In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
”Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
”What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends.”
For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their “friends.” They are not friends. They are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.
Right now they’re moving gradually:
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Infiltrating police departments and the enlisted ranks of the military
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Taking over school boards and local boards of elections
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Firing principals and teachers who defend multiracial, multicultural democracy while banning and burning books that contain such “dangerous” ideas
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Gerrymandering states so regardless of how people vote, Republicans control the levers of power
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Changing election laws so they can both make it harder for city-dwellers to vote and to ignore and then change the outcomes of elections they don’t like
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Building media structures that will support the authoritarian takeover when it happens
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Organizing armed paramilitary militias, with back-channel connections to local police
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Creating legal organizations to sanitize and rationalize ending messy democracy
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Radicalizing average Americans through social media and an ever-growning network of hard-right podcasts
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Spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about Democrats and Jews drinking children’s blood
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Firebombing Texas Democratic Party’s Austin headquarters and threatening them that if they don’t stop trying to get Democrats elected worse will come
It was “the other 9/11.” Everything seemed normal until General Pinochet declared he was taking over the government of Chile on September 11, 1973.
The Chilean government had been run democratically since 1923, the longest in South America, but Pinochet (with a little help from our CIA and ITT) had already infiltrated and gotten the loyalty of both the police, the army, and the civilian paramilitaries he’d spent the previous few years nurturing.
So when he rolled up to the presidential palace and declared he was taking over, nobody came to the defense of the elected president, Salvador Allende. The police were already loyal to Pinochet, including the police who defended that nation’s capitol. Allende, along with a few more than 30 supporters, held the palace for a few hours, gave a national radio address, and he then put a gun to his head and ended his presidency.
Gradually, then suddenly.
When Chileans poured into the streets, Pinochet swept them up and held them in the national stadium, where tens of thousands were tortured, murdered or simply disappeared. One of the favorite tactics of his military were to throw “liberals” out of helicopters over the ocean to kill them, a practice celebrated by rightwing militia around the US today.
Pinochet’s democratic political opposition lost all its power and went underground; it would be seventeen years before anything resembling democracy would return to Chile, a process that is still pulling itself together.
If Mike Pence had gone along with Trump’s plan to imitate the election of 1876 and install the guy who lost both the popular and the electoral vote as president (as happened that year when Democrat Samuel Tilden won both votes but the House of Representatives instead installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president),
