Continuing my series of looking at potential apocalypses, I'll veer off into something that isn't technically the end of the world, authoritarianism. As a science fiction author, this is sort of baked into our view of the future. There's a looming doom ahead of us that the relatively free life we enjoy today will vanish and be replaced by an authoritarian form of government that squelches all dissent and makes it a crime to even think the wrong thoughts.
The logic behind this premise is pretty soundly based in historical precedent. Authoritarian regimes do arise repeatedly in human history, and even today a sizable portion of the world's population lives without such fundamental freedoms as the freedom of speech, the freedom to vote, the freedom to own property, the freedom to travel, the freedom to worship, or the freedom to love whoever you wish to love.
Of course, these freedoms are squashed along a sliding scale and to various degrees. Americans are now mostly free to openly love whoever they wish to love, unless, of course, you'd like to be married to multiple partners, or to be involved with a very young person. In the second case, the question of consent and abuse in an excellent reason why we should prohibit such things. As to polygamy between adults... I have to admit I'm not at all certain what logical or legal argument should prohibit such a thing. Such an arrangement strikes me as distasteful and impractical, but I'm not certain why my feelings on such things should have any legal weight in keeping others from doing as they wish to do if it doesn't harm me.
As for free speech, a growing segment of the US supports prohibitions against hate speech. Your freedom to own property is compromised by laws and regulations declaring what you can't do with said property. We also have some odd barriers to voting. Most exist in the name of stamping out fraudulent votes, but there are also punitive laws. In many states, convicts can't vote, even though every other right is returned to them after they've served time. It's odd that some crimes carry a one year prison sentence, followed by a lifetime ban on possessing a fundamental right. As for your freedom to travel, sure, as long as you don't try to get onto a plane with the wrong papers or drive down a highway without the proper documents in your possession.
I give these examples to make a larger point: All governments are authoritarian governments. Every government ever formed by man has given someone the authority to restrict the freedom of other men by taking their property, silencing their voices, restricting their relationships, throwing them into prison, or killing them.
The trade off for giving others the power to restrict our freedom is that we hope they will use this power wisely. We want them to throw murderers into jail, but not the person standing on a street corner holding up a sign saying, "Trump sucks!" We want our governments to keep our next door neighbor from turning his front lawn into a junk yard, or building a fence 50 feet high that throws our house into permanent shadow. On the other hand, if you wanted to grow hemp in your backyard garden next to your tomatoes, you're likely not all that thrilled about the government's power to come and rip up those plants, seize your property and sell it without ever actually convicting you of a crime.
The great danger of authoritarianism is that it's absolutely vital if we want to live in a safe, comfortable, and clean world. Someone needs to be watching what's coming out of our smokestacks. Someone needs to be making certain I can bike through a neighborhood and not have to worry about packs of unleashed dogs chasing me down. And, yes, it does make most of us safer if we give some people with badges the power to stop random strangers for trivial reasons to ask a few questions.
But, of course, slopes are slippery. We get used to granting the government power over those who inconvenience us, then worry when we realize that the government might very well turn those same powers against us.
Good. Keep worrying. The greatest defense against a necessary degree of authoritarianism becoming an oppressive dictatorship is simply knowing and understanding the potential for the danger. To liberal friends who find themselves panicked at the thought about the powers that Trump and the right-wingers have seized, I encourage you to think deeply about why such powers should exist in the first place. If America was to slip into authoritarianism, it would be because we granted a central power too much authority in the name of pursuing some degree of good. We want to save the world from climate change, for instance, so we decide we should skip the messy compromises of the democratic process and allow a central agency to simply dictate the rules. Or, we panic because some people commit crimes like school shootings or flying planes into buildings, then grant our authorities power to seize and hold anyone they find suspicious under laws written vaguely to be broad enough to cover crimes we haven't even thought of yet. Or, we allow ourselves to be comfortable with ignoring the presumption of innocence in the name of respecting the rights of victims. Or, we celebrate the FBI monitoring the phone calls and emails of people we don't trust and don't like. Or, we decide we should subsidize and mandate the use of ethanol in fuels because it's great for the environment, then find ourselves completely unable to reverse the subsidies and mandates once we realize, nope, this path is actually much more harmful for the environment that simply doing nothing.
Before you grant any power to people you like and trust, please, please, please ask yourself one question: Will I also enjoy these powers winding up in the hands of people who are my enemies? Does the potential for abuse outweigh the potential for good? Are you absolutely certain you are wise enough to make that judgment?
The good news is I don't truly fear America sliding into an irreversible authoritarian dystopia for a rather simple reason. Our government was intentionally designed not to work very well. Trump can come into office promising to build a wall. He can have majorities in both houses of congress and a court that shows deference to such matters. And... nothing. Not even a mile of wall can get built. I don't doubt his sincerity in wishing to do so, but there are a zillion obstacles in the way, and any grand project that is going to take more than two or four or eight years to roll out and implement can only move forward successfully with bipartisan buy in. This is going to keep us from doing a lot of grand things, like colonizing Mars or signing some binding international treaty to regulate greenhouses gasses, then implementing it on any realistic time scale. It also likely dooms single-payer health care. Inertia and impotence are built into the system. They aren't the flaws, but the foundation.
The design of the American political system must look absolutely perverse to an outside observer. How the hell do we ever get anything done? Minority forces have too much power to gum up the works. Majority forces become paralyzed by internal fighting among factions. Laws that do get passed get tied up in courts and overturned or neutered. The laws that survive the courts get thrown into a bureaucracy that somehow implements them in the least efficient ways imaginable and often provides advantages to the very industries we'd hoped to regulate.
I can't speak for the rest of the world. Nor can I argue that it's inevitable that the arc or history is going to bend toward greater freedom and justice. But, I can take some measure of comfort in knowing that, at least here, the road to authoritarianism is littered with the landmines of ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and impermanence. So, keep worrying. But don't panic.
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