10 Ways to Tell if a President is a Dictator aka Authoritarian Creep

Just because the United States is a democracy now doesn't mean it will stay that way, says Harvard Prof. Stephen Walt,

if you live in the United States, what you should really worry about is the threat that Trump may pose to America’s constitutional order. His lengthy business career suggests he is a vindictive man who will go to extreme lengths to punish his opponents and will break a promise in a heartbeat and without remorse.

As if we've not been able to recognize it when we see it (and we've been seeing it for the last three years). Fortunately a LOT of Americans realize this particular problem right now.



By the way, I've been noting for months that I've seen NO data showing who is or is not electable. That's largely because the word is bandied about by many who don't have data to back up their claims, whether it's about centrist candidates, women candidates, or Progressive candidates. Last year, I published an essay by Bob Lord on a related subject. He began thus,

Holding the Center, or Abandoning Hope?

Trump's re-election would be an unmitigated disaster, but so would squandering the opportunity to establish a bold plan for America's future.

At times in recent months, Speaker Pelosi has shined. Her handling of Trump’s shutdown was beyond skillful. So give credit where credit is due.

But what is she thinking when she insists Democrats must “hold the center”?

Now I've found, because somebody posted a link where I could find it, that there apparently IS data on the subject. In an article on Salon, senior editor Keith Spencer wrote last June,

There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate

Economist Thomas Piketty wrote a paper about this in 2018, though the Democrats paid no attention

The Republican Party has earned a reputation as the anti-science, anti-fact party — understandably, perhaps, given the GOP's policy of ignoring the evidence for global climate change and insisting on the efficacy of supply-side economics, despite all the research to the contrary. Yet ironically, it is now the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections. As the Democratic establishment and its pundit class starts to line up behind the centrist nominees for president — like Mike Bloomberg and Pete Buttigieg — the party's head-in-the-sand attitude is especially troubling.

The mounds of data to which I refer come from Thomas Piketty, the French political economist who made waves with his 2013 book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." This paper, entitled "Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict," analyzes around 70 years of post-election surveys from three countries — Britain, the United States and France — to comprehend how Western politics have changed in that span. 

So, my friends who say nothing else matters more than beating Lord Dampnut (er, Donald Trump, an anagram of Lord Dampnut), pay close attention to what Professor Piketty discovered. From the paper's abstract,

Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, this paper documents a striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages. In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to a “multiple-elite” party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the “left”, while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the “right” (though less and less so). I argue that this can contribute to explain rising inequality and the lack of democratic response to it, as well as the rise of “populism”. I also discuss the origins of this evolution (rise of identity/migration cleavage, and/or educational expansion per se) as well as future prospects: “multiple-elite” stabilization; complete realignment of the party system along a “globalists” (high-education, high-income) vs “nativists” (low-education, low-income) cleavage; return to class-based redistributive conflict (either from an internationalist or nativist perspective). Two main lessons emerge. First, with multi-dimensional inequality, multiple political equilibria and bifurcations can occur. Next, without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low-education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party.

From the Salon article,

Now, here's the line that should make the Democratic Party perk up [...]

To translate from academese: An "egalitarian-internationalist platform" means the kind of political platform that articulates a shared, global struggle among all of the poor and working-class people around the world. In other words, a class-conscience platform that recognizes that rich people are not on the same side as the rest of us, have different interests, and are eager to exploit us. And egalitarian means the opposite of nationalistic or xenophobic: united in a common class struggle, you might say, towards a mutual goal of universal civil rights.

In other words, in America this year, Michael Bloomberg and Joe Biden are NOT electable. Bloomberg, however, is conning people into believing (because they're paying attention to his adverts rather than genuine DATA) that he can save us from Trump. It's a con.

Don't fret. We've ALL been conned in our lives. I could tell you about a couple of times it's happened to me, but that's beside the point at the moment. [The cure for being vulnerable to con artists is critical thinking.]

Trump pulled the biggest one in 2016. But we don't want our own rogue candidate.

If you know of any DATA which contradicts these claims, I'd love to see them.

It's also noteworthy that my friend Teri Kanefield has pointed to what ails us and how to cure it. The CURE does not entail trying to elect a centrist.

On the main subject of this blog post, it's also of the utmost importance that we put swing voters (persuadable ones) in perspective.

The people up for grabs, the persuadable voters, is a band of about 5-7% of voters. Get a chunk of those, and we can reach landslide numbers.

The problem: These are also the people vulnerable to propaganda. Given the recent uptick in Trump’s approval, the disinformation tactics are clearly working.

The cure is for you and I to get involved in rebuilding the institutions which have made our country great already. If you need ideas on how to get started, here's where you can find Teri's list of suggestions.

That includes getting potential voters who skipped the last presidential election to vote this year.

Today it is a case of the grasshopper pitted against the elephant. But tomorrow the elephant will have its guts ripped out. -- Le Loi, Vietnamese emperor, 15th Century.