“On Tyranny” - Chapter 3: “Beware the one-party state”

A long while ago, I posited the thought-game of what would a no-party electorate and government look like? How would it work? What if, instead of loyalty to party, people were actually encouraged to have to study a situation and determine who was right for the position by a series of rounds. Out of a pack of a couple of dozen people, all vetted based on background and what they had actually done in life and emphatically not on what they say they will do, the field gets winnowed down to a few and so on, until there is one person left who the majority has found to be best suited for the office.

It would be time-consuming and people would have to do their homework. Other rules would require that any campaigning would be done live and the same budget would be allotted to each prospective candidate; and it would not be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, this is my little Platonic ideal, maybe right behind Plato’s itself of a society run by philosopher-kings.

The antithesis of this would be a one-party system and for much of my life, many friends, voters, and non-voters, have claimed that the both major parties in the United States are really just the same thing. This is and has always been close to nonsensical, but not without some merit.

Both parties have been beholden to large corporate interest and funding. Both parties have complied with special interest groups and industries that have not always had the interest of the people at heart. Both parties have been populated with careerists, scalawags, liars, and worse. However, there have been salient differences, genuine substantial differences.

The Republican Party has, at least in the 20th century been the party of small government, pro-business, and supportive of economic growth. This is, of course, a portrait in broad strokes, as is the following. The Democratic Party is seen as the party of social support, and making the playing field level for all people. In foreign policy, the Republican Party is characterized as more hawkish, the Democratic Party more doveish.

Of course, within these broad strokes is a world of bullshit. Typically, under Republicans, government actually grows and often promotes policies that infringe on a variety of rights, mostly to keep businesses from being regulated and ever higher profit margins growing at the expense of other services. The Democrats have often been just as hawkish and militaristic as their counterparts across the aisle and both parties have promoted legislation and policies that have expanded the reach of the Executive Branch, as well as, very often policies that have broadened and deepened encroachment on civil rights.

Third party options like the Independents and Green Party haven’t gained the kind of traction necessary with the public to make a difference in the national make-up of the government, though some candidates have secured office here and there.

All of this said, the public perception of both major parties being the same paved the way for a degree of apathy and cynicism that has led us to this moment. The President won by the slimmest of margins, but what seems to have tipped the favor in his return to occupancy was the percentage of voters who decide to not vote at all. It may be this which characterizes the state of democracy in the United States more than anything else; adults of voting age too tired, dispirited, and perhaps too confused to care. In many ways I sympathize.

When I was younger, I sat out voting in the Carter-Reagan race because I’d just moved to Massachusetts and didn’t have time to register. I also thought that Carter would surely beat Reagan because Ronnie was such a doofus and was promoting an idiotic idea that government should be run like a business. I also detested his pandering to the religious right and his antiquated perspective on social issues, not the least of which was striking out at Roe v. Wade and framing abortion as a radical issue to be placed more center stage. It was political theater and my feeling was that if I could see it, so could everyone else. Well, it wasn’t the last time I’d be wrong.

Why am I recounting all that? To use myself as a prime example of how and why voters don’t vote. Although I didn’t consider both of the big parties equivalent, there was certainly an assumed sense that maybe my vote didn’t matter and once Reagan did get into office, it occurred to me that he was actually doing several heinous things; deregulation of industry, repealing environmental protections, expanding U.S. militarism/expansionism, fomenting instability in Latin America and the Middle East, and of course, his non-response to AIDs even as it was claiming millions of lives. That initially the victims were gay men spoke volumes about the administration’s inaction.

Would my vote have made a difference? No, but my inaction irritated me enough to not be apathetic ever again. Too little too late? Yes, but I hope I’ve made up for it in the ensuing forty years.

Now, however, we are at an inflection point. A critical juncture looms on our doorstep where one party - one that does not represent the majority of voters in the U.S. - has seized all three branches of the government and is responsible for dismantling it even as we watch. Some argue that this is not the Republican Party of previous eras, and I’m happy to debate that, but it is certainly the outcome of a decades long evolution that we have come to this point.

Regarding the other party, the Democrats have a terrible history of not keeping pace with their more conservative counterparts. It is also arguable that the Democratic Party is hardly the party of the Left. I’ve argued for much of my life that the U.S. doesn’t have a real Left Wing. The Democrats are, at best, centrists, and very often, ineffective in rising to challenges when needed. The Republicans have known this for decades and have weaponized this lag over much of the past ten years. Owing to this party’s antiquated and often tone-deaf approach to politics and the repeated number of times legislation has died on a Speaker’s desk with little fight, and yes, also owing to the legacy press ignoring or normalizing the more outré machinations of the Republicans, particularly those that identify with the current President and his cohort, we have an almost single-party rule.

I say “almost” because it is unwise to count anyone down until they’re verifiably out. There are still fighters in the Democratic Party, but it becomes painfully obvious that the party needs to reorganize and focus on the matters at hand. However, this is taking time that needs to be used immediately combatting the seizure of the Treasury by “a special governmental employee” without due process. In other words, there is a coup unfolding before our eyes and the Democrats seem ill-equipped to deal with it directly.

Snyder tells us that “The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent form the start. Tye exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents.” To be sure, he is looking at the twentieth century’s fascists and communists, but those sentences could apply to what we see before us.

Snyder abjures us to “support the multi[arty system and defend the rule of democratic elections.” And how to do this? “Vote in local state elections while you can.” (Emphasis mine.) “Consider running for office.”

He quotes Wendell Phillips that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” However, as Snyder points out regarding the extension and establishment of “durable democracies" in Europe, those that arose after both World Wars “often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of election and coup d’état.” He describes the "combination of spectacle, repression, and salami tactics — slicing off layers of opposing one by one" as the means by which people were distracted, imprisoned, or outmatched. In each case, the populace didn’t quite understand what had happened until they were in it.

The longevity of such governments is variable. The Nazis were in power for twelve years, the Czechoslovak communist government lasted for forty. The Soviet Union for over seventy years, and the People’s Republic of China is closing in on eighty years. It is also a good reminder that the early Americans who founded the republic would have been on guard against the rise of the single-party state and would have responded to the rise of an oligarchy with greater alacrity than we. “The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.”

Indeed, Snyder points out that we face “problem of oligarchy”, much like the ancient Greeks. What’s different, of course, is that we live in a much more connected, globalized world with increasing differences in wealth. He is quick to point out that we have this odd idea that giving private money to campaigns is ffee speech, which leads to the very wealthy having more free speech than the rest of us. I see this as one front in the attack of what is our current struggle. Snyder points to another:

We “have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties suppresses voting, claims fraud when it loses elections, and controls the majority of statehouses.” As we’ve seen, said party "proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are unpopular.” That this party either fears democracy or must weaken is its lifeblood. This other front is, perhaps, the harder to face directly. Both fronts can be won, but it will take a tremendous amount of effort and genuine social cohesion to do so.

As this was written before last November, Snyder asks if we will “come to see the elections of 2024 much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932?” These questions are no longer rhetorical; we are finding out now and November 2024 does seem to have rung in an era that echoes with the repressions of those earlier elections of the last century.

Snyder propose the following, and it may not be too late to implement strategies to eventually put them into place:

Fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one vote that can be counted by one other citizen

Paper ballots; they cannot be altered via electronic means and can always be recounted

Remove private funding from what should be public campaigns

And “We will have to take seriously our now Constitution, which forbids oath-breaking insurrectionists from running for office.” This last has already been breached and we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis.

Snyder feels that this work can be done (and I think must) at the state and local level. However, when that smaller party is entrenched at the highest level of legislative and judiciary at the state level, and where those same representatives are deeply entrenched, more work to win a state population over is required. Given the current climate, that might not be readily possible in many “Red” states, but perhaps in some, it is more doable than in others.

I will continue to post these links to Mobilize and Indivisible as primary resources. As more come to me, I’ll add those, as well.

Mobilize at https://www.mobilize.us/. I have the landing page set to my area; populated with events, petitions, and volunteer opportunities, it’s practically one-stop shopping.

Indivisible at https://indivisible.org/ is another comprehensive hub. You can sign up for updates, download their guide to oranizaing, find candidates to support, and more.

If you don't have a copy of "On Tyranny", you can purchase one here:

"On Tyranny" at Timothy Snyder's website where he lists several options. Support local bookstores and buy local or check it out from your local library.

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Introduction and Chapter 1