Two Kentucky historians agree the GOP is steering the US straight toward authoritarianism |Opinion

Two Kentucky historians agree the GOP is steering the US straight toward authoritarianism |Opinion

Two Kentucky historians agree it’s past time for Democrats to start warning voters — loudly, clearly and unceasingly — where Donald Trump and his truest true believers in the GOP are steering the country: Straight toward white supremacy and authoritarianism.

“This is real, this is serious and it’s frightening,” said Brian Clardy, a Murray State University history professor. “We must build a democratic resistance that amounts to a counter-fascist coup — In short, we must all become ‘antifa,’ or antifascists,” said John Hennen, a Morehead State University history professor emeritus.

Clardy said Trump largely won on a white backlash triggered by Barack Obama’s election. Clardy was in the crowd when our first African American president was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009.

“While we’re celebrating here in Washington, folks back home are seething,” he said to a woman standing near him. He meant white folks.

Hennen said Trumpism has deep roots. “The eruption of violent white nationalist authoritarianism in our country is the shocking manifestation of less noisy currents of fascist politics which have evolved for decades.”

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Trump and his sycophants ceaselessly demagogue against President Joe Biden and his party, falsely portraying them as “radical socialists” and even “communists” who conspired to “steal” the 2020 election. Yet most Democrats resist calling Trumpism what it is – a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and religiously bigoted movement that is anti-democratic and embraces violence and vigilantism.

Clardy and Hennen say Democrats are wrong if they think beating back COVID-19 and boosting the economy via their economic program will be enough to hold the House and Senate in 2022 and earn Biden a second term in 2024. “The Democrats have to remind people that next year and in 2024, democracy itself will be on trial,” Clardy said.

He and Hennen are hardly alone in begging the Democrats to denounce Trumpism forcefully and stop the hand-wringing over polls in which Biden's approval ratings are sagging and which suggest Republicans have a real shot at retaking the House — and maybe the Senate — next year.

"Democrats have real power," wrote Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, adding, “A lack of imagination and political cowardice, however, is inducing this attitude of helplessness in Democrats. And it’s one that Trump will all too easily exploit to get his way.”

Declared Kimberly Wehle in The Hill: “At the very least, Democrats need to wake up from their frightening state of denial and take whatever measures they can in the scant remaining months of their congressional majority to try to salvage democracy from single-party authoritarian rule."

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Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats seem content to let never-Trump Republicans or former Republicans sound the alarm. “The anti-democratic forces seem stronger at the end of 2021 than they were at the beginning,” William Kristol recently wrote in The Bulwark, where he is editor-at-large. “The Republican party seems to be more captive to authoritarian demagoguery today than it was a year ago following Trump’s defeat.”

He poured it on: “Establishment Republicans seem to be even more willing to appease a rising anti-democratic Right than ever. The trajectory of the Republican party heading into 2022 is worrisome. At the start of 2020, people believed that the Republican party might become explicitly anti-democratic. At the start of 2021, all doubt was removed. And neither the party’s leaders nor voters have done anything to change that base fact.”

At the end of 2021, Kristol found “respectable Republicans…not...doing much if anything to repudiate the conspiratorial craziness, the incitements to violence, the hostility to rational discourse, that are all around us and which have moved from the fringes of conservatism to close to dead center.”

He wrote that those fighting for our democracy hoped Biden’s victory over Trump would be like D-Day in World War II, “a decisive moment, an inflection point, a key achievement that would have signaled a forthcoming decisive success.” Instead, it was more akin to Dunkirk, “an escape from a terrible outcome, an occasion to heave a huge sigh of relief, but ultimately a success that simply allows us to regroup and gather our energies and forces for a longer fight.”

Dunkirk was in 1940. The Allies didn’t win the war over Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy until 1945, and only then after Allied troops invaded both countries. (American troops were preparing to invade Japan, in 1945 when the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced its fascist-style rulers to surrender.)

But if Trumpism topples our two-and-half century experiment in representative democracy, “there is no one today who will step forth to rescue and liberate us from beyond the ocean,” Kristol warned. “It’s not enough if we merely hold on. We have to be the source of our own rescue, the cause of our own liberation. And that work we have only just begun.”

Berry Craig is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community College in Paducah and an author of seven books and co-author of two more, all on Kentucky history.