La fantasy politics applied to the United States has its own history and the main text remains It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935 by Sinclair Lewis, the first American Nobel Prize winner for literature (1930). A super populist, Berzelius Buzz Windrip, wins the 1936 elections promising prosperity and glory for the forgotten man, restores tradition, peace and success, but he quickly silences Congress, ignores the Constitution and the law, organizes his own implacable militia, and soon comes the civil war, which only the little newspaperman Doremus Jessup had seen coming.
From the dystopia of the 30s to the signs of the present
Those were the days of the greatest fascist success, in Italy and Germany and elsewhere, Windrip It's a somewhat different and very American version of it, but he went to school, and with success. He drew inspiration from the super populist Huey Long, former governor of Louisiana and senator, killed in an assassination attempt in 1935, and who was preparing to challenge Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 vote.
There are several Doremus Jessups today, in Canada in particular, but even more obviously in the United States, and also in Europe and in Italy. Talking about civil war Is it unrealistic to believe that it's possible in the United States today? Yes, probably. But it's no longer absurd. Various assumptions that could, at a certain point and very quickly, make it possible—not necessarily make it explode, but make it possible—have already materialized. A recent analysis of Eric Schickler, a renowned political scientist from Berkeley, puts them in order: it is entitled “What Donald Trump Has Taught Us about American Political Institutions”, and was published by Political Science Quarterly, and it's a good starting point. It explains how and why the American political system, with a movement that now has decades of undetected slippage, has generated a Trump and an institutional reality that is very different and far more fragile than what many still delude themselves into thinking it is.
The Explosive Mix: Party, Executive Theory, and the Supreme Court
Nobody expected what happened, and even less so political scientists, Schickler argues. The explosive mix consists of three main components: a populist Republican Party, a metamorphosis that began half a century ago and concluded in 2016 when Trump it still looked like a foreign body to the history of the party; the “unitary executive theory”, a reading of the Constitution that began in the Reagan years and which reduces or in any case brings back into the hands of the president the autonomy of bodies created by Congress as unquestionable guardians of important sectors, such as transport for example or, at worst, the Federal Reserve which governs the currency; and finally, fundamentally, a Supreme Court with a clear conservative majority This paved the way, especially since John Roberts took office 20 years ago, seemingly a man of mediation and balance, but in reality a faithful executor of the Republican right's strategy. With him and five of his colleagues, the institution created to defend the Constitution has disappeared, becoming, with a few exceptions, by a majority, the institution to "defend" the executive branch from the Constitution.
The Crisis of Checks and Balances: An Increasingly Fragile Institutional System
Schickler touches on the Court here only in his conclusion, but he does not fail to indicate the centrality of the chief judges, members of a Court which, as he wrote New York Times, he betrayed his mandate. He left Trump's lie completely unpunished. Democratic election fraud in 2020A lie that Trump continues to maintain, never truly proven in over 60 lawsuits across the US, and which has become the cornerstone of Trumpism: the man of destiny stopped only by deception, but only for a pause. For five years, entry into Trump's court has required a constant and fervent endorsement of the deception theory.
Then the Court pretended not to see theassault on Congress on January 6, 2021 to block the ratification of the Joseph Bide's victoryn, the culmination of two months of Trumpian maneuvers to overturn the election results. And then, raising enormous doubts, he invented a total extension of presidential immunity, with the ruling of July 1, 2024, to protect Trump from any consequences, including that of the subsequent forgiveness for all those involved in the assault on Congress, which was not as bloodless as is known. Since then, the Court has continued, with a few partial exceptions, to pave the way for the president, including through a completely abnormal use of the emergency docket, brief preliminary decisions without explanation but which can be valid for up to a couple of years.
Two highly anticipated and imminent opinions concern one duties, whether or not they can be decided without the approval of Congress, to which the Constitution entrusts trade rules; the other, the constitutionality or otherwise of Trump's choice to restrict ius soli, automatic citizenship for those born on American soil. And there are many other crucial issues on the Court's waiting list. "Given the essentially supine nature of the Republican-controlled Congress, the stability of American democracy depends more than it should on the Supreme Court, which has thus far failed to live up to its constitutional role," wrote the Editorial Board of the New York Times. While Kate Shaw, a jurist at the University of Pennsylvania, observed back in May that "the Court may believe it retains supreme authority to check presidential noncompliance with the law, even as it approves the elimination of many other checks and balances. But the risk is that, by the time the Court decides to exercise its authority, it will be too late."
Schickler speaks above all of the deep crisis of these checks and balances, summarized by James Madison in 1788 with the famous phrase "ambition must check ambition," which is the central objective of the separation of powers. Congress is no longer a separate power from the executive branch, even though Article I of the Constitution designates it as the pivot and highest authority of federal power. Trump, thanks to the organization of the MAGA movement, to the myriad of websites and online activists, has been able and can punish any congressman and senator who dares to oppose it, even if their numbers are beginning to increase. The idea of a congressional impeachment, however, makes no sense in this context. The White House has been able cut budgets of federal agencies and ministries decided by Congress without consulting it, an act that violates the Constitution and the 1974 law, and carry out major military actions (Venezuela) without consulting it.
Likewise Trump and his advisers, who unlike in 2016 have long prepared this time the plan of attack and "rebirth" of the American institutional systemThey haven't forgotten civil society. Four sectors that matter, and for nearly a century have represented a significant counterweight even if they certainly lack constitutional standing, have been humiliated and defused: big business, with the partial exception of the stock market, the mainstream media, universities in general and elite ones in particular, and large law firms. Funding cuts, threats of intervention, demands for reparations and propitiatory gestures, and cash.
The following were treated in the same way: autonomous bodies of the federal system, gradually established by Congress since the 1920s, but especially since the 1950s, with sufficient autonomy to act without political pressure. The Fed is a special case, of course, but it partly belongs to this category. And we'll see what the medium-term consequences for the dollar will be if its autonomy is challenged by the Court's upcoming ruling.
A democratic model on the edge
In short, the American institutional system that set the world standard is no longer there. "The resulting potential for a breakdown of the democratic system, something almost no political scientist anticipated just fifteen years ago," Schickler concludes, "is all too real today."
After serious incident in Minneapolis last week, the woman killed who did not try to run over the ICE anti-immigration agent at all, the entire executive rose up in defense of the latter, claiming falsehood, and the vice president JD Vance He also declared that every agent is covered by "full immunity" for conduct on duty. Similar statements came from Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security and head of ICE. Immunity, indeed, like Trump. And to think that General Noem had told the Americans this. John F. Kelly, Trump's White House chief of staff for a year and a half in 2017-2018—effectively prime minister—with perfect credentials as a conservative Republican, but honest, told him that Trump has no idea what the American Constitution is. Let's hope the Supreme Court remembers this at some point.
But maybe, let's let this population of human waste self-destruct with civil war, the whole world would be better off, let's pray that happens, I want to see the USA in flames!!!!