Contemplating Dictatorships

Politics today is rife with Wizard of Oz moments, the curtain pulled aside and someone or something revealed to be different, and less functional, than had been purported. Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance is one. The Supreme Court’s decision, in Trump v. United States, to grant presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution is another; any vestigial image the Court held as above partisan politics, or intellectually rarified in its hermeneutical deliberations, dissipated like a fart.

When I recently expressed hope Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee, Steven Giardini, friend on X, wrote that I’ve “the zeal of a convert,” as an ex-Republican “embracing a radical” like Harris. I noted leftist protestors didn’t get the memo about her radicalism, and that Steven sees Democrats as an “undifferentiated blob”; I should’ve added I owe the “undifferentiated blob” term to Jonah Goldberg. I’m a centrist and think the Biden-Harris administration has a solid policy record, for example in expediting a rebuilding of U.S. manufacturing, and moving to prevent Chinese domination of semiconductors. But even if I didn’t have that policy view, I’d vote against Donald Trump as a clear danger to democracy.

Since writing my pro-Kamala article, I’ve come to hope not only that Biden will end his campaign, but that he’ll resign in the near term, letting Harris step up as not just candidate but president. The pros and cons of that move are discussed by Jonathan V. Last in a post at The Bulwark, a Substack-based publication that’s become a mainstay of anti-Trump polemics. “If Harris is running as the sitting president, she will have demonstrated that she can do the job,” rather than just defending Biden’s performance and policies, notes Last, adding that her incumbency will make Trump “plotz.” A possible downside is that Harris’ choice for vice president would have to be confirmed by both chambers of Congress, likely getting resistance in the House; but watching those nitwits caper might be an upside.

I worry that Americans lack imagination about the possibilities of dictatorship. We focus too much on Nazi Germany, as if unconcerned about anything not manifesting equivalent extremes of totalitarianism, war and genocide. Dictatorships vary greatly, in how they rise, rule and fall. The negativity of some Democrats about how a second Trump presidency would mean a definitive end to democracy could be self-defeating, deflating the morale needed for ongoing opposition efforts to block and repair the damage such an administration would do to American institutions.

Cults of personality are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. When the family of my father, Erich Silber, arrived in the Dominican Republic as refugees in 1939, my grandparents told the children to never say anything about the country’s president, Rafael Trujillo, who’d been in power since 1930. Signs and documents saying, “Trujillo es el Jefe” (“Trujillo is the Boss”) were common, including placards in private homes asserting Trujillo was the boss of that household, or that he was a “national symbol.”

My father, at 14, went to work for a Scottish businessman named George McNaught Lockie, who ran a large import-export firm. In a long-ago essay, my father wrote that Trujillo and Lockie were “personal enemies,” but “Trujillo was hesitating to make things too difficult for Lockie because of the latter’s close contacts with the British Embassy at a time when Britannia ruled the waves and England was the No. 1 buyer of Dominican sugar.” Trujillo’s reign ceased only with his assassination in 1961.

It's worth studying the various ways in which authoritarian regimes end, which don’t necessarily involve a leader getting killed, or committing suicide in a bunker as foreign armies close in. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. U.S. was unconscionable in the latitude it gives a president to commit crimes, and reminiscent of guarantees sought by autocrats in other countries. In Chile, Augusto Pinochet, who’d taken power in a 1973 U.S.-backed coup, held a 1988 plebiscite, under pressure, for an additional eight-year term as president; after losing, he attempted an autogolpe, or self-coup, but was blocked by military and police officials.

Pinochet claimed immunity from prosecution, as “senator-for-life” and as ex-president, but this was eventually overruled, and the ex-dictator contended in his final years with international and domestic prosecutors. He spent time under house arrest, but died before he was convicted of any crimes.

—Follow Kenneth Silber on X: @kennethsilber