Since January, there have been frightening signs that America is becoming an oligarchy overseen by a dictator. From the first, Donald Trump has followed an authoritarian playbook, beginning with his rejection of objective reality. Forced early on to defend the assertion that the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was the biggest ever witnessed, presidential spokesperson Kellyanne Conway explained that the administration used “alternative facts”. Since then, the president has repeatedly attacked fact-based media as “fake news”. Indeed, with his insistence on an alternative reality, Trump sometimes seems like an elderly Fox News-addled neighbour suddenly given power to make his bizarrely warped view of America real.

But now, it feels all too real, with Trump delivering on the economic core of his vision. He has slashed regulations that protect workers, walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, attacked the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) and gutted the government. Finally, in a dramatic “win” for his administration, the Republicans last week passed a major tax overhaul that slashes taxes primarily for the wealthy and is projected to create an almost $1.5tn dollar deficit. Republicans have already said that the only way to address that shortfall will be with cuts to Medicare and social security.

Since Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the New Deal in the 1930s, radical conservatives have railed against the idea that the government should intervene in the economy. The New Deal responded to the Great Crash and the ensuing Depression by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure in order to maintain a level playing field for all Americans. Opponents countered this principle by arguing that the government must not hem in America’s business leaders. In their view, government regulations and laws to benefit poorer members of society crippled leaders’ ability to prosper and, since their prosperity drove the economy by trickling down to everyone else, such laws destroyed progress.

But the New Deal was wildly popular, so conservatives sold their reactionary economic vision by enlisting white racism. As the federal government promoted civil rights, they warned that an active government redistributed the wealth of hard-working, white taxpayers to African Americans, a “special interest” that wanted better treatment than everyone else. In contrast, conservatives offered the image of the American cowboy individualist.

Ronald Reagan, with his derision of the welfare queen and his mantra that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”, rode that racist anti-government cowboy image into the White House. Trump is this conservative macho individualist exaggerated to caricature. He brags about how he knows better than anyone how to run a successful business, how to fight Isis, how to find “the best people” for office.

While Reagan hinted at the discrimination inherent in the conservative worldview, Trump revels in it. But Trump delivered not just on the racism and sexism of the individualist vision, but also on its economics. In short, Republicans under Trump have finally destroyed the New Deal, turning the government over to a small cadre of wealthy businessmen, unhampered, to run the country as they see fit. When Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore put on his cowboy hat and rode his horse to the polls in Alabama in December, he was deliberately embodying Republican individualist principles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A disturing affinity for Russian oligarchs’: Trump and Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg in July. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

And therein lies the rub. Moore lost the election. As Republicans under Trump have converted the nation into an oligarchy of rich individualists, Trump’s extreme macho individualism has bred a backlash.

Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour. At the same time, the Republican vision defined women primarily as wives and mothers and suggested that since men took care of their dependants, any woman protesting against her deteriorating conditions was demanding special legislation. The election of a man who used his privilege not to protect women but to assault them gave women a clear way to rally against Republican individualism.

In October, the New York Times’s exposé of film mogul Harvey Weinstein, who controlled women’s access to work by demanding sexual favours, lit the #MeToo movement. One powerful man after another fell before what is not simply a pushback against sexual assault, but is a rejection of the worldview that privileged dominant men.

Nowhere has the rejection of that vision been clearer than in the victory of Democrat Doug Jones over Roy Moore. Voters chose Jones, the federal prosecutor who brought to justice two Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four African American girls, over Moore, an alleged sexual predator.

In 2017, Trump brought to life the alternative reality portrayed on Fox News, the individualist vision designed to destroy the New Deal. Now that it is exposed to reality, Americans reject it. Trump’s approval rating is at 35%, a historical low.

Nonetheless, it is not clear that democracy will prevail. Trump admires not America’s democratic allies but autocrats: Turkey’s President Erdoğan, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He has shown astonishing disregard for the law, flouting nepotism and emoluments rules and treating regular government procedures, including the authority of Congress, with disdain.

He has tried to undermine the FBI and American intelligence agencies, shows a disturbing affinity for Putin and Russian oligarchs, and has tried to undermine the authority of special counsel, Robert Mueller, charged with examining the role of Russia in the 2016 election. Acting again from the autocrat’s playbook, he has repeatedly attacked the press and has packed the courts: appointing the supreme court justice Republicans denied to President Barack Obama and 12 circuit judges, more in a year than any other president in history.

And Trump has followers who appear to be willing to rally around him, no matter what he does, even, perhaps, to dismiss as “fake news” any evidence of collusion with Russia that Mueller produces or, maybe, as the president suggested, to let him “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody”. If Republican leaders are willing to enable Trump’s autocratic enthusiasms in return for oligarchy, American democracy will die.

In the 1850s, when a small group of rich slaveholders took the government away from the majority and tried to create an oligarchy, Abraham Lincoln implored Americans to work to guarantee “that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.

Words for Americans to think about in the year 2018.