Once Again, Under the Shadow of Authoritarian Power, Americans Must Decide What Kind of Nation We Will Become

Will we stand with the generations who expanded freedom through resistance and sacrifice or surrender self-government to fear, force, and authoritarian power?

There is something deeply unsettling about Lincoln’s famous phrase “four score,” meaning eighty years. It’s roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be.

Historian Neil Howe explores this pattern in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, arguing that every eighty years America reaches a sort of breaking point that ultimately hits on major issues like democracy or autocracy and oligarchy.

What typically triggers those moments, historians will tell you, is when inequality has grown extreme, political power has hardened into the hands of a few, and democratic norms have been eroded or even openly attacked. The country then is forced to choose: either expand freedom and rights, or slip toward authoritarian rule.

Nobody’s sure exactly why this keeps happening every eighty years. It may be because when the people who lived through the last catastrophe have just died off, their lived memory of repression and violence is gone with them. The guardrails then weaken, the warnings are forgotten, and people take leaps without remembering the lessons from the past.

Or it may simply be the way generations cycle through cultural and political power, producing recurring moments every eighty years when fear, grievance, and concentrated wealth overwhelm democratic restraint.

But it certainly appears to be real. Consider the history starting in the late 17th century as America became an important economic and strategic British colony:

— The government’s heavily armed men walked the streets as enforcers of religious conformity, making sure people showed up at the “right” church. Attendance was compulsory, dissenters or non-Puritans were fined or harassed, and the power of the state marched in lockstep with the power of the pulpit. Then came the Glorious Revolution and the end of King James II’s reign, as colonial charters were rewritten, Protestant dissenters gained new legal rights, and the idea of religious freedom in British America caught fire (eventually to be enshrined in the First Amendment). It was 1690.

— Eighty years later, the government’s heavily armed agents were roaming the streets looking for people who’d spoken out against King George III or his East India Company. If you defied them, they could imprison or even shoot you. The people, enraged, rose up, threw their tea in Boston harbor, and demanded self-governance and a political system that respected the rights of citizens. It was 1773.

— Eighty years after the American Revolution, armed enforcers again stalked the streets, this time in the Confederate South. They hunted abolitionists, journalists, and people of color who dared challenge the brutal system of racial hierarchy and human bondage they ran. If you resisted, you could be beaten, hanged, or shot with impunity. Speech was crushed. Violence enforced obedience. Elections were rigged. The nation was driven into civil war to stop an explicitly authoritarian system that had seized control of half the country. It was the late 1850s.

— Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, the government’s agents, heavily armed, were going door-to-door in communities across western states looking for people of color. Americans and immigrants of Japanese ancestry were immediately seized and put into concentration camps scattered around the country. It was 1942, just months after the attack at Pear Harbor.

— Exactly eighty years after the end of World War II, Donald Trump sent his heavily armed agents into American communities on “Kavanaugh stop” missions to find people with dark skin or foreign accents, regardless of their refugee or legal status, and imprison them in privately-run for-profit concentration camps. In Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities people are rising up and fighting back when confronted with chemical weapons and armed thugs who believe they have what VP Vance called “absolute immunity” to kill American citizens.

Each of these moments forced Americans to make a choice.

In 1690, we chose religious freedom.

In 1770, we rejected having a king and embraced the creation of a government “by the consent of the governed.”

In 1860, we rejected the fascist system that had completely seized control of the Confederate states and we preserved democracy for the continent.

In 1943, we freed the 140,000+ Japanese immigrants and Japanese-ancestry Americans we’d imprisoned after Pearl Harbor and fought a war to reject Hitler and Tojo’s attempt at creating a worldwide fascist empire.

And here we are, eighty-one years after the end of WWII, once again facing an authoritarian crisis that’s forcing Americans to decide afresh who we are and what form of government we want.

Trump and his gang of lickspittles, toadies, and incompetent hangers-on are hell-bent on turning America into a Russia-like authoritarian state with single party rule. Almost without exception, they’ve cowed the entire Republican Party into a frightened silence as their Brownshirts spread across the country to terrorize any city whose citizens had the temerity to vote against them.

Outside of a few real stars including Walz, Pritzker, Frey, Ellison, and Newsome, Democrats — particularly national Democratic leadership — have failed to meet the moment.

Nine turncoat Democrats even voted last week to give ICE more money and power (Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Jared Golden of Maine; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington; Don Davis of North Carolina; and Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, both of New York) and Hakeem Jeffries did nothing to punish them. None lost committee assignments or other perks. No one from Democratic leadership or from the DNC has meaningfully challenged the power or death-dealing of the Trump regime.

As a result, average Americans have picked up the slack, organizing ad hoc when ICE shows up, and showing up by the millions in the streets for No Kings and other protests.

Emperor Trump’s response has been brutal, murdering citizens in the streets and then defiantly lying about the circumstances while slandering the memories of those his goons killed. He’s questioned whether the election will even happen this fall and is now demanding voting rolls from every Blue state so, presumably, his people can figure out how to purge them of Democratic voters.

We are thus at a turning point, much as we were in the 1490 War of the Roses, the 1570 Armada Crisis, the 1690s Glorious Revolution, the 1770s American Revolution, the 1860s Civil War, the Republican Great Depression and World War II of 1929-1945, and today’s Trump Fascism Crisis.

Every one of these prior “great turnings” has produced an expansion of human rights, an improvement in quality of life and freedom, and, essentially, a rebooting of the country. We stand today on the verge of another turning point, every bit as important and consequential as the six that preceded it.

Will America choose Trump’s and Putin’s authoritarian model, compiling lists of “domestic terrorists” who dare film ICE operations, and killing people who dare drive away from them or try to protect people from being beaten to the ground and pepper-sprayed in the face?

Or will we constrain the jackbooted thugs who are currently running wild in our cities, stop the naked corruption of the Trump family that’s made billions in their first year back in charge, and help the GOP reinvent itself along the lines of Dwight Eisenhower’s moderate conservatism?

Neither outcome is guaranteed.

Trump and his degenerate suckups have no intention of relinquishing power, and billionaires like Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Ellison appear committed to using their media and social media power to back him up. MAGA families are replacing their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags with ones that say, “Comply or Die” as submissive conservative men worship at the golden “Big Daddy Trump” altar.

But the flame of freedom also burns bright in the hearts of most average Americans and has for over 250 years. The heirs of MLK’s marches, the SDS resistance to Vietnam, and my father’s generation who put down Hitler like a dog continue to spark and inspire us.

A time of choosing is again upon us.

Will we stand with our ancestors and re-embrace democracy and reinvent America as a new and better nation with equal justice for all and a commitment to peace and human rights? Or will we become a MAGA version of Putin’s empire bent on war, conquest, and terror, egged on by rightwing billionaires and their media?

At the moment — but only at this moment — our fate is in our own hands. Now, we must choose.

Louise’s Daily Song: “This is the Time of Choosing”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
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