Logan Ramsey
News Editor
Donald Trump’s election was what made me want to go into journalism. As a senior in high school, who already felt pressured to pick a career path, listening to the way he talked about journalists made me realize how important good information would be over the next four years. It felt like a way to fight back against the authoritarian shift in the country.
And it’s not just America that’s been shifting authoritarian. We’re a part of a world trend.
Some of you may disagree with the assertion that Trump is an authoritarian, so I’m not going to try and prove that to you. What you need to understand is that Trump never would have won the presidency in a vacuum, and the stage had been set for an authoritarian to take power in America for two decades.
Blind patriotism has been brewing in this country for my entire short life. I was three when the World Trade Center was destroyed. People my age might not remember 9/11 but we’ve grown up in a country defined by that fateful day.
After these horrific attacks, the American populace expressed a new wave of patriotism and cheered the military on as they declared a war on terror. It was a war that would never end.
While this happened, the attacks inspired great fear, which allowed the government to take away the average citizen’s rights to privacy and introduce a surveillance state.
Despite these surveillance programs being deemed illegal in court, they continue to this day and the American public pays little attention to them. Most of us are aware that the government and corporations collect vast quantities of information on us and yet the majority doesn’t really care. The convenience that corporate surveillance offers us and the security government surveillance gives us outweighs the loss of privacy in many people’s minds.
All of these powers the government gained after 9/11 are the tools of an authoritarian state, but neither George Bush nor Barack Obama could be defined as an authoritarian leader. For an authoritarian to take power, it requires great anger in the public.
Racial tension has always been a feature of American life, but it has been on the rise since the 1990s.
The Rodney King Riots took place six years before I was born. The acquittal of the officers who beat King was just one instance in a long pattern of racial injustice since our country’s founding. The rage that gripped Los Angeles has never been answered for to this day. Instead, cases like King’s have been ignored by both political parties and allowed to happen again and again.
Even while people of color have never been offered the same protection under the law that white people have, society has become far more progressive than it ever had been before. Racist beliefs once held in the mainstream were no longer tolerated. Politically correct dialogue entered the national conversation. We elected our first black president. It felt like the country was on an upwards trend of progress.
But it didn’t feel like that for everyone. As a teenager who grew up in a conservative area, listening to Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck on the radio, I felt like we were losing our country. I thought reverse racism was real, illegal immigrants were stealing our jobs and American values were eroding.
While I grew out of these beliefs as I learned how to read the news, I wasn’t alone in feeling them. Conservative white people felt like they were losing their place in society, so they became angrier and angrier.
Then one strange event changed everything. Donald Trump was elected president. The man who ran for the highest office in the land just to show everyone that he could. The right rallied around him because he was the man they’d been waiting for.
After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, my relatives were devastated. They complained about how all the politicians were beholden to the lobbyists, even Romney, and money had ruined politics. At one point in the conversation, I remember hearing, “We just need someone rich enough to not be bought out by the system.” I think this was a sentiment felt by many Americans. We wanted someone who was above it all, and would bring our country back.
Trump became that person in our eyes, whether that was the reality or not. The truth is that he’s someone who’s capitalized off the system and bent it to his advantage. He lived in the lap of privilege his whole life, and was not prepared to take on the office of president.
We could debate endlessly about his entire presidency and never come to a consensus, but he has indisputably continued the state’s trend of increasing authoritarianism.
I used to think that conservatism was a disease in society, but that’s another belief I’ve grown out of. I don’t blame conservatives for feeling the way they did before 2016, because there are misleading media figures, like the ones I listened to, that prey on fears of a changing world.
If conservatives knew that the source of their problems aren’t illegal immigrants or declining American values, but the very politicians who claim to care for them, then we wouldn’t be nearly as divided as we are now. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the two political parties of America’s duopoly want.
The 21st Century began with a republican as president, then we elected a democrat, and then another republican. All three of these presidents continued the U.S. on a trend of authoritarianism, so I don’t see this course reversing anytime soon.
Fear, anger and ever-increasing state power is what gives way to authoritarianism. America has checked all of these boxes for a long time and it will only get worse as time progresses.
The problem with the state gaining increasing power is that it’s up to them to give that power up. One party may promise to reverse that trend, but once they gain office, they have the power. It’s much easier to make promises than to keep them.
So how do we stop this? That’s still a question I can’t answer. What I do know is that we all need to know that authoritarianism is the path our government is taking us down, and it’ll take more than a presidential election to turn the tide.
