Intended or Accidental Authoritarians?

We as a nation are currently paying the consequences for decisions made by short sighted establishment “Movement Conservatives” in their quest for power in the American government. What began with Nixon, was sewn into the fabric of Republican political strategy with Reagan, and perfected with Trump; this post truth doctrine has created a bastardized version of the founders and their principles. 

To be fair, and maybe this is too generous, I don’t believe that the political movers and shakers of the time, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Roger Ailes et. al, were thinking of downstream effects as they were crafting the narrative that has turned into the modern GOP platform. At least, I don’t want to have to believe that they willfully plunged this nation of democratic freedom, in principle if not in completeness of action, towards authoritarianism and the supremacy of a select few. Well, maybe Manafort did given his later actions and dealings surrounding Russian Oligarchs. 

Either way, whether intended or not, we are dealing with the ramifications of their eschewing of truth in pursuit for voters and power. 

At the time, I feel Republicans were simply trying to find effective ways to manipulate voters into putting them into office so that they could use the mechanisms of government to reshape the nation in their image. In their eyes, voters were simply a means to an end and it did not matter what lies they fed to stoke anti-democrat sentiment as long as it got them into office. They were making bad faith arguments while relying on the good faith of the government establishment to maintain the foundations of democracy while they hung their “conservative” ideals on the walls. This was all “well and good” while there were still old guard politicians acting as a buffer to their zealotry (real or manufactured).

However, now in 2025, we are seeing what happens when conservative politicians who have “grown up” in a post truth era take office. Never in their political careers has there been any accountability for things said to get into office. As long as their made up data and misinterpreted, or out of context, research speaks to their voters’ fears that they themselves have manufactured, nothing else matters. We are seeing the manifestation of the lie based belief that only certain people are fit to govern because they know what is best. This is authoritarianism, and it always results in the further disenfranchisement of the working class, the regular people that were manipulated to vote it into office or to put it in power. By definition, authoritarians will only enact policy to their benefit and to the benefit of their wealthy benefactors that enabled them to come to power. 

By advancing a narrative that Liberals were evil socialists out to redistribute wealth from working class americans (read “the rich”) to women and minorities (read “anyone who wasn’t a white male”), Republicans created a breeding ground of fearful zealots worried that their freedom and liberty (read “ability to feel superior”) were at stake. Donald Trump has weaponized this to stay out of prison and enrich himself and select others. 

I understand that this can be considered a naive position, choosing to believe that the GOP has accidentally stumbled into a gleeful embrace of ideals and philosophy antithetical to the principles of our founders and this nation. To clarify, creating Trump and the MAGA cult in 2016 was most likely, I hope, not the intention. The embrace of that ideology since then is absolutely the disgrace to this country that it seems. 

The alternative is to believe that a large section of the American people, and their leaders, are forgoing the ideas of freedom and equality under the law to recapture an era when the enslavement of other human beings was the norm. And let me be explicitly clear, the distance between rich plantation owners of the 1850’s looking to “protect their investment” to uber rich corporate elites looking for “deregulation” is not nearly as far as they want us to believe. What the american people have lost sight of, what women, black, asian, hispanic, and any other minority americans have been trying to say for damn near 100 years or more, is that we will suffer for their enrichment. 

Which leads me to a very uncomfortable question. At what point does America’s desire to live a life of prosperity through the wealth created by the sweat of their labor finally outweigh the desire to claim supremacy over those seen as “less than”?

– The People. Of, By, and For