In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest.
James Baldwin
I watched episodes of Flash Gordon when I was a child. I believe these shows might have been reruns of the 1954 TV series. Buster Crabbe is the blond-haired Flash Gordon pursuing Dale Arden. Both Flash and Dale are pursued, in turn, by Ming the Merciless. Flash is forever saving Dale from the evil Ming. I was too young to recognize in Ming a "likeness" to Mao, the non-democratic leader of China. More than a menacing image, in Mao, was the embodiment of the villainous dictator.
It's the Cold War Era. The threat to the American way of life was out there. Or so it seemed to some of us.
In his article "A trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable. We Should Stop Pretending", journalist Robert Kagan urges that we "stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality". America may see Trump in office again and not for just another term. We'll actually experience, here in the United States, a dictatorship. And why not, he argues.
"Rarely in American history has democracy's inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from squabbling of the democratic parties." The Democratic Party, as a result, is in "a mounting panic about its prospects" and he is right. It's not just the Democratic Party but anyone opposed to an openly authoritarian government at the helm in the US.
Yet, once again, along with millions of voting-age Americans, I'm asked to choose. I want the democratic experiment to continue, even as that experiment has included the suffering and death to millions by way of the conquest and displacement of indigenous people and the enslavement and disenfranchisement of black Americans. So, it's democracy or the other option. Further eroding of my rights, which could result in the lost of my right as a black American to exist.
I'm not talking about the one or the other presidential candidates. Rather, I'm considering how the party, claiming to stand for the people, for human rights and justice, continues using taxpayers' money to support the suffering and murdering of children? How does a party claiming to be in opposition to fascism continue to support the use of fossil fuels? The Democratic Party rejects the ideas offered by those who know history and don't want to see a repeat of the Weimar Republic. Or, for that matter, the end of the Reconstruction era, that further institutionalized anti-democratic ideas in the US.
There are voices calling attention to a vision of the US, leading the world as a humane and compassionate beacon of democracy. A democracy that wouldn't arrest protesters, including Jews, for calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A democracy that wouldn't think of supplying manufactures of weapons taxpayers' money to create technology to kill children and women. And yet, we are expected to be content with incremental steps of progress and then watch as each and every gain, from civil rights to voting rights, is vehemently denounced as unfair to white America!
Because the Democratic Party will respond to backlash! Anti-black backlash! So many Americans began quietly calculating how much white America will lose or have taken from them if blacks have access to the "American Dream" too. What would become of white America?
So, of course, we are here once again, calling for compassion and understanding, calling for a new way of seeing the world, seeing this country move forward, only to be met with new laws for arresting our civic duty, our activism, our recognition that we aren't islands unto ourselves. That the death of another "diminishes" me, diminishes even those who believe themselves justified in killing and therefore innocent.
Here we are witnessing the banning of the history of blacks in America. The banning, in short, of the black-lived experience, placates those whose ideas are anti-democratic. After all, as philosopher Jason Stanley writes, the "key to democracy is an informed electorate". But why would fascists "want an electorate that knows about persisting racial injustice in the United States along all its dimensions, from the racial wealth gap to the effects of over-policing and over incarceration, will be unsurprising by mass political rebellion in the face of persistent refusal to face up to these problems"?
If, on the other hand, we are faced with an electorate "ignorant of the facts", writes Stanley, then we will experience a lack of understanding and an "uncomprehending fear and horror of black political unrest". For fascists, isn't it more desirable to have a manipulable and a more docile population?
As Kagan notes, the Republican Party is now a fully anti-democratic institution, "responsible for Washington's dysfunction", and Trump benefits from this dysfunction. His solution is to offer none other than himself as dictator, for only he will have the radical fervor to dismiss "with rules". Trump will do away with the perceived problem.
What is that the problem if not democracy itself.
But, we are witnessing a set of ideas espoused by the Republicans, ideas not necessarily alien to the leadership of the Democratic Party. There is always money to hand off to corporate enterprises in war or anti-climate adventures. In the meantime, the citizenry is asked to recognize yet another villain, enemy to democracy, across the Atlantic or in the Pacific and never right there in the mirror.
I agree with Kagan that Trump offers his followers a triumphant victory "over the forces they hate in American society". This desire for justice and equity would be a fine collection of ideas if not for the democrats, Marxists, communists, socialists, leftist in general. Trump's "primary mission as president", however, will put into effect a "simple" solution. Never mind if that solution almost always come at the expense of those designated as "outsiders".
Trump, as an authoritarian head of state, would make sure, as Kagan notes, that his followers recognize in him the American Dream a dream under threat from those communists, Marxists, and interestingly, fascists! He will come for those who spoiled his potential to establish a dictatorship the first time. The administration he envisions, writes Kagan, "will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler's local gauleiters needed instruction". People, Kagan explains, worked toward the Fuhrer then. We are witnessing in the 21st century, in the US Americans working toward Trump's brand of fascism.
And why not, if in the 21st century, in the US, Americans mean, once and for all, to return to its greatness its most perfect state of innocence? It no longer matters if believers of this narrative fail to miss it's fictional origins. All it takes is a campaign led by liars, working their magic among the gullible.
And where is the leadership of the Democratic Party? Its don't-rock-the-boat liberal class?
Trump's followers, and aspirants of a full-fledged fascist state, are far more outraged it seems than the leaders of the Democratic Party. Kagan suggests that we shouldn't expect a sudden awakening from followers of Trump. But I wonder more about the need for an awakening from the leadership in the Democratic Party. Will that ever happen?
Trump followers want freedom from blackness. One too many times I've been asked to join the MAGA movement. Work toward Trump! My mind, let alone, my voice will surely be consumed under laws and policies further eradicating my existence as a human being. But this is a key step toward a fascist state for any respectable far-right movement. In the consumption of black minds and voices, freedom for white America will rise from the aches of dead corpses. Even now, black-lived experience in the US is being erased, is it not? Where is the outrage from the Democratic leadership?
We have learned from historian Carter Woodson, as Stanley reminds us, that this deadening of the black mind has served as a sure-fire, go-to violence for white supremacists in the past. In Woodson's 1933, The Mis-Education of the Negro, the author, writes Stanley, "describes how history was taught 'to enslave the Negroes' mind' by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities". Today, the fascist would have Americans believe in the benefit received by African Americans as a result of our enslavement!
I would have to be "dead" to shift from a belief in democracy to a society, resembling, once again, the ruins of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, the Trail of Tears, the Japanese determent camps... Fields of mutilated and slaughtered bodies, which many of us have seen in history books, along with images of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
"Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of perception, and the opposition prove powerless to stop it," writes Kagan, "then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship." The odds, he continues, have "grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left."
As we drift toward a dictatorship, we Americans, pro-democracy, Kagan writes, will be waiting "for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance".
I guess that savior might be someone like Flash Gordon. But then, Flash Gordon is looking elsewhere!
