Authoritarian nations come in many different stripes, but they all share a fundamental characteristic: The people who live in them are not allowed to freely choose their own leaders. This is why Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, in his speech announcing his vote to convict on the first article of impeachment, said that “corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”
Democracies are sustained through the formal process by which power is contested and exchanged. Once that process is corrupted, you have merely the trappings of democracy within an authoritarian regime. Such governments may retain elections and courts and legislatures, but those institutions have no power to enforce the rule of law. America is not there yet—but the acquittal vote was a fateful step in that direction.
--Adam Serwer in the Atlantic: "The First Days of the Trump Regime."
The problem isn't Trump; it's the Republican Party. Republicans simply do not care about the rule of law, i.e., the constitution, except when they can use it as a club to hit their political enemies. This isn't new; it been a growing trend at least since Nixon. But if you had any doubts, their lockstep acquittal of Trump (Romney excepted) is all the proof you need.
Even if the Dems win in November, they're going to have to contend with half the country that is hellbent on destroying the current political order, and these Republicans don't care what comes out of the rubble so long as their thugs come out on top. And they have every reason to believe that they will come out on top because they understand that when you make a mockery of the rule of law and when you destroy the norms and traditions that make a republican form of gov't possible, the authoritarian thugs usually win. The Dems will always be hamstrung by their desire to follow the rule of law; the GOP feels no such compunction. The Dems are like the feckless Weimar Liberals trying to cope with the brown-shirts. These thugs have nothing but contempt for these Liberals and their process and their laws. Roger Stone is exemplary in this respect.
Serwer goes on--
Much has been made of Trump’s unfitness for office. But if Trump were the only one who were unfit, his authoritarian impulses would have been easier to contain. Instead, the Republican Party is slowly transforming into a regime party, one whose primary duty is to maintain its control of the government at all costs. The benefits here are mutual: By keeping Trump in power, the party retains power. Individuals who want to rise in the Republican Party and its associated organizations today must be unwavering in their devotion to the leader—that is the only way to have a career in the GOP, let alone reap the associated political and financial benefits. Allowing Trump to fall would render all the humiliations, compromises, and sacrifices the party has made to keep him in power meaningless.
***
I wrote a long piece in October entitled Law and Order and the Jacksonian Right in which I argued something that I don't think most Liberals understand, which is that for Law and Order Conservatives, the emphasis is on Order, not on Law.
...Republicans see themselves as the party of law and order. I think this only makes sense if you understand that the more important word in that pairing is "order", in the sense of social order, not the political or legal one. Or to put it another way, the political and legal order has legitimacy only insofar as it is a reflection of the social order. The social order that shapes the politics of [American] social conservatives traces its roots back at least as far as the 1820s when the party of Jefferson became the party of Jackson. Then a rather primitive, premodern customary sense of American identity came to dominate in the political sphere, and in doing so replaced the modern, enlightenment imagination embraced by most of the founders. It was a collective return of the repressed.
We were taught in school that the Jacksonian democracy was a good thing, that it made America more representative of the will of the people. We tend, however to romanticize the "people" because we were not taught that the "people" who saw Jackson as their hero couldn't have cared less about the rule of law and the kind of virtue that is necessary for a true republic to thrive. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the older republican imagination of America infused with Enlightenment ideals was displaced by an imaginary that legitimated the lawless, loutish, violent impulses exemplified by Andrew Jackson himself. These Jacksonian Democrats never really cared about good government; they just wanted to be left alone to do their lawless, loutish, violent thing, especially regarding their slaves, the Indians, and the Mexicans. Trump, despite his un-Jacksonian bone spurs, is Jackson redivivus.
Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support the social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Those conservatives in the past who have thought of themselves as advocates for Law and Order have often not opposed lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the kind of lying that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump. What has mattered to them is that the Conservative social order be maintained, and so any technical lawlessness undertaken to promote or maintain that order is legitimate. If in the past lynching some uppity Negro was technically illegal, then obviously the law is illegitimate. The same goes for Trump's illegal abuses of power.
Russia used to be an enemy of these law-and-order conservatives when it was ruled by the godless communists, but now that it is a nominally Christian fascistic autocracy, they see it as an ally. They are very happy to accept its help in keeping Trump in power. They are gleeful that Brennan, Comey, Yates, and all the national security types who appear on CNN and MSNBC are in such a snit about Trump's dismantling of the government and institutions they have devoted their careers to defend.
And so this explains why Evangelical Christians support Trump. They see him as someone who is restoring the old social order. His personal behavior and lawlessness are irrelevant because they see hm as sent by God to destroy the godless secular Liberal Order. If that means destroying American democracy, so be it. Better a kingdom or autocracy where civil laws align with divine law (in the primitive lex talionis sense) than a democracy that is out of alignment with it. The authoritarian thugs, of course, don't care about the divine order; they just care about maintaining power. But they understand that they need to be seen as champions of the divine order if they are to maintain their base of support.
The naïveté required of the supporters of this kind of politics is, of course, jaw-dropping, but it has always been there waiting in the wings for its moment, and that moment is now. It explains why Trump's approval ratings can be so high after everything we have learned about him. None of that matters to his supporters because he is the great destroyer of the Liberal State. This is Bannonism more than it's Trumpism. Trump has no agenda except self-aggrandizement. But reactionary Opus Dei-type Catholics--Francoist fascists--like Bannon, Barr, Gingrich along with Falwellian Evangelicals see Trump as the sword that divine powers are using to destroy their secular enemies. Rule of law be damned if rule of law keeps their enemies propped up.
So we are seeing this play out now in front of us in real time. If any Liberal is so naive to think that Trump is an aberration, and that things will go back to normal after he is gone, they are as delusional as the benighted religious conservatives who see Trump as their divinely inspired champion. They do not understand what the Republican Party has become--and will remain--deeply fascistic. I'm sure Susan Collins would be deeply offended to hear such a thing, but her utter cluelessness is characteristic of how many non-fascists have been and are now being coopted to support a fascist regime.
And so if the rule of law and a decent, tolerant American society have any chance of survival in this century, the first step is to vote Trump and the Senate Republican majority out. If this doesn't happen in November, then there is very good reason to fear it will be too late. Another four years of Trump and/or McConnell will give these fascists enough time to consolidate their grip on power. But this is also why the Democratic moderate candidates--especially technocrats like Bloomberg and Buttigieg (And I don't even want to think about the utterly clueless Biden)--provide no solution and could make the situation worse if elected. Their mindset is naively symptomatic of and so therefore dismissive of the underlying problem.
Bernie is a risk, but Bloomberg is an even bigger one. Neither is likely to have a maximizing unifying effect regarding consolidating opposition to Trump, and that consolidation will be necessary to beat him. I'm writing this before the Nevada results are known, and I'm still hoping Warren will make a good show. It's clear to me that she has the best chance of uniting both wings of the Democratic Party. She is not clueless in the way the Neoliberal moderates are, but neither is she a Democratic Socialist. I agree with Krugman that Bernie isn't really a socialist and that he's just playing one on TV. But it's an open question whether most Americans will understand the difference. I'm perfectly fine with a Sanders' presidency, but I worry that he may not be the candidate that enough people will unite behind to beat Trump.
What worries me most about the Sanders' candidacy is that the Neoliberal establishment--think Chris Matthews or the Bloomberg/Buttigieg, NY Times/WashingtonPost wing of Liberalism--will refuse to enthusiastically support his election or to undermine him once he is elected. The Neoliberal establishment must join with the Progressive Left if we are to prevail in defeating the increasingly fascistic GOP--not just in November, but in the years to come. The passion and the unity of the Right is not going away soon, and it will continue to exploit the divisions of those who oppose them.
The Dem establishment needs the energy and commitment of young people to win in this fight--not just in November, but in the years to come. They must not be alienated from this process. Yes, there is a lot of political naïveté driving the Sanders' campaign, but he and his more fervent supporters are at least groping in the right direction. Better Sanders capture youthful, populist anger and energy than the fascists capture it. This election is our 1933. That's what's at stake. This is not hyperbole.