Glenn Greenwald: The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like
dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy
has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain
entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper
columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a
preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly
crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health
pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American
cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities.
Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on
the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents,
to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less
civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the
streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to
assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of
industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked
by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean
War. In March, The Washington Post reported
that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have
been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his
potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet
“Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands
to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is
not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator....
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