Are the Streets of Chicago Showing Us the Future of American Democracy?

When federal agents turn weapons on citizens, it’s not just a local scandal — it’s a national reckoning.

Yesterday, here in Chicago, where I am today, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers.

The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark.

This was not a foreign regime or some distant “law-and-order” fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement.

The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?

Trump’s secret police are trying to provoke riots in the streets to justify a harsh crackdown on dissent and the Democratic Party. They’re kicking in doors and dragging screaming American citizen children into the cold night. They’re shooting priests in the head with pepperballs.

And they say it’s all to “make America great again.” Again?!? Like in 1861?

Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy, dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media. Strip away the slogans and the tweets and you can see the same architecture: oligarchy instead of democracy, hierarchy instead of pluralism, the rule of the white wealthy few over the many.

This isn’t nostalgia for Dixie so much as a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead.

That same racist, fascist goal appears to animate today’s GOP, which fights tooth and nail to defend the interests of white people, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden. Government subsidies flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that cross political leaders are punished with the withdrawal of federal support and attacks by ICE.

Racism, too, is baked into the GOP’s contemporary model. The Confederacy was built on human enslavement and white supremacy. Today’s Republican project echoes that same spirit by targeting immigrants, demonizing Black people (even in the military, per “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth), restricting voting rights in communities of color, and maintaining a system of informal but organized apartheid. Housing segregation, school funding disparities, and the over-policing of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods today accomplish the same results as the old Jim Crow laws, just through different mechanisms.

Male supremacy is also apparently central to the new GOP Confederate order. Back in the day, women were property under the law, and patriarchy was woven into both religion and politics. The modern right’s war on reproductive freedom and equal rights for women is an almost perfect parallel. A woman’s autonomy and economic power, in their worldview, must always be subordinate to the demands of men and to a rigid religious orthodoxy.

The old Confederacy depended on cheap labor, and when it couldn’t enslave outright it invented systems like debt peonage and sharecropping. Today’s Republicans defend the use of prison slave labor, which is still constitutionally permitted under the 13th Amendment and most heavily deployed in Red states. They attack unions, push gig work without benefits, and refuse to raise minimum wages, ensuring that working people remain trapped in low-wage jobs without bargaining power.

The plantation economy itself was a form of monopoly: vast estates swallowed up smaller farms and drove independent competitors under to the point where a few hundred families controlled most of the region’s economy by the 1860s. Today the GOP defends monopolistic corporate power in much the same way, blocking antitrust efforts and encouraging consolidation across agriculture, media, energy, retail, insurance, medicine, and technology. Small business is starved out by giants, just as yeoman farmers in the South were once pushed off their land by the spread of the slave plantations.

The Confederacy was also defined by its propaganda. By the mid-1850s, virtually every anti-slavery or pro-democracy newspaper in the South had been shut down. Writers and publishers were imprisoned, hanged, or fled north to survive. What passed for “news” was propaganda controlled by morbidly rich elites.

Today, billionaire-owned Fox “News” and a constellation of billionaire-funded right-wing outlets play the same role, drowning out dissent and feeding a steady diet of disinformation to keep people angry and loyal. The very idea of objective truth has disintegrated in Republican-adjacent spaces as propaganda replaces journalism.

Another parallel is the fascist ideal of a mythic past. The Confederacy glorified a “golden age” of white rule and slave labor. When defeat came, the Lost Cause mythology grew up to claim victimhood and sanctify the old order. Trumpism and today’s GOP use the same trick. They conjure visions of an imagined past when “real Americans” controlled everything, erasing the ugly realities while promising “a return to greatness” if only people will give them absolute power.

The Confederacy’s legal system was never neutral. It protected the rich and powerful, treating enslaved people and poor whites as expendable, and punishing any who resisted. Today’s Republican project is similarly defined by a two-tier justice system. Elites like Tom Homan who back the movement are shielded, while dissenters and critics like James Comey are punished.

Judges and even military lawyers are now carefully chosen for loyalty, not fairness, ensuring the law remains a weapon for the GOP to use rather than an instrument of justice. Authoritarian capture of the military and judiciary today mirrors the way slave states stacked courts to defend slavery and property rights over liberty.

The Confederacy was also sustained by religious fundamentalism. Pastors preached that slavery was God’s will, and dissenters were driven out of the churches. In our time, white Christian nationalism functions the same way, sanctifying hierarchy and obedience while insisting — based on lies about the Founders — that religion must dictate law. The goal is not faith but control, and theology is being twisted into a tool for political power.

The Confederacy used culture war censorship to keep people ignorant. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed, abolitionist literature was banned, and abolitionist or pro-democracy speakers risked their lives if they crossed into the South. Today’s book bans and restrictions on curriculum are the modern equivalent. History is rewritten, ideas are suppressed, and young people are denied a full education to make sure they grow up docile and misinformed.

Violence has always been the enforcer of these systems. The Confederacy depended on slave patrols, irregular militias, and paramilitary terror to keep people in line. Reconstruction was undone by Klan terror and mob violence. Today’s GOP movement relies on heavily armed militias including ICE, groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and vigilante intimidation at polls and protests. The parallels are unmistakable: raw political power backed by the threat of force.

There is also the matter of dynastic families. The old South’s leadership was concentrated among interrelated planter aristocrats who controlled politics for generations. In modern America, political dynasties and billionaire networks serve the same role. Power is concentrated within circles of interlocking families and interests who use money, media, and influence to entrench their rule.

Regional economic hostage-taking was another weapon of the Confederacy. By controlling cotton exports and key resources, Southern elites tried to force concessions from the North and from Britain. Today, Republican leaders use their grip on energy, agriculture, and shipping industries in much the same way, holding national policy hostage to their own demands. Blue parts of the nation are told to bend or else face disruption in fuel, food, or logistics, and other nations’ leaders must publicly kiss Trump’s ass and give his children billions to avoid punishing tariffs.

The Confederacy also merged state power with its ruling economic class. Planters not only owned the land and the labor but controlled local courts, militias, and legislatures. Today, corporate monopolies and billionaire oligarchs have similarly captured our federal government and legislatures in the former Confederate states. The state becomes an extension of private wealth, fusing corporate and political power into a single apparatus of control.

Even in foreign policy, the parallels hold. The Confederacy was isolationist abroad, seeking recognition only to preserve its oligarchic order, but inwardly it was aggressive, unleashing violence on its own people. Trumpism follows the same pattern. International alliances are abandoned, democratic norms abroad are derided, while at home the state turns its power inward against dissenters and marginalized groups.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better and freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked.

The danger is not simply that Trump may win an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws. The danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and refined by generations of oligarchs, is becoming normalized across the Red states and increasingly in the federal government.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be. America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

The question today is whether we still have the clarity and courage to defeat it again, not with cannons and bayonets, but with ballots, organizing, and a renewed commitment to the democratic ideals that Confederates then and now have always hated and feared the most.

See you on No Kings Day!