The Fascist Face of America

 As a child, I dreamt of standing on the beach, my little feet planted in the grainy, damp sand, staring out at the ocean. While I watched, the vast waters receded far from the shore and the outline of a monstrous wave formed. I screamed my throat rasp, trying to get the attention of the other people on the beach, “WAVE! WAVE! RUN! RUN!” No one moved, or looked up, or reacted. The wave smashed into my helpless body. It all went black. I awoke gasping. The memory of this dream returned to me today, as headline after headline of Supreme Court rulings rolled in, mere hours after a disastrous presidential debate, all while the threat of authoritarianism towers ever nearer. Once again I am standing on the shores, staring out at an insurmountable threat, screaming upon deaf ears.  

Everyday America becomes a less humane place due to the actions of Donald Trump. His appointments to the Supreme Court created a supermajority who seem to share an agenda of cruelty. They began by overturning women’s long held right to the reproductive health care of abortion, impacting millions of the most vulnerable women, some of whom are victims of incest or rape. In some states, the punishment for raping someone may be less severe than the punishment for performing an abortion. The court has further loosened the separation of church and state in the Kennedy v. Bremerton case in which they sided with a Christian football coach praying with his students on the 50 yard line. The ruling created a precedent that has led to Oklahoma announcing public schools must now incorporate the bible and the 10 commandments into their curriculum, and Louisiana mandating that the 10 commandments be displayed in every classroom. Would the ruling be the same if the coach gave speeches on Atheism, Islam, or Wiccanism to his team? I doubt it, but Christianity gets continual handouts under the guise of religious freedom by judges who surprise surprise are Christian extremists. 

In subsequent rulings the Supreme Court has reduced limits to concealed carry, ended affirmative action in higher education (amplifying racial inequality in an increasingly exclusive academic landscape), and decreased the EPA’s power to protect our environment. In the last session alone, the court announced rulings that allow cities to prosecute homeless people for sleeping outdoors, limit obstruction charges against January 6th insurrectionists, protect corrupt bribes and gifts to political figures as well as judges, and gut federal agencies’ authority to regulate our air, affordable housing, healthcare, food, and all other manner of products and services. In their personal lives, Justice Alito flew a flag outside his home linked to January 6th insurrectionists and another flag linked to Christian nationalists. Justice Thomas’s wife contacted White House officials following the 2020 election to encourage a coup. Justice Thomas has also accepted luxury vacations from a billionaire Republican Donor for over 20 years. Our highest court is clearly corrupted and compromised, acting off of personal gain, not public good. I believe those who abuse power should lose their power.

By and large the highest court has shifted power away from our executive branch and into federal courts. A supposed win for those opposing “government overreach”, except that citizens hold the power to vote for elected officials, whereas we do not hold the power to appoint judges. Which leads me to my next point, the damage of Trump’s judge appointees sweeps far beyond the highest courts. During his presidential term, Trump appointed more than 230 federal judges, each serving a life term, with many of them decades away from retirement. According to Vanita Gupta, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “Nearly 7 in 10 of the Trump judges are white men. Just 28 of the 200 are people of color. And there's only one Latina appeals court judge, and no Black appellate judges''. Trump-appointed-judges swayed far more conservative than their judicial colleagues. Trump-appointed-judges also empower an insidious portion of our population who wish to strip the rights of anyone existing outside of a stringent, repressive status-quo. Anti-LGBTQ+ legislations flood our communities. Hard-earned tax dollars are spent on persecuting transgender children, rather than bolstering our educational systems. “Religious freedom” is being used to justify blatant discrimination. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and red-lining run rampant. A violent attempted insurrection took place under the encouragement of our former president, demolishing the precedent of peaceful, democratic transitions of power.

All the while, the Republican party under the direction of Trump, inches closer and closer to autocracy. According to a national survey taken in 2015, the most predictive factor of a Republican primary voter supporting Trump was their propensity to authoritarianism. Further studies conducted by Matthew C. Williams indicated that roughly 40% of Americans favored authority, obedience, and conformity over freedom, independence, and diversity. Williams continues:

(T)hese findings don’t mean that 4 in 10 Americans prefer dictatorship to democracy. Authoritarianism is best understood not as a policy preference… but rather as a worldview that can be “activated” in the right historical moment by anyone with a big enough megaphone who is willing to play on voters’ fears and insecurities. When activated by fear, authoritarian-leaning Americans are predisposed to trade civil liberties for strongman solutions to secure law and order; and they are ready to strip civil liberties from those defined as the “other”—a far cry from the image of America as a country built on a shared commitment to liberty and democratic governance.

Republican Politicians know this and thus centralize fear and insecurity in their campaigns. They create fictional tales of boogeyman immigrants sex trafficking children. They fib about border security, while blocking bipartisan border protection laws. They convince suburbanites that the biggest threat to their children are drag queens, not dictators. They paint the most privileged as victims of oppression when minorities simply ask for equality. They stoke religious bigotry towards Queer people. They bemoan the end of the family while trying to criminalize IVF. They lie, cheat, steal, and provoke hatred until they create a mob of terrified cronies, and then they repeal all our rights. 

Most terrifyingly, if Trump wins, he will receive support from fanatical conservative theocrats. A radical right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, released a 900 page playbook to create a Christian Nationalist state called Project 2025. In it they state their plans to create a pro-life task force, dismantle environmental protection agencies because “they are the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”, eliminate head start programs (educational daycare for impoverished children), and criminalize pornography. Project 2025 also plans to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce. At this point, you’re likely thinking our checks and balances would prevent any of this from actually happening. Project 2025 accounted for the impact of the separation of powers and found a way to circumnavigate them through the Unitary Executive Theory. This theory argues that article two of the constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch. Project 2025 explains the impact as essentially, “turning the separation of powers among the three branches into a game of rock, paper, scissors – except rock beats everything”. 

Project 2025 knows exactly what they will do with this unchecked power too. There are two kinds of federal employees: the first group are merit based career positions, like nurses at the V.A. or airway transportation system specialists at the F.A.A., and the second group are political positions, such as cabinet appointees and those working for them. Federal career positions have robust political protections, which prevent them from being fired for political reasons. This enables them to work over many administrations to keep our government functioning through expertise. Political employees change with each administration and work to fulfill the goals of the campaign. There are roughly two million career employees, and only four thousand political employees. In a plan called Schedule F, Trump will reclassify around 50 thousand career civil servants as political appointees, allowing Trump to fire experts for a lack of loyalty to him and his policies. Trump stated he will enact this plan on day one of his second term. The impact would devastate our democratic processes. Dozens of government agencies would run according to Trump’s deranged whim without regard for safety, science, expertise, or outcome. As one head of a government union said, “Do you want someone doing scientific research on nuclear regulatory plants whose only qualification is an allegiance to the Trump agenda?” 

SCOTUS paved the path for Schedule F by ruling that any action taken by a current or former president considered “constitutional” receives full immunity from prosecution. Unitary Executive Theory hinges upon the interpretation that article two of the constitution gives the president supreme control of the executive branch, and our radical right supreme court ultimately decides if an action is constitutional or not. If SCOTUS rules that a president’s complete executive control is in fact constitutional, everything Trump does with that power will be immune to the law. One of the plans for this autocratic power outlined in Project 2025 is to order a Trump loyal FDA to declare all birth control pills unsafe and remove them from the market. Why? According to key contributor of Project 2025, and self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist, Russel Vought, “The families of the west are not having enough babies for their societies to endure”. We should all be deeply terrified of the vision of enslavement, the radical right dreams for the American people. A vision of sparse freedom and extensive regulations for people, but extensive freedom and sparse regulations for corporations. A vision of theocracy and autocracy. A vision of forceful regression back into the “traditional Christian values” of violent, patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ+, white supremacist dominion.

Biden is frail, faulted, and contributing to genocide. I condemn many of his decisions, especially abroad, and if Biden wins, I continue to hold the right to condemn presidential actions. I continue to hold the right to protest, to petition, to enact change within my government. With Biden and his cabinet, we protect our country from further regression. Standing still is not the goal, but if the alternative is moving backwards, then standing still is progress. Biden is by no means the ideal candidate and his cabinet has done decent work for the American people. Biden and his cabinet passed historic gun restrictions, bolstered unions, passed student debt relief, protected same-sex and interracial marriage, pushed for aggressive climate protection, and pardoned all marijuana possession charges. If Biden wins, a democracy remains to be amended, and we will fight tirelessly the next four years to rebuild a democratic party which hears, honors, and protects its constituents. A party which takes no part in violence, here or abroad. If Trump wins, we face repressive, authoritarian rule, where our voices are not only ignored, but actively silenced. We will be clawing our way back to basic human rights for decades to come.

As our founding father John Adams declared, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide”. If the people hold the power in a democracy then it stands to reason that the suicide of a democracy comes due to its own constituents’ inaction. We are standing on this beach together. The tidal wave approaches. I beg you to hear my screams; I am so tired and so frightened. Together, will we run to higher ground? Or will we remain on the beach as the ocean consumes us?