A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Friday, October 3, 2025 06:54
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Thursday, October 2, 2025 7:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

An Autocracy of Dunces

How stone-faced generals, Wall Street pushback, and a government shutdown may save America’s quickly declining democracy

By Paul Krugman | Oct 02, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-autocracy-of-dunces

If America still had a fully functioning democracy, Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday to the assembled generals would have ended his presidency. Trump treated the event like a political rally and was clearly taken aback by the refusal of the audience to applaud or laugh at his jokes. Delivering a nakedly partisan speech to a mandated assembly of military officers was a gross violation of the Hatch Act. The content —telling the officers to be ready to use force against U.S. citizens — was clearly an impeachable offense. In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment.

But how did this happen?

It’s clear that the decision to summon top officers from around the world to receive a lecture about “warrior ethos” from a man who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon was made by Pete Hegseth. It confirmed publicly what is being whispered within the military, and presumably among our allies and enemies: that Hegseth is an abject incompetent who isn’t remotely up to the job. And this toe-curling performance is a reflection of his underlying panic.

It’s yet another example of Trump being undone by his even more chaotic minions – RFK Jr. and vaccines, Peter Navarro and his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Bill Pulte’s scurrilous use of private mortgage information (which implicated his own family) and Brendan Carr’s own-goal from going after Jimmy Kimmel. I could go on, but I think the point is made.

Back in August I wrote about “hackification,” invoking what I dubbed Arendt’s Law. As I noted, Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian regimes don’t want competent people, who might sometimes take a stand on principle. They prefer crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

My case in point in that post was E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, who Trump was trying to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous Commissioner because he didn’t like the numbers the agency was reporting.

While there are many competent conservative economists, Antoni isn’t one of them. He is, instead, stunningly, Stephen-Moore-level incompetent, with a toxic history on social media. Trump’s choice of Antoni proved Arendt’s dictum: crackpots and fools are likely to be more loyal than people who actually know something.

The same logic surely explains the appointment of the hapless Hegseth.

Hackification is also an important factor in the government shutdown. Democrats have made their willingness to supply the extra votes needed to keep the government open contingent on an extension of the Biden-era expansion of health insurance subsidies, which will expire at the end of this year.

It’s good ground for them, politically: More than 24 million Americans get health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, almost all of them subsidized. And if the subsidies are allowed to expire, many families will face a disastrous financial hit:

Source: KFF

The political puzzle is why Republicans didn’t see this coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill carefully and cynically delays big cuts to Medicaid until after the midterms. Why didn’t it include a similarly cynical delay to the looming premium apocalypse?

Well, Chuck Schumer, who met with Trump Monday, said that the president appeared to be “not aware” of the impact of expiring subsidies. I just had a conversation with Jonathan Cohn, which will be posted on Saturday, and we agreed that many Republicans, like Trump, simply weren’t aware of the issue. Who would tell them? As far as I can tell there are no competent health analysts working either for Trump or for Republicans in Congress.

So let me return to my opening point: America is no longer a fully functioning democracy. In the good old days of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party had the conscience and backbone to standup to Nixon’s attempt at autocracy. William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, recused himself from US vs Nixon because of his close prior association with Watergate conspirators? Can you imagine Scalia or Thomas having any such sense of fairness and duty?

But like all authoritarian regimes, America’s autocracy is being run by malevolent incompetents. And while our hallowed institutions are utterly failing to rise to the occasion, the sheer incompetence of these hacks is generating pushback that may yet save us.

While it is likely that the top ranks of the US military skew right politically, all of us – liberals included – should applaud their stony reception of Hegseth and Trump. Likewise, while business leaders are also likely to skew right politically, we all should applaud their pushback over tariffs, the appointment of E.J. Antoni, and the attempt to fire Lisa Cook. And let’s give special thanks to the many Disney subscribers who canceled after the abortive attempt to fire Jimmy Kimmel.

Many innocent people — above all, federal employees — will be hurt by the government shutdown. But Democrats needed to take a stand, to show that they will try to hold Republicans accountable for their assault on the welfare of Americans, and Republican incompetence gave them good ground for doing so.

In a perverse way, we can be grateful that Trump and his minions are so incompetent, because that is forcing the dormant parts of our country to push back. Let’s just hope that the pushback is strong enough and fast enough to save us all.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 10:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 1:09 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Hegseth’s Hatred of Americans Makes Him Unfit for Office but a Perfect Fit for Trump

The secretary of war is a Christian nationalist who wants to eliminate those who don’t agree with his totalitarian vision

By Cathy Young | Oct 01, 2025

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/hegseths-hatred-of-americans-makes

The image of Hegseth that emerges from his authorship of The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.

The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a “free” country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.

In addition to treating a broadly defined “Left” as the enemy, American Crusade also heaps scorn on ostensibly patriotic but overly complacent “fifty-fifty Americans.” The term comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who is quoted in the epigraph to the first part of the book: “There is not room in the country for any fifty-fifty American, nor can there be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes.” The quote appears to be a garbled amalgam of several passages in Roosevelt’s speeches and writings, all of them from a very specific context: divided loyalties among some German-Americans during World War I. Hegseth’s “fifty-fifty American,” by contrast, refers to a well-meaning non-combatant in the culture war: a “squish” who disapproves of the perceived excesses of the progressive left but shrugs them off in the hope that “common sense will prevail,” or who doesn’t want to be “overly political,” or who thinks his or her local public school is great. For all his talk of reverence for America’s founding ideals, Hegseth’s version of Americanism sounds at times more like proto-totalitarian French Jacobinism, whose ideologues asserted that not only “traitors” but the “indifferent” and the “passive” must be punished.

Besides Hegseth’s quasi-totalitarian demands for complete fealty to the right and intensely held animus toward the left in the culture war, there is also the troubling question of just how literally he takes the “war” part. American Crusade, after all, explicitly invokes the medieval Crusades as a model for the fight against “the Left.” Although Hegseth acknowledges that the history of the Crusades is “complicated” and that it includes nasty episodes, such as horrific violence toward Jews, he sees in them a model for civilizational conservation against an existential threat. He even justifies them based on a bizarre alternative history in which they served the cause of peace: “After centuries of fighting … Christianity in Europe was saved, Jerusalem was liberated, and Christians did not seek further war with Muslims.” In fact, Jerusalem was captured by Christian forces in the First Crusade in 1099 but recaptured by Muslims in 1187; seven subsequent Crusades over the next century were unsuccessful, and Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule—first by North African sultanates, then by the Ottoman Empire—until the 20th century.

Hegseth’s caveat that he is using the Crusades analogically and not calling for actual violence is at least somewhat belied by his suggestion that a future phase of this conflict may involve literal war. He writes in his 2020 book: “Our fight is not with guns. Yet.” One may also ask if Hegseth believes that the time for guns has now come?

Much more at https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/hegseths-hatred-of-americans-makes

Download all Pete Hegseth books for free from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Pete+Hegseth

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 4:23 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out.

An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times.

By Peter Turchin | Oct 2, 2025, 5:00 AM CDT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin

. . . the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?

Our current predicament is not unprecedented. We can learn from how past societies survived through, and ended, their crisis periods.

The “wealth pump”

The collapse of ancient empires, the revolutions that convulsed early modern Europe, or the tensions tearing apart today’s democracies are often treated as products of unique historical circumstances. But my analysis of more than a hundred past crises spanning the last two millennia shows that these outbreaks of societal instability are driven by a mechanism that operates with surprising regularity across different historical eras and places: the wealth pump. The term describes a set of conditions — economic and political — that transfer wealth from the broad base of the population to the elite, a small proportion of people who concentrate power in their hands.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703238/end-times-by-peter-tur
chin/
Free download from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Peter+Turchin

The wealth pump consists of various means by which the fruits of economic growth are, instead of being shared equitably, siphoned upward the social ladder. In the past, this was from peasants to landlords; today, from workers to business owners and corporate executives. First, economic inequality rises. Then political inequality follows, as the wealthy convert their riches into influence. This development erodes democratic institutions, making it harder for the non-elite majority to defend their interests through formal politics. Eventually, systemic stability is threatened.

Undermining society

The wealth pump undermines the stability of societies in three ways.

1) It causes growing popular discontent.

The obvious effect of the wealth pump is that it enriches the upper strata and increases their numbers via upward economic mobility — for example, enabling CEOs of large companies to enter the ranks of uber-wealthy. However, this happens at the expense of the majority. To understand this, consider the relative wage, defined as the wage earned by typical workers (technically, the median wage) relative to the GDP per capita. When the relative wage declines, non-elite workers receive less and less of the fruits of economic growth. This decline in relative wages means that while wages stagnate, the costs of housing, education, and healthcare soar.

In the United States, for example, the relative wage began falling from the 1970s onward. Even as the economy grew, most Americans fell behind. This results in anger and increased mass-mobilization potential.
https://peterturchin.com/population-immiseration-in-america/

2) The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.

This is most clear when we consider that some top wealth holders are interested in translating their economic power into political office (think Trump, but also Michael Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, and so on). There are 10 times as many decamillionaires today (and the number of billionaires has increased even more), but still the same number of political positions — one president, 100 senators, and so on.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28383/w28383.pdf

3) The wealth pump creates too many youths pursuing not just college but even more advanced degrees in hopes of escaping looming “precarity.”

Increasing the number of elite wannabes (stemming from the overproduction of both wealth-holders and degree-holders) who compete for a fixed number of power positions results in a game of musical chairs. As the proportion of aspirants who are frustrated in their quest for power positions swell, many are tempted to start breaking the rules of the game.

This all creates an explosive mixture: raw energy and mass action, coupled with organization and charismatic leaders. We are thus left with a paradoxical coalition: alienated elites from above, and angry masses from below. Historical revolutions — from the late Roman Republic to 18th-century France to the Russian Revolution — have often emerged from this volatile combination. It is not just the poor who revolt; revolutions are incubated among those who are downwardly mobile or shut out of power despite their elevated status and aspirations.
The long arc of instability

Of course, human societies are complex systems and the road to state breakdown is affected by other factors. And this dynamic — wealth concentration, elite overproduction, mass immiseration — does not lead to collapse overnight. But there is a point at which the contradictions can no longer be contained. Eventually, something gives.

We can trace this cycle through history. In ancient Rome, the wealth pump destroyed the class of independent citizen farmers, while the elite class ballooned with equestrians and senators jockeying for position. The result was a century of civil wars that ended with the Republic’s death and the rise of autocracy. The original populist party (populares in Latin), was launched by the Gracchi brothers, and its most successful (for a while) leader was Julius Caesar. The careers of Roman populists, who channeled the discontent of non-elite Romans, are eerily similar to the modern populists, most notably Trump.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691136967/secular-cycl
es

In 17th-century England, decades of population growth, declining wages, and dramatic expansion of the landed gentry numbers led to civil war, regicide, and a revolutionary reordering of the political economy. In pre-revolutionary France, the aristocracy and clergy entrenched their privileges while the rural and urban poor bore the burden of taxation — until the whole system exploded in 1789.

These were not isolated incidents. They are manifestations of a recurring structural dynamic. To end a crisis, a society, first and foremost, needs to shut down the wealth pump.
What can we learn from history about ending crisis periods?

Once a society steps on the road to crisis, it resembles a massive ball rolling down a narrow valley with steep slopes. It’s very difficult to stop or even deflect its rush to an impending disaster. But when the ball arrives at the crisis point — for example, when counter-elites seize power — the valley opens up.

In the past, most exits from crisis had to pass through a lengthy period of disintegration and disunity, lasting many decades and sometimes longer than a century. An example is the early modern crisis in France, which began in 1562 with the Wars of Religion and ended with the start of Louis XIV’s personal rule in 1661. The next disintegrative period in France, the Age of Revolutions, also lasted many decades — from 1789 to 1870.

Most commonly, wealth pumps were turned off by a major epidemic, calamitous civil war, or transformative revolution. “Death is the great leveler,” as the historian Walter Scheidel argued in his eponymous book. The Black Death in 14th-century Western Europe carried away half of the population. Collapsing labor supply drove up real wages, reversing the wealth pump. In France and England, this was followed by many decades of internecine wars, in which overproduced elites partly exterminated themselves, driving large swaths into the commoner class. In the next cycle, known as the General Crisis of the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) killed off more than one-third of German population, also resetting the structural conditions that then ended the crisis.

But there are other ways to exit the crisis and some trajectories manage to avoid a revolution or a civil war. Analysis by my research group suggests that at the cusp of the crisis the massive ball of the state can be nudged to achieve better outcomes. This insight is highly relevant to us today — in fact, a high degree of unpredictability and historical contingency is grounds for optimism. It means that we collectively can really shape the future.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rk4gd_v1

We should be ready for years and perhaps even decades of social turbulence and political infighting (and I hope we will avoid hot civil war).

My colleagues and I review several examples that successfully avoided revolution or civil war. In one article, we discuss the Conflict of the Orders in ancient Rome, which brought the Roman Republic to the brink of civil war, but was resolved when the patricians agreed to share power with the plebeians.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mw3d3r7

During the reform period in England (1838–1857), political reforms removed “rotten boroughs,” thus shifting the balance of power away from the landed gentry in favor of the upwardly mobile commercial elites. Later reforms increased the electorate by broadening who could vote. Another key legislation that alleviated immiseration was the repeal of the Corn Laws that had imposed tariffs on the import of grains, which benefited large landowners but inflated the price of staple food in domestic markets.

The Great Reforms in the Russian Empire (1861–1874) not only abolished serfdom, but also relaxed censorship of the media and revamped the judicial system. Other reforms include military modernization, local self-government, education reforms, reform of the Russian Orthodox Church, and economic modernization.

The US was in crisis before the New Deal (1933–1938). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343312442078 But the New Deal instituted a broad array of redistributive policies: steeply progressive tax rates, strong labor rights, regulation of finance, large-scale investment in infrastructure and education, and the expansion of social safety nets. These reforms didn’t happen overnight. They were the product of hard-fought political struggles (beginning during the early decades of the twentieth century), often driven by mass movements and reform-minded segments of the elites who recognized that continued extraction risked systemic collapse. Social Democratic movements in northern and western Europe, such as Denmark, did an even better job of turning off their wealth pumps, over the same period of time.

Finding a way out

Unfortunately, analysis of 150 of past crises showed that they avoided substantial bloodshed only in about 10 to 15 percent of cases. But it is encouraging that successful crisis resolutions, rare in the distant past, become more frequent as we get closer to today.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0402

Our societies are different from Imperial Rome and from even our mid-20th century predecessors. But the principles behind a successful exit from crisis remain relevant. While the specific policies will differ across societies, the overarching goal remains the same: to rebalance the distribution of wealth and power in a way that promotes long-term stability, not short-term elite enrichment.

One principle is the need to emphasize the importance of productive, and not just extractive, economic activity. In recent decades, financialization and monopolization have shifted the economy’s center of gravity away from industries that produce real goods and services toward those that merely rearrange ownership or extract rents. To reverse this, we need tax and regulatory structures that reward innovation, job creation, and sustainable enterprise — while discouraging speculative asset bubbles, predatory lending, and corporate hoarding.

Progressive taxation is another cornerstone of any effort to slow the wealth pump. This may include not just higher income tax rates on the top brackets, but also wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, and the closing of loopholes that allow billionaires to pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.

Equally important is the restructuring of the labor market from below. For decades, the decline of organized labor has weakened the bargaining power of the majority, resulting in wage stagnation. When workers are empowered to demand their fair share of economic gains, the upward suction of wealth slows — and the society becomes both more equitable and more resilient.

Another key front may be the regulation of political power itself. As wealth has concentrated, so has influence — often in ways that distort democracy. Campaign finance reform, lobbying restrictions, anti-corruption measures, and increased transparency in government are all essential to ensure that public policy serves the broad citizenry rather than narrow elite interests. A democracy dominated by oligarchic donors is a contradiction in terms — and a recipe for social unrest.

But policies alone are not enough. The wealth pump is also sustained by narratives: the belief that extreme inequality is the price of progress, that markets always know best, that poverty reflects moral failure rather than structural disadvantage. These cultural frames must be challenged and replaced with a new ethic of social solidarity and reciprocal obligation. No society can thrive when it abandons the idea of a common good.

The thoughts above should not be taken as a concrete reform program. Historically, different societies used a variety of ways to end their disintegrative periods. Often, finding a way out requires many decades of experimentation and political conflict. The main problem is that the continuing operation of the wealth pump is extremely lucrative for most elites. Institutional inertia and vested interest will resist every step of the rebalancing. This is why I wouldn’t expect rapid action. Instead we should be ready for years and perhaps even decades of social turbulence and political infighting (and I hope we will avoid hot civil war). But the longer we fail to tame the wealth pump, the longer our own disintegrative period will be.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 4:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Your self-proclaimed "experts" have all flushed their credibility down the toilet.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 4:40 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
...the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?

Stop selling civil war, traitor.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 4:55 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
...the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?

Stop selling civil war, traitor.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

I'm selling the idea that if Trump were dead, America's problems would be solved. Killing the fat, dumb motherfucker and pedophile is a worthy scientific experiment to test the hypothesis. Numerous presidents have been killed in the spirit of scientific endeavor, and after each experiment, America was stronger and wealthier. It is time to run the same experiment again, to see whether the same improvements will follow.

Very Impressive, Mr President!

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape
-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882

Case 5:16-cv-00797-DMG-KS Document 1 Filed 04/26/16 Page 3 of 6 Page ID #:3

11. On the third occasion involving the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson was forced to engage in an unnatural lesbian sex act with her fellow minor and sex slave, Maria Doe age 12, for the sexual enjoyment of Defendant Trump. After this sex act, both minors were forced to orally copulate Defendant Trump by placing their mouths simultaneously on his erect penis until he achieved sexual orgasm. After zipping up his pants, Defendant Trump physically pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the "poor" quality of their sexual performance.
12. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, was tied to a bed by Defendant Trump who then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff Johnson. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff Johnson loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to "please wear a condom". Defendant Trump responded by violently striking Plaintiff Johnson in the face with his open hand and screaming that "he would do whatever he wanted" as he refused to wear protection. After achieving sexual orgasm, the Defendant, Donald J. Trump put his suit back on and when the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, in tears asked Defendant Trump what would happen if he had impregnated her, Defendant Trump grabbed his wallet and threw some money at her and screamed that she should use the money "to get a fucking abortion".

It’s only 6 pages! See them all in their original form at https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape
-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 6:46 PM

THG

Keep it real please

Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 7:06 PM

THG

Keep it real please

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
...the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?

Stop selling civil war, traitor.

Not to worry comrade. Jack, i.e. Gilligan, will be in his ICE uniform any day now. They couldn't possibly stamp rejected on his forehead and kick him out onto the street.

T

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Friday, October 3, 2025 6:54 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Declining American Democracy: Trump is a Symptom, Not the Cause

The modern GOP is inherently authoritarian

By Paul Krugman | Oct 03, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/declining-american-democracy-trump

It’s now undeniable that American democracy is in very big trouble. An autocratic president, abetted by collaborators in the Supreme Court and the Republican party, is actively attempting to use the military, the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, trade policy, voting rolls, federal spending, and any other weapon he can get his hands on to punish his critics and lock in permanent power. Yet it still comes as a shock to have the dire state that the country is in confirmed by the experts.

On Wednesday G. Elliott Morris directed us to the findings of Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who monitor the functioning of democracy in many countries. They now rate the United States as an “illiberal democracy”. That means that the ruling party can still lose elections, so we aren’t a full autocracy just yet. However, that democracy is on the ropes because the power of the state is being used to put a heavy thumb on the scales, tilting us towards autocracy.

Much of our legacy media is still in denial about this reality, or is actively trying to cover it up. I still see news reports describing some offense by the Trump administration as potentially “worse than Watergate” – a description that is ludicrously quaint when applied to an administration that does things worse than Watergate several times a week. Two weeks ago I hosted a recorded interview with Karen Attiah, the former Global Opinions editor of the Washington Post, who was summarily fired for refusing to canonize Charlie Kirk, while the Times’s Ezra Klein has faced no consequences, despite widespread outrage, for declaring that Kirk did politics “the right way.” And I needn’t remind you about the Disney-Jimmy Kimmel saga.

But how did we degenerate like this? Nixon, who was a piker by comparison to Donald Trump, was repudiated by his own party. Not only is Donald Trump a wannabe dictator, surely the worst person on multiple dimensions ever to occupy the White House, but he made his intentions clear in the January 6th insurrection and his promises of retribution if re-elected. But unlike Nixon, Trump is backed by a Republican party that has become so extreme, so unwilling to acknowledge that opposition is even legitimate that none of his actions matter. Today’s Republicans show no hesitation whatsoever in adopting the Führerprinzip, the “leader principle”, in which Trump’s diktats override all written law and democratic norms.

Is calling the modern GOP an extremist party just my subjective assessment? No, it’s an assertion backed by solid evidence. And like Morris, I loves me some visual data. So let’s talk about political polarization supported by hard data.

I’m a big fan of Voteview, which uses roll call votes in Congress to place politicians along an ideological spectrum. The details are complex, but it turns out that you can predict senators’ and representatives’ votes on most legislation by assigning them positions in a two-dimensional, abstract “issue space.” One dimension is left versus right — support or lack thereof for progressive taxation and social spending. The other dimension historically had to do with racial equality, although it’s harder to interpret now.

Here’s where Republican and Democratic senators were located in that abstract space during the Watergate affair:

Source: Voteview

As you can see, there was a lot of overlap between the parties. There really was a political center, illustrated by the red and blue dots straddling the half-way mark of the horizontal axis. And it was that center that basically decided that Nixon must go.

We shouldn’t romanticize this era of relative bipartisanship. The primary reason the parties overlapped on economic issues was that the South still voted Democratic. So there were still Dixiecrats, politicians who were economically conservative and anti-civil rights, but who caucused with the Democrats. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, that faction has switched parties, and is a wing — arguably the dominant wing — of the GOP.

As a result, the Republican and Democratic parties are completely polarized. Here’s the current picture:

What this chart shows is that the center did not hold. There is now a wide gap between even the least conservative Republican and the least liberal Democrat, illustrated by the absence of any blue or red dots near the half-way mark of the horizontal axis. And this means that the centrist, bipartisan bloc that forced Nixon out no longer exists.

How did Congress become so polarized? It’s true that, on average, Democrats moved left. But this is sort of an optical illusion: what really happened was that Dixiecrat Democrats moved into the Republican camp, leaving the remaining Democratic Party to Northern Democrats. Ideologically, Northern Democrats have hardly moved since 1950. Republicans, on the other hand, moved very far to the right, as shown by the upward trajectory of the red line in the graph below:

Source: Voteview

These changes have produced asymmetric polarization. While the de-Dixiecratted Democratic Party broadly looks like a center-left European party, the GOP doesn’t look like the European center right. Instead it looks like Germany’s AfD or Hungary’s Fidesz, extremist parties with a clear authoritarian streak.

And all of this happened before Trump, certainly before Trump’s return to power in the 2024 election. Trump is clearly hell-bent on destroying American democracy and turning us into a rogue nation. He is personally cruel, corrupt and vindictive. (Hey, I think I’m allowed to say that about a man who called me a “deranged bum.”) But it’s the nature of Trump’s party, not his personal depravity, that is responsible for the decline of American democracy.

The obvious next question is how such a party came to power in a nation that has long, for all its flaws, been a beacon of freedom for the world. This in turn is part of the larger question of why “populist” parties have been on the rise throughout the Western world. I use scare quotes around “populist” because neither the GOP nor its counterparts abroad are, in fact, representing the interests of ordinary people. But that’s the term everyone uses.

Anyway, the answer to that question is that there are a lot of potential explanations, ranging from rising income inequality and the power of the plutocracy, to the problems of left-behind regions, to men not working, to the injured pride of white men who feel that they have lost their dignity and their privilege, to the social anomie caused by the Internet. Also, racism never went away and has become increasingly overt again. I take all of these issues seriously, but don’t have firm views about their relative responsibility for our current moment of democratic peril.

The only thing I’m sure of is that the threat to U.S. democracy is much bigger than Trump himself. And it won’t end when he leaves the scene.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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