TRUMP V SLAUGHTER – A CRUCIAL SCOTUS DECISION THAT HANDS THE TRUMP REGIME THE KEY TO DICTATORIAL POWER

 

My thanks to Martin "Mick" Andersen for sharng this illustration

Anyone who still cares, even a little, about how the Trump Era is undermining democracy and turning the US into an authoritarian regime, with the aid and comfort of the six so-called “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, need only read the brilliant dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the case of Trump v Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, with which her liberal democratic colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson both concurred.

In summary, this is the issue, which is now  a legal precedent, thanks to the six far-right justices and their apparent Project 2025 agenda: The Court’s majority decision in Trump v Slaughter has effectively handed Donald Trump the blueprint for authoritarian rule by dismantling any and all independent oversight over the Executive Branch, thus enabling the transformation of any office of the federal government into a patronage system based on personal loyalty to the supreme leader, rather than on constitutional duty and service to the people of the United States.

Hitler himself could not have come up with a better surrender of the judiciary to the whims of the Führer than Trump v Slaughter. And indeed, history tells us (if anybody bothers to read it, nowadays) that Hitler was unable to establish complete dictatorial control over power in Germany until he managed to compromise the judiciary. He did this by systematically dismantling the independence of Justice, and turning it into a vindictive tool of the Nazi state. This was achieved through a combination of purges, institutional restructuring, and ideological subversion, often carried out in the guise of legality. Sound familiar?

Trump is having an easier time of it, because in nearly every major decision that reverberates in increased Executive power, this Supreme Court has had Trump’s back. It began with a decision  that made him immune to prosecution even if he commits indictable crimes in office. This was the same sort of lenient appeasement that permitted him to run for president again in 2024, despite having been found guilty by a jury of his peers of thirty-four felonies, as well as having been indicted on numerous federal charges, which were forcibly dropped when he won a second term.

A 'friend' of the Court

In the specific case of Trump v Slaughter, what the majority of the Court (ahistorically and undemocratically) posits is that, as president, Trump has the executive authority to fire without cause anyone and everyone that he feels like firing in the federal bureaucracy. This includes what until now have been independent agencies that were not subject to political influence. In particular, it includes Justice Department employees, federal regulators, and inspectors general and their offices, whose job descriptions as such have always, logically, included independence from all political considerations. That is because one of the main specific jobs of these State bureaus is to keep administrations honest by holding them to standards that have historically foiled corruption and despotism.

In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed the Court’s decision for making President Donald Trump even more powerful than a king. “No Kings” has never had greater significance, since the Supreme Court decision on Trump v Slaughter is a slap in the face to the great majority of Americans who have been seeking to remind the nation through massive public demonstrations that the Founders’ main premise for rebellion was rejection of absolute monarchies and the abuses they encompassed. One of the main founding principles of the Republic was, then, the definitive rejection of kings and the embracing of representative democracy with three co-equal branches of government.

Instead, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v United States—a precedent that empowered Congress to limit a president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and has allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

According to Sotomayor and her two liberal colleagues, “The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President…In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor warned that the Court’s majority decision has just made Trump even more powerful than the despotic English monarch against whom the US colonies revolted, since, back then, the British Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”

Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision in Trump v Slaughter could be considered constitutional. So true was this, she wrote, that the country’s founding Framers had clearly “never intended to give the President the complete set of powers that the English Crown held, let alone more.”

In effect, this hijacked Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter will surely be remembered historically not as a simple technical dispute over a president’s power to remove a specific federal employee, but rather, as the most consequential transfer of constitutional authority to the Executive in American history. By overturning nearly a century of precedent established in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the Court’s conservative majority dramatically expanded presidential authority over independent federal agencies—institutions specifically designed by Congress, ironically enough, to restrain executive overreach.

In authoring the liberal democratic dissent, Justice Sotomayor fully recognized the gravity of what had occurred. Her warning was not procedural or technical. It was constitutional and structural.

Her central argument can be summarized simply: The Court has now given the president (this president and thus all presidents in the future) power over institutions deliberately designed to remain independent from the Oval Office.

Capturing the full force of the danger to which this situation exposes American democracy, she wrote: “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him.”

These are some of the grave and direct consequences of the Court’s ill-advised but intentional decision on Trump v Slaughter:

1. The Court’s decision, in one fell swoop, gutted independent oversight of the Executive. The modern American administrative state was deliberately constructed so that certain institutions would remain insulated from direct presidential control. Not anymore. These bodies included bureaus like the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the  Federal Election Commission. The Court has now declared that the President can remove officials in many of these agencies at will. That means the agencies designed to check presidential misconduct now answer to the President himself. Those independent offices are now at the mercy of Trump’s cronyism and dishonest dealings, since anyone not toeing the Trump line will be gone. In simple, understandable terms, the referee is now subordinate to the player.

2. The Court’s decision in Trump v Slaughter has, overnight, undone Constitutional rule and institutionalized a “Loyalty State”. In her dissent, Sotomayor repeatedly emphasizes that independent agencies have existed until now precisely because certain government functions should not depend on partisan loyalty.

She writes: “For most of this Nation’s history, Congress and the President together have decided that some Government functions should operate at a distance from partisan politics.” The far-right majority of the hijacked Trump Supreme Court has unilaterally reversed that principle. And the practical implications are enormous. A president no longer needs competent administrators. He can simply surround himself with loyalists and sycophants. In other words, the Supreme Court, which is supposed to uphold American traditions and democratic institutions is, instead, adopting Trump’s cronyism and disregard for checks and balances as the new model for presidential empowerment.

This opens the door to systematic purging of career officials who demonstrate independence, and their replacement with individuals whose primary qualification is obedience to the head of state. This is not theoretical. It mirrors the logic of systems historically associated with authoritarian governance, including a patronage State, a one-party bureaucracy, and a personalized executive regime.

In short, the State bureaucracy ceases to serve in accordance with the Constitution and serves, instead, at the pleasure of the ruler.

3. The Court’s decision has also reversed traditional checks and balances. And that is institutionally grave. The entire US constitutional system was designed around one foundational assumption: namely, that power must check power.

Under this effective system, Congress creates institutions, the courts interpret the law, and independent agencies enforce statutory mandates insulated from political interference.

But this ruling kicks over the table on all of this, fundamentally altering the playing rules so that the game is fixed in favor of a single player. In more technical terms, the SCOTUS ruling embraces an extreme version of the so-called “unitary executive theory.” In other words, from now on, Congress can create all of the formerly independent institutions it wants, but, in the end, the Executive has been handed the authoritarian power to dominate them completely. This signifies a direct transfer by the Supreme Court of institutional sovereignty from Congress to the Executive.

In her dissent, Sotomayor warns that the Court has “distort[ed] the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control.”  And that phrase, “total executive control” is constitutionally devastating. Because once independent institutions are no longer independent, separation of powers implodes and all power is handed to one office.

4. In short, the Supreme Court decision creates fertile conditions for the establishment of de facto dictatorial power. History demonstrates that dictatorships do not usually begin with abolishing elections. They begin, instead, when leaders eliminate independent institutions capable of constraining them. This ruling creates precisely that possibility. A president can now systematically and summarily remove officials who investigate corruption, enforce campaign finance laws, regulate his or her corporate cronies, protect labor rights, prosecute regulatory violations, or resist compliance with unlawful executive orders.

The end result is that this MAGA Supreme Court, through this one ruling, has returned the country to the bad old days of boss rule and “machine politics”. Perhaps the best and most applicable example of this was the Tammany Hall machine run by William “Boss” Tweed in the second half of the nineteenth century in New York. This is the era of rampant corruption and violence so well depicted in Martin Scorsese’s now classic 2002 film Gangs of New York. Under "Boss" Tweed in the 1860s and 1870s, his Democratic Party doled out citizenship, municipal jobs, food, and housing to newly arrived, mostly Irish and Italian immigrants in exchange for unquestioned electoral loyalty. This structure funded massive graft, such as inflating the costs of the new New York County Courthouse by millions of dollars. It was graft so iconic that the building would be commonly known as “the Tweed Courthouse.”

William "Boss" Tweed

The Court has, then, now institutionalized the tools for the recreation of corrupt boss rule, since, thanks to Trump v Slaughter, it is, since that partisan ruling, the president, ironically, who controls the tools that were designed to restrain presidential abuse.

In classic political science terms, this is the very defining characteristic of authoritarian government: Not a formal dictatorship as such, but the intentional re-tooling of the rules, and of the law, so as to foster a functional dictatorship.

5. As devastatingly major as this ruling is, it is actually a complement to the Court’s earlier expansion of presidential immunity, which had basically given Trump impunity to do whatever he wanted and to go unchecked for as long as he and or his regime is in power. Trump v Slaughter, then, cannot be viewed in isolation. It must, rather, be viewed as part of a far-right Court agenda aimed at removing any and all guardrails against dictatorial presidential power.

In the earlier Trump v United States, the same Court granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity for official acts. Famously writing, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Justice Sotomayor warned with unequivocal clarity, “The President is now a king above the law.”

But with Trump v. Slaughter, the Court has doubled down. The 2024 ruling shielded the President from indictment or punishment. The 2026 ruling gives the President power to neutralize institutions that might expose his wrongdoing in the first place.

Together these rulings have established a very dangerous Executive formula:

Immunity from consequences.
Control over investigators.
And, control over the bureaucracy through enforceable vows of loyalty, not to the Constitution, but to the authoritarian ruler.

That combination is the veritable architecture for unchecked executive rule, and it now has the Supreme Court stamp of approval on it.

So there you have it, the combined effects of Trump v United States and Trump v Slaughter have created the perfect storm by which  federal government can now be converted into Trump’s personal political machine. Historically, civil service reform in the United States—especially after the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act—has sought to end the “spoils system.” It had become a merit system in which government jobs were no longer being used as rewards for personal loyalty. This ruling fully revives that danger, and you can bet that Trump will put it to bad (the worst) use.

A president now has unprecedented constitutional authority to fill key governing structures with ideological loyalists whose allegiance is personal. Loyalty not to Congress, not to the law, not to the American people, but to the person of the president, the individual, not even to his branch of government.

That fundamentally and profoundly changes the democratic nature of the Republic.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor understood perfectly what was at stake in this nefarious decision. Her dissent is not simply a disagreement over administrative law. It is a warning to the American people that the Supreme Court has radically altered the constitutional structure of the United States. By allowing the president to dominate agencies created to remain independent, and as oversight for unbridled Executive power, the Court has enabled something profoundly dangerous: the conversion of our constitutional government into a personalized executive regime—in short, an autocracy.

As Donald Trump—in his delusional state of psychopathic fever—sought ever more seriously to be the most powerful despot in history, many of us said, “Never fear. There are checks and balances in the system that will never allow that to happen.” We were naïve. I was naïve. We did not count on a GOP dominance of Congress or on its total surrender to a tyrant. Nor did we count on a Supreme Court majority whose self-interested loyalty to a despot would prompt it to betray the Constitution and the integrity of American democracy, and to facilitate authoritarian rule.

In practical effect, the Supreme Court has ripped away the power of the institutions meant to investigate, restrain, and regulate presidential abuse and subordinated them to the president’s whim and will. The corrupt Supreme Court majority has, in a very real and tangible sense, betrayed the democratic history and traditions of the United States, and granted Trump all of the raw authority necessary to make his life-long wet dream of unchecked and unlimited personal power and impunity come true.

And we are all the worse for it.

 

D-DAY – THE HEROIC ANTIFA HISTORY LESSON TOO MUCH OF AMERICA HAS FORGOTTEN

 

June is the month in which many of us from the US and across the world take time to think about, remember and commemorate the supreme sacrifice of the now nearly extinct generation that went to war in the worst conflagration in history in order to rid the world of the scourge of fascism. This year marks the eighty-second anniversary of the June 6^th D-Day Normandy invasion.

For the people of my own generation, D-Day commemorations are more than the mere marking of an historical milestone. They are real and personal and literally hit home, since it was our parents’ generation that made those supreme sacrifices to free Europe and the world from the nefarious, encroaching despotism of fascist ideology. Many of us went to grade school already knowing the gist of World War II history. We knew the names of American military leaders, of some of the key battles, of a lot of the weaponry used. We knew basically what the war had been about.

Hero dads - Sergeant Whitie,
antifa freedom-fighter

Above all, we knew who the good guys and who the bad guys were. Our dads were the good guys, the ones who had gone to war to fight for freedom and democracy. Our mothers were the ones who took up the posts in manufacturing factories and defense plants left vacant by our fathers who were off at war. No matter what sort of relationships we might have with them as we grew up, in that, in having been true freedom-fighters, they were our heroes. The bad guys were the fascists, the Nazis, the militarized far-right imperialists. And we knew the names of their leaders as well, and that the most diabolical one of all was Hitler. His insane, despotic, callously cruel figure was the manifest avatar for fascism and everything that rendered it deplorable enough to warrant the most destructive war in history.

It is worthwhile recalling what D-Day signified in the prosecution of World War II. It was, quite literally, the turning point at which the Allies began winning a definitive victory over the fascist forces of the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany.

On June 6^th, 1944, US, British, Canadian, and other Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious military operation in history. D-Day was not merely a military maneuver. It was the opening of the Western Front against Nazi Germany and a direct assault on history's most destructive fascist regimes.

More than 156,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel to France in staging the invasion.  In the first twenty-four hours of the invasion alone, Allied troops suffered ten thousand casualties, 4,414 of them fatal. The US lost 2,501 troops that day, in the bloody fighting to rout the well-entrenched Axis forces. Fatal British casualties numbered 1,449, Canadians 391, and other Allies 73.

Most of the Axis troops defending the positions firing on the Allies at Normandy were German. But the Nazis were also joined by what were known as the Osttruppen, or Eastern Troops. These were volunteers from other countries, or draftees and prisoners of war from Nazi-occupied nations. The Osttruppen, then, were comprised of volunteers from occupied territories in the Soviet Union (such as Ukraine and Georgia), as well as forcibly conscripted men from countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia. In the months leading up to the invasion, the German Army integrated tens of thousands of these non-Germans into their coastal divisions. As many as nine thousand Axis troops were killed, wounded or went missing on that day.

German soldiers entrenched at Normandy

The American forces suffered their devastating casualties at Omaha Beach. Canadian forces stormed Juno Beach under heavy fire. British troops landed at Gold and Sword Beaches. Behind them stood entire societies mobilized against fascism, against white supremacists, against authoritarianism, militarism, and aggressive, imperialist nationalism.

The significance of D-Day cannot be separated from what the Western Allies were fighting against and the freedom-loving attitude of an entire generation in the West. I have underscored Western Allies, since Soviet Russia was an anti-fascist ally during World War II as well. But it was an ally of convenience rather than ideology. Indeed, the Russians paid the highest price of the war, with at least twenty-four million fatalities between civilian and military personnel. But the Soviets’ war with the Nazis was a war between two authoritarianisms—Communist totalitarianism and Nazi fascism—not a war between fascist authoritarianism and democratic freedom.

Nazi Germany was not just another authoritarian government. It was a fascist state built on an historic cult of personality surrounding a cunning if demented leader. The cult was built on contempt for democratic institutions and for the rule of law. It encouraged attacks on the independent press, political violence in support of fascist aims, racial hierarchy, the scapegoating of minorities, and the belief that national greatness justified the destruction of constitutional constraints and of entire ethnicities.

That generation, my parents’ generation,  which fought, and sacrificed,  and died on D-Day, understood that democracy is fragile. They comprehended and believed that democratic institutions can only survive when citizens reject and actively oppose authoritarian designs before these turn into politically backed movements and manage to consolidate power.

British troops deploying at Sword Beach

For decades after World War II, Americans commemorated D-Day as historical proof that the United States was the world's foremost opponent of fascism. The nation portrayed itself as a defender of constitutional government, of free elections, of independent courts, of a free press, of political pluralism and of the rule of law. It was, in short, a society of laws, not of rule by force and by decree.

This historical identity began to erode in small if significant ways as far back as Ronald Reagan. Restrictions on rights and freedoms increased notably in the post-Nine-Eleven Bush Era, as US presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, gained an ever more powerful role, to the detriment of the other two supposedly co-equal branches of government.

But the deterioration of American institutions, democratic government and the rule of law has burgeoned out of control as of 2016, with the appearance on the political scene of Donald Trump, and the start of the Era of Trump. Since then, even in the four years that Trump left office between one term and the next, his nefarious figure has loomed large, not only in American politics, but also in the pernicious “culture wars” that have accompanied his rise to power and bitterly divided Americans.

In view of the fact that the hijacked GOP, which seems oblivious to—or indeed, complicit with—the destruction of America’s democratic institutions, it is almost impossible not to view the Trump administration, based on the most obvious of evidence, as being, not an administration at all in the traditional sense of the word, but a fascist regime. Note that I am not using the word fascist ill-advisedly or as a mere political slur, but rather, in the truest sense of the word.

Let me just clarify what I said above. Historians who specialize in the study of fascism and authoritarianism define some of the hallmarks of these phenomena as follows:

Fascism/authoritarianism is usually a cultist movement that elevates personal loyalty to a leader (cult of personality) or autocratic movement over and above the nation’s institutions. Fascism/authoritarianism is always marked by constant attacks on the independent media as “enemies of the people,” and by enormous efforts to convince the public that the only truth is disseminated by the State, and the propaganda media that support it. In its latest iteration, it also appeals to rich supporters of the movement to buy recalcitrant media and break them into a shadow of their former self—a model favored by former Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán, who was greatly admired by the current US president.

Modern-day fascist and
Trump hero Viktor Orbán

Fascist/authoritarian regimes seek to garner the impression of legitimacy by de-legitimizing constitutional elections and election outcomes through false claims of election fraud. They also demonize political opponents as “traitors against the nation” rather than viewing them simply as rivals. As these claims get a foothold, fascist and other authoritarian regimes also often trump up charges against their rivals and seek to use the courts to jail them, and thus take them out of circulation. Alternatively, they seek to trash the reputations of their opponents, and to convince their followers that these individuals are dishonest or perverted.

These regimes always celebrate “strongman” leadership as the solution to the nation’s problems, plugging into the narrative that representative democracy is weak, inefficient and ineffective. They employ stark nationalist rhetoric that centers on the grievances and victimhood of their constituencies, casting themselves as having come to power to put right those “discriminations” perpetrated against their supporters and to punish those who “slighted them.”  Along these lines, they eschew legal processes and use the power of State to go after their perceived enemies.

Normalizing violence - J-6 Insurrection - blanket pardon

Fascist/authoritarian regimes seek to reward uniformity and to punish diversity. They are usually misogynist, racist, tribal and rooted in a single religious dogma.

And finally, these regimes seek to normalize violence and threats of violence against “enemies of the State” and of its leader. They encourage violent acts to weed out or overthrow what they tout as “rigged systems” so that the authoritarian leader can put things to rights and “restore the rights of the people.”

If we were to place a checkmark by the items above that apply to the current Trump regime, objectively speaking, they would all be checked. And to the chagrin of those who get a throbbing vein in their forehead every time they hear me use the word fascist to describe MAGA ideology, sorry, but if it walks like a fascist and talks like a fascist, and acts like a fascist…

But don’t take my word for it. Numerous noted scholars specializing in fascism and authoritarianism—including, but not limited to, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiát, Jason Stanley, and Madeleine Albright—have argued that these patterns in the Trump regime and MAGA closely resemble warning signs historically associated with fascist and authoritarian movements. And this argument has become significantly stronger since Trump returned to office last year. Trump 2.0 is looking more and more like fascism on steroids—the forming of a State paramilitary commanded by the president to violently repress dissent in entire communities, almost daily violations of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, encroachment on congressional powers, the reshaping of the military that answers to one man rather than to the tenets of the Constitution, and so on.

During Trump’s first presidency (2016-2020), opponents often argued that, despite his attempt to usurp exclusive power, the  institutional checks and balances remained intact. While this is somewhat debatable, let’s agree that, for the sake of argument, it’s true. Indeed, courts blocked executive actions. Career civil servants resisted political pressure. Senior military officers publicly emphasized constitutional obligations. Elections remained competitive, and power was ultimately transferred after the 2020 election—even despite Trump’s historic first as the only president not to accept the peaceful transfer of power, and despite his mounting a bloody insurrection at the Capitol to try and overturn the election results by force in 2020.

But the second Trump presidency has been, to date, stunningly different, because many of those institutional restraints have been purposely weakened and attacked by the regime. Efforts to centralize executive authority, to purge perceived opponents from the career State bureaucracy, to weaken or remove completely independent oversight, to politicize federal statistics, and to redefine loyalty to the state as loyalty to a central political leader represent a grimly advancing stage of democratic erosion.

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower with
 Screaming Eagle 101st Airborne troops in Normandy

The contrast between this state of affairs and the antifa ideals that inspired D-Day are increasingly stark. The soldiers who landed in Normandy fought a war against a system that concentrated power in a single leader and that demanded ideological conformity, and cultural and ethnic uniformity. Those who fought and spilled their blood on the beaches of Normandy and turned the sea red were, in the truest sense of the word, antifa freedom-fighters, and the US was the exemplary champion of antifa ideals.

Today, as a result of a GOP leadership that is either all-in for fascist-style, one-party rule, or too politically weak or cowardly to resist, contemporary American politics increasingly rewards precisely the fascist tendencies enumerated above. The more than two thousand American heroes of Omaha Beach—or, indeed, the more than four hundred thousand Americans killed in the course of the entire war—didn’t die to establish a political climate in the US in which loyalty to one individual outweighs loyalty to constitutional principles. Indeed, they fought and died to cut the cancer of that fascist model out of the world order.

Canada provides a particularly revealing comparison to what is happening under the Trump regime in the US today. Canadians fought fascism alongside Americans at Normandy in June 1944. Canadian forces suffered more than a thousand casualties on D-Day alone.

Canadian troops disembarking at Juno Beach in
  Normandy, 1,000 casualties, 391 dead in a day.

As a result, for generations, the two countries, which were somewhat wary of each other until that time, have maintained one of the closest alliances in modern history, sharing defense commitments, intelligence partnerships, economic integration, and democratic values. But in recent years, Canadian leaders, policymakers, commentators, and much of the Canadian public at large have expressed growing concern about political developments in the United States. Concerns have included attacks on democratic institutions, threats against electoral legitimacy, political polarization, hostility toward allies, trade disputes, and increasingly hardcore nationalistic rhetoric.

These concerns have morphed into full-blown opposition since Trump began his second term and, unable to corrupt Canada’s democratic ethics and ideas, started attacking Canada outright, levying outrageous trade tariffs on it, and going as far as to suggest he planned to turn Canada into the fifty-first US state. This has obviously infuriated Canadians as a whole, and soured the alliance between the neighboring nations to the point of near dissolution.

Beyond the diplomatic meltdown with Trump, however, Canadians are entertaining more deep-reaching concerns regarding their mammoth neighbor. Indeed, many—perhaps most—Canadians view these developments, not as ordinary policy disagreements, but as evidence that the United States is moving away from the liberal democratic consensus that united North America as well as Western Europe following World War II.

As a result, Canada is  increasingly exploring ways to reduce strategic dependence on American political stability and to strengthen its relationships with other democratic partners. There has even been some talk of Canada’s becoming a member of the European Union, even as it is already reaching out to like-minded Nordic nations in Scandinavia.

It speaks loud and clear of the democratic crisis in the United States that this stunning development in bilateral relations between Canada and the US is historically remarkable. The country that once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the US on the beaches of Normandy is now, in truly significant respects, attempting to insulate itself from the aggressive instability emanating from Washington.

It is noteworthy that, historically, fascism/authoritarianism succeeds, not because democratic societies consciously choose dictatorship, but because democratic norms are gradually eroded by bad actors. And as this takes place, citizens become accustomed to attacks on institutions, with many people coming to believe the narrative that “the system is rigged,” or that “the system is broken.” And, in the minds of these members of society—usually not a majority, but a critical-mass minority—it stands to reason that the leader and the regime denouncing that supposedly rigged system are “the only ones who can fix it.”

In my own experience, this was true of the military regime that took power in 1976, in Argentina, where I was working for an opposition newspaper that consistently defended the rule of law, and civil and human rights. There was a widespread belief at the time of the coup that the democratic system, rather than the weak and corrupt elected administration, was broken. And a far too extensive proportion of the population was willing to stand behind the dictatorial regime and let it act, “to make the country safe for a clean-slate constitutional democracy.”  Indeed, that was the initial promise of the regime. Instead, that regime ended up staying in power for nearly eight years by means of a bloody reign of terror.

Argentina 1976 - Arrests without charges,
disappearances and summary executions

In such systems, political opponents become enemies. And if the regime becomes powerful enough, it is no longer necessary for it to ostensibly bring charges, false though they may be, to get rid of its rivals and opponents. They are simply and summarily eliminated. In the case of Argentina, from the mid-seventies through the early eighties, thirty thousand were eliminated.

As authoritarianism gradually advances, loyalty to a movement and its leader replaces loyalty to constitutional principles. Exceptional measures become normal. What once seemed unthinkable becomes routine. And people all too often become numb to it until they themselves or their loved ones are caught in the gnashing teeth of the repressive monster.

The lesson of D-Day is that democracy is not self-executing. It survives only when citizens do everything in their power to defend it, no matter how disillusioned they might become with occasional outcomes in a functioning democratic system.

The soldiers who landed in Normandy confronted fascism in its most visible, highly developed and violent form. The challenge facing modern democracies is to recognize authoritarian tendencies before they become irreversible, and to stop them in their tracks.

It is a profoundly cruel reality that the generation that crossed the English Channel on D-Day fought and, in huge numbers, gave their lives to defeat fascism abroad, while many people among today’s generations in the US have embraced fascism. Meanwhile, the rest of Americans may eventually be forced to decide just how far we are willing to go and what we are willing to do to resist and hopefully defeat authoritarianism at home.

That is why today, D-Day and what it signifies is more relevant than ever. It is not merely a commemoration of a massive military victory. It is, additionally, a reminder that democracy can be lost, that fascism can emerge in unexpected places, and that the preservation of free societies requires constant vigilance and participation.

The central debate facing many in the United States today is whether current political developments represent ordinary democratic conflict or the early stages of the very authoritarian traditions that Americans once crossed an ocean to defeat. In my own mind, this debate is moot. Fascism is already upon us. It is here, and steps must be taken to put an immediate halt to its pernicious advancement. Either that, or we must resign ourselves to the death of American democracy.

How we respond to this issue—whether embracing the “new order”, being submersed in apathy about it, or fighting it tooth and nail—will shape not only the future of American democracy but also the future of what generations have, until now, called the Free World.