The birth of an authoritarian nation
By 
Bill Kristol has actually been one of the very best Never Trumpers, which is something I never would have predicted ten years ago, but that’s why American lives have second acts, as F. Scott Fitzgerald did not say:
Wannabe authoritarians have sought power in many places and at many times, and their modus operandi is no great mystery.
How do you undermine a healthy democracy? Scapegoating minorities is a good start. How do you consolidate power? Purging the security agencies is a key to success.
From the moment he came down the escalator in Trump Tower, Trump has understood the political utility of scapegoating minorities.
In the world according to Trump, immigrants, especially immigrants of color, account for the misery, the carnage all around us.
Who’s responsible for the plight of “Real Americans,” for the unprecedented oppression and persecution of the straight white Christian men who once reigned supreme in our fair land? Minorities.
What small group can be an easy object of a Two Minutes Hate, to use Orwell’s conceit from 1984? Transgender individuals.
What programs can we blame for any disaster? How about DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion?
In the first two weeks of his second term, Trump has accelerated the demonizing and intensified the scapegoating. Immigrants have been a singular target of many of his executive orders. But so have transgender individuals, and so too have diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Yesterday from the White House podium, Trump blamed DEI programs for Wednesday night’s terrible aviation disaster in Washington. This was an utter invention by Trump. But brazen lying is part of the authoritarian playbook, and he ran the play shamelessly.
The scapegoating that is so important to weaponizing grievances and undermining civic spirit in a democracy—and then to winning power and maintaining public support—is flourishing under Trump’s direction.
And the purges, especially in the power agencies, that are so important to securing governmental power for the aspiring authoritarian, are underway as well. First we had the dismissal of nearly a dozen career prosecutors at the Justice Department. Last night we learned that key senior career employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation—“executive assistant directors” who oversee criminal and national security investigations—as well as high-ranking officials in field offices, have been told to resign or retire by Monday. “The massive law enforcement bureau is being run by an acting director and an acting deputy director,” the Washington Post explained. “It is highly unusual for senior staffing changes to be made under such circumstances at the FBI, a law enforcement agency that is supposed to be insulated from politics.”
This morning, we were treated to another quasi-purge. The top career staffer at the Treasury Department was expected to resign because he objected to Elon Musk’s attempts to access sensitive information related to payments from programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Such purges are highly unusual. The attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power was also highly unusual. The mass pardons of hundreds of violent supporters of the president was highly unusual. The nomination of utterly unqualified but utterly obedient apparatchiks like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel to the highest positions in key security agencies is highly unusual.
But none of this is unusual for wannabe authoritarians. It’s a pretty standard part of their playbook. It may simply seem unusual here in America because we have limited experience with attempted authoritarian takeovers of power in our democracy.
Until now.
The firing of the top Treasury Department official is the kind of thing that’s easy to miss among all the carnage, but it’s extremely important. Elon Musk hasn’t been elected to anything, and his DOGE operation has zero authorization from lawmakers. Musk himself is a Nazi drug addict with delusions of grandeur that make the average Bond villain look like Baruch Spinoza. Giving him access to highly sensitive information about the movement of literally trillions of dollars in government funds is insanely reckless, not to mention flagrantly illegal.
The more general point here is that Trump’s demagoguery about “DEI” works because whiteness and maleness remain, despite developments in recent decades, completely unmarked categories for right wing nitwits like Trump and Musk. To translate this into Cletus-speak, if a minority fucks up her job that’s perceived by MAGA as a consequence of putting minorities in important positions. If a white male fucks up his job, well that’s just what happens sometimes, because “people” aren’t perfect dontchaknow.
I have a vague memory of a Russell Baker column from about 35 years ago, just as the concept of “political correctness” was getting off the ground, which featured Baker’s complete incredulity at the notion that that concepts of whiteness and maleness were now being used in the same way that concepts like “black” and “woman” were used — that is, as identifiers of salient social characteristics. This was so obviously ridiculous to him that he didn’t need to explain why. I mean he was just Russell Baker, not a “white male.” And Baker wasn’t a right wing reactionary or anything: he was a normal ordinary person, whose race and gender were completely irrelevant to his opinions, job performance, social status, etc. Obviously.