In a democratic society, a person’s fundamental rights are respected and protected, including the rights of the people who work AGAINST it. And those rights are earned, not given, by fighting hard for Democracy. American Democracy are inscribed in the Constitution. Once its constitutional democratic institutions are undermined, ordinary Americans will go back to being slaves at the beck and call of a few who are in power.
The people behind the Republican Party’s push for Donald Trump to win the presidency this year, 2024, are MAGA Republicans who are trying, one step at a time, to undo democratic institutions until Democracy is replaced by Aristocracy or another form of dictatorship.
Who are they? The followers and practitioners of an outlandish political doctrine called Traditionalism, formulated by a Frenchman who uncannily resembled Stephen Miller, the acerbic anti-immigration advocate, and his followers. Traditionalism dictates that white men rule the world, and other people including white women must be put in their place as white men’s subordinates. That was the tradition since Cro-Magnon men took women by the hair to drag them to their caves for copulation (it is doubtful they had anything resembling the concept of wife or marriage).
The former president and his supporters, MAGA Republicans and their allies want to restore that tradition disguised under the pretext of restoring Aristocracy that has a more romantic, therefore more palatable and acceptable to their supporters.
Racism has always been a negative force in society long exploited by its bad elements. But since the rise of world immigration, racism has become a political strategy – and a very effective one to gain political power. White people have flocked to the MAGA Movement in droves due to their unfounded fear that their culture, tradition, and even lives are about to change by immigrants. But change is the course of nature.
The compass and gunpowder were invented by China, a loathsome country to MAGA. But learning from it and adopting its knowledge opened the world, literally, to the Europeans. Adopting foreign ways of life and making good use of them has been the right course of progress, and, in light of the history of life on Earth (a very enlightening series on Netflix), is one way of saving mankind in the long run. If America just stays calm and thinks deeply about foreign cultures and enriches its people’s life by sensibly adopting them into its own culture such as using gun powder to clear the boulders to build the Panama Canal, but not for killing our fellow humans. Complaining about foreign culture is misplaced.
White folks support the MAGA Movement for another reason: its pursuit of white supremacy within a white nation. MAGA Republicans have been using it to build their grass root support to control Republican elected officials to make sure that they are in line with their grand plan to restore Aristocracy and from there to a white dominated world – to be exact, white men dominated world.
But is it in the interest of white people to support the former president and the MAGA Movement?
It is definitely not in the interest of white women, unless they want to be submissive to white men to caress their egos. The former president, to woo them, has soften MAGA’s position on abortion. But he has been known to change his position on many issues, opportunistically. Besides, even if he turned out to be “soft” on abortion and women’s rights, MAGA Republicans would not let him. There have been indications that he is the head of the Republican ticket because MAGA put him there, but MAGA themselves formulate policies and implement them.
The answer is the same for white men including Republicans. The pro-Aristocracy faction whose members have surfaced lately in debates in public forums, posits that Aristocracy is better than Democracy for America. They seem to be willing to debate Thomas Jefferson: Stephen Bannon versus Thomas Jefferson. America’s money, and trust, should be on and in Jefferson.
Younger generations of white Americans have politically experienced nothing but Democracy, so they are easily persuaded to try something new such as Aristocracy. A war against a dictatorship, WWII, was 80 years ago. All the horrible things committed by the German Nazi were just stories, boringly repeated that they might as well forget them.
But it should be remembered that their ancestors had been there and done that. For hundreds of years, ancestors of European and American white had fought not just tooth and nail but with blood and tears to get rid of Aristocracy, because it was bad, really bad, for them, for their well-beings and for their children’s development. They even migrated to America to escape the Aristocrats’ tight grip on their life. And after years of living in freedom and practicing democratic politics, they found out the political truth that Aristocracy had no place in America, in their lives, and the lives of theirs descendants.
Young Americans should be conscious of the horrendous ramifications when a dictatorship takes hold of a country, such as the German Nazi, the North Korean regime, and Putin’s Russia.
After Barack Obama was elected president, some of those descendants frantically searched for an antidote to what they perceived as the doom of the white men’s supremacy. Because they could not think of anything better to replace Democracy, they compulsively attacked, and continue to attack their opponents who are practically everybody who is not MAGA, bad mouthing their opponents, and readily and disdainfully labeling them “woke” whatever that means.
But their plan is now clear and in the open: they want a dictatorship that would make it more effective for them to control and easier to suppress the populace and exile their opponents.
People thought that the former president slipped his tongue when he said that he would be a dictator on day one. But he also said at a conservative Christian event in July that “Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” So, it was not a slip of the tongue but deliberate declarations carefully calibrated so that the populace are conditioned to something that will certainly happen if he and MAGA win this year presidential and congressional elections: a dictatorship.
George Washington, a man who could not lie, fought against Aristocracy and upheld Democracy by serving as president for two terms then retired even though if he wanted, he could have been king or at least president for life. Donald Trump lost the election but fought and continues fighting with suspicious means (lying is one of them) to cling to being president. Now he plots to be president for life or emperor. His temperament is clearly in sync with dictators’. He is more comfortable with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin than leaders in the free world. He has more kind words to talk about Kim, who put his uncle in a cage for the dogs to tear his body into pieces when he was alive, and Putin who eliminated so many of his billionaire cronies and political opponents that the number is uncertain when they disagreed with him. The former president has only disdain for leaders of the free and democratic nation.
Recently even before he could be back in the White House, the former president publicly called for the national guards or the military to “handle” his opponents. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think … they should be easily handled by … the National Guards or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” He even named California Rep. Adam Schiff as “the enemy within” who should be “handled” by the Guards or the military.
As he seems to be in no mood for political discourse, political debate, or political opposition, it is clear that the former president is deeply anti-democratic. That is probably a big reason why MAGA sticks with him and defends him despite his erratic and weird behavior as observed by many.
America, even though the best society in the whole world in many terms, still has social ills. Understandably, Americans want to address them. But the solution is definitely not voting for MAGA. A dictatorship or Aristocracy once established, would be there forever to carry out its natural mission: to enslave the multitude to serve a privileged few.
The first few years of a Trump MAGA administration after 2024 would be champagne and caviar for its supporters. Then in no time, Americans including MAGA Republicans would find that gun control would be semantic because they would have no right to own a gun let alone a concealed pistol. Twitter or X would go first among the media outlets and what’s left of it would be a propaganda tool working for the regime.
If a former president calls for a current congressman to be “handled” by the military, a dictatorial president’s security apparatus would “handle” not just Twitter but its CEO as well if it ran a post critical of him. All news channels, talk shows, and podcasts would be closed; a dictatorship would not need that many outlets because it would only need one to fawningly praise, 24/7, the “great leader” who was forever magnificent and wise even if he turned lies into a normal way of communication and, even though he did not say so, made false statements acceptable such that WWII was fictional, the Holocaust was fake, and there was no history of any race which had made sacrifices with sweat, tears, and blood to help build this country.
The former president has denied any connection with the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 (please read my previous post). He shifted his position many times on abortion to gain women’s votes. But he made false or misleading claims 30,573 times during his four years in the White House as counted by the Washington Post. The historian Douglas Brinkley called Donald Trump a “serial liar”. The psychiatrist Donnel Stern declared that Trump “lies as a policy” and “will say anything” to satisfy his supporters or himself.
It is hard to believe a person of such lying caliber will keep his word on abortion, or not replace Democracy with Aristocracy or a dictatorship, or not jail his opponents, or not carry out Project 2025. With his belligerent attitude toward the lawful result of the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 riot, it would be naïve to trust him to uphold law and order.
Here are the two possible scenarios of the political landscape of the U.S. after the 2024 election:
Democrats won. Democracy would be preserved, the rights of the people, rich as well as poor, MAGA and non-MAGA, were protected. In four years, if they could not solve the country’s problems, voters could vote them out in 2028. Or,
MAGA Republicans won the election in 2024. There would be no chance for the people to change guards in 2028 or ever after. In four years since 2016, MAGA has learned from within how to manipulate and control the American security apparatus. Since 2020, with the help of the billionaires’ money and AI, they have developed even more sophisticated ways to impose a dictatorship on the country and tighten their grip on the populace. If modern dictators such as Putin and Kim could do it, Trump and MAGA could do it. Americans could go out and buy a hamburger and a beer then come back home to listen to the radio singing praise of the dear leader, but never ever could say the emperor was naked. Public opinion would be a forgotten political term. The country and its constitutional democratic foundation would be turned upside down.
Could the U.S.A. turn into a Hitler’s Germany, Putin’s Russia, or Kim’s North Korea? The votes in November will answer the question.
JOHN P. LE PHONG.