Trump is unleashing authoritarianism on US cities – just in time for the election
The essence of fascism, and authoritarianism more generally, is violent spectacle. This is why uniformed security forces and the violence they unleash are venerated in authoritarian regimes. They represent the unity, strength and virility of the nation – not least when they are suppressing dissenters and undesirables who they believe threaten these attributes.
Perhaps luckily – it might give him ideas – Donald Trump knows precious little history. But he understands this dynamic on a gut level. He saw through all of modern conservatism’s cant about rights and liberties and saw that its beating heart is authoritarian. Rights and liberties exist for people like them, not outsiders and dissenters. The slightest hint that the state might come for their liberties and they’ll cry bloody murder. But provide them with the spectacle of uniformed officers purging the nation of undesirables, and they’ll cheer along. They might even help out.
Only the thirst for violent spectacle can explain the president’s decision in recent days to send federal security forces – including paramilitary teams from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – to Portland and elsewhere. Clad in the same woodland camouflage that American troops wear into combat, this is precisely how they are supposed to be understood: as soldiers suppressing America’s enemies.
This theater is not being staged for the benefit of people who live in the affected areas. Democratic-run, minority-populated cities which can be portrayed as plagued by anarchy and lawlessness are a much more useful political foil for Trump than peaceful, prosperous metropolises. And predictably enough, the appearance of paramilitary federal security forces – who have reportedly violated the rights of protesters and shot one in the head with a riot munition – has inflamed rather than calmed the situation.
The real audience is to be found on one of the few things Donald Trump truly understands: television. As other authoritarian leaders have understood, television is the perfect medium both for knitting a country together and for tearing it apart. Simplistic in its framing and visceral in its impact, it recreates far-away events right in our living room.
This can be positive, such as during the civil rights movement, when images of bloody beatings and fire hoses made plain to those outside the south just how far America had strayed from its promise. But it can also be used to blow out of proportion, to try to convince Americans who couldn’t find Portland on a map that events there pose an existential threat to their country. Replayed endlessly on screen, protests and violence which are mostly limited to a few blocks of a city far away become a symptom of a country “under siege” from “far-left fascism”.
This is simply the latest example of Trump’s attempt to benefit from authoritarian spectacle. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he ordered a surge of US military forces to the southern border in order to protect it
from “invasion” by “caravans” of asylum seekers traveling from Central America. Prohibited by law from making arrests, the soldiers busied themselves ferrying CBP agents around in helicopters and laying barbed wire. Trump got the television images he craved, creating the sense among sections of the electorate that they were under existential threat from hordes of brown outsiders, and that Trump was their brave protector. Once the election was over, he scarcely ever uttered the word “caravan” again.
Watching the same pattern unfold in American cities themselves is deeply concerning. It also demonstrates the links that exist between the treatment of outsiders and the treatment of those deemed internal enemies. Just as the military support CBP at the southern border, now the border patrol itself appears in the heartland to suppress dissent and unrest, while its officials condemn fellow Americans as “anarchists” and “terrorists”. What this drives home is not just the interchangeability of America’s security forces, but also of their targets.
For the purposes of the spectacle, this interchangeability is central. Heroic soldiers are a staple of authoritarian imagery because they seem to embody the nation, united under a strong leader. To oppose either the soldier or the leader is hence to oppose the nation itself. Trump – who spent years trying to organize a military parade in Washington DC in order to encourage just such an association – understands this. Sending the same camouflage-clad forces to battle both America’s external enemies and its internal dissenters is supposed to send the message that ultimately, the latter are just as dangerous to the nation as the former.
As Trump has already revealed, this message is central to his case for reelection. Between now and November, he can be expected to use and abuse his power over America’s paramilitary security forces to try to bolster this case. It is clear that many conservative politicians and voters who claim to believe in individual rights and to fear abuses of federal power are now too deeply invested in authoritarianism, too convinced of the depravity of their opponents, to restrain him. Once their power is taken away peacefully at the ballot box, reforms to the behemoth which America’s security apparatus has become will be vital. Without them, there is no telling how far a future president might take the spectacle of violence.