But maybe America will not go quietly, slowly dying out and leaving no one to bury its corpse. Maybe there will be a backlash.
If America is to continue as a going concern, there are three options for its future, just three:
Option 1 is the preferred option, and we will get to that shortly. Option 3 is the option that our current establishment has selected and which it is trying to make a reality. As we have seen, this is unacceptable to those of us who are not leftists, which is the vast majority of us.
Which leaves Option 2.
We want Option 1, we won’t accept Option 3, but we could live with Option 2 if we had to.
What would this Option 2 be like? What happens when the right controls America, and not in some apologetic way where it tries to build bridges and sing “Kumbaya” and generally return to normalcy, whatever that means? No, we are talking about right-wing control where the agenda is the conservative wish list and there is no stopping it. Checks and balances—adios! This is about wielding will and power—the will and then power to enact and run things the way liberals only dream of in their nightmares.
First, we should figure out what to call this vision of an unapologetic right-wing America. Uncompromising right-wing control of the country would imply that we Americans have given up on restoring America to what it was and are seeking something new. Like the old Roman Republic—or even the Old Republic in the insufferable post-1983 Star Wars movies—the old American republic would be replaced by something different that responds to the weaknesses and failures of the past paradigm. Does this constitute a “fall” in the sense that what comes after it is something, in the words of Woody Allen describing his bizarre transformation of a minor Japanese gangster pic into the brilliant dubbed comedy What’s Up, Tiger Lily, “wholly other”?
Probably not. When the Roman Republic “fell” after a century in free fall, Augustus did not announce, “Hey, we’re now an empire and I am the king of the empire—I guess that would be the ‘emperor.’ Yeah, I’m that.” In fact, there was no word for “empire” or “emperor.” Augustus would have been hailed as imperator, but that venerable title regularly went to victorious Roman generals and did not necessarily mean the head of state. Of course, Augustus was not really a victorious general himself—his pal Agrippa usually did the general-ing for his sickly buddy and was happy to play second fiddle to the adopted son of newly minted god Julius Caesar.
What Augustus did, and what is important to understand about a scenario where the right wing unapologetically assumes total control, was not draw a bright line between the past paradigm and the new reality. Historians did that later. He did not dismiss the Senate and sit inside a palace, surrounded by courtiers, issuing commands. When he granted an audience, he did not demand that petitioners grovel and kiss the hem of his purple robes. That only came into fashion a few hundred years later, starting in 284 under Diocletian. On the surface, Augustus changed nothing.
Well, except for making himself the First Citizen, the princeps. This changed everything. The institution became known as the principate, and the princeps was basically an emperor in terms of raw power, but Augustus and the rulers that followed were careful to observe the traditions and institutions of the old republic. There were senators, whom Augustus pretended to listen to as they droned on, and there were consuls, whom he picked (and, occasionally, he picked himself). The not-emperor (wink, wink) worked through a simulacrum of the old mos maiorum institutions in a simulacrum of the republic.
But the change was real and the change was permanent. Everyone knew it, too. There were occasional mutterings about restoring the republic during the early principate, but that usually came to naught. When Caligula got knifed by one of his soldiers whom he had publicly humiliated—probably not a great idea to insult the guys around you who have weapons—there was a short window where some folks tried to go back to the old ways. But the Praetorian Guard liked the new ways, since a savvy princeps paid them well and did not insult them publicly, and the guys with the swords told the guys with the togas, “No, here’s Claudius, and we know he’s deformed but he’s princeps now and you guys probably want to confirm our choice right now.”
When the choice was the old republic and a gladius through your liver, or Claudius and business as (now) usual, the senators chose expedience over nostalgia. Probably a wise choice.
So, we are not talking about some right-wing ruler (or junta) announcing that America is now an empire and he’s the emperor, any more than a left-wing ruler or junta would announce that America is now the United Soviet States of America and we now have a chairman. Likely he would rule through the current institutions. He would just have absolute control over the institutions, free of those nagging checks and balances that make governing such a hassle. There would be elections, but there are elections in North Korea and Chicago too. Likely, we would have the same country name—the United States of America—but a very different country.
The presidency, by its unitary status, would be the focus, and we would expect the ruler to occupy that position. He would effectively control the Congress and the courts as well. He would do it as head of a party—in this scenario, likely the Republican Party, but there is a small chance a new one might rise up to fill the role of the party of the right. In that way, he would seem, superficially, to be just a really successful politician. His commands would not be anything so vulgar as orders and decrees. They would be carefully and deliberately enacted through the processes outlined in the Constitution. Things would simply always turn out how he wanted them to turn out.
His rise would come as the result of a backlash against the left, and it would be propelled by a sense that the institutions, left to their own devices, would frustrate the true intent of the framers and the people. He would call himself the restorer of American democracy (which sounds better to American ears than “restorer of the republic,” even if not technically correct). He would observe the rituals and symbols of the old United States, yet his reign would be distinguished by the unbridled use of his power. He would ignore the norms and unofficial rules of American politics that have so far restrained the conservatives but, to their mind, not the left. Checks and balances? Nah, it’s an emergency. We’ll get back to having those later.
And later never comes. His supporters would see him as cutting through the obstacles to enact the necessary reforms to restore America to greatness. His opponents would call him an authoritarian. And they might have a point.
Now, their promiscuous use of language in the past would definitely raise the specter of Chicken Little. They called Trump an “authoritarian” throughout his tenure, and it is truly hard to seriously apply that title to The Donald. Trump respected the institutions, unlike many of his supporters. He proposed laws, got many passed, and mostly undid executive orders of other presidents as opposed to issuing a flurry of decrees of his own. When the courts shot down his actions, he acquiesced. Congress impeached him twice. No one has ever been as checked and balanced as Donald J. Trump.
Even at the end, after the fundamentally unfair—from a combination of traditional cheating, unlawful election law changes, and the informal intervention of the entire establishment in favor of the basement-dwelling incompetent who falsely promised “normalcy”—2020 election, Trump still kept within the rules. Yes, he later listened to the insane ramblings of the likes of Lin Wood and bought into the coming of the Kraken, but on January 20 he packed his gear, did the duffel bag drag to Marine One, then choppered off to Mar-a-Lago and (at least temporary) retirement.
If Trump was an authoritarian, he was a really, really bad one. But he was not an authoritarian in any serious sense. An authoritarian does not color within the lines. And an authoritarian, when faced with institutional resistance, levels the offending institution. Then he posts the figurative head on a pike for all to see and learn from.
Trump played by the rules, for all the credit that brought him.
The left suffers from the problem common to those who create new rules. Their new rules will come back and bite them. Here, the new rule is that norms and mores and traditions that slow you down in the short term may be waived. We’ve discussed examples of this previously—the corruption of the justice system, the indoctrination of students with leftist race effluent, and the ideological purging of class enemies from the military are just a few. Compounding this is the active participation of nongovernmental institutions. The regime media has discarded objectivity, Silicon Valley tech titans have taken it upon themselves to limit the range of tolerable speech, and Big Business has signed on to promote the leftist narrative.
All these things would have been verboten a generation ago—or, at least, no one would have admitted to doing them out loud. Now they shout their norm-abortions. And the consequences are inevitable. The conservative victims of this onslaught will grow to reject the idea of norms at all, viewing them as what they have effectively become—a set of constraints that apply only to conservatives and prevent conservatives from using all their power against opponents who feel free to use every ounce of their own power to get what they want.
What the left will call an “authoritarian” is basically someone who will play by the left’s rules in pursuit of conservative objectives, dispensing with checks and balances in the pursuit of power. He might well be celebrated for it by the right. Such is the fallout of leftist rule-breaking.
The norms ’n’ rules crowd on the right is shrinking into a small rump subset of conservatives that includes the likes of the editors of National Review and, well, Ben Sasse maybe. Other conservatives moved on completely as the right began to lose its taste for norms. Some used the end of norms as cover for defecting—despite their protests, they were less concerned with the end of the old ways than the end of their sinecures in the old order. Bill Kristol’s shabby crew of grifters abandoned the conservative cruise ship; today, that bunch is effectively left-wing. The Lincoln Project types are practically enrolled in the Frankfurt School, which is conveniently the one school that they are allowed within a thousand feet of.
As the left rejects the norms by embracing (with varying levels of success) such previously unthinkable initiatives as filibuster repeals, court-packing, speech limits, and open borders, the right is rejecting the unilateral disarmament that is pretending the norms are healthy and vital and must be scrupulously observed regardless of what the other guys do. Trump’s election, of course, was a breaking of norms in the sense that he was, well, Donald Trump. But that was done within the rules, and it was less a calculated pursuit of conservative objectives than a cry for help. “Listen to us, we’re serious—look who we’ve elected!”
But the leftist establishment did not listen, nor could it. The logic of the left was always authoritarian because the authoritarianism is part of the fun. It’s a delight to torment and command others without restraints—if COVID taught us anything, it is that there’s a little dictator inside every frigid Karen scolding normal people for not wrapping a cloth around their three-year-old before he jumps on the jungle gym.
Conservatives tend not to get off bossing around others. The leftist catalog of conservative faults includes selfishness, but “selfishness” is really a focus on dealing with their own business and letting others do the same. Telling others what to do is not part of the joy of conservatism. The left cites abortion as such interference, but to the extent that telling someone she cannot kill her baby is bossing her around, that exception hardly disputes the rule.
An authoritarian of the right will almost certainly come to power as part of a backlash toward leftism gone too far. It will be reactionary in the truest sense of the word—it would be a reaction to the failure of the left. When would it arise? When inflation gets to Weimar levels and a Big Mac is $22 while a gallon of gas—assuming you are still allowed to drive a gas-fueled car—hits $25 a gallon? When crime is so bad people are huddling in their homes as the hordes of thugs left unprosecuted by Soros-bought district attorneys roam the streets? When America’s military is crushed by an enemy sneak attack that occurs while our troops are attending their mandatory Non-Binary Gender Appreciation Day celebration?
This could come through a crisis, such as one we have described, but most likely it will come via a wave election. It would have to be a massive Republican victory—again, the GOP is the party of the right and the most likely vehicle for such an electoral victory. If you look at the situation in the run-up to 2024, with a manifestly senile jerk in the Oval Office presiding over an endless pandemic, tail-spinning economy, military humiliation, and rising anger, you see the seeds of such a transformative election.
The American people will demand that their candidate “fix it,” and the man they choose to do it will nod and proceed.
The Romans had a fix-it-man procedure called, not surprisingly, the dictatorship. When everything was going to hell, they would appoint a guy for six months with near total power. He was above the law, unaccountable, and empowered to cut through the clutter of process to make things happen. And then he was supposed to lay his power down. Cincinnatus did. He served, and then went home to his plow—almost certainly he inspired George Washington, who could have been king but instead returned to Mount Vernon. But Julius Caesar became dictator for life. If a true authoritarian is not a dictator, he would be perilously close.
Keep in mind that there is an authoritarian fantasy on the left. Writers such as Thomas Friedman admire how the Chinese communists do not have to consider the petty complaints of mere stakeholders when imposing their vision. Joe Biden’s fellow travelers feel the same way. They are outraged that their razor-thin Senate majority—based entirely on Kamala Harris’s wandering over to cast tie-breaker votes—does not allow them the same nearly limitless power as FDR had with a huge majority. The left sees limits on its power as a crime against progress; limits on conservatives are blessed by Gaia herself.
A right-wing authoritarian simply would not care.
What would an authoritarian do? The most important characteristic is that he would wield his power without restraint, ignoring checks and balances. It is not so much that he might exceed his enumerated powers, though he might well do so. If norms won’t stop you from doing something you really want to do, then rules on an old piece of parchment probably won’t either. But a United States president, the unitary executive, has enormous powers at his fingertips without even tearing out of the envelope. He just has to push the envelope.
The first thing is personnel. The government is not elected officials. No, they come and go—regardless of who they are, they do go, and that is truly their distinguishing characteristic. But the distinguishing characteristic of civil servants is that they don’t go—ever. And why would they? The money is ridiculously good for the effort required. Far from being impecunious do-gooders sacrificing for the American people, these toxic layabouts have managed—often through union contracts—to set themselves up quite nicely. They stay, the elected officials go, so who has the real power over the long haul? Call it the deep state if you wish—it is really more of the deep states, with dozens of little fiefdoms scattered throughout the bureaucracy—but it is real and it is a problem.
It also has a reputation, which it does nothing to undermine, of being invulnerable. You can’t fire a civil servant, goes the conventional wisdom. But that is not so. They can be fired, though it takes some effort. But they can also be neutered. A civil servant who is ordered to his new position in Nome, Alaska, will certainly complain, but unless he packs up his stuff and hightails it there, he is insubordinate. And that is grounds to boot him.
There was once a senior commander of the California National Guard who had such issues with the bureaucracy. He was told that low performers could not be fired, so he would fire them anyway and have them walked out of the building with their junk in a banker’s box as they threatened to get a lawyer and sue. And he would answer them, smiling beatifically, “Yes, you can sue. I have lawyers too, dozens of them, all being paid by someone else to defend the case. And you might win. But by then, I will be retired, and you will be old.”
One thing people who are not lawyers do not seem to understand is that all it takes to file a lawsuit is a filing fee and a word processor. “But they will sue!” seems to work for many folks as a kind of trump card that stops an action in its tracks. But it need not, and a president who realizes that it matters not at all if the government’s lawyers must fight one more lawsuit by some aggrieved oxygen thief at the Department of Agriculture who has been holding up one of the president’s initiatives, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand of them. By the time they come back to work, if they ever come back, the president will be gone and they will be old—and a bunch of things they were delaying, disregarding, or undermining will have happened.
Or, or course, a powerful president could ram civil service system reform through the Congress. The left would scream that this would turn the civil service into a patronage system with ranks full of the president’s personally picked cadre of enabling bureaucrats. And that would be true. Entirely true. That would be the goal. Instead of a long-term, left-leaning bureaucracy, it would be one full of conservative-friendly appointees. The left would accurately assess the objective. And a right-leaning authoritarian would not care.
Not caring is a powerful weapon that is sorely unappreciated. Besides the fear of procedural consequences, such as lawsuits, other conservatives have been terrified of public opinion. But does that truly matter, especially if the authoritarian is actively reforming the electoral system to one based on securing the vote from Democratic manipulation? Photo identification would be mandatory, as would in-person voting on Election Day only. Absentee votes would be greatly limited, like to deployed troops and coma victims, and counting would be closely observed in blue cities by an army of active and aggressive federal election watchdogs.
Naturally, the outcry would be deafening within the legacy media. But then, if a tree falls in the wilderness, does anyone see it if CNN broadcasts it live? There are do-it-yourself pedicure shows that outdraw CNN’s ratings, so what that collection of clowns, potatoes, and sex pests says matters little. Moreover, the legacy media has largely destroyed its own credibility anyway. Let them scream that securing elections is an attack on democracy. They have been doing that for years. Nobody cares.
What matters more is what the tech titans do. With control over search engines and social media, these Silicon Valley boys and girls wield an unacceptable level of power which they have managed to protect both by liberally showering dough onto Capitol Hill and by hiding behind the conservative principle of free enterprise to retain their lease on the public square.
An authoritarian right-winger would not adhere to such alleged principles. He would be about power, and he would not hesitate to exercise it. The first step might be to convene a summit with the titans soon after inauguration and then, behind closed doors, tell them there is a new sheriff in town and this one is not playing around. There are whole battalions of lawyers paid by Uncle Sam to litigate anti-trust violations. And there are others to investigate civil rights violations against Christians and others whom the Palo Alto pagans disapprove of. Will the feds win? Maybe. But hey, those lawyers are on the payroll, and they might as well be suing everyone in Cupertino. And perhaps the algorithms they use are of interest to China and other enemies—better designate them as national security items to limit their use. And this is even before the Congress starts passing new laws.
Now, they might well protest that the president is using his power against political enemies, to which he would answer, “Yes, I am. Good catch.” Then he would have a question of his own: “Do you still want to be my enemy?”
Understand that this treats our nation’s norms like Brazil treats the rainforest, clear-cutting it and setting the debris on fire. This is not business as usual. This is not within the spirt of the Constitution, as any reasonable reader might understand it. It is unchecked and unbalanced. But this is well within the new rules of a norm-free paradigm.
Adios to academia. Cut it off from money and derail the student loan gravy train.
The military? Say goodbye to diversity, and pretty much all of the generals and admirals appointed under Obama and Biden—and Trump too.
Antifa? BLM? The new FBI director would refocus the antiterrorism mission on actual terrorists instead of on conservative dissidents. You know, like Antifa and the liberal millionaires who fund it.
And his politicized Department of Justice—because the new rule is that the DOJ is the president’s enforcer—would follow suit, starting with subpoenaing all of the text messages from your favorite Joe Scarborough guests. We would finally see Eric Swalwell’s Fang Fang chats. Pity the guy who has to wade thought what every creepy, weird stuff Ted Lieu and Adam Schiff have been texting with their buddies about.
The authoritarian will be charged with solving problems. Dealing with the bureaucracy, with the media, and with the opposition are just supporting efforts in that. The real key is results. Augustus may have taken away the ability to rise to true greatness from the Romans, but he gave them a long peace and a lot of prosperity. Cheap gas and low crime are our bread and circuses.
Obviously, the authoritarian would reject the entire climate hoax and administratively order exploitation of American energy resources—including nuclear. Like Augustus, who found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, an authoritarian could cut through the red tape of environmental hooey and build a network of modern reactors that would power America for generations.
He would seal the border and deport illegal aliens—oh, and they would again be called “illegal aliens.” Due process would consist of “Pack your stuff and get on the bus—next stop, Tijuana!”
He would handle the true homelessness problem by dealing with its root causes—derelicts are either on drugs or on drugs and nuts. The nuts go to asylums, the addicts to treatment or jail. This is not cruelty; cruelty is letting madmen and junkies in throes of delusions and addiction die on our streets. Nor should asylums be snake pits. Conservatives have a vision of limited government, but that reasonably includes compassionate care for the insane and the hopeless while they cannot live in society. And it’s also compassionate to everyone else too. If conservatism becomes so entangled by alleged principles that it cannot provide normal people with secure streets, it has lost its reason for being.
Some might point out that this is a federalism issue, and homelessness is an issue for the states. But notions like federalism could get in the way of delivering a life-enhancing improvement to his people, and this would not deter the authoritarian.
And he would deal with crime. He would restore the commonsense notion that the cause of crime is criminals, and lock the root causes up for good. He would also turn the feds on the enemies of the regime, investigating them until a crime was detected, after which it would be prosecuted to the maximum extent allowed. The new rules the Democrats pioneered sure are a bitch.
Authoritarians are tolerated as long as they deliver results. The idea that these types of issues are not federal issues is not going to stop him from addressing them—and harshly. But if you can reject the limitations of federalism, what else will you reject? Maybe the freedom to utter insurrectionary words and deeds. After all, the left demonstrably wants to undermine the checks and balances of the Constitution to seize total power. Does it make sense to allow that? We have been told by the legacy media that insurrections are bad, so is it wrong to treat them that way? Should leftist insurrectionists be allowed into positions in and out of government where they might undermine the Constitution? Should they be allowed to express opinions to that effect? Is it wrong to use the power of the government to stop that threat in its tracks?
The logic of the authoritarian is that it is not.
So is it really wrong to ban inflammatory speech? Is it wrong to disqualify brother-touching anti-American ingrates like Ilhan Omar and Marxist morons like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from office? After all, they would trash the Constitution and ship you off to the gulags in a heartbeat given the chance. And if not barring them and their ilk completely, is it wrong to administer the elections in such a way that the People get the right answer?
Again, the logic of the authoritarian is that it is not.
And what if the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the authoritarian? Might he just wonder, as Stalin did about the pope, about how many divisions John Roberts has? What if Congress put up a fight, not just the tiresome pinkos but the respected members? Might a White House staffer show up with some embarrassing data mined by the National Security Administration and suggest they fall into line lest it leak? You know, like the kind of leaks that started the sequence of events that led to the prosecution of Lieutenant General Mike Flynn?
Or, if they won’t play ball, might they get a knock on the door from one of those SWAT teams that took down desperados like the elderly Roger Stone? Does anything limit the power of the authoritarian once he begins to use it?
The logic of the authoritarian is that there is no limit. Power is the only principle. The authoritarian logic is that claimed necessity trumps the rules.
But then, taken to the extreme, there goes the Constitution. While the deus ex imperator fantasy is fun—it’s always entertaining to imagine a world without constraints—the reality is not so delightful. Yes, an authoritarian can make the trains run on time for a while, but that kind of regime has to derail eventually. The authoritarian scenario above assumes an authoritarian whose sole purpose is conservative change. After all, he would only be using his power for good, right?
But what are the chances of that? Did human nature suddenly change when Ronald Reagan came along?
Every imperator is not going to be Augustus. Even Augustus was not Augustus in that sense—sure, he sought to do great things and he did do them, but not for their own sake. He was interested in his own greatness. One of his most famous legacies is a long litany of his achievements, “The Deeds of the Divine Augustus,” that he had sent around the empire. He chose the name “Augustus” (granted, he was born Octavian, which sounds like Rome’s equivalent of “Newton” or “Melvin”) and had himself declared the son of a god, all of which gives you an idea about where his head was at. He turned down the title “dictator,” but he never gave up dictating.
Notably, though some solid performers showed up occasionally, the Romans never topped Augustus. So, unless America is blessed with an endless series of men even greater than Augustus, the authoritarian fantasy is probably not going to pan out in the long term. Nor would we want it even if it did.
“My Justice Department will not tolerate perjury,” the president said into the mic. “Which is why Mark Zuckerberg is in custody.” In fact, the FBI raid on his home had dragged him out of his palace in his underwear in cuffs. His security team, mostly ex–special forces, had stood down when the convoy arrived to serve the arrest warrant for lying to Congress about Facebook’s censorship policies. It was the same team that had busted the head of YouTube the week before.
“There are some who say that this administration is intimidating its political enemies?” one reporter asked.
“I don’t speak to the New York Times,” the president said. He nodded and three Secret Service agents hustled her away. The other reporters watched, but none spoke up.
“This is an emergency,” the president said. “Our very democracy is at stake. There are some that demand we coddle the criminals who terrorize our streets, that we subsidize un-American ideas in schools and universities, that we allow illegal aliens to freely remain in our country. We will no longer tolerate it. The American people elected me to solve these problems. I will do so.”
“Many people say you are exceeding your power as president and acting without the authority of Congress,” another reporter said. “Do you believe your actions are undemocratic?”
“Nothing I do in the defense of democracy can be undemocratic. I was elected to fix this crisis. For too long, we tolerated division and hatred from the media, from the corporations, and from the other party. That ends now. I was elected to unify this country, and I intend to do so.”
“Well, then I guess you can close the school part of your organization,” John Stewart told the Harvard chancellor. “After all, you basically are a hedge fund that occasionally teaches some classes to spoiled rich kids.”
“But if you seize our endowment, we will—” the chancellor began.
“What?” asked Stewart, cutting him off. “Can’t your rich kid students pay their own freight? I mean, it’s harder since we banned red Chinese students, but I think you can manage.” Stewart had worked for Senator Ted Cruz before being brought into the Department of Education under the new administration. He relished his new role as Undersecretary for University Liaison.
“This is unprecedented! You can’t interfere with how we choose to teach!”
“Why not?” Stewart asked. He was genuinely curious. He had helped draft the new curriculum guidance the department had sent out. It included “Civics and the American Way” as a required course for any university receiving any federal funding. And it banned all critical race theory and Marxist coursework, with one exception. “You know, you can still have a course on ‘The Failures of Marxism’ if you want.”
“This is an attack on our academic freedom!” the chancellor said, but not loudly. It was more in resignation, since the protests at the other colleges being informed of the new rules had totally failed. And, as he felt he would fare poorly in prison, he did not wish to be one of the administrators being held without bail on charges of “interfering with federal administration activities.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” Stewart said. “First, there are several cancelled professors you’ll need to hire back. And second, my Education Department’s Office of Academic Diversity will need to approve all future hiring decisions to ensure you are complying with the new ideological diversity mandates.”
“You’re going to destroy Harvard,” the chancellor sputtered.
“I know,” Stewart replied. “But then again, if you cooperate with us, like you did with the left, maybe you can keep your school and your job. Maybe.”
The federal marshals in riot gear cleared the protestors out of the way, and not gently. Any of them that had shown the least resistance were zip-tied and hauled away in black vans to be charged with assault on federal officers. The U.S. attorneys were seeking that these rioters be held without bail; all were being charged with felonies. Word would soon get out that there was a price to rioting, and the criminality would fade. In Portland, over three hundred people had been arrested and charged with crimes that carried more than five years in prison before the trouble there ended. The federal prison system was now largely full of drug traffickers and spoiled kids shocked to be doing a stretch for the same thing their older brothers and sisters had done in 2020 without being charged at all.
With the activists out of the way, the feds descended on the homeless encampment. The inhabitants were herded out and triaged. The obviously insane were hooked up and hauled away to the mental health facilities—actually, large encampments out in the sticks—where they were assessed and treated, mostly with medications. The straight-up drug addicts got a choice, then and there: rehab or incarceration. The rehab encampments were also out in the sticks. The ones with warrants were sent to jail—if the local authorities would not take them, the feds held them using some of the new laws passed by the Congress that criminalized homelessness under an expansive view of the Commerce Clause.
The inhabitants having been shipped off, the contractors came in and loaded up the entire encampment for disposal. This one was in Los Angeles, where the mayor had promised no cooperation with the federal initiative right up until he was arrested for interfering with federal officers. The people of Los Angeles, except for the die-hard liberals on the Westside, were happy to see the streets cleared of the drugged-out zombies and junkies, as well as the petty (and not-so-petty) criminals who had defiled the city.
As one man said to a TV interviewer, “Yeah, it seems kind of harsh, but now my kid can play outside again.”
The authoritarian fantasy, and it is a fantasy in the sense that it’s nothing more than an expedient to address the monumental problems the left created or refuses to solve, is a concession of failure. It says the Constitution does not work and we need to abandon it. In that sense, it tracks with the three options. We want the constitutional option, but if that’s not happening, we will resign ourselves to doing the best we can. It certainly beats the other alternative, submission to leftist tyranny. Perhaps, if there is to be tyranny, it’s better to be on the side of the tyrant.
But is everything an authoritarian would do necessarily wrong? We have seen that the key to authoritarians is that they ignore formal and informal rules. But some formal rules have outlived their purpose, and some informal rules are unequally applied. The formal rules that need changing can be changed. The informal ones are tougher. To accept a double standard is to accept defeat. There is no moral obligation to submit to the tyranny of others in order to prevent the risk, down the road, of tyranny by your own side. This is the challenge when the other guys have decided to abandon the rules—you have no good options to deal with them. You can continue to play by the old rules and risk serfdom, or you can abandon the rules and hope to change course down the road. The Romans hoped that. It never happened.
But perhaps there is a middle ground.