Edging Toward Authoritarianism
January 3, 2022
By Haviland Smith
At the onset of 2022, The United States of America appears to be heading for possible major change. Opposing forces and ideologies are so hostile toward each other that there is clearly the possibility that this former relatively pure democracy will be taken over by an entirely authoritarian management.
Authoritarianism is defined as “the enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom and a lack of concern for the wishes and opinions of others”. Does that not define the United States at this moment? All we need to do now to be true to the ongoing world pattern is codify the situation governmentally.
If you look around the world you will see case after case of countries being taken over by authoritarianism. Look at the Philippines, Brazil. Nicaragua, and Venezuela. One rationale for these takeovers is to “restore order”.
How is it possible that the United States could fit into this mold? To understand that question, it is important to look at the religious and ethnic makeup of today’s authoritarian states. What you will see right away in many if not most of those states are ethnically and/or religiously divided countries. Authoritarianism in the Middle East has not only ethnic divisions (Arab, Persian, Kurd, Druze, Turkish, etc.), but the religious split between Shia and Sunni. The Chinese have the Uighurs and over 50 other ethnic groups. The Russians have over 120 ethnic groups within their borders. And so it goes on and on, with many, if not most countries dealing with minorities that are not always friendly and that are often sufficiently hostile for the majority to install authoritarianism to gain and maintain power and to cope with those minority groups and their concomitant disorders.
Where many if not most of such divided countries have simply evolved that way through the realities of geography and simple migration, the United States is in class by itself. It has voluntarily created what may well be the world’s most diverse country and it has done so purposefully and eagerly. Let’s face it, the only people who have always lived here are the native Americans. Europeans changed all that when they arrived in numbers on this continent in the middle of the 16th century. Since then, largely for economic reasons, we have seen every kind of migration that has ever existed. Over the centuries we have benefited from immigration from over 100 countries in Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, South America and North America.
Many of those immigrants, particularly black Africans, were brought here against their will as slaves to work for the European settlers. Others, mostly from more adjacent countries to our south, came here to work for better compensation, but it is critical to understand that they have played an incredibly important role in the advancement of the United States on the economic front. How are we Americans to survive if today’s politicians succeed in forbidding or even limiting the migration of Latin Americans who come to work mostly in agriculture? Who will do that work?
Nativism has always existed in United States history. Some of the original colonists despised people who did not share their own religious faiths. Nativism was particularly strong during the major periods of immigration in the 18th Century.
Somewhere along the way, America’s nativists came to believe that people who were born in the United States were somehow better than those born abroad. Given our history and recognizing today’s realities, one simply has to ask whether the remnants of nativism are playing a role in the philosophy of a large chunk of the American population.
We have imported diverse groups of people over the years. In the main, they have been encouraged to maintain their original identities and cultures. This has created here in immigrant America the kinds of frictions between those groups that have always existed around the world. With a positive attitude toward immigration, whether for justified reasons or not, we have created the kind of situation that has led to authoritarian coups throughout the world.
One could speculate that the negative attitudes of one third of our population toward immigrants and foreigners is nothing more than a holdover of attitudes that have existed here since the first European settlers arrived on our shores. That certainly does not make those attitudes appropriate, but it would provide some understanding on how they got here and why they continue to exist.
Is America to have the next authoritarian regime?
Haviland Smith is a long-retired CIA officer who concentrated during the Cold War on the Soviet Union