The Slow Bipartisan Slide to Authoritarianism

The funniest thing about Trump are those who feel he is of a piece, separate from US history and somehow a break from it. That this government is significantly, qualitatively worse than those that came before, rather than an extension of it. (A good example is immigration policy, about which Trump is somewhat worse than Obama, but only somewhat, and where Obama had a chance to end Bush’s policies, he embraced them, instead.)

We now have the spectacle of the success of the cloture vote for re-authorization of section 702 of FISA, which allows warrantless spying on Americans who have contact with foreigners, and which has been changed to allow the database of all such conversations to be searched, trolling for crimes.

These seems like a fairly clear violation of the Bill of Rights prohibition on, well, warrantless searches, but there you go.

Eighteen Senate Democrats crossed the line to make this possible and so did 65 House Democrats. Obama, of course, supported the FISA bill (which was bad even without this newest addition).

Indeed, going back to 2001, the Patriot Act, the 21st century “daddy” of authoritarian overreach was opposed by only one Senator out of 100 (and he’s no longer in the Senate).

One can cavil that at least less Democrats voted for this, but somehow “enough” always do, and those who know how legislatures work will suspect that those who didn’t were given “walks” so they can say they voted against.

There are three likely possible outcomes of our ongoing realignment period. One is left-wing populism. The second is right-wing populism (a very different thing, and not what Trump is actually doing. Its policies are what Bannon prefers.)

The third is an authoritarian surveillance state which attempts to freeze current power relationships for as long as possible.

And that’s what too many Democrats and Republicans are more than okay with; that’s what they want.

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