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President Donald Trump is openly transforming the Department of Justice’s primary role of advising presidents on the limits of their authority under the Constitution into one that justifies and advocates his MAGA philosophy. This overlooks the reality that the public does not adhere to a single philosophy other than preserving their rights as guaranteed by our constitutional government.

Congress established the position of Attorney General in 1789, and the Department of Justice was founded in 1870 to serve the AG. The department was necessary to legally enforce the Constitution’s 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments following the Civil War. The Attorney General now possessed expanded powers, shifting from defending the government against civil lawsuits to enforcing laws and pursuing criminal prosecutions.

President Ulysses S. Grant appointed a former Confederate Army officer to prosecute those who resisted the transformation of the Southern Confederacy into a democratic institution, utilizing intimidation and violence against these amendments. By the end of Grant’s first term, there were over 3,000 indictments, with more than a third resulting in convictions. 

A 154 years later, we have another Republican President appointing an Attorney General who directs the Justice Department to punish individuals, schools, and businesses if they promote Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) classes. The classes explain why the reconstruction of the South along democratic principles was needed. However, Trump’s MAGA movement sees it as anti-American because it could make white citizens feel guilty about America’s history. 

Trump had a small but well-funded right-wing think tank help him turn our justice system on its head. The DOJ would not seek to protect the constitutional civil rights of oppressed groups. Instead, its objective was to preserve the status quo of groups traditionally benefiting from laws not being enforced. In short, its mission was to reverse the clock to a time when those with the most political and economic power were not threatened by the federal government chipping away at their entitled benefits.

Two right-wing think tanks drew up plans for accomplishing this critical task. Although the Heritage Foundation received the most attention through its Project 2025 report for developing Trump’s policies, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is now executing them.

AFPI was founded in 2021 by two former Trump administration officials to promote Donald Trump’s public policy agenda. Like the Heritage Foundation, it prepared for Trump’s return to the White House. The AFPI president revealed, at a women’s event it sponsored, that they had already “298 executive orders drafted and ready for day one of the next president.”

AFPI was writing executive orders that could utilize the President’s muscle to overpower any opposition to Trump’s policies. The executive orders would then be carried out by Trump’s appointed cabinet members, of whom at least seven out of fifteen are former AFPI employees. 

The incoming secretaries of education, agriculture, veterans affairs, housing, and now the Department of Justice have all been employees of AFPI. We are not talking about interns. These are folks at the top, like Brooke Rollins, the president of AFPI, who heads up agriculture, and Linda McMahon, chairwoman of the AFPI board, who runs the Department of Education. 

Other cabinet posts held by former AFPI employees are Lee Zeldin for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Turner for secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Doug Collins for secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Matthew Whitaker for U.S. Ambassador to NATO.

Most importantly, AFPI folks are running the Justice Department. Pam Bondi is the General Attorney. She previously controlled the litigation arm of AFPI, which brought at least five lawsuits against the Biden Administration. According to the Brennan Center’s research, AFPI intended to hinder ballot box access or disenfranchise specific groups of voters in swing states. 

However, even conservative judges saw their lawsuits as political conjectures without evidence. For instance, a Texas federal trial judge, who is a conservative Trump appointee known for his nationwide injunction on the abortion pill, denied AFPI’s request to stop a three-year-old Biden Executive order that encouraged federal agencies to integrate voter registration opportunities into their services. 

The judge held that AFPI’s request provided “no direct evidence to support its claim” that the executive order “weaponize[d]” and “partisan” scheme to register noncitizens to vote to benefit Democratic candidates.

The other AFPI implant in the justice system is Trump-appointed FBI Director Kash Patel, who serves as a paid Senior Fellow at AFPI’s Center for American Security. Previously, he was a senior aide to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Patel was the primary author of the Nunes memo, which alleges that officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation abused their authority during the investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials.

Patel claimed in a podcast before being appointed that “FBI’s Confidential Human Source Corruption Coverup Network” was involved in allowing, if not helping, incite the January 6^th insurrection. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report discrediting the claim that the FBI corruptly used this network to instigate January 6th in December 2024, before Trump was in office. Trump did not fire him because he believed that this inspector general had been fair to him in the past.

Nevertheless, Trump ordered the FBI, presumably through Attorney General Bodi, to turn over a list of everyone who worked on the January insurrection 6 cases. The agents sued, believing Patel would reveal their identities, endangering them and their families from MAGA movement members. While a judge temporarily blocked the public release of names, Trump said he’d fire some for being corrupt. 

Trump and his appointees to the highest public offices in the nation have consistently asserted that their opponents are corrupt. They have defined corruption not as accepting bribes but as sabotaging Trump’s reactionary agenda by neglecting to execute his orders.

This definition of corruption is at the core of how the DOJ has become a tool for Trump to apply the law to retaliate against all federal employees and any citizen or business that questioned or challenged his authority. Bodi and Patel were prior employees of AFPI, so they could work as a team to defend and justify Trump’s orders as legal. 

Consequently, the only avenue for challenging them is through the court system. According to Just Security’s tracking, there are 170 open legal challenges to Trump administration actions as of April 6, 2025. In the 67 cases before district courts, where multiple lawsuits produced a single, consolidated ruling, 46 halted a Trump administration action from 39 judges appointed by five presidents. While both Democrat and Republican judges were represented, every judge appointed by Trump ruled in favor of him.

Nevertheless, Bondi considered that the judges who had stopped a Trump executive order needed to be removed. During an interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” show, she said, “These judges obviously cannot be impartial. They cannot be objective. They are trying … to obstruct Donald Trump’s agenda.”

That attitude aligns with how judges should comply with Trump’s executive orders, much like AFPI believes all executive agencies should. On AFPI’s website, one of its primary objectives is to make all agency heads “serve to the pleasure of the president,” not serve all citizens by upholding the Constitution. 

This goal reflects Donald Trump’s vision of the unitary executive theory, in which the president directs the decisions of all agencies, including the DOJ. The Supreme Court has never endorsed this legal doctrine, even though Democrats have been a minority on the Supreme Court since 1970.

Trump has corrupted the DOJ’s intended purpose, which is evident by how Bondi is punishing them if they do not comply with Trump’s political agenda.  Bondi placed a Justice Department attorney on leave after he told a judge that he did not know what authority was used to arrest and mistakenly deport an El Salvadoran national even though an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling protected him from deportation to El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs.

The Department of Justice provided no evidence that he had no criminal record or was a gang member. However, Bondi insisted that “every DOJ attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” In reality, Bondi means to “advocate” Trump’s political agenda of deporting anyone legally living in the U.S. who is deemed a national threat, not by providing evidence but by being a suspicious immigrant. 

If an attorney fails to vigorously enforce that assumption, like acknowledging that there is no evidence to pursue a legal motion, they could be fired. Bondi clarified this in her statement: “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

This was not an isolated incident. The White House press secretary said that more than 50 U.S. attorneys and deputies had been fired “in coordination with” the Justice Department since the end of March. Almost all lawyers who worked on the prosecutions against the president were fired, and many others were demoted because they were seen as insufficiently loyal. 

These employees may have included more than a dozen who worked before he was reelected or prosecutors in the cases against the people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. These measures appear illegal because firing many of them requires a specific reason not cited in the firings. 

Trump uses AFPI as a fifth column within the judicial branch of government to eliminate any federal attorney who might not “zealously advocate” his philosophy on how Americans should behave. This top-down approach emphasizes loyalty to superiors, with Trump at the pinnacle. Requiring personal loyalty to a president is an action that is not covered in the Constitution or Congressional laws.

Although Trump has referred to himself as a king, in a half-joking manner, a U.S. District Judge, in a ruling against him, wrote that “a President who touts an image of himself as a “king” or a “dictator” misapprehends Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which tasks “the President to be a conscientious custodian of the law, enacted by the Congress and as interpreted by the Judiciary.”

Federal employees are the first and easiest citizens to be targeted by Trump because he can claim executive authority over their jobs. However, they are not his only targets. Other constituents who he sees as possibly resisting his MAGA agenda are already on the receiving end of his executive orders. These are schools, law firms, and cultural institutions. Each necessitates a more thorough examination of how his aggression is impacting them.

If citizens cannot rely on the government to protect their freedoms, they must learn to utilize the legal system as a peaceful avenue for achieving a just and fair society. 

To help citizens better understand and protect their rights, the Washington State Bar Association is launching the Rule of Law Ambassador Program. This program will teach volunteer ambassadors in constitutional law so they can educate community members and secure constitutional law as the foundation of our democracy. This effort is based on the “rule of law” principle that government power is bound by law and human rights are guaranteed to all. Email ambassadors@wsba.org to receive updated information on this effort. 

Nationwide, 98 bar associations endorsed the American Bar Association’s statement on the Rule of Law. Unfortunately, the ABA’s website does not mention national or state initiatives like the Washington State program. If readers know of such programs, please email nick@citizenshippolitics.org, and they will be posted.  

Please email this issue of Citizenship Politics to others or post it on a website. 

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

You can read this piece on my website, Medium, or Substack.

You can also continue to read below.

If you like it, become a Patreon patron or make 
a single contribution
to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

America obtained universal democracy through the diversification of our electorate.

To understand American democratic society is to understand how liberalism and conservatism apply citizenship to individual rights.

Although they have had different party affiliations throughout America’s history, as I describe in Why did the Parties Switch to Conservative & Liberal?, today, the Democratic Party represents liberalism and the Republicans, conservatism. 

Liberalism, as practiced by the Democratic Party, recognizes that diverse groups can strengthen our democracy. However, liberalism, as an economic philosophy, emphasizes individuals’ right to control their property as they wish, aligning with conservative beliefs. This is an example of how both philosophies hold sometimes competing beliefs. 

Liberals have always protected individualism, dating back to the influence of the Enlightenment on our nation’s founders. It began with the right of individuals to interpret the Bible directly without being interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church or a monarch. 

Conservatives supported the status quo; in the Middle Ages, it was to abide by the distribution of power and rights. Part of that orientation was to align with the local community’s beliefs and prejudices. 

Liberals, not conservatives, believe individuals should have equal rights across all communities. That extension allows greater participation in determining government policies. Broadening citizenship is a step toward creating a universal democracy rather than one stratified by groups having different rights. 

Liberalism has amended the Constitution to accommodate the needs of individuals in unrepresented communities. Consequently, liberals have been more successful than conservatives in altering America’s society. Expanding citizenship rights to new communities is a prominent conservative concern in the twenty-first century, but it stretches back over a hundred years. 

Diversification allowed three huge communities to be eligible to vote.

President Andrew Jackson opened the gate to diversity by changing how we select our national representatives. He was the first major presidential candidate to call for “universal” suffrage, ending the property requirements that barred small landholding, mainly white male farmers, from voting. 

Jackson gave rise to the Democratic Party by allowing white males to vote regardless of whether they lacked property in various states. Jackson’s efforts pushed voting participation from 360,000 in 1824 to 1.2 million in 1828. It enabled him to win the presidency after losing it by a close margin in the prior election.

However, that process was not completed within all states until 1856 when, in effect, all white men, including migrants and transients, had the right to vote. The 1860 election of Lincoln saw a total of 4.7 million voters. In the space of two generations, voting increased by a thousand percent. Our Civil War immediately followed, which ushered in the second major step to diversify American citizenship: ending slavery and allowing Black citizens to vote. 

Like Jackson, Abraham Lincoln campaigned for the presidency in 1864 by endorsing a radical new idea. He supported a constitutional amendment that would override states’ sovereignty by abolishing slavery throughout the country. After Lincoln won, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, doing just that. 

However, it took another five years for all the states to ratify it. Even before it was ratified,  the margin of General Grant’s popular majority vote in 1868 to become president resulted from winning a high percentage of the half-million newly enfranchised black men. He won reelection in 1872, with his popular vote increasing by half a million. Grant won over half of the old Confederate states, with Black citizens able to vote in the reconstructed Confederate states.  

The last significant diversity occurred when women gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920. However, women’s suffrage took 72 years to achieve, beginning in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, the first public gathering to advocate for women’s rights.

The 1920 election saw Republican and Democratic Party conventions endorse the Susan B. Anthony (woman suffrage) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the Republican Party was the liberal party, promoting the suffragette movement to amend the constitution before the Democrats. 

Consequently, Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding lobbied the last state to ratify it just months before election day. Harding won, his vote tally doubling that of the previous Republican presidential candidate. This was likely due to a huge wave of new women voters. The total votes cast in the 1920 election exceeded the 1916 total by 8 million votes, a 40% increase. 

Conservatives failed to stop diversity.

The ultimate form of diversity is expanding citizenship among a diverse population. Conservatives have continuously opposed this expansion because it could disrupt the political system dominated by the community they represent. While their reasons have varied, their core objective has been to conserve the culture and resources of this community. By protecting the rights of the existing dominant group, conservatives restrict the rights of individuals not part of that group.

Before the move to broaden our citizenship, our government was generally controlled by the largest community – property-owning white males. This was the standard arrangement for European countries, adapted to establish the United States of America. 

Our country’s founders believed that property ownership was a strong indicator of the virtue necessary to participate in a new democratic government. This new expanded form of government shifted ruling from a monarch, most beholden to the landed gentry and the most prominent commercial and financial families, to a much broader base of people owning property who elected a leader from among them.

Our democracy adjusted and strengthened as our population changed through immigration, the expansion of land, and population growth. Diversity in citizenship made that transition possible, expanding in three stages by admitting all white males, all males regardless of race, and all women as equal citizens. 

These transitions took decades – at least four for extending legal citizenship to all males and over double that for women. Although Amendments were passed to allow all citizens to vote, conservative-endorsed obstacles still hinder voting access for some. 

However, individual rights extend far beyond equal access to the ballot box. They are about the freedom to live a full life without trampling on the rights of others. Finding this balance is at the heart of our cultural war over how individuals can exercise their freedoms in America as a single, open culture.  

Why MAGA Conservatives fear diversity.

MAGA conservatives fear diversity will endanger their rights because it legitimizes behavior that deviates from America’s established White dominant culture. 

Liberals support individuals accessing abortion, recognizing institutional racial discrimination, allowing for gender identification, tolerating non-traditional marriages, and respecting different religious principles. Conservatives see these beliefs and practices as anti-American because Conservatives define America as their community. 

Two leading conservatives describe individual freedoms wholly within the context of being a proper American and not diverting from conservative values.   

Kevin Roberts is the President of The Heritage Foundation, which created and spent $22 million to staff and write the Presidential Transition Project 2025 report that Trump is proceeding to enact. Roberts wrote that the federal government, “must protect and promote the values that most Americans espouse and to “revive—marriage and family, church and community, private enterprise and public spirit.” He then ties “the rights of the individual” to “the virtue of local communities” and “the centrality of the family.”

Those are beliefs anyone is free to express in America. But Roberts goes one step further. He says “we”, meaning the majority of Americans, need to figuratively burn down federal “institutions like the Department of Homeland Security, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the FBI, the Department of Education.”  Adding that they are the enemy and “function as anti-American, anti-constitutional predators. They cannot be negotiated with or accommodated. They must be defunded, disbanded, and disempowered.”

Roberts makes no direct mention of stopping DEI or opposing diversity training, but Trump is following Project 2025 by attacking these institutions as spreading hate against America through DEI. 

Michael Shellenberger founded the conservative Substack publication Public and is a journalist and book author. He uses classic liberalism to promote meritocracy as an antidote to DEI manipulating Whites to feel guilty about their heritage. He writes, “They love America. They built America as the greatest nation because of individual initiative. The Democrats just want to tear down that image, tear it down as a flawed myth.” 

Shellenberger appeals to the “common sense” underlying the anti-DEI movement, that individual responsibility rewards achievement based on personal effort and ability rather than external factors like inheritance or race. This line of reasoning acknowledges no immense wealth being passed from one generation to another or institutions that have and continue to discriminate based on color. 

His position reflects what Trump said in a Time Magazine interview, “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.”

Shellenberger is more direct: “The big idea behind DEI programs is that white people, all white people, are responsible for the bad behaviors of a few white people in the past, and they are uniquely advantaged, or ‘privileged.”

Liberals must link diversity to protecting individual liberties.

Democrats must expose the Republicans’ “illiberal” crusade against diversity as a threat to dismantle our commonly shared belief that we all should have the freedom to exercise rights that are not bound or enhanced by belonging to any group. 

Those rights have been extended for over 150 years by expanding who can vote. Similarly, individual rights in choosing how to live peacefully with others must continue to develop for the next 150 years as our society changes. 

Republicans’ assault on diversity, as exemplified in attacking DEI programs, does not protect the dominant white and traditional family culture. It is a distraction from obtaining a more informed and caring citizenry. 

Understanding our collective history does not elevate the status of Blacks and other minorities above that of Whites. It does not undermine the nuclear male and female marriages by upholding LGBTQ rights.

If presented properly and respectfully, the message of obtaining and sustaining equal citizenship across all communities is at the heart of liberal and Democrats’ efforts. That effort can build trust across communities and not feed the anxiety we all feel about change. 

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

And share it with others on the internet.

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Three African American Civil Rights protesters at Woolworth's Sit-In, Durham, NC, 10 February 1960, a protest that led to the end of legal segregation. Photos taken by The News & Observer, Raleigh, NC.

Within 24 hours of becoming president, Donald Trump released his first White House Fact Sheet, “Ending the Radical and Illegal DEI.” He signed an Executive Order claiming that eliminating programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.”

Trump, and by extension the MAGA Republican Party, link eliminating diversity and equality to promoting civil rights. This is not a new concept. However, one must understand our history to understand how these two practices are linked to civil rights. 

The civil rights movement exploded after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 rejected African American citizenship claims. This decision was not based on economic claims of owning slaves as property but on racial claims that citizens who were seen as Black had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War to protect not only the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons but all people treated as Black, and in due course, it was extended to all minorities. Nearly a hundred years later, with the majority of Supreme Court justices being Republican-appointed, the Brown v. Board of Educationdecision was released. It found that denying racial diversity in public schools through segregation was unconstitutional. 

In other words, achieving and sustaining equality and diversity among our citizens in our legal and educational institutions is guaranteed within our Constitution, according to our Supreme Court. 

The bizarre importance of attacking transgender people.

Trump links civil rights to restoring “biological truth to the federal government.” This was a direct attack on citizens who identify with a gender different from what was determined at birth. We are talking about a minuscule percentage of Americans. Published findings show that 1.6% of U.S. adults are trans or nonbinary.

 Is this a national emergency? Or is this a hot cultural issue among Republicans? According to a Pew Research Center survey, 66% of them say society has gone too far in accepting people who are transgender. Still, roughly eight in ten Americans say transgender people face at least some discrimination, with 35% of Republicans saying there is a great deal or a fair amount of discrimination against trans people.

Despite the majority of Americans believing that defining the rights of transenders requires a thoughtful approach, one of Mr. Trump’s most aired ads attacking presidential candidate Harris ended with a tagline raising the issue of transgender people as not part of America’s society: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The implication is that Democrats would treat transgender citizens better than everyday Americans.

On his first day in office, he issued an executive order mandating that those federal agencies “that prompt users for their pronouns” in their email systems, like Outlook, be turned off. They had 72 hours to comply or jeopardize their job.

It seems petty, but it does conjure up an image of Big Brother closely looking over your shoulder to see how you sign off on your emails.  This is being done to force federal workers to adhere to the new administration’s rules: Employees must repudiate their freedom to declare their gender. 

It’s unclear how Trump’s attorneys will align this mandate with the Supreme Court’s decision protecting the rights of trans and gay citizens from being fired due to their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Trump is setting up a “spoils system” of government patronage.

Although Trump denied reading the Heritage Report Project 2025, his newly appointed public officers immediately implemented its reactionary objectives. 

Trump appointed Russell Vought, coordinator for Project 2025, as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought supports withholding funds appropriated by Congress and vows to roll back the merit-based career civil service. This goes beyond civil rights by tossing out legal contractual union rights, which Heritage’s Report ignored.

For instance, the report’s Equity Agenda recommended that employees breaking the law by openly promoting diversity could lose their jobs. It stated that participation in any DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, would be grounds for termination of their employment.

In line with that objective, the Washington Post found that dozens of federal agency workers who didn’t work on diversity or inclusion issues were placed on administrative leave in the week that Trump was sworn in as president. Their findings showed that some federal agencies targeted “people who have expressed interest or participated in programs related to DEI.”

By pushing these employees out of government jobs, he borrowed a practice from President Andrew Jackson, who created a “spoils system” of government patronage. This was accomplished by rewarding his supporters to fill the empty seats available after he removed about 10 percent of all government postings.

For both Jackson and Trump, having supporters fill taxpayer-funded federal jobs instills personal loyalty to the president in their party’s ranks. See – Trump uses 3 Jacksonian Strategies.

Trump downplayed attacking diversity to allow others to do so. 

Other Trump executive orders demanded that DEI “language in Federal discourse, communications, and publications” be removed.  These orders merely resuscitate his prior Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,which he signed two months before the 2020 election and was revoked by President Joe Biden.  It’s possible that he saw this order as cementing his voter base by declaring that anti-American race and sex stereotyping would be eliminated from government agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, he may have decided it best not to broadcast messages that frightened too many people about losing their civil rights. So, he let others do that so he can deny responsibility for their statements but enact those policies once elected. Project 2025 identified the most reactionary decrees that Trump should pursue. 

Within the first 24 hours of being in office, Trump abolished all DEI training or discussion groups in the Federal Government. Historically, such a sweeping move would have been foreshadowed in a newly nominated party’s candidate at their convention.  In Trump’s 90-minute acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, not a word was spoken about DEI or diversity.  

That’s because Trump didn’t want to give the media and Democrats a paper trail exposing his anti-diversity strategy before taking office. Since promoting diversity is tied to promoting civil rights to those who are disenfranchised from voting or receiving social services, Trump would have to defend those intentions. Better to execute this strategy after taking office and avoid any pushback beforehand. 

It helped avoid a public debate by not warning the public what the Republican Party would support. What better way to secure its silence than to have its platform not mention DEI, diversity, equity, or inclusion? This was accomplished by eliminating the chance of any questions being raised in an open-air platform committee to approve the text.

No committee discussions would happen because Trump created the Republican Party’s Platform with his advisors in private without formal party involvement. When he completed the final document, he presented it to the Republican Party to adopt as their new platform. It was accepted without question, not a surprise given that Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, was the Co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

The RNC’s acquiescence to Trump allowed him to adopt the most severe measures of the Project 2025 report without submitting them to a traditional debate within a president’s party.

Democrats, having no leverage in Congress, are not mounting a systematic response to this new Trump Civil Rights Era. 

The reality is that Democrats cannot move any legislation through Congress without attracting at least several Republican House and Senate members. Consequently, individual Democratic members have threatened to take Hail-Mary efforts to block Trump’s executive orders. 

Unfortunately, both parties have used presidential executive orders to get what they want without the other party’s support. So they have contributed to an executive-dominated government using those orders to accomplish tasks that would have been an act of Congress.  

Democrats are baffled on how to mount an effective opposition. They hope that enough of the public will turn against the Trump administration as they lose critical services customarily provided by departments being effectively shut down.

Rather than relying on hope, Democrats need to go beyond challenging Trump’s MAGA agenda through a hopelessly compromised legislative process. They need to alter the mindset that Trump has successfully instilled in a plurality of voters that diversity is a threat to American freedoms. 

Political movements grow out of a society’s most emphatic values. My next Citizenship Politics will examine why diversity is seen as repudiating those American values and how Democrats need to respond within that framework.  

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Across the political spectrum, there are concerns and predictions that the US government could become authoritarian. A shared theme is that power will be concentrated at the top and not originate from below. 

Liberals fear an authoritarian future is coming. 

Liberals see former President Donald Trump as the leading perpetrator of creating an authoritarian state. Organizations backing him, like the conservative Heritage Foundation, which released Project 2025, reinforce this perception. 

Trump claimed not to know who was behind Project 2025; however, a CNN review found that at least 140 people who worked for him were involved. The 900-page document details how the federal government’s “deep state” must be destroyed in a new Trump Administration.  

Liberals from the west to the east coast feared a possible authoritarian future. From the heartland, the Nebraska Examiner contributor professor Steve Corbin writes in his piece, Authoritarian rule threatens America’s democracy, that 147 congressional Republicans voting to overturn the 2020 election results was authoritarianism in action.

Veteran national political columnist Dick Polman, in the Progressive Populist, describes today’s political fight as between a pro-democracy party and an authoritarian cult.

Ralph Nader accuses Roberts and his “clique” of five like-minded Supreme Court judges as 

authoritarians who re-installed the doctrine of “The King Can Do No Wrong.”

Donald Trump is seen triggering authoritarian views.

Because Trump ignited the MAGA movement, he is viewed as the embodiment of authoritarian behavior. Even mild-spoken President Joe Biden remarked at a Maryland fundraiser that the MAGA philosophy was “semi-fascism.”

Consequently, liberal commentary interprets Trump’s language and actions as displaying approval for authoritarian government leaders.

He has expressed admiration for Russian President (Dictator) V. Putin. At a campaign rally in 2022, Trump said, “The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart.”

Just before one of his other rallies, Trump was caught on a hot mic saying that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was his kind of guy: “He speaks, and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.” His list of dictators he respects or envies goes on to include others.

Trump provides liberals a big easy target for fearing a coming authoritarian state. Biden does not offer that target for Conservatives. Also, Democratic presidential candidate VP Kamala Harris lacks the baggage of quotes that can match the veracity of Trump’s allegiance to exercising raw power. 

The far right believes we are already halfway to being an authoritarian state.

Trump’s MAGA is a core group fearful of the federal government. The large crowd attending Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech at the White House Ellipse shared that belief. They cheered when he said he would “never concede” the race and that if his supporters didn’t “fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Mainstream media rarely notes the size of the crowds that Trump attracts other than in general terms. Trump also contributes to doubting their size when he describes them in absurd comparisons.

For instance, Trump claims that his January 6 crowd was larger than the 250,000 people who attended Martin Luther King’s DC speech in 1963 from the Lincoln Memorial. However, by repeating the Associated Press’s estimate that it was at least 10,000, the media diminishes the level of Trump support. Rarely mentioned is that according to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, the crowd size before heading to the Capitol was possibly as much as 80,000.

However, despite Trump’s language, some conservatives critical of Trump do not see him as a danger to democracy. John Bolton, former US national security adviser and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, says former President Donald Trump is not fit to be president. Still, he’s not a threat to our democracy.

As faith in our democracy falls, support for more authoritarian rule increases.  

What does endanger our democracy is that many citizens see the federal bureaucracy as currently or potentially restricting their freedoms. 

A Monmouth(“Mon-muth”)University Poll in the summer of 2023 found the following. A majority (55%) of Americans are very concerned that their fundamental rights and freedoms are under threat – with Republicans (63%) being more likely than Democrats (53%) or independents (51%) to feel this way. The three top “rights under threat” were speech 26%, guns 21%, and abortion/women’s rights 19%. Republicans were at 38% on speech and guns and 1% on abortion/women’s rights. Democrats were most concerned with abortion/women’s rights at 36%, then speech at 14%, and guns were at 4%.

These threats could explain why polls show low faith in the U.S. institutions necessary to maintain a democracy. A July 2023 Gallup poll measured Americans’ confidence in 16 institutions it tracks annually. Congress was at the bottom at 8%, but the Presidency at 26% and the Supreme Court at 27% were nothing to brag about. The military was at 60%, and the police were right behind them at 43%. 

Both polls suggest that people fear losing their freedoms under elected government officials. However, the most trusted institutions are those that use force, the military and police, to ensure their safety. This may explain why the following polls strongly support a strong, authoritative government run by a strong leader or the military. They may see how using state-authorized violence could free them from chaos and insecurity.

According to a February study by the Pew Research Center, 32% of Americans believe a military regime or authoritarian leader would be a good way of governing the country “without interference from Congress or the courts.” The U.S. had the highest percentage of citizens holding this belief among the 14 wealthiest nations surveyed in Europe, including Australia and Israel. 

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Support for authoritarian rule varies by political leanings and personality traits.

Support for authoritarian rule among Americans registered at 37% from the center, 29% from the right, and 25% from the left. The right’s support for authoritarian rule was the highest percentage in 16 nations of the 18 nations polled, with the center having the highest percentage in the U.S. and Australia. These labels are self-identified by those surveyed. 

The high percentage of those in the center who support authoritarian rule would indicate that the term “moderate” is not the same as being in the center. It’s just that these folks don’t like the major parties representing the right or the left. They still want drastic measures that are more reflective of their core beliefs than affiliating with a party.  

Historians have observed that the tendencies of the farthest wings of the left and right movement overlap. In the Atlantic, psychiatrist Sally Satel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, points to some research that supports that belief. She writes that researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.” 

These traits are shared by political and religious groups across the spectrum who strongly believe that the policies they support are best for everyone. For them, our democracy is failing to pursue their policies. Given the results of a Pew Research Center survey in July 2023, they also have many potential followers to preach to. Pew found that 63% of Americans are exhausted by politics, and 55% are just plain angry with politics. Just 16% of the public say they trust the federal government always or most of the time.

Where do we go from here?

Remember Barack Obama’s campaign theme, “Hope”? That Pew survey found that only 10% were hopeful about American politics. Nevertheless, although many other polls show dissatisfaction with our government, that level is similar to that of other functioning democracies in wealthy countries. 

In a 2022 Pew survey, France, Japan, Italy, and Spain, like the U.S., had majorities dissatisfied with their democracies. The political orientation of those governments didn’t matter; Japan was conservative-nationalist, France was centrist, Italy and the U.S. were liberal, and Spain was Socialist leaning. 

When asked if their political system “allows people like them have not much or none at all influence on politics,” Japan, Australia, and the U.S. all scored 71% for those polled who agreed with that measurement. 

However, complaining is not the same as rejecting the principles democratic institutions protect. Americans surveyed by Pew in 2020 were asked, “What are very important” functions of their democracy to possess? The following six, in order of importance and percentage, were: Fair Judiciary 93%, Gender Equality 91%, Free Religion 86%, Regular Elections 84%, Free Media 80%, and Free Speech 77%. These conditions could easily be restricted if not eliminated under authoritarian rule.

To sustain a functional, not a fake, democracy, we must measure whether these conditions are being provided. Failing to provide and protect them will gradually transform any country into an authoritarian state. 

The political conditions in Venezuela and Hungary provide two recent examples of how democracies can drift afar when authority is concentrated at the top. In the next Citizenship Politics, I will analyze what lessons we can learn from them.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter, Citizenship Politics.

The Atlantic hosted twenty-four liberal writers to comment on a possible second term for former President Donald Trump. Covering autocracy to science, they saw a future reminiscent of the Roman Republic’s decline as it slid into chaos and collapsed.

The essayists touched on three recurring themes: Trump’s personality, objectives, and legacy.  These themes also buttress other commentaries on Trump’s past and future impact on America. I believe that Trump’s personality disrupts our society’s normative behavior more than his political policies.

Mainstream media critics often cite Trump’s personality when describing how he implements policies, such as being heartless by separating children from their parents when they cross the Mexican border seeking asylum. 

Still, the conservatives he chose for the most critical positions in his administration have been some of Trump’s severest critics. David Frum, who leads off the collective of Atlantic’s writers, notes that his first secretary of state called him a “fucking moron” not capable of learning how government works. 

For instance, according to the authors of A Very Stable Genius, “the universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty,” not to the country or its laws but to him personally. For example, he wanted to eliminate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because US companies, like real estate developers, such as himself, were not allowed to bribe foreign governments to secure special services. He asked his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “to get rid of that law.” Tillerson said he’d have to work with Congress. Unsatisfied, Trump turned to his most loyal senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, to draft an Executive Order repealing the law.

In reflecting on his personality, his second chief of staff said he was “the most flawed person I’ve ever met in my life,” and his dishonesty was “just astounding.” The above insights seem to be the same as those of his 44 former Cabinet secretaries. McKay Coppins of NBC reported that only four of them endorsed him as a presidential candidate.

The Social & Behavioral Sciences Encyclopedia defines “personality traits as persistent underlying tendencies to behave in particular ways in particular situations.” It is more quirky or flexible than what we think of as character. 

Liberals are blind to ignore that Trump’s “quirky” personality does attract strong support from more than a third of the nation. And his personality has made him the leading presidential candidate for Republicans for the third straight election. 

One of Trump’s longtime friends defended Trump, saying that Trump “has genius characteristics… Like all savants, he has edges… he has a kind of brilliance and charisma that is unique, rare, and captivating, although at times misunderstood.” 

Trump doesn’t leave much room for his attitudes to be misunderstood in how he leads. After he fired his national security adviser, John Bolton, by a tweet an hour before Bolton was to appear in a press conference with the secretary of state, Trump quipped about how he runs his administration. “It’s very easy actually to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions.”

He will make the most important national decisions if elected to a new term. The most important one on his mind is getting revenge for those who blocked his interests. Unlike White House advisors and cabinet officials, he won’t be able to fire citizens who are not his employees or contestants on his former TV show, The Apprentice.

According to Atlantic writer Baron Gellman, Trump has openly talked about taking revenge on his enemies, like President Joe Biden, against whom Trump would deploy federal prosecutors. Previously, Trump suggested that Hillary Clinton be thrown in jail, but he lost interest after she lost the election. With presidential powers back in his hands, limiting his support to right-wing House Republicans to impeach Biden is not enough because, apparently, he’d like to see Biden in jail this time. 

What kind of personality is focused on having the power to exact revenge on anyone who offended you? Psychiatrists describe an affliction that affects around 5.3% percent of the U.S. population; it’s called narcissistic personality disorder NPD. Among the traits that define that behavior are a grandiose sense of self and fantasies of unlimited success. Revenge is narcissistic behavior to achieve unlimited success.

Health professionals urge caution in planting the NPD label on anyone acting narcissistic in certain situations. The difference between narcissism as a personality trait and clinical narcissistic personality is how persistently it shows over time and across all situations. 

In assessing Trump being in office again, people need to consider how he has consistently exhibited narcissistic traits that will reshape or ignore our established public policies and laws. Like election laws. His fantasies of unlimited success align with Atlantic writer David A. Graham’s observation that the former president has described himself as a “very proud election denier.” 

He has repeated for years that the 2020 presidential election was not legitimate, despite the highest elected state official from both parties certifying the ballot counts in every state and confirming that Joe Biden won the election and Donald Trump lost. His attorneys, including his appointed attorney general, had personally informed Trump that there was no evidence that the election outcome would have differed.

In other words, Trump created a fantasy world, and most Republicans have followed him into that world, where he promises to pursue vengeance if elected as president again. 

Atlantic writer Ronald Brownstein writes that during his 2024 campaign, he promised to deliver “retribution” for his supporters. From the beginning of his current run, Graham notes that Trump “has a record of repeatedly threatening and intimidating judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and even the family of prosecutors involved in the cases against him.” His sense of omnipotence extends to saying that “his legal opponents will be consigned to mental asylums if he’s reelected.”

A grandiose sense of self is another trait that defines NDP behavior. It can be presented as a charming and entertaining personality, as Trump elicits more laughter than any other presidential candidate in his last three races. 

Why is that? Because the crowd, and he consistently attracts large crowds, loves his performance of making fun of others, calling them outrageous names. And then there is his smirky smile with remarks that invite his audience to share in his disbelief of the ideas and facts that science, government, and historians deliver. Those experts speak the language of the elites, those who think they know better than Trump’s audience. 

Atlantic writer Michael Schuman recognizes that “he won’t change his personality” regarding his admiration of authoritarian leaders. China’s Xi may become more hostile to American overseas interests, but Trump knows that he is superior to Xi and can flatter him into being nicer to us. Trump believes he understands them because he knows what powerful leaders want; it is just like what he wants – more power.

And the authoritarian leaders likewise know how to flatter Trump to get what they want.

Schuman believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin manipulated Trump by telling him that his ideas were brilliant and warning that he couldn’t trust anyone in his administration to execute them. Trump publicly refuted his own appointed Justice Department for indicting twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails. He said his logic was that Putin told him they didn’t.

Trump also considers himself smarter than his contemporaries and previous American presidents. He said someone told him that “Thomas Jefferson was the smartest one ever. I don’t think so…  frankly I think my IQ — people tell me it is tremendous; doctors can’t believe it.”

No one is excluded from overshadowing Trump’s greatness, including the Republican Party’s iconic founder, President Abraham Lincoln. On January 6, Trump suggested Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War. If Trump had been president, he said he could have avoided an unnecessary bloody war through “negotiation.” I’m sure Trump wasn’t lying. He truly believes that, as he said previously, “Only I can fix it,” whatever the problem.  

Trump’s grandiose sense of self makes it easy for him to reject or seek information that contradicts his beliefs. His insistence that he could have negotiated away our Civil War woefully ignores the fact that Lincoln supported the first proposed 13^th Amendment (called the Corwin Amendment) to save the Union before the Civil War began. It would have shielded slavery within the existing slave states from a federal constitutional amendment process and abolition or interference by Congress. Only a handful of states ratified it. And yet, what more could Trump have offered the South? Probably, he’d just let the South leave the Union and call it a victory because he avoided a war. 

Trump’s statement on Lincoln is a prime indicator of a future president who will appoint his advisors and the most powerful government officials based on who is more loyal to him than to the nation or the real world. This time, he will not make the mistake of picking the most intelligent conservatives to serve him but instead will select the most servile conservatives. These are the types of officials that serve kings, tyrants, and dictators. 

Luckily, Trump said he would only be a “dictator for a day” to build a wall and drill. Acting on his belief that he got elected on the public promise to be a dictator to fulfill his stated goals, he could try to ignore budget constraints, congress, and the courts. If blocked, he will attack the people and institutions that deny his public mandate for change. With that attitude, the nation will begin a constitutional crisis during Trump’s first week in the Oval Office. 

The institutional chaos that he provokes will either splinter the Republican Party, or it will continue to transform into the MAGA Party led by Trump. 

Trump could follow Putin’s past political practice and push for a constitutional amendment or another way to allow him to run again for president. It has such a low probability of happening that the two-dozen thoughtful Atlantic writers have not imagined such a Trump move. 

Still, how many predicted that Trump would demand Vice President Mike Pence stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election because it was stolen from him? And that a thousand pro-Trump rioters chanting “Hang Pence” would storm the capitol looking for him? Trump calls the protestors arrested for insurrection “heroes,” and he will pardon them if elected president. Could laws again be flouted when they don’t yield to Trump’s will?

All Americans, whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents, could find themselves living in a republic subject to the intentional chaos Trump ignites in his second presidency. That is the message voters need to hear.

If you found this essay helpful in understanding what may happen after November 2024, please pass it on to another to begin a conversation with them.

The two Republican front runners for their party’s Presidential Candidate fear that communists could take over America if the Republicans don’t win in 2024. 

In a speech after his indictment for mishandling classified documents, Donald Trump said, “At the end of the day, either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.” Adding that “we will cast out the communists.” Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law designating November 7 as “Victims of Communism Day.” DeSantis said this was “to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

Democratic campaign strategists recommend ignoring these statements; do “not take the bait.” Don’t get into a dialogue about communism. If you dignify them with a response – their message will only resonate with the MAGA base. However, even if true, it will likely be repeated as election campaigns roll out. Ignorance is not bliss.  We cannot have a vibrant democracy if one side concedes the debate floor to the other side. 

To ignore confronting this doomsday prophecy is, in effect, elitist. It betrays an attitude that only uneducated people would follow this thinking. By remaining silent, the perceived threat, but not the reality, of a communist takeover will increase. It shows that the Democrats lack the stamina to refute the Republican’s narrative logically. 

Jon Schwarz of The Intercept wrote of the revival of this red-scare tactic. The author concluded that people, since 1945, have been the same, so beware. People are the same in many ways, but that recognition does not provide a pathway for countering disinformation. Going forward demands a rational response to counter the fantasy that our nation is under a communist attack from within our boundaries.

Let’s begin by identifying what action would bring about communists ruling America. It could result from a violent revolution, an election victory, or a secret cabal within the federal bureaucracy.  

Communists Controlling America Through Revolution

The world’s first communist party was formed when V. I. Lenin created the Bolsheviks. It was previously a faction of a revolutionary Marxist-oriented Russian social democratic party. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, became the lead spokesmen demanding that a true communist state could only exist after a bourgeois democratic government was eliminated. 

Their resulting new ruling government would eradicate capitalism and establish a dictatorship of the workers. In time the state could also be eliminated. Lenin refined Marx’s evolutionary theory of economic and political change to enable Russia to survive as a lone communist state within a capitalist world. Later revolutionary Marxist-Leninist parties were formed worldwide to achieve a communist future in their countries. 

America has had and continues to allow Marxist-Leninist communist parties to exist. They began shortly after the Russian Revolution. The main party, the Communist Party USA, has gone from espousing a rigid Marxist-Leninist philosophy to adopting a tamer version. The party had never sanctioned violent activities. 

During the sixties, when revolutionary rhetoric was at its apex on college campuses, the Communist Party was shunted aside as ineffective and irrelevant. More radical and youth-dominated parties emerged with revolutionary rhetoric. By the end of the seventies, small groups like the Weathermen had either disbanded or remained as endless talking circles defining Marxist theory. 

The reality of a Marxist communist revolution in America is a delusion. After a hundred years of organizing, communists accomplished less than President Donald Trump almost accomplished in only four years: toppling the Federal Government. The January 6 insurrection (described by some Republicans as a harmless unguided tour of Congressional offices) came the closest of any past action from any leftist party to stop the orderly transition of presidential power.  If you expect a revolution to overthrow the government, look to the diehard MAGA adherents. Meanwhile, orthodox Marxists are in the libraries reading incomprehensible tomes on why a revolution to eliminate the bourgeois democracy is inevitable sometime in the future.

Communists Controlling America Through Elections

So, let’s turn to the election route for a communist takeover of America. It’s difficult to believe people voting for candidates who don’t think our democracy has legitimate elections. Then again, since Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election, forty percent of Republicans believe our democratic presidential election was corrupt.  Those thinking that democracy doesn’t work for them are often attracted to parties and political leaders who promise a new political order that will deliver what they want, which is seen as achieving true democracy. 

Since America’s Communist Party was created in 1919, its political perspective and subsequent policies have drifted from strictly adhering to ML’s revolutionary dogma to actively supporting liberal reformist policies. In the tradition of Marxist movements fragmenting, America’s communist party began as two competing factions. Nevertheless, they shared a common objection. While one proclaimed that it had “only one demand: the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” the other announced that it did “not propose to ‘capture’ the bourgeoisie parliamentary state, but to conquer and destroy it.”

Communist Party candidates reached their high-water mark while the capitalist economy was failing during the Great Depression. They received about 100,000 votes in several elections during the 1930s. William Foster, the communist presidential candidate in 1932, promised that when they came to power, “all the capitalist parties—Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc.—will be liquidated.…”

Not waiting for that to happen, most of those suffering during the Great Depression favored FDR’s tangible reforms over the vision of a future communist society. Foster received less than 1 percent of the vote, and the communists subsequently denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as “social fascist.”

Over time, America’s communist party dropped its revolutionary rhetoric and began promoting progressive policy legislation. It supported the civil rights and anti-war movements, organized against police abuse and mass incarceration. It resisted climate change by most recently endorsing the Green New Deal legislation by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In other words, the communists in the US started to participate as just another political party in the democratic legislative arena. This is a similar practice to what communist parties were doing in seven other functioning democratic countries (including Spain and Brazil), where they have been or are part of the ruling party. Most had about 2 percent communist representatives in their parliaments, where the ruling party needed small parties to cobble together a majority to govern. 

Support for communism occasionally peaks in some opinion polls. According to a 2019 poll conducted by YouGov, communism received a 36 percent approval rating compared to 50 percent for capitalism. Professor of political theory at San Jose University, Lawrence Quill, said that these theories are so broad they lend themselves to endorsement by very different sorts of people looking for very different things. 

The poll measured attitudes, not election preferences. Just two decades ago, membership in the Communist Party was below 2,000. The chance of any communist party’s path to controlling our government through elections is zero.

Communists Controlling America through the Federal Bureaucracy 

Republicans know that the communists will not initiate a revolution or win elections. But they do fear the federal government intruding on their lives, such as using public money to provide social security to everyone, forbidding their children from working in factories, or providing public health care to women who seek abortions. 

These can be big-budget public policies they do not need or want. On the cultural front, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation reported that “cultural Marxism today presents a far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism.” What are they referring to?  Is big government, like communism, attacking their Christian beliefs? Is it doing that by eliminating the freedom to discriminate with whom where one wishes to work, live with, and serve? 

Government employment has expanded to provide both services and regulation of the marketplace. The upside is that more acceptable conditions exist for safe working, sustainable environments, healthy living, and affordable housing. However, more government workers translate into a bigger, more distant, and deeper bureaucracy, which can breed alienation. Unfortunately, that condition afflicts every type of sizeable secular organization serving multiple purposes. And it provides a feeding ground for sprouting conspiracies when government policies do not align with a sector of the population. 

In 1950, it generated McCarthyism, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to have a list of members of the Communist Party USA  working in the State Department. The late fifties saw the explosive growth of the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, who believed that American liberals acted as “secret Communist traitors.” Fear of an internal communist takeover had Congress publicly questioning citizens if they were communists in this grand scheme. 

Today, that search has morphed into Republicans trying to find those in the “deep state” who unfairly helped impeach and indict Donald Trump. Republican candidates, like Trump and DeSantis, need a boogeyman to scare voters. Communists had been ideal because of their revolutionary fervor and association with the Soviet Union. Being a member of the Communist Party has been dropped as a meaningful charge, mainly because the party is no longer linked to a foreign county.

But what does the gradual growth of a state’s bureaucracy have to do with fearing communism? Nothing. The five proclaimed communist countries that exist (ironically, Russia is not one) resulted from internal revolutions, not elections or the gradual growth of bureaucracy. 

The real threat to our democracy is the acquiescence to authoritarian actions. Democrats must show that authoritarian regimes have emerged from socialistic, theocratic, or democratic governments. That happens when the executive, legislative, and judicial government branches are under absolute control by one person or political party. 

The first step in protecting our democracy is to have a public campaign to advocate retaining laws that uphold election procedures that have ensured fair elections for all political parties. Democratic governing is not achieved by storming the Capital to overturn an election after it was certified by all fifty states and confirmed by over 50 court cases. 

When Republicans claim that socialists, Democrats, and federal employees belong to some manipulative communist-like cabal hidden within government, they undermine our democracy. They should look in the mirror and see that it’s not communists tearing apart the democratic norms that keep our institutions functional; it is them. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics