Do People Want a Fascist States of America? Maybe So | Opinion

There are a number of lessons to be learned from last week's Iowa Republican caucus, won by former President Donald Trump, including that defeated ex-presidents are formidable opponents if they seek their party's nomination again. But it is also clear that roughly half of Republicans are unapologetic members of an authoritarian political movement whose strength has only grown since the failed post-election coup attempt in 2020.

No one is coming to save us from this threat—not the Supreme Court, which will almost certainly thwart efforts to remove Trump from state ballots, not the lower courts, which cannot bar him from the presidency even with felony convictions, and certainly not Republican primary voters. We are the guardrails, and it is best to think of the battle against GOP authoritarianism as a fight that will consume the rest of your life.

That democracy is not important to a majority of Republican primary voters is no longer really in dispute. Survey after survey finds that Republicans don't care that their likely nominee tried to overthrow the American system of government by illegally installing himself in power. One October 2023 poll of South Carolina Republicans asked whether the charges against Trump, if accurate, for subverting democracy would affect his fitness to be president. Sixty-seven percent said no. In a December 2023 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, just 31 percent of Republicans believe that President Biden was legitimately elected. A December 2023 Des Moines Register poll found that for 51 percent of likely Iowa caucus-goers, Trump's promise to "terminate" parts of the U.S. constitution either made them more likely to support him (14 percent) or made no difference to them at all (37 percent).

In an October 2023 PRRI poll, 33 percent of Republicans agreed that "true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save our country," and 48 percent of Republicans said that "we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that's what it takes to set things right."

A recent study in PloS One showed that "MAGA Republicans" were more than twice as likely as non-Republicans to agree with the statement, "having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy." The numbers in nearly all such surveys have gotten significantly worse over the past few years, as the belief that the 2020 election was stolen has calcified among rank-and-file Republicans, who are mostly just following the lead of their own cowardly elected officials.

There is still some disbelief on the American left and center-left that U.S. democracy is truly threatened by this movement, which is full of what seem like self-evidently comical figures like Trump and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But recognizing that a significant share of GOP voters has been enlisted in an effort to destroy democracy does not require casting them as irrational or crazy. On the contrary, the appeal of authoritarianism is timeless, and not terribly complicated or mystifying.

Democracy is messy and frustrating, and making change in any democratic system of government, especially ours, is slow going at best and maddeningly elusive at worst. Legislation is always the work of compromise, and compromises often please no one completely. The losers of an election have to wait years for another crack at power, and in the interim must accept the reality of governance by their adversaries. Republicans in particular are tired of losing presidential elections, and are increasingly incapable of accepting that their Democratic counterparts have real support because leading GOP politicians talk incessantly about how people who live in cities aren't real. It is easier for them to imagine that it must be a vast conspiracy.

Authoritarianism, on the other hand, lends itself to decisiveness. It offers the allure of unmitigated power, and the ability not just to steamroll your opponents, but, when necessary, to punish or even kill them if they get out of line. And authoritarian leaders, far from being universally loathed, often have the support of significant segments of society. As Yale University political scientist Jennifer Gandhi argues, "There's a misconception that there's always a fight between the state and society, where you have the leader and his cronies and everyone else is against them." But that's not how most tyrannies function. On the contrary, they often safeguard the interests of one group of citizens against others, and by closing off the possibility of change through elections, offer the illusion of permanence to their supporters.

That's why appealing to Republicans' commitment to democracy to pry them away from Trump and his movement is futile. Rank-and-file Republican voters understand that the authoritarianism Trump promises to usher in if he wins the election in November will benefit them personally. Not only will they get their kulturkampf wishes fulfilled with endless "war on woke" policies and stunts, but they will be personally insulated from accountability by the degradation of electoral integrity. The place of white Americans atop the social and economic hierarchy will be fully restored and protected by policy. That's why calling imprisoned insurrectionists "hostages" makes perfect sense for MAGA politicians like Trump and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). That's why Republicans are embracing the possibility of dictatorship—it's not just that it's in their self-interest, it has also proven to be a potent way of unifying their coalition and not much less popular, if at all, than traditional conservatism.

With every passing day it is harder to imagine this threat vanishing or being permanently neutralized with some sweeping electoral triumph. The blind rage and thirst for retribution that Donald Trump unleashed on America will survive his eventual exit from public life for the very simple reason that millions of people seem to love and embrace the idea of it. There's no sugarcoating it—about a quarter of your neighbors are fascists-in-waiting, and they have a very real chance of being in charge at this time next year if you don't stop them.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.