A Centrist Democrat President Will Ultimately Enshrine Authoritarian Rule in America (abridged)

Synopsis added 11/7/2020

• Societal inequities and institutional corruption promote social instability, racism, sexism, xenophobia, tribalism, and the denial of scientific facts and truth.
• History has shown that eliminating these drivers of America’s demise will be a Herculean task that cannot be accomplished through incremental, middle of the road political initiatives.
• “(I)f we don’t do bold change, we could end up with someone worse than Donald Trump in four years.” Senator Charles Schumer

Many Americans believe that the most important issue in the 2020 Presidential election is to ensure that Trump is removed from the White House. This electoral sound bite overlooks a much more important problem, social inequities and institutional corruption, which has the potential to cause America to devolve into an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian state. Unfortunately, fixing these problems will be immensely difficult.

For many Americans, the American Dream is now a myth, as an individual’s socioeconomic destiny can largely be predicted by their birth zip code. The advantages that an individual will obtain from our political, judicial, educational, financial and medical institutions are now, to some extent, inversely proportional to their socioeconomic status. Thus, many Americans have concluded: “I am unable to get ahead because the system is rigged against people like me.”

Social scientists believe societal inequities cause social discord. The resultant discord has caused many Americans to question the value of democracy in America. Polling data found that 20–30% of Americans would be willing to jettison democracy and 32% of Americans believe that having a “strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress or elections was either good or very good.”

The Democratic Party is now trying to decide whether their nominee should come from the centrist or egalitarian branches of the Party.

If a Democrat is sworn into the Oval Office in January 2021, it is inconceivable that Donald Trump will withdraw from public life. He will spend his time as an ex-President on Fox or Trump TV condemning the Democrat President, inflaming and dividing America, and laying the groundwork for re-taking the White House in 2024.

Unfortunately, history has shown that a centrist Democrat President will not mitigate America’s social inequities and institutional corruption, as those problems have only continued to to get worse during the tenures of our recent centrist Democrat Presidents.

By the time we get to the 2024 Presidential campaign between an incumbent centrist Democrat and Donald Trump, Americans will be even more divided and disillusioned. In response, America will choose to reelect an authoritarian Republican who has repeatedly stated that he is the only person who can fix the problems which plague America. And after he is sworn-in on January 2025, he will finish reconfiguring the US Government to ensure that he remains in the White House indefinitely.

And thus ends America’s 2.5 century experiment in democracy.

In the last few decades, we have seen more than 2 dozen countries devolve from democracies into various stages of illiberal democracies and authoritarian states. There is no objective reason to believe America is immune from the anti-democracy virus which has infected the rest of the world.

To reestablish democracy in America, we must eliminate societal inequity and institutional corruption, which are the primary drivers of discord in the American body politic. This will require a President who is willing to alienate powerful people and institutions as they shift wealth and power from the few to the many.

As a centrist Democrat President will not eliminate societal inequities and institutional corruption, (what’s past is prologue) the only way to preserve democracy in America is for Americans to choose the path of putting an egalitarian Democrat into the White House.

If this egalitarian Democrat President is successful at eliminating/reducing societal inequities and institutional corruption, all boats will rise and a societal consensus will emerge that it is in the best interests of all Americans to reaffirm the wisdom of the US Constitution, the essentiality of a tripartite government and re-establish the truth that a free and objective press is essential to maintaining a functioning democracy.

Americans will then no longer fear for their future and will desist from sequestering themselves into tribes, politicians who promote societal discord will be ostracized and authoritarianism will crawl back under the rock from which it recently emerged.

And then, maybe, America will again become the shining light on the hill.

There is only a single path that has the potential to enshrine democracy in America. A centrist Democratic Presidential nominee is not on that path.

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Note: For a more “referenced” version of this article, see https://medium.com/@HZwerling/a-centrist-democrat-president-will-enshrine-authoritarian-rule-in-america-16f8ff6271d6