HERE’S A THOUGHT…

A universal rule of thumb I learned covering South American dictatorships in the nineteen-seventies and eighties: If a single person’s human and civil rights can be suspended, everyone’s rights are at risk.

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A lot of people seem to think cutting out due process and just trusting the president, the attorney general or the secretary of state to randomly decide innocence or guilt is a great shortcut to getting dangerous criminals off the street and/or out of the country. Instead, it’s an ad hoc shortcut to making the Bill of Rights obsolete and allowing the government to arbitrarily accuse anybody it wants of anything it wants and to be the sole judge, jury and executioner, with no legal recourse to its decisions. (Case in point: The president is now talking about arbitrarily, and unconstitutionally, snatching American citizens off the street and sending them to a foreign gulag, where American justice is powerless). It's likely they will eventually be known as America's "disappeared".This is absolutism, of the sort prevalent in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc.

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The arbitrary nature of the Department of Justice under the current administration is graphically on display when the attorney general obeys an order to try and find a way to jail and exile “homegrown terrorists” of Trump’s choosing, while justifying the president’s release from prison of fifteen hundred pro-Trump domestic terrorists convicted of attacking the Capitol in his name.

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When you start dictating what both public and private universities can teach, suspending freedom of speech, punishing professors for exposing students to diverse ideas and teaching them to think for themselves, blackmailing authorities by threatening to withhold federal funds if they don’t align the syllabus with official government policy, you no longer have institutions of higher learning. You have “re-education centers” whose goal is to crush dissent, eliminate critical thinking, and create a uniform society in which everyone toes the official line.

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There may well be some excellent reasons for private Ivy League schools with multi-billion-dollar endowments not to receive even more millions or billions in taxpayer money. But not agreeing to ideological and educational restrictions that a centralized federal government seeks to dictate isn’t one of them. Accepting political and intellectual strings-attached money from the government is tantamount to the prostitution of higher education, and yet another nail in the coffin of democracy.

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If you're interested in how a leader might transition into dictatorial behavior based on historical examples, these tendencies nearly always involve undermining democratic institutions, centralizing power, restricting freedom of the press, limiting political opposition, and using the legal system to maintain control. So far, with Donald Trump, we’re batting a thousand.

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When a president who has already once tried to overthrow the government and remain in power even after decisively losing an election manages to create a rubber-stamp majority in Congress, hires a politically compromised attorney general, talks about returning to power after the current term is over even though he won’t be eligible to serve again (in accordance with not one, but two constitutional provisions), violates due process misusing federal powers, defies the lower and appellate courts and considers the opinions of the Supreme Court optional, as well as flirting with the future possibility of imposing martial law, perhaps it’s time to stop asking ourselves if there’s a possibility that the US could become an authoritarian regime. News flash, folks: It already is.