The New Authoritarians – Tablet Magazine
While the GOP was once considered to be the party of big business, the country s top billionaire megadonors are split between Democrats and Republicans, and Democrats equal or outpace Republicans in donations from pharmaceutical companies, the tech sector, and Wall Street. The alliance between Democrat-led causes and corporate executives is sometimes portrayed as necessary for holding off an insurrectionist, anti-democratic threat from the right. However, it is this very alliance that has produced highly centralized government and corporate control while curbing free expression and open discourse.
After Trump s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms. The trend Lasch wrote about in the 1990s has metastasized. It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed resistance to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information. While scapegoating Trump supporters, a nexus of billionaires, woke corporations, public intellectuals, and Democratic officials have sparked the very descent into authoritarianism they claimed would emerge from the populist right.
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