Arthur E. Sowers is a resident of Harbeson.
Donald Trump has always been unhappy with the media. He has, all along, threatened, sued or otherwise intimidated media organizations and individuals in the hopes that they get the idea to produce news that Trump wants you to get rather than the truth. And, after all, he could write an executive order establishing prosecution for unpatriotic or disloyal statements, in which he would be the judge, jury and executioner, all rolled into one. Or, better yet — like what happened to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — you say something Trump doesn’t like, and Trump calls you a name, and then, one or more “anonymous” persons (could they be Trumpers?) carry out a “vigilante” act against you. Read, for example, the Newsweek article: “Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Received Assassination Threats: Police.”
Let’s look at some real history, when authoritarian governments suppressed bad news and made up, out of thin air, lots of only good news.
Right after becoming a dictator in France, Napoleon Bonaparte seized the newspapers, to control what information people were reading. More about this can be found on history.com, under the title, “How Napoleon Tried to Silence the Press.” And still more can be found in the Wikipedia article about how Napoleon generated his own positive fake news: See “Napoleonic propaganda.”
Napoleon’s era ran from 1799 to 1815. It was complicated, chaotic, corrupt and full of many bloody wars, and it ended badly. How Napoleon became dictator in 1799 is described in the Wikipedia article, “Coup of 18 Brumaire.” He replaced the French Republic (established in 1792) by declaring France an empire in 1804 and declaring himself to be emperor. This is described in the Wikipedia article, “French First Republic.” He caused the Napoleonic Wars, until his final, greatest defeat in 1815 at Waterloo, Belgium, as described in the Wikipedia article, “Napoleonic Wars.” Otherwise, my point is that Napoleon made sure that you only heard about his successes (which were sometimes failures), and you never heard about any failures.
Under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, the media was also heavily controlled. One of many Wikipedia articles on this subject is “Censorship in Nazi Germany.” Like during the era of Napoleon, the public only heard positive news, not real news. I think everybody knows that the Nazi period ended badly, too.
On the Reporters Without Borders website is this article, “Trump’s war on the press: 10 numbers from the US President’s first 100 days.” It gives a short story about the situation. Another article, on the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting website, is a second example: “Feds Threaten Wikipedia After Right-Wing Media Uproar.”
I have been searching the internet for any relevant history to understand what we might expect from Trump in the future. The Google artificial intelligence search gave me a summary, with this first sentence: “The collapse of a democracy into a dictatorship typically occurs through three main methods: foreign conquest, internal imposition (coups), and constitutional takeover (backsliding).” One of the links in that summary was to a short but good article on Wikipedia: “Democratic backsliding.” Within that Wikipedia article is this sentence: “(D)emocratic backsliding has occurred most frequently through the election of personalist leaders or parties who subsequently dismantle democratic institutions.” That looks exactly like what Donald Trump is doing. He is replacing our democracy with his “Trumpocracy.”
A 2018 book, “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, shows how leaderships, in recent decades in five European countries and four South American countries, carried out slow “coups” (constitutional backsliding) to create highly authoritarian states. There is a Wikipedia article on the book with the same title. I read the book.
I fed all the names and collapse eras for the nine countries, as well as for Napoleon’s greater authoritarian empire and Hitler’s Third Reich, into two artificial intelligences (Aria and ChatGPT) to get a summary of changes in civil rights, human rights, economic status, media freedom, crime and corruption. The short answer is that, for all six factors, practically everything always got worse in all 11 countries.
Usually, according to economic history, authoritarian governments do worse than full, strong democracies. Even during the 31-year authoritarian rule of Singapore by Lee Kuan Yew, success was only partial, the press was not free, criticism was not allowed, and equality was low. But, unlike Trump, Yew kept quiet and out of the limelight, plus kept corruption under control. It is rare, though, that this happens in authoritarian governance. Connect all the dots, and the new America is going to be less great than the old, pre-Trump America.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
