The vast majority of people alive today don’t live in liberal democracies where fundamental human rights are respected, elections are real, and the rule of law, at least theoretically, applies to everyone.
Freedom House, in its annual Freedom in the World survey, estimates that only 20% of the world’s population lives in freedom, and even among free nations, democracy is still a baby. Out of 195 UN-recognized countries in the world, only eight — including the United States — have existed as electoral democracies for a century or more. This means that worldwide, most people have suffered under authoritarian rule, or lacked basic political or human rights, for part if not all of their lives.
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Many Americans have no concept of these realities and little understanding of our own remarkable history, in part because of the erosion of public education. As MAGA acolytes rush to crush democratic norms and blow up a system built to ensure liberty, they have no appreciation of the political precarity we’re in, or that once the rule of law is gone, illiberal brutality will fill its void.
And they’ll pay for it with their freedoms and as much as any Democrat or liberal.
Throughout most of the world, bloody conflict and brutal repression are the norm, not the exception. Military juntas, genocide and civil wars predominate in Myanmar, Mali, Sudan and many conflicted regions. Repressive and often barbaric religious fanatics reign in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa and in many other parts of the world. Some nations — Syria and Sudan, and Haiti and Venezuela closer to home — have entered the dark realm of failed states. Seventh-century brutality and medieval-era misery are baked into life in these countries, with their citizens harboring no real hope for escape.
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In North Korea, Russia and China, nearly 1.7 billion people live under ruthless dictators no one is allowed to criticize. Kim Jong un uses prison camps, torture, forced labor and executions to terrorize citizens into submission. Vladimir Putin poisons his political rivals, blows up their planes or has them thrown out of windows. In China, ethnic and religious minorities are subject to torture, political indoctrination and state-forced sterilizations; many political activists live and die in labor camps.
All three of these dictatorships tightly control and prohibit free media and internet access. They forbid unscripted contact with the outside world to prevent citizens from seeing freedom, lest they compare.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (L) visit a construction site of the Angara rocket launch complex on Sept. 13, 2023 in Tsiolkovsky, Russia. (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images)
It’s clear that human evolution, and human progress, have advanced unevenly throughout the world. Plotted on a map, current stages of social evolution would look like a rash with high variability, with plot points ranging from caveman-era brute force to socially advanced, peaceful cultures, and everything in between.
Anyone who has access to the internet or TV can find real-time evidence of what life is like under totalitarianism. Anyone who is not intellectually challenged can see that life in America, even among the poor, is vastly more privileged, comfortable and free than almost anywhere else in the world.
But instead of taking sober stock of how the world really is, and what happens when the rule of law falls and a reign of terror takes its place, a significant percentage of Americans are now embracing a Donald Trump-stamped brand of political vengeance and violence with no clue whatsoever of what they are unleashing.
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The naivete is remarkable, and dangerous, and reflects a nearly complete ignorance of both American history and human nature.
It’s almost as if they’ve been listening to a malign charlatan who has hoodwinked them into believing their relatively well-fed, clothed and secure lives are so terrible, and their grievances so severe, that they have no alternative but to subvert the rule of law, dismantle an imperfect but functional government and assume that the charlatan will grant them a better seat at his non-existent table of plenty (despite all evidence to the contrary).
On January 11, Trump defied the judge presiding over his business fraud trial and delivered a rant the judge had prohibited — flaunting, on national media, his abject disdain for the rule of law.
Two days before, Trump’s attorneys argued that a president cannot be prosecuted unless that president is first impeached by the House and convicted in the Senate.
Using that logic: If a president sells our nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, and makes enough cash in the bargain, he can simply resign from office to escape impeachment and move back into private life, much enriched.
Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, D.C., for his inauguration as president. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The legal absurdity of Trump’s position was laid bare when Judge Florence Pan asked whether a president could deploy SEAL Team 6 to murder a political rival and get away with it if the Senate failed to convict, for whatever reason (such as being scared of what an assassinating president would do to them.)
Trump counsel’s contorted answer boiled down to a ridiculous yes, yes indeed: If Congress fails to impeach, a president can murder his political rivals and get away with it.
A week later, the collective eyebrows of the nation’s criminal trial bar remain hyperextended, stuck somewhere between mid-forehead and natural hairline.
Trump’s embrace of political violence is not new. During the first months of his campaign, in 2016, Trump encouraged his fans to attack protestors they didn’t like, and to “knock the crap” out of them. At least one MAGA man took him up on the suggestion.
Undeterred, Trump has continued to extol the virtues of violence ever since.
He has suggested shoplifters should be shot and has called for the death penalty for drug dealers, petty or otherwise. He encouraged New York police to rough up people they were arresting, telling the police not to be “too nice.” He called for George Floyd protesters to be shot, and he threatened to deploy the U.S. military to quell Black Lives Matter protests across the country. He said that his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a military general he appointed, should be executed for treason. On Jan. 6, 2021, after he convinced a frothing mob their votes had been “stolen,” they stormed the U.S. Capitol, carrying a noose and chanting for the death of Vice President Mike Pence.
Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
A defeated president trying to subvert the Constitution through force to stop the peaceful transfer of power is the closest our government has ever come to being overthrown, not counting an attempt to secede that sparked the Civil War. It is no comfort that, throughout history, malign actors who attempt a coup rarely attempt only one.
To attend this month’s appellate argument on his claim of criminal immunity, Trump had himself driven by motorcade (presidential style).
After his attorneys flailed under questioning, Trump festooned himself with American flags and state insignia, and held a press conference (presidential style).
After previously referring to the “poisoning of American blood,” and calling Democrats and political opponents “vermin,” at his press conference he threatened the nation with “bedlam” if he loses (Hitler style).
Despite his unending fascistic rhetoric, Trump remains paradoxically prickly about Adolf Hitler comparisons. His spokes-bull Steven Cheung recently warned that people who make such comparisons will have their "existence crushed" in a second Trump term, apparently missing the irony.
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If Trump has stayed true to one principle, it’s this: Only Donald Trump matters. His supporters, the political violence he encourages in them, and the destruction of institutions such as the rule of law are no more than means to an end. His end, he has made clear, is unchecked power. The same can be said of Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, Kim and nearly every dictator, past or present.
Meanwhile, the grift continues. A recent Trump fundraising email told supporters, “America has descended into utter tyranny” because “right before our very eyes, our once beautiful Republic is being transformed into a Marxist tin-pot dictatorship where Crooked Joe’s regime has weaponized the legal system against not only a former president (your favorite, I might add), but against the very citizens he swore an oath to protect.”
It's pretty obvious that Trump supporters have no concept whatsoever of what a tin-pot dictatorship really is, or they wouldn’t be rushing toward it, arms outstretched.
Other people, including those who have lived under oppressive rule, understand that freedom is the global exception, not the rule, and they are aghast to see the world’s gold standard of liberty winking at dictatorship.
The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has observed that the main goal of Trump’s rallies is “not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”
As a teacher in Australia recently posted on my substack,“From the outside, the USA presents as bats—t crazy.”
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25-year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.
