Why Americans Don’t Fear Dictatorship

Most are already in one.

You’re an American. You live hundreds of miles from Washington DC. You work for a company. You own a house. You’re married. You have kids. You have some money (but could always use more). You have car payments, medical bills, a fat grocery tab, and a boiler that keeps threatening to crap out.

There are two dictators in your life.

One has enormous power over you. Your house, they can kick you out of. Your marriage, they can end. Your kids, they can starve. Your money, they can cut off. Your bills, they can stop you paying. Your groceries, they can deprive you of. Your boiler? It’s not getting fixed but by their good graces.

This dictator can snap their fingers and end you. A stray word, a misunderstood comment, a wrong gesture, an ill tempered email, a single, awkward interaction and everything you have goes. Your kingdom crumbles.

You didn’t vote for this dictator. You didn’t assent to their wielding this power over you. You have no say in setting their priorities, no ability to influence their whims, no recourse in the event they unfairly set their sights on you, and if you fall afoul of them, you may never escape their wrath. For the rest of your life.

This dictator, with the stroke of a pen, can make you a pauper. They can make you radioactive. Untouchable.

You will dance to their tune. Every day. Without exception. When they speak, you will listen. When they pontificate, you will obey. When they issue a new directive, you will get in line. When they tell you to jump, you better damn well know how high it needs to be, because if you get it wrong, you’re eating cat food and somebody else is raising your children.

One of the two dictators in your life is the most powerful man in the world. He is the President of the United States of America, the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the history of mankind, the Chief Executive of a vast, federal government, and the conductor of a foreign policy regime that spans the globe and reaches off it into outer space itself.

But he is not this dictator.

This dictator is a 38-year-old dyed-blonde named Amanda with a bachelor’s in communications from your backup school.

Amanda is your company’s Assistant Director of Human Resources.

And Amanda is here to fuck you up.

Bad Education

It’s always struck me that there is a gaping hole in the civics instruction offered to American students. Americans are taught, from the time they can walk, to love freedom and to hate tyranny. Not just to hate it, but to be on the constant lookout for it. To adopt a posture of hypervigilance, and to cultivate hair-trigger sensitivity to anything that even smells like it.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But Americans aren’t taught to evaluate these conditions in a very useful way.

We’re like kids who were shown how to cross the street, but after looking in only one direction.

Good, we avoided getting in the way of the sedan driving too close to the curb. But the bus coming the other way is going to run our asses over.

Somehow, through learning about the genuine brilliance of the American governmental system, and through learning about its power to keep us safe from tyranny, we were all left with the impression that governmental tyranny was the only kind we needed to worry about.

In a whole host of ways though, this turns out not to be true.

It might feel like I’m winding up here to take a big swing at the left. And I am! So it’s appropriate that it should feel that way. But to my conservative readers, I’m afraid you too are in for some licks. This is an everyone problem.

Americans are more, or less, sensitive to their government infringing on their freedoms depending on their political leanings. Obviously. A liberal is more likely to be worried about a bill aimed at limiting abortion rights than about one restricting gun access, and a conservative is likely to have inverted priorities on those issues.

That’s fine. That’s part of the deal, and it’s how it’s supposed to work.

But while our heads are all turned to allow us to keep a watchful eye on Uncle Sam, our pockets are being picked from behind us. And not only are we mostly not noticing, it’s not even clear to me that we would care if we were.

Most of you will have witnessed, oh…a thousand or so iterations of the following exchange:

Person A: “You can’t say that here.”

Person B: “Yes I can. The 1st Amendment guarantees my free speech.”

Person A: “The 1st Amendment only restricts what the government can do. This is a private space. We set our own rules.”

While technically correct, I’ve never understood why this take on free speech is so compelling. Particularly in light of how often throughout history, and how devastatingly, free speech has been curtailed or punished by extra-governmental actors. When the church burns a heretic, the mob lynches an activist, or a hooded death squad drags a dissident out of bed, do we shrug and say, “welp, it wasn’t technically the government?”

I understand the line between public and private. But it seems to me that if an idea is a good one for government, but we’re saying it’s a bad or irrelevant one for everyone else, we ought to at least be able to carefully explain why we think that is.

How did Amanda from HR get so much power over us?

One reason is that nobody had their eye on her while she was amassing it. But also, nobody had their eye on Amanda’s boss, or his boss, or her boss, or even his boss, while they were constructing a corporate (and cultural) system that used Amanda to protect their interests at our expense. Amanda is a curtain of faux-decency that the real wizards hide behind to avoid having to do anything that costs or upsets them.

I think the political left mostly has to answer for Amanda. The left created Amanda. They summoned her. Amanda shares their politics. She speaks their language, and she forces others to do so. She went to their universities, grew up watching their movies, reading their books, and subscribing to their newspapers. The left is okay with Amanda because the left understands Amanda. They know how to dodge Amanda’s fire. And since they don’t really like the people who don’t, they’re okay with Amanda’s presence in their lives.

But that’s only because the left got stupid.

The left has either forgotten or misunderstood their civics lessons. They have failed to correctly identify the danger Amanda poses to them. Amanda isn’t behind the wheel of the sedan they can see coming, she’s driving the bus that they can’t. Yes, Amanda is a daily threat to their right to free speech, free expression, and free assembly. But since Amanda doesn’t work for the public sector, the threat doesn’t register. Amanda is a color on the tyranny spectrum that their eyes simply cannot see.

They also don’t understand that Amanda is the pitbull who’s “really nice and great with kids,” until she mauls one. They think Amanda is on their side because she walks like them, talks like them, and looks like them. But she isn’t one of them. She is not on their side.

Amanda is a tool of a class of people that the left hates. People they would instantly regard as a threat if they had to deal with them one-on-one, instead of through somebody like Amanda. Amanda isn’t there to protect them from their dirty, bigoted, foul-mouthed, handsy co-workers (even if Amanda thinks she is). She’s there to protect a system that they would rightly regard as hazardous to them if it wasn’t wearing Amanda as a fig leaf.

No Champagne for Conservatives

The right is cheering right now, because the other dictator in their lives - the one in the Oval Office, that they did vote for - has just fired Amanda. Ding dong, the witch is dead! Can’t you feel a brand new day?

Not so fast, righties.

Because the people who put Amanda in your way to begin with, the people who handed her the power to harass and threaten and ruin you; they’re all still around. And they’ve all just been given carte blanche.

Amanda sucked, because she had the power to destroy your life and future. But if Amanda’s bosses ship your job to Bangalore and gamble your pension on a crypto-bubble that bursts; if they poison your kids’ drinking water, or let them eat e-coli cheeseburgers, or they let your health insurance lapse, or your plane crash, your life is just as destroyed. And your future is just as bleak.

And Amanda? She’ll be back. Fucking bet on it.

She’s only gone right now because the winds changed a little. Because Amanda, and her minions, and her teachers, and her allies got too annoying. They pushed too hard.

The social justice gremlins forgot themselves. They forgot the number one rule of being an authoritarian thug: you have to leave your victims with something. You can’t take it all. If you do, they have nothing left to lose.

And if they’re all problematic scum, there’s no danger anymore in being problematic scum. If they’re all racist, none of them are racist. If they’re all phobic, phobic doesn’t mean anything anymore. If they’re all canceled, guess what, dumbasses, none of them are canceled now.

The rightoids will learn their lesson too before long. We’re all about to get a very ugly refresher course in why unaccountable, right wing deviants aren’t really the people we want taking a chainsaw to a sophisticated system of government that was 250 years in the making, and created the most advanced economy, advanced military, and advanced innovators in the history of the world.

The reason I’m so furiously angry with the left right now is that they allowed themselves to become so freakishly irritating, and crawl so far up everyone’s ass, that they made people forget that actually, you want a system that gives individuals agency. You don’t just want a bigger and better boss. I have a hard time blaming the right for feeling the way they feel right now because God, anything to get out from under Amanda’s thumb.

The problem is, it was never really Amanda’s thumb they were under.

Pulling the Wool

I’ll always wonder why nobody on the left thought it was strange or suspicious that corporate leadership so eagerly snapped up every woke, goober, undergraduate idea that was thrown their way, and immediately ran straight to the endzone.

Did you guys not think that was just a little too easy?

That practically overnight, there were so many rainbows on so many products, it looked like a unicorn threw up in the Target storeroom? That companies that hadn’t even let black people in their stores until a few minutes ago were all hawking BLM regalia?

Did it really seem credible to you that people whose job it was to sell you sweatshop goods at sickening markups had all transformed into champions of social progress? Did you ever, for one second, stop to wonder why so many Fortune 500 CEOs were, all of a sudden, talking like Angela Davis and bell hooks? That people who commuted to work in helicopters were singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ in the streets?

I can tell you why all that happened. Are you ready for it? It happened because doing all that meaningless, performative horseshit cost them nothing.

That equity statement on the corporate website? They tapped some intern to draft it on her lunch break. The diversity training they made everyone sit through? That came out of Christmas bonuses. The Stop Racism! wall art? They made Miguel from San Salvador paint that before he went home to his grandkids, and Miguel doesn’t get overtime.

They did this shit for one reason: to get you off their back. And it worked. Because you’re easy.

In fairness to these corporations, all they were doing was reading the room. The left’s commitment to social justice never actually went any deeper than surface level.

“We acknowledge that we are meeting today on land that used to belong to the proud Lakota Nation.”

Oh. Cool. So you’re giving it back then?

“Lmao.”

And FYI, to my friends of the rightward persuasion, the rainbows, and black fists, and slogans, and painted crosswalks are disappearing right now, not because these institutions are reconnecting with their true, right-wing roots. My God, if you believe that, you’re as gullible as the wokesters.

The virtue signals are all going dark because the same people who were blasting them are doing the very same thing they were doing before: they’re reading the room. And the room is sick of the fucking rainbows.

Bud Light is not, never has been, and never will be either a champion of LGBT rights nor a threat thereto. Bud Light cares about one thing, and one thing only: whether or not you are willing to buy their shitty beer. That is their morning, their noon, and their night. They will say, do, or project anything to get you to reach past the Pabst and grab their six-pack instead.

You’ll never catch me saying that language and symbols don’t matter, because they do. But the reason the entire “woke” era produced not a single, serious policy legacy is that the left has broadly forgotten how to tell the difference between a symbolic victory and a material one. I’m not actually sure the left knows that those things are different.

But the guys zipping over our heads in their private Gulfstreams? They know.

Don’t Hand Over Your Shield

Conservatives shouldn’t get too excited about the left’s fall from grace. Elon and his boys, out there hacking through your government like it's firewood? They’re not doing that to get government out of your way. They’re doing it to get it out of theirs.

And as soon as it is, they’ll take you for everything you’re worth.

Example:

The online right has turned its guns on an obscure arm of the federal government - the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) - because a lying, asshole billionaire (Marc Andreesen) was dispatched to go on the podcast of a gullible hundred-millionaire (Joe Rogan) and simply make shit up about what it does.

“ThEy’Re cAnCeLlInG tHe BaNk AcCoUnTs oF aNyOnE tHeY dOn’T LiKe!”

The irony here is rich.

“Debanking” is a real phenomenon, and a very controversial topic. I’m not sure why it is, at least not from a conservative perspective. Shouldn’t banks, as private institutions, be free to do business, or not, with whomever they see fit? Isn’t that kind of what conservatism is all about? I’m not a conservative, so I’m a little unclear on this point, but whatever. There is understandable concern over the politicizing of this process.

So it might be a good thing for critics to know that the CFPB has taken serious steps to end it. Because it’s not government doing it, it’s the private sector. It might also be good to know that political debanking is not the real problem Andreesen, Elon, et al have with the CFPB. In Andreesen’s case, his beef is that they trashed a dubious lending startup he was trying to get off the ground.

The tech and business sectors don’t like the CFPB because the CFPB exists to do the unsexy work of slashing their profits by making sure ordinary Americans aren’t taken to the cleaners by shady mortgage lenders, ripoff crypto rackets, and other monied bad actors.

They go after phone and cable companies who load up your monthly bills with junk fees that you can’t understand and that they don’t have to explain. They try to make your late fees lower when you struggle to pay off your credit card debt, and they try to make sure that questions you ask your bank are answered by humans instead of by useless chatbots.

I’m as pleased as you are that Amanda from HR is out of our hair. But I’d also like to retire in a dwelling larger and nicer than a sleep pod. So after you’ve given them their fair chance, I hope you’ll join me in at least keeping an eye on these motherfuckers before they make off with everything that isn’t bolted down.

In A Dictatorship

It’s very hard to get people worried about dictatorship when they’re already functionally in one. Why should conservatives care if Trump lays off a bunch of federal workers they’ll never meet, and whose work they don’t think they’ll miss? Why should liberals care if Amanda and her pals cleanse workplaces of all conservative thought when they hate conservative thought anyway and consider it all good riddance?

Obviously, I’m a pretty cynical dude.

Obviously.

But I stand firm in my belief that it’s better when folks can at least look the person who’s screwing them in the eye, and maybe ask them to go a little easier.

I understand the impulse to hand over power to people who promise to use it only on your enemies. I’ve been in that boat. But it is always, always a bad move, even if you think a serious course correction is necessary. This attitude makes it impossible for us to ever enjoy any actually smooth sailing.

Instead, we end up violently rocking back and forth, always in danger of tipping over, and always just waiting for things to get bad enough that the other guys will take the helm and have their own chance to fuck us up.

Have you noticed this dynamic in American life?

We’re never just normally spending, for example. We’re either ruthlessly tightening belts, or we’re exploding the budgets. We never get normie foreign policy. We’re either sticking our noses everywhere it doesn’t belong, or we’re going full isolationist. We get intern-diddling degenerates or Bible-thumping zealots. Social security is either starving to death or it’s about to crush us under its weight. Regulation is either so toothless as to allow a handful of Wall Street crapshooters to wreck the world’s economy, or so savage that it takes you 19 permits, 10 years, and $70,000 to build a back patio.

We get blood red, or we get baby blue. We get Amanda, or we get Elon.

I’m not a reflexive centrist. I swear to God I’m not. I can’t fucking stand the Goldilocks people.

I believe that some things are good and some things are bad. It doesn’t really matter to me who else agrees, or where their agreement lands me on some imagined political spectrum. My inclination will always be toward utilitarianism, and I have a strong bias in favor of rule by popular will.

But ya know what? Whatever. Meh.

I’ve lived in dictatorships. Actual, official ones. And they’re not as bad as all that. Stay in your lane and nobody really fucks with you. People in dictatorships buy lattes on the way to work. They stop for beers on the way home (if beer happens to be legal). They watch Netflix. They follow sports teams. They raise kids. They have parties. They get sick. They get better. They get old. Their kids get old. The world keeps turning.

One of the many reasons Americans keep flirting with authoritarianism - whether lefty authoritarianism or righty authoritarianism - is that the alternative to it is slow, messy, and uncertain. It also doesn’t reliably preserve the things they’re supposed to fear losing in a dictatorship.

“Man, it would really suck if I couldn’t say what was on my mind.”

“What a bummer it would be if I couldn’t travel or relocate.”

“It would be a real drag if some faceless bureaucrat told me I couldn’t put an addition on my own house.”

“I’d hate it if I were stuck in some shitty, soulless job and couldn’t retire.”

How many Americans, if transitioned to living under true authoritarian rule, would lose any actual freedoms that they actually enjoy right now?

Some? Sure. But many? I kind of doubt it.

And of course, it would entirely depend on what flavor of authoritarian rule they were served. They might get a dictatorship in which kids aren’t allowed to watch drag shows. Or they might get a dictatorship in which parents aren’t allowed to complain about their kids watching drag shows.

If recent experience is any guide here, approval or disapproval of the dictatorship would hinge more on who was running it than on whether or not it existed in the first place.

Meanwhile, folks are looking to places like China, with its high speed rail, and sexy new skyscrapers, and megacities, and cool gadgetry, and nice public parks, and streets with no crime, and they see the future they thought they were promised.

Then, they drive across crumbling bridges, dodging potholes, in cars they can’t afford to fix, to jobs they don’t want to do, that don’t offer them a comfortable life, and don’t provide them with a sense of purpose or fulfillment, in which they have no real security, because fucking Amanda is waiting behind the water cooler to catch them discussing the wrong Youtube clip, and ready to bring their whole world crashing down around them.

And they wonder what the damn point is.

This is probably where you’re expecting me to close with some paean to Democracy. Maybe quote Churchill, about it being the worst system, except for all the others.

But you know what? I got nothing.

One thing that both sides actually agree on is that the system is shit. It’s failing us, it’s not failing our overlords, and it needs a ground-up shaking.

We might disagree wildly over what its new makeover should look like, but we all agree it needs one. And when all’s said and done, we’re all responsible for it not having happened yet.

Libs perfectly teed up Trump by convincing a normie-infused majority that they needed him to make them go away. Now, Trump is teeing up…whatever the hell will come next. Maybe when (if?) the dust finally settles, we’ll still have something we can call a democracy. Or maybe we won’t.

It doesn’t feel like we’re a people who actually care though.

It doesn’t feel like we want to live and let live, or cooperate, or compromise, or even necessarily coexist with one another. It feels a lot more like we’re a people who, when we win, want to stomp whoever lost into dust.

That’s pretty normal, actually. A lot of places work like that. Just not stable, peaceful democracies.

A friend of mine, a guy who’s lived all over the place, said something to me once that was both obvious and profound: “people get the country they want.”

This doesn’t mean you win every election, obviously. It means that you play a part in setting the tone, no matter what.

If you want to live in a tribal, rancorous hellscape, where everyone encourages everyone else to size up their family, friends, and neighbors for potentially being evil, you’re going to get that. If you want to be constantly agitated and at odds, you’re going to get a country that’s constantly agitated and at odds.

If you want calm and order, you’ll get calm and order. It may come with a slice or three of injustice. If it does, you may be called upon to look the other way. You may find you can’t do that. Worse, you may find you can.

I’m not saying there aren’t tradeoffs.

But even real dictatorships have corrective mechanisms. I mentioned it earlier. There’s only so far you can push people before they’re going to storm the palace gates.

I was in Egypt about 20 years ago, and talking to an Egyptian friend of mine about what elections - sorry, “elections” - were like there. He left me with two instructive anecdotes.

One was about an army buddy of his who’d decided, as a lark, to vote for the *wrong* candidate in an “election.” He got cold feet after he cast his joke ballot, realizing it could actually get him in trouble, so he went back to the polling place to ask if he could change it. They told him, “don’t worry, we already did.”

The same guy told me that anytime there was an “election” on the horizon, the ruling party would lower the price of wheat to make food cheaper, and flood the streets with really strong hash. As long as people were happy, stoned, and well-fed, they didn’t make trouble.

In Egypt, that worked. For a long time. Until it didn’t. Until people were pushed too far.

I feel all that.

Maybe as long as the lights come on, the toilets flush, the trash is collected, the weed is legal, the beer is strong, the Kraft blue-box tastes good, and they make another season of Stranger Things, I don’t really care what system of government I get.

Maybe no one ever does.

Since I have nothing more encouraging or inspiring to say, I’ll wrap this up by handing it over to the wisest political mind of the 20th Century:

“There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

― George Carlin