The Trumpian future: Dictatorship or anarchy?
Trump is ultimately an agent of disorder, not order
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There have been a rash of recent articles from major commentators arguing that if Trump is elected in 2024, there is a good chance he might establish an American dictatorship. It all started with a piece by Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, which you can read a good analysis of by
here. Kagan basically argues that Trump will turn the American government against his perceived enemies and that other institutions like Congress and the media will be powerless to stop him even if they want to.The piece is frankly quite thin when it comes to sketching out exactly what this might look like, but recent statements by Trump lend some credence to the idea that he wants to massive increase the reach of the state and use its power in oppressive ways. He has recently talked about mass deportation camps for undocumented immigrants, invoking the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the military against protesters, and prosecuting his perceived enemies. According to Axios, he is considering making the immigration restrictionist and white supremacist Steve Miller his Attorney General and Steve Bannon his Chief of Staff. These names indicate that Trump is likely to emphasize extreme personal loyalty in making high-level appointments. Because most of the people who remain extremely loyal to Trump share his obsession with hunting and hurting the far right’s perceived enemies, this also points towards an administration which will try to wield the power of the state aggressively.
I’ve written many times about the risks of Trump’s authoritarianism and his impulse for violence. But I also have some qualms about dictatorship discourse, which I think fails to capture the full complexity of the possible dark outcomes that the United States faces in the remainder of the 2020s. In particular, I think focusing just on the risk of “dictatorship” vs. “freedom” misses another crucial axis of contention, which is “stability” vs. “anarchy”. Trump might try to establish a dictatorship, but it doesn’t seem that likely to me that he’ll succeed. Rather, his attempts might plunge the country into something more akin to anarchy, producing inter-communal violence, balkanization, and a progressive loss of governmental legitimacy and authority. Crucially, this remains a threat even before the 2024 election and even if Trump doesn’t make serious efforts to establish a dictatorship after it.
The outcome might also be some combination of these things. You can have highly stable dictatorships, but you can also have anarchic ones, in which the government is simultaneously too powerful and too weak. Governments like this thrash their power around and oppress their opponents, but by doing so they undermine their own legitimacy and bring about the steady erosion of any other form of authority except brute force.
Imagine that it’s March 2025, and President Donald Trump declares illegal immigration to be functionally equivalent to an invasion and announces that he is calling in the military to round up the undocumented and place them in detention camps prior to their deportation. States and localities then refuse to cooperate and even begin actively attempting to protect the undocumented from federal authority. Trump declares California, Oregon and Chicago to be in a state of rebellion, invokes the Insurrection Act, and orders the military to seize their organs of civil government. Soon, military and civil officials are refusing to comply with his orders, a dozen courts have enjoined various aspects of them, and there are mass protests in American urban centers on a scale unseen since the summer of 2020.
In this scenario, the result of Trump’s actions is not dictatorship - it’s anarchy. At a stroke the federal government has lost all of its legitimacy in the eyes of large swathes of the country, and it has become effectively paralyzed. But at the same time, the right - militias, red-state voters, and a GOP majority in Congress - are becoming increasingly polarized and calling for violence to be used to enforce the president’s orders and reassert federal authority at gunpoint. Local police forces and red-state security agencies like the Texas Rangers might attempt to enforce the president’s deportation orders even as the federal military refuses to. It would be the country’s greatest crisis since the civil war, one after which it might take decades to stitch the country back together. But it wouldn’t be a dictatorship.
This kind of anarchic crack up is not impossible to imagine even before the November 2024 election. One problem I have with the “dictatorship” discourse is that it focuses our attention on what might happen after January 2025. But Trump remains a threat to American freedom and stability even today, and that threat will only increase once his criminal trials begin.
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