Luke Ford

If America was in danger of slipping into a dictatorship, trillions of dollars would move out of America (because in a dictatorship, you no longer have the rule of law and wealth can be arbitrarily confiscated), and the U.S. dollar and stock market would collapse in value. That is not happening. That means that people with skin in the game don’t think America is slipping into dictatorship.

Peter Baker writes Dec. 9, 2023:

When a historian wrote an essay the other day warning that the election of former President Donald J. Trump next year could lead to dictatorship, one of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison.

The “historian” in question is Robert Kagan who might more accurately be described as a propagandist. Notes Wikipedia:

* In 1997, Kagan co-founded the now-defunct neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century with William Kristol.[4][6][13] Through the work of the PNAC, from 1998, Kagan was an early and strong advocate of military action in Syria, Iran, Afghanistan as well as to “remove Mr. Hussein and his regime from power.”[14][15] After the 1998 bombing of Iraq was announced Kagan said “bombing Iraq isn’t enough” and called on Clinton to send ground troops to Iraq.[16] In January 2002, Kagan and Kristol falsely claimed in a Weekly Standard article that Saddam Hussein was supporting the “existence of a terrorist training camp in Iraq, complete with a Boeing 707 for practicing hijackings, and filled with non-Iraqi radical Muslims”. Kagan and Kristol further alleged that the September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official several months before the attacks.[17] The allegations were later shown to be false.

* In 2008, Kagan wrote an article titled “Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776” for World Affairs, describing the main components of American neoconservatism as a belief in the rectitude of applying US moralism to the world stage, support for the US to act alone, the promotion of American-style liberty and democracy in other countries, the belief in American hegemony,[27] the confidence in US military power, and a distrust of international institutions.

* Andrew Bacevich referred to Kagan as “the chief neoconservative foreign-policy theorist” in reviewing Kagan’s book The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

* “The problem with [Colin] Powell is his political and strategic judgment. He doesn’t believe the United States should enter conflicts without strong public support, but he also doesn’t believe that the public will support anything. That kind of iron logic rules out almost every conceivable post-Cold War intervention.” (July 2000)

* In 2003, Kagan’s book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, published on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, created something of a sensation through its assertions that Europeans tended to favor peaceful resolutions of international disputes while the United States takes a more “Hobbesian” view in which some kinds of disagreement can only be settled by force, or, as he put it: “Americans are from Mars and Europe is from Venus.”

* In February 2016, Kagan publicly left the Republican party (referring to himself as a “former Republican”) and endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president and argued that the Republican Party’s “wild obstructionism” and an insistence that “government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves” were things meant to be “overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at” set the stage for the rise of Donald Trump. Kagan called Trump a “Frankenstein monster” and also compared him to Napoleon.[43] In May 2016, Kagan wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post regarding Trump’s campaign entitled “This Is How Fascism Comes to America”.[44] Kagan has said that “all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump.”[45] In September 2021, Kagan wrote a related opinion essay published in The Washington Post by the title, “Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here”.[46] He continued his criticism of Trump in November 2023 with another essay in The Washington Post titled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”

Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, under secretary of state for political affairs under secretary of state Antony Blinken. Notes Wikipedia:

During the Maidan Uprising in Ukraine, Nuland made appearances supporting the Maidan protesters.[20] In December 2013, she said in a speech to the US–Ukraine Foundation that the U.S. had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1991.[20] The Russian government seized on this statement, claiming it was evidence the U.S. was orchestrating a revolution.[20]

On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on January 28, 2014, was published on YouTube.[21][22][23][24][25][26] Nuland and Pyatt discussed who they thought should or shouldn’t be in the next Ukrainian government and their opinion of various Ukrainian political figures. Nuland told Pyatt that Arseniy Yatsenyuk would be the best candidate to become the next Prime Minister of Ukraine.[22][23] Nuland suggested the United Nations, rather than the European Union, should be involved in a political solution, adding “fuck the EU”.

Kagan and Nuland, to me, embody the worst of the U.S. foreign policy establishment because they consistently push for unnecessary American intervention overseas.

My primary response to the charge that Trump wants to become a dictator is that he has never shown much ability at running things, and he’s never seemed terribly interested in running things. He just wants attention, and the more conflict he engenders, the more attention he gets.

Paul Gottfried wrote May 21, 2012:

Robert Kagan, who seems to relish every war the U.S. has been in and regrets we couldn’t have fought in some of them even longer. Although Kagan is now selling himself as some kind of foreign-policy realist, all the “realists” he admires are people like himself, who supported all of America’s past military adventures and presumably would favor lots more military intervention in the future.

I agree with Steve Sailer’s Nov. 6, 2020 tweet: “Trump is just about the least authoritarian President since, say, Calvin Coolidge and those who obsess about Trump’s “authoritarianism” are projecting their own dark anti-democracy urges on Trump.”

Sailer wrote Oct. 9, 2018:

Republicans are paranoid! You can tell by how they are just on the verge of rounding up dissidents into soccer stadiums. That’s why the stock market has hammered Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’s net worth down to, uh, … well … that’s not the point. The point is that my enemies, who are always plotting to get me, are paranoid.

…I think Trump would be bored about the second hour of a “full authoritarian” regime and let his critics out of the soccer stadiums to give him back somebody to clash with. In fact, I don’t think there is anybody in American public life who loves the conflict of democratic politics more than Trump. Maybe Pat Buchanan, who doesn’t take conflict as personally and is more able to put himself in the other man’s shoes than Trump is, but that’s about it.

Authoritarianism in the European sense that brought to power both Hitler (bad) and De Gaulle (not bad) was connected to the feeling that partisan debate was unseemly. Trump, on the other hand, loves conflict. His enemies typically hate him because they find his love of conflict unseemly. They long for a philosopher-king like Obama under whom they can serve as PR flacks crafting “conversations” in which the citizenry’s job is to shut up and listen to their betters’ talking points.

Admittedly, I see Trump as the second coming of his role model George Steinbrenner, so I view Trump through the lens of the 1977-1981 World Series rivalry of Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees and the O’Malley family’s Los Angeles Dodgers.

The O’Malleys, in contrast, ran a super-authoritarian corporation where everybody, even a Steinbrenner / Trumpish personality like Tommy Lasorda, had to follow the corporate PR line that everything was copacetic behind the occluded mask. The L.A. Dodgers were extremely opaque and had largely co-opted the media into going along with their strategy.

In contrast, the early Steinbrenner Yankees were the most public controversy-friendly baseball team of all time, with Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, Reggie Jackson, and Thurman Munson engaged in a war of all against all carried out on the back covers of the tabloids.

Jan. 24, 2018, Sailer wrote:

…it’s comical that so many have denounced Trump as an “authoritarian” whose election threatens that “democracy dies in the dark,” as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post claims.

In reality, of course, Trump’s administration is the most public in memory. Comedians are making jokes about the president for the first time since 2008. Americans are enthusiastically arguing over politics. Trump, love him or hate him, has revitalized democracy.

Ironically, the authoritarian Bezos runs his Amazon company very much along closed, manipulative O’Malleyite lines rather than Trump’s wide-open, brawling Steinbrennerist principles. As evidence of just how dictatorial America has become under Trump, note that Bezos, who has gone out of his way to pick fights with the president, this month became the richest man in the history of the world.

Sailer wrote Oct. 8, 2021:

Trump’s “extraordinary effort” [to overturn the 2020 election result] didn’t take much thwarting:

Trump: “Do it!”

Officials: “We’ll resign.”

Trump: “OK, you win.”