Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
From an outside perspective this is a good demonstration that while your system is somewhat flawed, it’s still resilient. By flawed I mean mainly the two party system and stuff like judges being appointed by politicians. However if your system didn’t have some builtin failsafes, it would have been much more vulnerable to influence from unwanted sources.
Even if most trump voters wanted to turn the US into a proper aristocracy, (some right wingers actually do*), the process would have been much more complicated in comparison to countries that have become dictatorships in the past decades.
*I’m referring to a somewhat new trend, where influential people are claiming that the US is suffering from a dumb population, and that experts should be given more power.
What exactly do you mean by “aristocracy”? You could argue that that’s what the US already is. Lobbying by the very rich means they get their way much more often than the majority of the population gets their way. Even many of the senators and congress people are deci or centi-millionaires.
I’d say the Trump voters want a fascist state with some hints of democracy remaining. They want rich people (other than Trump) to have less of a voice than they currently do, and they’re willing to give up many democratic aspects of the current system to get it. I think most of them would still like to be able to vote for things, and would still want their votes to matter. But, I think they’d be willing to give up many of their rights as long as the strong man in charge hurts the right people.