The United States of Authoritarianism
We're living in it. What are we going to do about it?
Every time I turn on the “news” I see and hear the same caterwauling, the same histrionic hair pulling and table-pounding nonsense.
“Authoritarianism is coming! Authoritarianism is coming!” You’d think Paul Revere was riding through town shouting about the British, but no, it’s just another cable news talking head foaming at the mouth about our impending doom.
But let’s be clear – I don’t hate them for their ceaseless self-promotion. I just hate their verb choices. Let me explain:
Verbs ending in -ing are said to be using the progressive voice, which we use to talk about something that is currently the process of occurring, but has not yet fully come to pass.
Saying that “authoritarianism is coming” is like saying the Oklahoma City Thunder are “winning the NBA Championship” even though they won it in dramatic fashion last Sunday. It’s not a thing that is currently in the process of happening. It happened. I saw them lift the trophy and everything.
Authoritarianism is not something off on the horizon; it is not an impending anything. Authoritarianism has arrived, and it governs us all, whether we like it or not. It is not on its way, and it is not in the process of becoming the ruling force in America. It arrived a long time ago. We are not losing our freedoms. We have lost them.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is fundraising.
Now, the exact moment that autocratic rule arrived in America is debatable. Some might even claim its been in place since the Patriot Act; others might choose the Citizens United ruling as the start of American authoritarianism, but one thing is clear – only the scavengers looking to enrich themselves on the carcass of a declining superpower would dare claim that we are anything other than a government of one. I take no pleasure in saying this, as I am and always have been a patriot, but it’s time for some honesty. It’s time for the cable news corporate mouthpieces with their big microphones to start leveling with us, ratings be damned.
I know there are many who would dispute my claim, as it used to be their right to do, but those arguments cannot win for one very simple reason, and here it is:
I am 51 years old, born in America to parents who were also born here, and who come from more people who were born here. You would have to go back at least four generations to find an immigrant, yet tomorrow, for good reason or for no reason at all, I could be scooped up, black-bagged, and sent to El Salvador (a country where I have never been and have no connection to), and no power in America could stop it from happening.
Sure, it might create a fuss, and those talking heads might just use me for ratings for a few days, but if Trump wanted me gone, no one reading this could do anything about it. Habeus Corpus is dead, and the 14thAmendment just died on Friday, so there is nothing left to save me. But there would be lots of clicks and views. I’d go viral for sure. I’d just never see it.
As much as it pains me to say it out loud, I am no longer free, and neither are you.
So here’s my point. There is no time for preventative action because there is nothing to prevent, and very little left to preserve. There is no time to “vote harder” because we may never vote again, and even if we do, the election won’t be free nor fair.
Cancer cannot be prevented after the diagnosis. It can either be defeated, or it can win. Well, the cancer is here, and it is quickly killing us. It must be cut out, and the people in charge of doing so are all the wrong people. They keep telling us how to prevent it, even as it eats away at us from the inside.
We are not fighting to preserve democracy. We already lost that fight. The next fight will be to get it back, and that fight will be a good old fashioned American street fight. Our elected leaders will not be present, nor will the talking heads with their $500 hairdos. It will be us and our neighbors, once again doing the hard work that made America the greatest nation on earth.
We are no longer the land of the free, but we can certainly still be the home of the brave.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days fighting for working families as the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show, and his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.