Want some racism, sexism, misogyny, blunt and angry nationalism, and good-old-fashioned corruption with your government?
We just had an example during the four years of the Trump presidency of how this could change everyday life in America, and the election to leadership of Trump acolyte Elise Stefanik shows how many in the Republican Party want to institutionalize it. It's important to understand what it really means.
A lot of names have been bandied around to describe the form of government Donald Trump tried to impose on us during his administration. "Fascism" was used commonly, as were words like "little dictator," and "cult of personality."
But really what Donald Trump was proposing and trying to institute is a fairly common form of government, a variation of authoritarianism called oligarchy.
We are seeing it played out around the world in governments controlled by rich elites and run by authoritarians like Duterte, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Erdowan, Putin, Orban, Modi, and Duda.
They seem like they are increasingly becoming one-man-rule governments, but authoritarianism is just the midpoint after oligarchs begin corrupting democratic governments that have not yet become full-blown fascist oligarchies.
Because they are rarely stable, these "midpoint" authoritarian governments usually are grown in, and rise up to seize control of, democracies, as has happened several times over the past 40 years in the Philippines, for example, where the biggest businesses are inextricably intertwined with the state, corruption is rampant, and the media, the courts and the legislature are all essentially under the control of the billionaire or oligarchic class.
Oligarchy is when the very rich rule a country largely for their own benefit. They typically bring along a charismatic but compliant leader at the top (often an oligarch himself, and if he doesn't start out that way he certainly ends that way), and are supported at the bottom by "authoritarian followers" who feel insecure about their personal and economic prospects and want a "big daddy" who will soothe their anxieties, affirm their victimhood and outrage, and help them sleep at night.
Oligarchy is always the result of very wealthy people corrupting the political process, something the Founders thought they could control in America but that political philosopher Robert Michaels, with his "Iron Law of Oligarchy" in 1911, proposed was the inevitable result of every democracy that didn't maintain strong guardrails to prevent the rich from rising up and corrupting the political process.
This corruption of politics is exactly what has happened in the United States since the late 1970s when the Supreme Court ruled (in their Buckley andBellotti decisions in 1976/1978) that billionaires and corporations owning politicians was merely "First Amendment-protected free speech." It brought us the Reagan Revolution.
The Court doubled down on this in 2010 with their Citizens United ruling, saying that if government prevented billionaires and giant corporations from overwhelming elections with their money and advertising, we were not just inhibiting their free speech.
The conservative justices on the Court invented a bizarre new doctrine to justify Citizens United, saying that average people were being disadvantaged when billionaires and corporations couldn't pour unlimited money into the political process because if they were stifled we'd lose our "right to hear" from some of the most "important" and "well-informed" players in the economic and political game.
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