive out the globalists … throw off the sick political class that hates our country”:

“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. And it is growing every day. Every single day.

The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.

Our threat is from within.”²

“I keep telling people: ‘Watch the speeches,’” Trump henchman Steve Bannon told the New York Times. “When you look at the content of what he’s putting out there, he couldn’t telegraph this any more clearly: what he stands for, and what he’s up against.”

As historian Federico Finchelstein told the New York Times: “This is how fascists campaign.”

***

For years, media coverage of Donald Trump’s fascist tendencies has typically focused on one question: Is he?

Yes, he is. We know this. He tells us as much every day, with both words and actions.

And so it is time — long past time, really — for media coverage to turn to a new central question: Trump is campaigning the way fascists campaign, so how do fascists govern? What is life like in fascist regimes? Not just the broad strokes or big principles — everyday life.

I was struck by this passage in Matthew Yglesias’s recent explanation of how he plans to cover the election:

“Under the circumstances, I think (Trump’s) return to power is genuinely dangerous.

That said, I don’t think the future of democracy will be a major theme in our 2024 coverage. For starters, I don’t think there’s that much that’s journalistically interesting to say about it. He lost a fair election, pretends that didn’t happen, and tried to get the results illegally tossed out. What more can I say?”

Yglesias went on to explain that the more journalistically interesting task, to him, is explaining how people’s lives would be different under Trump vs. Biden based on the candidates various policy preferences. But question of how our lives would be different under Donald Trump shouldn’t be siloed off from Trump’s autocratic aspirations. The two are inextricably linked.

What would life for everyday Americans look like in a Trumpian autocracy? How would turning our government into an oligarchy of Trump cronies and sycophants affect the economy, the delivery of basic services? The collapse of liberal democracy is not an abstraction. There’s a story to tell there. An important one. What does life look like in Putin’s Russia, in Orban’s Hungary? In nations that have been controlled by autocratic regimes in the past? That's a Trump-assault-on-democracy story that remains largely untold: How will it affect people? It’s a good and important story.

It’s deeply weird how absent that story is from the national conversation about the Trump/GOP assault on American democracy — both media coverage of it and political responses to it. For a long time it was pretty widely believed in America that American democracy was a far better system of government than, say, Eastern European autocratic regimes not merely because of abstract notions of the fairness of representative democracy but because of quality of life outcomes too. The soul-crushing austerity of life under an autocratic regime in which a handful of favored party loyalists lived lavishly while everyone else stood in bread lines and worried about who was listening in on conversations in their own homes — these images of bleak and punishing everyday life in the kinds of regimes Donald Trump is trying to emulate were once a fixture in American culture, ever-present in our consciousness. Not that long ago, either.

A scene from season five of The Americans depicting a Soviet grocery store

That concept -- that quality of life outcomes will be much worse in America under an autocratic regime -- is pretty much entirely missing from media coverage of the GOP's assault on democracy. It isn’t particular present in the story Democrats tell about Trump, either. There’s so much fretting about whether Democrats should center Republicans’ assault on democracy or talk about things that affect peoples lives. It’s kind of unbelievable, really. Dismantling democracy would be really bad for the American people! Including most of the people who will vote for Trump! Things are generally not great for people living under autocratic regimes. And that’s a story we should tell: Democracy is the best system of government anyone has yet come up with not merely because it’s the fairest way of making decisions or the “right” way to do things — though it is both — but also because it yields better results than a power-hungry strongman imposing his will on the nation he rules.

That’s a pretty important story to tell at a time when “democracy is on the ballot.”

1. The Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority, half of which Trump appointed, appeared intrigued by this exciting new expansion of presidential powers to include a 007-style license to kill.

2. “I keep telling people: ‘Watch the speeches,’” Trump henchman Steve Bannon told the New York Times. “When you look at the content of what he’s putting out there, he couldn’t telegraph this any more clearly: what he stands for, and what he’s up against.”