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.”

An Imperial Presidency’s ‘Prerogative’

Review by Bill Doughty

Some of America’s greatest presidents have assumed emergency powers during crises. Jefferson took the law into his own hands when he ordered the arrest of Aaron Burr for treason. Lincoln blockaded ships of the Confederacy and employed exceptional powers in the Civil War. FDR assumed extraordinary powers as Commander in Chief Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt

They acted on “presidential prerogative,” a right to act temporarily outside of the Constitution as justified in times of emergency or extraordinary imminent threat to the nation.

But, like George Washington before them, they worked with Congress and followed constraints of the courts. In his farewell address, Washington rejected “change by usurpation; for through this, in one instance, may the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.” Washington famously turned down calls to serve as president beyond his two terms.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. examines the history of the tension between the executive and the other co-equal branches of government in “The Imperial Presidency” (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973). Despite being written more than half a century ago, this remarkable book is relevant in 2026 in the era of “No Kings” protests. In fact, as we show, Schlesinger predicted what the United States is now experiencing –– 50 years after his book was published.

President John F. Kennedy and historian/advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Schlesinger, an advisor to JFK, was an advocate for a strong forward-thinking executive as essential to a healthy democracy. But in The Imperial Presidency –– published near the end of the Vietnam War, the Nixon presidency, and Watergate scandal –– he warns of the expansion of presidential power leading to dangerous abuse of the office.

His book and conclusions especially resonate in a topsy-turvy week –– as the current president and his administration go after a former FBI director for posting a picture of seashells, attack a comedian for telling a joke, justify tearing down part of the White House to build a ballroom, and try to manage a war of choice that is causing massive damage to the world's economy..

Years later Schlesinger also criticized George Bush’s ill-conceived “needless war” in Iraq, calling Bush an “imperial president.”

Marines marching prisoners in Iraq in 2003.

Commitment to the Constitution

Key to the success of American democracy, Schlesinger contends, is respect for and commitment to separation of powers as outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

“The American Constitution was established, for better or worse, on an idea new to the world in the eighteenth century and still uncommon in the twentieth century –– the idea of the separation of powers. This forbidding phrase represented a distinctive American contribution to the art of government. There had been no such doctrine in medieval times. Before the eighteenth century, everyone assumed that government required the unification of authority. But the Founding Fathers, who saw conflict as the guarantee of freedom, grandly defied the inherited wisdom. Instead of concentrating authority in a single institution, they chose to disperse authority among three independent branches of government, equipping the leaders of each, in the words of the 51st Federalist Paper, with the ‘necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.’ These branches, as every schoolchild used to know, were the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. The Constitution thus institutionalized conflict in the very heart of the American polity.

The question has always remained –– and has provided a central theme of American political history –– how a government based on the separation of powers could be made to work.”

Using events in American history, Schlesinger examines how a balance of power without checks on that power can create “inertia” that allows a president to become a corrupt autocrat. He shows how the executive branch can then manipulate fear, hate, religion, and emergencies such as war to breach the Constitution.

Schlesinger writes this:

“This book consequently devotes special attention to the history of the war-making power. The assumption of that power by the Presidency was gradual and usually under the demand or pretext of emergency. It was as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation. As it took place, there dwindled away checks, both written and unwritten, that had long held the Presidency under control. The written checks were in the Constitution. The unwritten checks were in the forces and institutions a President once had to take into practical account before he made decisions of war and peace –– the cabinet and the executive branch itself, the Congress, the judiciary, the press, public opinion at home and the opinion of the world. By the early 1970s the American President had become on issues of war and peace the most absolute monarch (with the possible exception of Mao Tse-tung of China) among the great powers of the world.

The Indochina War placed this problem high on the national consciousness. But the end of American military involvement in Southeast Asia would not extinguish the problem. The assertions of sweeping and unilateral presidential authority remained official doctrine in foreign affairs. And, if the President were conceded these life-and-death decisions abroad, how could he be restrained from gathering unto himself the less fateful powers of the national polity? For the claims of unilateral authority in foreign policy soon began to pervade and embolden the domestic Presidency. ‘Perhaps it is a universal truth,’ Madison had written Jefferson, ‘that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.’ The all-purpose invocation of 'national security,' the insistence on executive secrecy, the withholding of information from Congress, the refusal to spend funds appropriated by congress, the attempted intimidation of the press, the use of the White House itself as a base for espionage and sabotage directed against the political opposition –– all signified the extension of the imperial Presidency from foreign to domestic affairs. Underneath such developments there could be discerned a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers itself.”

Schlesinger continues:

“This book is written out of a double concern. The first concern is that the pivotal institution of the American government, the Presidency, has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint. The second concern is that revulsion against inordinate theories of presidential power may produce an inordinate swing against the Presidency and thereby do essential damage to our national capacity to handle the problems of the future. The answer to the runaway Presidency is not the messenger-boy Presidency. The American democracy must discover a middle ground between making the President a czar and making him a puppet. The problem is to devise means of reconciling a strong and purposeful Presidency with equally strong and purposeful forms of democratic control. Or, to put it succinctly, we need a strong Presidency — but a strong Presidency within the Constitution.”

The solution is to find a balance between a strong executive and strong guardrails of, by, and for the people. Schlesinger examines the yin-yang relationship between the executive and legislative branches within the context of the War Powers Act and how the military is used or abused.

[Of note, England’s King Charles spoke to a joint session of Congress yesterday in this “No Kings” era and 250th commemoration of the birth of the United States. Charles praised the prowess of the American military. And he gently rebuked those who are against NATO, who oppose support for Ukraine, who only look "inward," who refuse to recognize climate change, and who want an imbalance of power without checks and balances. He did not mention directly the hundreds of women who were victims of Epstein, Maxwell and friends (including Charles’s brother Andrew).]

Corruption and Tyranny

Near the end of The Imperial Presidency, Schlesinger makes the provocative statement that “Watergate was potentially the best thing to have happened to the Presidency in a long time.”

Facing certain impeachment, Nixon was forced to resign the presidency. His associates were jailed and humiliated. But accountability and lessons-learned sometimes do not last forever.

Here’s Schlesinger's astounding prediction from 50 years ago:

“We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.

A constitutional Presidency, as the great Presidents had shown, could be a very strong Presidency indeed. But what kept a strong President constitutional, in addition to checks and balances incorporated within his own breast, was the vigilance of the nation. Neither impeachment nor repentance would make much difference if the people themselves had come to an unconscious acceptance of the imperial Presidency. The Constitution could not hold the nation to ideals it was determined to betray. The reinvigoration of the written checks in the American Constitution depended on the reinvigoration of the unwritten checks in American society. The great institutions — Congress, the courts, the executive establishment, the press, the universities, public opinion — had to reclaim their own dignity and meet their own responsibilities. As Madison said long ago, the country could not trust to "parchment barriers" to halt the encroaching spirit of power. In the end, the Constitution would live only if it embodied the spirit of the American people.”

The presidency has some prerogatives in times of crisis. But in the American democracy, Congress has the prerogative to impeach the president, fund the government, and declare war. Under the Constitution, the media (and comedians) have the prerogative and right to free expression. And the people have the ultimate prerogative through their voice and vote –– as long as voting is not corrupted by an imperial presidency.

“Unless the American democracy figures out how to control the Presidency in war and peace without enfeebling the Presidency across the board, then our system of government will face grave troubles,” Schlesinger warns.

The Imperial Presidency concludes with a quote from Walt Whitman:

“"There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, –– and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance –– Tyranny may always enter –– there is no charm, no bar against it –– the only bar against it is a large resolute breed of men [and women].”

Andrew Young ‘An Easy Burden’

Review by Bill Doughty

He was a lieutenant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, he was by his side not only in life but also at King’s death at the hands of an assassin.

Andrew Young, now in his 90s, has had many titles in his lifetime: UN Ambassador, Mayor of Atlanta, Congressional Representative, Co-chair of Olympic Games, Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. His other titles include: civil rights leader, peacemaker, family man, and author.

Young’s “An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America” (HarperCollins, 1996) is as relevant today as it was when written nearly 30 years ago.

Need a jolt of hope? This is a good book filled with optimism in the face of pessimism, love in a time of hate, and unity despite efforts at creating division and inequality.

Andrew Young shows how the American civil rights movement arose largely as a result of World War II and the resultant Marshall Plan. The military provided proof and a blueprint for the success of diversity, inclusion, meritocracy, and equality.

Young’s perspective is rooted in a post-colonial world and his religious faith and commitment to nonviolence.

“There were many who made the American civil rights movement possible: men and women, preachers and laypeople, students and workers, young and old. But in the 1960s, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization I was involved with during the civil rights movement, was largely made up of thirtyish, Southern-born, Negro preachers. We were children of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We spent our adolescence enjoying the rise of the United States as a defender of liberty and democracy in World War I. Our high school and university life was defined and colored by the social responsibility of the Marshall Plan, a sense of world community signaled by the founding of the United Nations and, yes, the successful liberation of India from British colonialism— without violence.”

Despite growing up in a segregated and racist South, Young and his compatriots committed themselves to finding the “better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln called for.

Young writes, “The former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass described the effort to end slavery as a struggle to save "black men's bodies and white men's souls." It was in this tradition that the preachers who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided its mission was "to redeem the soul of America."

“That soul we saw less in America's actions than in its ideals: freedom, equality, justice. While we endured segregation, we knew that America had shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of its sons and daughters in a war that ended slavery. We knew that America had risen up out of the depths of a Great Depression to defeat fascism. We had cheered the exploits of Dorie Miller and the Tuskegee Airmen and other colored soldiers who refused to let racial segregation prevent them from offering their lives for freedom and for America, and we were inspired by their example. Dorie Miller was told he could only be a cook's helper, but he dared to believe he could shoot down enemy aircraft [at Pearl Harbor]. The Tuskegee Airmen dared to believe black men could fly. 

We were thought to be naive, but in truth we were visionary. We dared to believe that America could be healed of the gangrene of racism. We saw America as we could become, not just as we were.

We believed that people could change, because we were constantly aware of how far we had come, personally. But most of all, we believed that a free society was constantly changing and that we could influence those changes to accommodate the needs and aspirations of all of our citizens, and that race, creed, gender, and national origin could be strengths rather than problems.

We began with the limited goal of ending racial segregation. But we came to understand segregation as just one aspect of the barrier confronting black Americans in American society.

The March on Washington became a march for jobs and freedom, because in a nation based on free enterprise, access to jobs and money are an essential component of freedom. We came to see the war in Vietnam as a symbol of the destructive role America was playing in suppressing the cause of freedom for people of color not just at home, but around the world.

As America made the world safe for democracy, we had to make America's democracy safe for the world.

Racism, war, and poverty were anchors dragging on our society, preventing us from reaching our full potential, as if anchors from a nineteenth-century sailing ship had been attached to the space shuttle. We accepted the challenges of detaching those anchors.

We knew it was a burden, but we believed it was an easy burden in a country as great as ours. We believed that God didn't give anyone more burden than he or she had the strength to bear. Our faith made our burdens light, because we never carried them alone. Our understanding and clarity of vision was a blessing, and I was taught that God requires us to use the gifts that we have been given. Racism, war, and poverty were heavy burdens, to challenge injustice was an easy burden.

We possessed a fundamental faith in democracy and free enterprise. We learned to address the nation through a free press; we made our claims on the economy by word and deed. We believed in our American heritage-a great people in a great nation that was ready to lead humankind in a new way of thinking and working. We believed in a future that we would help to create from our faith in spite of very real fears. Martin expressed it for all of us when he constantly reminded us that ‘the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’"

In protests and marches for freedom, against poverty, and “against fear,” Young lived and preached a code of nonviolence as learned from MLK who learned it from Ghandi.

Young’s view is one with a wide-aperture –– focused on the whole world and also into the future. And his love for America as well as his hope and optimism are at the center.

“America is so important to the world at this moment in history as we seek a new vision for our world. As I travel around the globe, I am reminded that the heads of state and people of nearly every country look to America for leadership. Yet, the poverty in our midst undermines our will and ability to respond to the call to global leadership and to meet the challenge of global poverty and environmental degradation—a far greater threat to future generations than even the Cold War. When I served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, I became aware of the intense appreciation that the Japanese delegation had for the U.S. role in rebuilding Japan after World War II. That experience led many Japanese businessmen to advocate a global fund for strategic infrastructure projects that would improve the environment, facilitate sustainable development, and generate jobs. They identified fifty such strategic projects, including the English Channel Tunnel (which the British built themselves), a natural gas pipeline across Africa from the Nigerian oil fields to the Mediterranean, and a sea level canal through Nicaragua. Without enthusiastic backing from the United States, a new global infrastructure fund could not move past the visioning stage, yet no nation would benefit more from such projects than the United States. For example, the practical benefits of a canal across Nicaragua to accommodate modern supertankers are at least twofold: given the cost and dangers associated with the long voyage around South America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the canal would pay for itself in short order. Moreover, a canal under international governance would provide the basis for long-term economic growth and resulting political stability for U.S. neighbors and trading partners in Central America.

Investing in development in Central America would produce far better results in reversing the immigration flow than the punitive measures presently finding political favor.

This is the kind of forward thinking that is required from American leadership today: investing in the future to solve problems and prevent problems. How much better to build a canal than to build a wall. How much more effective to support the creation of jobs in their own regions for workers who presently risk life and limb in pursuit of a better life in the United States, rather than to put forward yet another plan for making illegal immigrants' lives only more miserable once they're here. Our nation's prosperity rests on the vision of leaders who invested in and built bridges, roads, canals, communication networks, and national parks. These are the things that make for peace.

In an expanding economy people are too busy making money and accumulating material goods to fight over ancient prejudices.

Had there been growth rather than recession in Europe when Bosnia and Serbia became independent of the former Yugoslavia, I doubt we would have seen the kind of bitter carnage that we have witnessed in that region of the world. The frustration that erupted in riots in South Central Los Angeles were rooted as much in the steady withdrawal of jobs and resources from that community as in the tragic beating of Rodney King.

Our own budget deficit has become the new excuse for ignoring growing problems in our midst and shirking our global responsibilities. But America does not have the luxury of attempting to shrink its way out of deficits; we only enlarge our problems when we withdraw resources from cities, schools, rural communities, infrastructure, parks, health care, and environmental protection. We undermine the integrity and vitality of our communities and we trigger dangerous recessions that breed conflict and violence. Surely responsible and dedicated Americans of all races can, based on the dictates of our minds as well as our hearts, pull together to meet the present challenge of poverty in all its complex manifestations both at home and

I am considerably older than I was in 1961, and I hope I'm wiser and certainly much more experienced after having moved through the Congress, the United Nations, the city of Atlanta, and the private sector. I have yet to find a reason to question or doubt the faith that we had in America then. Everything I know now convinces me that the struggle to eliminate racism, war, and poverty is a burden, but in America, with all the freedom and opportunity afforded us under our Constitution, in the most productive society in human history, it is an easy burden if we undertake it together.”

For much more about Andrew Young, readers may want to watch Rachel Maddow’s new film: “Dirty Work.” From the MSNBC website: “This gripping documentary reveals the untold story of Andrew Young — a behind-the-scenes force of the Civil Rights Movement and a quiet giant of international diplomacy. A master negotiator, strategist, and bridge-builder, Young was the man who did the essential, often thankless ‘dirty work’ that changed history, operating in the shadows while others stood in the spotlight.” Young considers the “dirty work” he did as “an easy burden.

Andrew Young celebrates black history with First Army, Fort Gillem, Georgia, in 2009 (Gayle Johnson, First Army Public Affairs Office)