A Republican View of Autocracy –– Pt. III

Review by Bill Doughty––

As the saying goes, “fear is a powerful motivator.” A survey of 11,000 U.S. federal workers shows they are terrified of mass firings, political coercion, job insecurity, and retaliation for reporting wrongdoing or voicing opposition. This week’s Supreme Court ruling that gives the president more power to fire federal employees just adds to the angst.

The rise in fear (and decline in morale) follows recent executive orders stripping protections from thousands of senior civil servants. A 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) reveals a striking contrast from 2024’s FEVS.

According to University of Michigan Economics Professor Justin Wolpers, an OPM survey of federal workers reveals a sharp increase in fear and chaos, a decline in morale, and an rise in costs to American taxpayers. Yet, members of the Civil Service are still dedicated to public service, Wolpers reports.

No doubt fearing the results of a similar survey this year, OPM canceled the 2026 FEVS and is instead changing future survey questions to purportedly focus on performance.

Meanwhile, President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth –– fearful of differences of opinion or inconvenient facts –– have fired inspectors general, JAGs, and senior leaders who fail loyalty tests.

Fear is used as a motivator by both Democrats and Republicans, as explained by Republican strategist Stuart Stevens in his landmark book “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Democracy Away” (Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2023).

“All political parties use fear of an opponent to unify supporters, and they always have. When Democrats attack Republicans by saying Medicare cuts will effectively roll old ladies in wheelchairs off cliffs, that's fear. When Nixon ran on his infamous law-and-order platform in 1968, it was very much a strategy based on fear. What is different about the current Republican Party is that fear is its organizing principle, both internally and externally. The party drives support through fear and enforces discipline on the elected officials through fear.

January 6, 2021, was the defining moment of today's Republican Party. Fear drove the mob to the Capitol –– and the mob was called to action by a fearful leader. They were afraid of the choice 81 million Americans had made about who would be their next president, and they were fearful that their coalition consisted of 85 percent white voters was not big enough to win in 2020 America. They were terrified of what an inclusive, multicultural America could do to their status and superiority.”

One wonders if fear (of looking weak? of more Epstein revelations?) drove Trump to conduct a war of choice with Iran –– and then if fear of an economic catastrophe (“the late, great Herbert Hoover”) drove him to end the war with concessions to Iran: lifting sanctions, ending the naval blockade, allowing development of ballistic missiles, offering up to $300 billion to assist with Iran's postwar reconstruction, and more.

President Putin used fear as a reason to Russians for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Putin lied that democratic Ukraine was a nest of Nazis. Putin, in fact, fears the influence of free NATO democratic nations on his power as an autocrat, propped up by wealthy oligarchs.

Stevens makes the point that Russian oligarchs actually fear Putin, while U.S. politicians fear American billionaires (and now a trillionaire!).

“When Vladimir Putin decided to invade a neighboring country, dooming hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians in a war of genocide, it was his decision alone. Western Russian observers speculated that Russian oligarchs might be able to press Putin to end the war. But it never happened. These men—and they are all men—who possess enormous money, influence, and power nonetheless wake up and fall asleep terrified of a single short former KGB agent who drove a St. Petersburg taxi in the 1990s. They know for a fact that a jail cell, an open window, or a slow death by poison is the fate of those who dare not obey the Russian czar.

In the American political system, on the other hand, it's the politician who wakes up and goes to bed fearing the very wealthy. For all the never-ending talk of campaign finance reform, the billionaire class has designed perfectly legal methods to exert tremendous influence over the democratic process. In theory, this is a power that is ideologically neutral, available to liberal billionaires like George Soros and libertarian conservatives like the Koch brothers. The same is also theoretically true of the First Amendment. Notionally, a powerful far-left television network –– one operating with the same disregard for ethical journalism that epitomizes Fox News ––could emerge and successfully compete with Fox News. But it has never happened and there is no reason to believe it will. So it is with campaign finance. The wealthy on the right have proven to be more effective exerting their influence than those on the center-left.”

Before mega-donors dominated election campaigns Stuart Stevens served well-known Republicans such as Massachusetts Governor William Weld, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, and several U.S. Senators; he also led  Mitt Romney’s campaign for president.

“For most of the years that I worked in campaigns, the popular belief that politicians sell their votes never struck me as accurate,” Stevens observes. “The corruption of money in the American political system is not so much the corruption of individual politicians but the corruption of the entire electoral process.”

And fear motivates the ultra-rich on the Right who are afraid of losing some of their wealth and power as well as what Steven calls a “demographic apocalypse confronting Republicans.” Young voters and people of color are turning away from the GOP, which fears "replacement."

“At the heart of the Republican Party’s coordinated, dedicated, and patient efforts to change the legal parameters of how American democracy functions is the deep fear that the party is doomed,” Stevens writes.

“If you believe that America was chosen by God to be a white, Christian nation, then the looming specter of a minority-majority America demands action.”

“It's obvious why Republicans have consistently pressed to make it harder to register and more difficult to vote. In 2015, when Donald Trump began openly to challenge the legitimacy of any election he didn't win, he was building on the well-seasoned doubts of election integrity Republicans have used for decades to justify their highly focused efforts to curate the electorate. The "Big Lie" was simply an amplification of the time-tested voter-fraud lie.

Both parties are constantly engaged in efforts to change voting laws. The difference is that Democrats consistently try to broaden voter participation, while Republicans attempt to shrink it.”

One side fears losing power and privilege; the other side fears losing freedom, democracy and the rights guaranteed in the Constitution.

That last fear is not unfounded. Consider Trump’s 2022 “Truth Social” comment related to losing in 2020. He said election fraud allows "allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

President “Teddy” Roosevelt feared something that makes Trump’s visit to the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library yesterday more than ironic.

Trump arrived with his sons in a Boeing 747-8 that was a gift by government of Qatar but that cost taxpayers at least $400 million to retrofit. The visit came on the day a financial disclosure report revealed that Trump generated more than $2.2 billion in his first year in office, mostly from cryptocurrency and stock investments of corporations he promoted. (His sons and other family members are making millions in government connected businesses.)

What Teddy Roosevelt openly feared was grift, corporate influence, and “corruption of the electorate.” His concerns were deeply rooted in the history of the founding of the United States even before July 4, 1776.

Stevens writes:

“In April 1699, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law prohibiting a candidate ‘or any persons on their behalf’ from giving voters ‘money, meat, drink, entertainment, or provision or … any present, gift, reward, or entertainment, etc. in order to be elected.’ Two centuries later, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt devoted whole sections of his 1904 and 1905 State of the Union speeches to calls for campaign-finance reform. ‘There is no enemy of free government more dangerous and none so insidious as the corruption of the electorate,’ he told Congress in 1904. A year later, he called for the banning of contributions by corporations and their directors, reforms that have never been universally enacted in American elections: ‘All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law,’ Roosevelt contended.”

“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Roosevelt warned in his 1913 autobiography.

Roosevelt welcomed “muckraker” journalists to uncover corporate misdeeds. He used federal prosecutors and wide-ranging regulatory legislation to fight corruption, filing 40 antitrust lawsuits and breaking up monopolies.

TR was a proud Republican in the mold of Abraham Lincoln (born in 1858, just three years before the start of the Civil War and Lincoln’s preservation of the Union.)

Fear is a powerful motivator. But it is also a catalyst for change.

Stevens concludes with a challenge: “It is up to each of us to save the America we love. We are our own last best hope. No one is coming to save us. We are our own destiny.”

A Republican View of Autocracy –– Pt. II

Review by Bill Doughty––

Some of the strongest voices standing up to MAGA “Trumpism” are current and former Republicans: George Will, Max Boot, David Frum, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, William Kristol, Nicolle Wallace, Michael Steele, Joe Scarborough, Tim Miller, and Stuart Stevens.

Stevens –– one of the founders of the Lincoln Project along with Rick Wilson, George Conway , and Steve Schmidt, and others –– is a Paul Revere figure among those strong voices.

Published a year before that last election, Stevens warned of his party’s fast-moving slide toward autocracy in “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Democracy Away” (Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2023). The author is a former chief Republican strategist. He worked on campaigns for prominent republicans including Bob Dole and Mitt Romney and helped elect George W. Bush.

In a blurb for this eye-opening book, journalist and author James Fallows writes, “Stuart Stevens has been everywhere and seen everything, and he shares what he has learned in concise, vivid prose. His book is urgent but not despairing. It is deadly serious but frequently funny. It offers the big picture…”

Here is how Stevens presents the big picture.

“While it is difficult to attribute any deliberate or methodical plan to Donald Trump, whose mind operates like an old-fashioned pinball machine on tilt-bouncing from one inchoate impulse to another—his basic anti-democratic, Strongman instincts have crushed dissent in the Republican Party, empowering the underlying authoritarian impulses within the party. A once-center-right political party with core ideological principles is now marching toward the formation of an autocratic state.”

The big picture includes obvious racism and misogyny in MAGA’s core constituency that would reject a woman of color, Vice President Kamala Harris, from becoming president.

“…the xenophobia and racism that appealed to Trump voters was far more motivating to Republican voters than the small government, low taxes, constitutionally conservative so-called "values" they insisted were the true core of the Republican Party. The absurdity of their deceit could not have been more glaringly obvious. Their commitment to their deeply held beliefs was so weak that they now supported a man who bragged he was "the king of debt," refused to release his tax returns to show he even paid taxes, and his Muslim ban was a religious test that was a clear violation of Article VI of the Constitution that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." They didn't care about anything but remaining in power. The Republican Party leadership was a collection of liars and frauds who thought they could use Trump while controlling him.”

Ouch.

Stevens saw (and foresaw an even greater) corruption by Trump and his family –– and the acceptance by the cult followers of grift and greed.

“Trump’s base of supporters didn’t care if he used his office to enrich himself and his family because if being rich was a qualification for office, getting richer only proved you were more qualified,” he writes.

A party that once stood for “states’ rights” and against a centralized government under a single authority, now supports the opposite. How has the Republican Party strayed? Lincoln emancipated slaves and united the nation; Teddy Roosevelt fought against big money in politics; Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and achieved rapprochement with China; and the Bushes and Reagan welcomed immigration. All would be considered “woke” or supporters of DEI (diversity, equity/equality, inclusion) by MAGA Republicans today.

“Once a political party in a democratic system abandons any moral or ideological rationale for its existence, it is on the road to autocracy.”

Stevens offers these nuggets of wisdom about the current downhill road to autocracy, from the Big Lie of election fraud to greater violence against democratic institutions:

• “There’s always been too much money in American politics. No other Western democracy allows vast sums of money to pollute its electoral system.”
• “No anti-democratic movement becomes more democratic once in power.”
• “The last time Americans couldn’t agree on who was a legal president was in 1861.”
• “Two truths remain constant … if there is to be a democracy, someone must be willing to lose … (and) no one tries to change the rules…”
• “The truth is that no one in the Republican Party actually believes there is widespread (voting) fraud, but it is a convenient cover story for the destruction of democracy.”
• “The success Republicans have had gerrymandering congressional districts is a supercharged propellant for minority rule.”
• “The Trump loyalist who stormed the Capitol have broken faith with the institution of American democracy.” [ written before Trump pardoned them and is now attempting to pay J6ers reparations]
• “You do not assault the Capitol unless you believe the democratic process has failed and must end. You do not refuse to certify the election of the candidate who received more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history if you respect the will of the people, an essential element for any democracy to survive.”
• “Violence has become an essential element of the Republican political narrative, signaling to the once fringe militia groups and their sympathizers the they have a place in the party.”
• “The far right is obsessed with guns and violence because they reject … the essence of a shared community.”
• “The Trump announcement at Waco was a declaration of war against American democracy made to a well-armed crowd eager to be his soldiers.”
• “If white evangelicals love Trump and black evangelicals hate him, is this about religion or race? And like all of Trump’s appeals, it is about race.”
• “In healthy democracies the heads of state act as a calming influence, reassuring citizens that their safety is protected by government policies and institutions of the state. Dictators act in exactly the opposite manner.”

Trump and his chosen loyalists have fast-laned the U.S. military on the highway to autocracy and Christian Nationalism/Supremacy by using troops as backdrops at Republican rallies, promoting protestant Christianity in the ranks, and restricting balanced media and independent thinking at the Pentagon.

Stevens notes:

“People in the armed forces are fond of the term ‘combined arms maneuver.’ The U.S. Army's Military Review defines it as "the application of the elements of combat power in a complementary and reinforcing manner to achieve physical, temporal, or psychological advantages over the enemy to preserve freedom of action and exploit success.’ This is exactly how Republican efforts to shape elections should be perceived. The Republicans have successfully undertaken ‘complementary and reinforcing’ efforts to control legislatures and appoint conservative judges at every level for decades.”

In Part I of our review of “The Conspiracy to End Autocracy,” we pulled quotes from various authors cited by Stevens.

One of the authors Stevens relies on to make his point is “Surviving Autocracy’s” Masha Gesson who warns, “Autocrats declare their intentions early on. We disbelieve or ignore them at our peril.” Gesson adds about President Trump, “He was probably the first major party nominee who ran not for president but for autocrat. And he won.”

Trump won again in 2024, despite Stevens’s warning a year earlier.

Trump was elected, in part, because of the support of Republicans who were former “never-Trumpers” –– especially in the immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021 –– but who then pinballed back as loyal supporters and enablers: J.D. Vance (who called Trump “America’s Hitler”), Marco Rubio (who referred to Trump as a “con man”), Ted Cruz (who said Trump was “utterly amoral”), and Lindsey Graham (who once called Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot”).

Other formerly ardent supporters, however, have turned away from the MAGA leader’s autocracy movement: Marjorie Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, Chris Christie, Megyn Kelly, Sohrab Ahmari, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Shawn Ryan, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan.

Once afraid of Trump and his followers, they are joining the ranks of those opposed to tearing down the Constitution and democracy.

A Republican View of Autocracy –– Pt. I

Review by Bill Doughty––

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commanding general of U.S. forces in Europe, reminds us of this old saying: “If you want a new idea, read an old book.”

A book that is not too old –– and seemingly written yesterday –– shows how the United States is embracing autocracy. Longtime Republican campaign strategist Stuart Stevens captures the country’s current radical slide with the clarity of hindsight in “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Democracy Away” (Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2023).

For a new idea, read an good book!

Stevens quotes key authors of other “old books” to investigate the seeds and roots of an anti-democracy and pro-authoritarian movement growing in the government –– including the justice department, legislature and military –– and branching into society. Five building blocks of autocracy include propagandist media, MAGA followers, oligarchic financiers, corrupt legal theories, and shock troops such as J6ers and right-wing militia all supporting the totalitarian movement.

One of the first authors of “old books” Stevens cites is George Orwell, who writes, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” [Instead of a belief in belief. Or skewed news and propaganda.]

In 1984, Orwell warns about Big Brother and in effect Big Lies despite objective facts. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It means loyalty to the leader, not the Constitution or even to concrete reality.

Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” writes, “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”

Regarding dictators and autocratic movements, Arendt (above) says, “Their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member.”

Examples today are obsequious cabinet meetings in the White House and the recent firing of freethinking military officers, including General Todd Donahue, commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa and commander of Allied Land Command. [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who calls himself Secretary of War, has removed or pressured removal of more than two dozen senior military leaders, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr.; Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti; Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan; Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George; and Army Gen. James Mingus, vice chief of staff of the Army. A disproportionate number of people removed from power are women, African-Americans, and/or free-thinkers.]

Attacks on education and science are a hallmark of authoritarians, as Stevens points out through the perspective of philosopher Umberto Eco, who writes, “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity” to the fascist, and “thinking is a form of emasculation … Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

As fascist-friendly forces attempt suppression of free speech, media and voting rights, authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in “How Democracies Die,” “The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy –– gradually, subtly, and even legally –– to kill it.”

Anne Applebaum writes in “Twilight of Democracy” that this “soft dictatorship … relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.”

Legislative and judicial enablers, administration sycophants, propagandist media, and oligarchs –– “elites” –– either endorse or allow the authoritarian to gain power and restrict liberty.

It happened in 1930s Germany.

Another seminal author quoted by Stevens is William Shirer, who penned “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” Shirer writes about Franz von Papen, an aristocratic conservative politician who served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932. Papen made a deal with Adolf Hitler, thinking he and his fellow conservatives could control him and the Nazis.

Shirer writes, “By means of a shabby political deal with the old-school reactionary he privately detected, the former tramp from Vienna, the derelict of the First World War, the violent revolutionary, became chancellor of the great nation.” Hitler then removed, often violently, anyone not completely loyal to him.

In her book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” Ruth Ben-Ghiat (above) describes this as a tradition of the strongman: “…divide-and-rule and bullying tactics to weed out government officials who won’t conspire in his corruption and subversion of the rule of law.”

Their efforts are often funded by misguided oligarchs.

Ghiat writes, 

“Once the ruler is in power, elites strike an ‘authoritarian bargain’ that promises them power and security in return for loyalty to the ruler and toleration of his suspension of rights. Some are true believers, and others fear the consequences of subtracting their support, but those who sign on tend to stick with the leader through gross mismanagement, impeachment, or international humiliation.”

In a chapter titled “The Financiers,” Stevens examines the role of Peter Thiel through Max Chaikin’s book “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.” Thiel wrote in an essay for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel is a big funder of his proteges J.D. Vance, who would become vice president, and Blake Masters, who would win a Republican primary election but lose to Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.

In the same chapter, Stevens uses Jane Mayer’s (above) 2016 book “Dark Money” to springboard onto a discussion about the influential Koch brothers.

The Kochs inherited a fortune from their father who helped both Stalin and Hitler develop oil industries that were indispensable in their respective war efforts. As libertarians, the Kochs were ironically opposed to centralized power and autocracy. They championed and funded Mike Pence, Trump’s first vice president. Pence served Trump faithfully until January 6, 2021 when he resisted an effort to subvert the election in the face of an angry populist mob demanding he be hanged at the Capitol.

A highlight in Stevens’s “The Conspiracy to End America” is a timeline in a chapter titled “The Legal Strategies.” After the formation of the Federalist Society in 1982 and appointments of Federalist judges to the Supreme Court –– Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett –– there is an exponential growth of the influence of money in politics, inequality in society, control by Christian Supremacists, and corruption within the executive branch, including lying to the public.

Moisés Naim cites “3 Ps” of the autocrat in “The Revenge of Power”: Populism, Polarization, and Post-Truth. The 3 Ps are often seen as nationalism, division and outright lying, where the truth no longer seems to matter to those in power.

A “Big Lie” like election denial is an example of the 3 Ps and the root cause of the J6 insurrection coup attempt. Russians and the Soviets before them sowed discord in U.S. elections. Stevens writes, “There is no more fundamental assault on democracy and the rule of law than overturning the results of a free and fair election.”

When Trump announced his last election campaign in Waco, Texas, it was a form of endorsement of White Christian Nationalism. According to Stevens, it was a link to Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge, and Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing that targeted the federal government.

In Kathleen Belew’s masterful “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary in America,” the author writes, “Nowhere was the horror of Ruby Ridge more acutely registered than in the white power movement.”

Trump’s Waco speech starkly presented his election as a “final battle” of good versus evil and of a “final battle,” linked to biblical end times.

Stevens writes, “As Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry (above) wrote in their 2022 book, “The Flag and the Cross,” as absurd as it might seem that a three-time divorced failed casino owner who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy could appeal to conservative Christians, Trump fits a narrative of Christian Nationalism:”

“The first thing to note is that Trump's MAGA narrative can be understood as a semi-secularized version of white Christian nationalism's deep story. Trump's narrative is shorn of the sorts of biblical references and allusions that peppered earlier presidents' speeches.

But the MAGA narrative still has many parallels with the deep story. The most obvious one is between the apocalyptic strand of white Christian nationalism and the catastrophizing aspect of MAGA. Premillennialists believe that there will be a final battle between good and evil, a life-and-death struggle between natural and supernatural forces that is visible to them, but invisible to unbelievers. Trump's worldview is similar. ‘Disaster’ is one of his favorite words. He sees life as an endless battle between us and them. He sees hidden conspiracies everywhere he looks. We should not be surprised that Trump's rhetoric resonated so strongly with many white devotees of Christian nationalism. Their deep stories are quite similar.”

At today’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference President Trump lied to evangelical supporters that recently elected democratic socialists were “hardcore godless communists” who “will close your churches in this country.”

Trump said. “They will kill your people and that's what they're about. They want to end religion.”

The opposite of “diversity, equity and inclusion” can be considered as religious-based “racism, inequality, and exclusion.” It’s “Us vs. Them” instead of “E Pluribus Unum.”

By using the words of other authors to make his point, Stevens achieves a brilliant strategy of illustrating the five “building blocks” of autocracy: propagandists, support of a major party, finances, legal theories to legitimate actions, and shock troops.

General Hertling’s reminder to read old books for new ideas also applies to “old” ideas: freedom over suppression, ethics over corruption, and democracy over autocracy.

We have Hertling’s book, “If I Don't Return: A Father's Wartime Journal” on our summer reading list.