Autocracy or Democracy: Our Choice

December 7, 2025

As the year 2025 begins to wane, it’s a good time to start reflecting on where we are. For perspective, let’s briefly go back to a day in fall 2021, when Attorney General Merrick Garland and other Justice Department officials had an emergency conference call to decide how to deal with what they considered a dangerously inappropriate remark from President Joe Biden.

Steve Bannon had defied an order to appear before the House select committee investigating January 6^th, and the committee had to decide whether to ask the Justice Department to prosecute Bannon. The White House press secretary at the time, Jen Psaki, when asked how the White House felt about the issue, said, “That would be up to the Department of Justice to determine. They’re independent.” Then Biden himself, asked by a reporter whether he thought people who ignore subpoenas should face contempt charges, answered, “I do, yes.” Those three words so alarmed the Attorney General that he felt compelled to rebuke the president.

Ah, how far we have come. Today’s Department of Justice under Pam Bondi shows no such independence as a separate branch of government. Trump orders Bondi and her Department of Justice to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and others, posting that it’s the Democrats who cozied up to Epstein and consorted with young girls. Bondi responds to Trump’s order by dutifully going to work on investigating Democrats, just as she has obeyed Trump’s order to launch frivolous retaliatory investigations and prosecutions of his political enemies like James Comey and Letitia James. The Justice Department now operates at the king’s bidding; the American system of checks and balances is gone. Gone!

This is not to say that there aren’t rumblings of concern in the judiciary and the legislative branch. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene has defected by quitting Congress. For some reason--as US diplomatic standing in the world has plummeted, as Trump has turned allies into enemies and enemies into allies, as he has slapped an absurd, punitive, and ever-changing regime of tariffs on almost every nation, as he flouts the Constitution by sending troops to occupy American cities, and as he has dismantled much of the government that serves the people—scientific research, healthcare, national parks, education, community safety, the arts--and as he lays waste to the global effort to stem the irreversible devastation of climate change--, what has finally raised the Congress’s doubts about him is two desperate guys clinging to the wreckage of a boat in the Caribbean. Hegseth’s extrajudicial killings, and also Trump’s attempts at a coverup of the Epstein business: these two things seem finally to be pushing a few Republican members of Congress over the edge.

But is it too late for democracy? Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the brilliant scholar of the ways dictatorships take hold, states bluntly that the United States is in full-fledged autocracy now. We’re not approaching it, we’re there.

“The scenes now playing out across the US today recall the history of authoritarian regimes,” she wrote this week. “Troops roam city streets, and masked state security forces round up people and ‘disappear’ them to domestic and foreign prisons. … In a matter of months, Trump has made abrupt and radical changes to US economic and trade policy; upended longstanding foreign-policy positions, alliances, and intelligence arrangements; and unleashed ICE operations that disrupt the daily lives of US-born citizens and immigrants alike.

“Authoritarians think big, and they think about the long term. The figures who are now shaping US policy (such as OMB director Russell Vought and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller) know that creating a compliant civil service is essential. This explains the Trump administration’s purges of federal employees in the military and civilian sectors, including the Department of Justice. Only by erasing professional experience and institutional memory from the government can they create a civil service amenable to authoritarian practices.”

Ben-Ghiat reminds us what Musk and his DOGE boys accomplished: “Like soldiers executing a coup, they occupied government buildings, sometimes locking out members of Congress; fired thousands of government employees after barring them from their own computer systems; and physically removed officials who sought to stop them from seizing digital property.  DOGE’s real goal was never to ‘boost efficiency,’ but rather to create a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of US citizens and residents, which could be used for government surveillance and AI training. … This combined data heist and state infiltration has no precedent.” We might simplistically be assured that Elon is gone, since we don’t see him now, but he’s not. “DOGE continues to operate clandestinely in hundreds of US government agencies, offices, and departments,” she writes, “and Musk remains very involved with US policy at the highest levels.”

And so the president can act like a dictator, because he is one. He can take over the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace. He can lie endlessly about everything, like saying he has stopped or prevented all the wars on the planet and that America used to be dead but now it’s the hottest country. He can demolish much of the White House and build a fascist monstrosity of a ballroom for billionaires. He can call women Piggy, he can call congresswoman Ilhan Omar garbage. Although he campaigned on affordability, now he calls affordability a “Democrat con job.” His DHHS secretary can take us back decades in fights against diseases and for women’s health. Trump can declare not only that brown people are unwanted in this country, but that anyone who disagrees with him is a “violent insurrectionist” who must be rounded up and prosecuted.  He can use the resources of this great nation as a cash cow for himself, without even hiding the vast extent of his corruption. 

 So what do we do with this reality? We continue to be loud with the truth, to call members of Congress and strengthen their spines, to show up to demonstrate and march, to protect and help our most vulnerable neighbors, to build community, to stay informed and agile. Being passive is a choice, and it’s a really bad choice. That’s what dictators want, a passive population that permits their abuses and accepts the regime.

Can we continue to be loud? Will we continue to find strength and sanity in each other as we show up to protest? Yes, protest: we have the numbers, If we only mobilize and organize. Will we talk with family and neighbors and urge them to get off their rear ends and commit to democracy?  Will take five minutes a day to use the app 5Calls to call members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, and tell them what we think?

Will we keep the flame of democracy burning?