Citing "national security," the Leader's private militia will have an undisclosed and therefore vast budget. Outside of times it's called on to intimidate people or make a public display of power, it'll largely operate in secret.
It's members won't have to obey the law because, as agents of the Leader who's above the law, they are, too. If they have to kill somebody, there will be no investigation unless it's to cover up the crime. If they need to make somebody disappear, that person disappears.
They, along with the Leader's allies, promote a law-and-order crime ideology in public that results in high levels of incarceration, heavily militarized police, and a disregard for the general rights of the average citizen, particularly racial and religious minorities.
This is how the kind of government the Donald Trump was trying to establish in America has played out, over and over again, across the world and throughout history.
In our own time we've seen it in Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Cuba, Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela, and dozens of other countries around the world less well known for the nature of the government.
It may call itself left-wing or right-wing, but what really matters is that all power and authority rests with the Leader. Stalin was every bit the fascist that Hitler and Mussolini were; his fascism just had a different face and brand.
As dystopian as all this may sound, there are more governments in the world run this way today than there are democracies. It's "normal." Once established it's almost impossible to dislodge without a crisis like the death of the Leader or an actual revolution.
Some of the governments around the world that are structured like this were democracies that turned fascist, like Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But many have been this way for centuries, like hereditary kingdoms in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
So, how do the democratic countries that make the transition to fascism allow that to happen? And what is life like in those countries, both during and after it's happened?
After World War II, a Chicago reporter named Milton Mayer struggled to understand how Hitler was able to flip one of the world's most stable democracies into fascism.
An American Jew of German ancestry and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany seven years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 "average Germans," asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.
Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing what happened once the Leader seized power:
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
Did the German people realize they'd abandoned democracy? That they would soon become international pariahs? The college professor Mayer interviewed answered:
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.
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