One thing has become clear enough: On Tuesday, one historical epoch in American democracy will end and another will begin. To understand what’s ahead, we need to look back at what’s in the past. There in our past as a historical process, America has come to know three different stages of democracy, each stage developing as follows:
STAGE I: “Jeffersonian Democracy” (political freedom and economic equality for all): The first (and only true) democratic system is what we might call “Jeffersonian Democracy.” Abraham Lincoln famously defined it 100 years later: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” It is frontier America’s original form of self-governance, in which people are politically free and economically equal, the kind that Alexis de Tocqueville famously witnessed in the 19th century as “democracy in America.” In it, no democracy is deemed possible or true if the citizens are economically unequal, so that no person, group or class can monopolize the nation’s wealth created by the commoners’ labor. In Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s America, the open land and even-handed guns in the New World eventually created political freedom and economic equality for all Americans. (For Black Americans, it took another 100 years). This Jeffersonian Democracy in America ended with the Civil War and the industrial capitalism that followed.
STAGE II: “Liberal Democracy” (one controlled by corporate America): Technically named “Liberal Democracy,” or simply “democracy,” this capitalist-dominant form is the one most people recognize as “American-style democracy” today, even with its glaring economic inequality. In its pure form, it’s an everyman-for-himself system in which individual liberty is transformed into free entrepreneurialism and then naturally evolved into corporate capitalism.
This liberal democracy eventually conquered America’s heart and soul with its frontier spirit of individualism, now expressed as consumer freedom, inevitably leading to a system of the few who own everything and the majority struggling as wage earners. While the rich have become richer and the rest merely surviving, this “free” liberal democracy has been relatively successful in keeping most American consumers happy and entertained and has prospered under both Republicans and Democrats.
In the waning decades of liberal democracy, however, the two political parties in America have quietly switched their party lines, Republicans shifting to the (white) working class to stroke its resentment and fear and Democrats accommodating capitalism in their welfare-state ideal for America’s underclass, mainly Blacks and Hispanics. In the meantime, the white majority — angry, fearful and lonely in an increasingly dehumanizing society and ever-isolating digitalized lifestyle — has turned its wrath toward non-whites and the Democratic elite seen as neglecting white people. Here, the GOP, now inspired by Trump’s skilled white populism, finds its chances to restore white America on an epic scale.
STAGE III: “Fascist Democracy” (one controlled by constitutional fascism): Still “democratic” in form, but unabashedly and unmistakably “fascist,” Donald Trump, following the trail blazed by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, popularized this third kind as a major force in America. Using his presidency, 2016-20, as a dress rehearsal for American fascism, the full-fledged fascist era will officially inaugurate on Nov. 8, whether or not a numerical majority of voters consent.
This new “Fascist Democracy” is made up of the structure of traditional American democracy (using constitutional provisions to its advantage) combined with Americanized European-style fascism (brute political power) and highly seductive “red-meat” messages. The white working-class Americans — feeling neglected for generations under Democrats and being skillfully seduced by right wing GOP extremists and demagogues — are now ready to demand the liberal pound of flesh. Liberal democracy, America’s longest-surviving political system, will begin its swansong as soon as the vote-counting formality is done.
In the emerging new political landscape, the relationship between old capitalism and new fascism remains unclear. As competing forces trying to dominate the social system in America, the two camps compete for power whenever necessary. As the dominant institutional mechanism in economics and in politics, respectively, they cooperate wherever possible. As two historical forces destined to accomplish great things in the modern world, they jointly represent threats to egalitarian-Jeffersonian democracy. Familiar remnants of liberal democracy, like elections and the Democratic Party, will diminish in utility, meaning and even public memory. Most white Americans will accept fascist concoctions as long as racist-nationalism remains their guiding creed. This is the white utopia whose official beginning (or continuing) we are likely to witness Tuesday.
Historically, America has come full circle as the three types of democratic experiences interrelate to form a causal triangle: Jefferson’s classic liberalism led to the free-enterprise system of capitalism, which, through its deregulated liberation of consumerism, (unintentionally) groomed a generation perfectly conditioned for Trump’s fascism, which in turn harkens back to the original all-white American paradise of the Jeffersonian era.
Come Tuesday, white America will be in a frenzy of excitement for revenge. With the GOP in control of both the Senate and the House, with the compliant Supreme Court as backup, fascist plans will become government policies and rhetorical violence will be transformed into real blood. Donald Trump, the hitherto-uncrowned king of American politics, will prepare for his grand coronation in 2024 and the infinite beyond. Beginning on Nov. 8, or thereafter, the unthinkably un-American will become routinely American.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.