Bob Burns

During my teaching tenure at SDSU I taught an undergraduate course titled American Political Issues. The course included a discussion of several leading U.S. public issues of the time including national defense spending, energy, environmental and economic issues, national taxation issues, civil rights, crime, education, health care, poverty and cultural issues including abortion and gun control.

What I did not include was a discussion of democracy as a domestic issue. It did not occur to me that democracy was an issue that divided us. Indeed, I understood democracy and the underlying tenets of democratic governance to be a part of the belief system that united us. Sadly, I can no longer make that assumption as the 2024 Republican Party presumptive nominee for the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump, increasingly embraces authoritarian governance as opposed to our system of constitutional representative democracy and his MAGA supporters respond to his authoritarian words and actions with agreement.

There are several recent happenings that have prompted my concern about Trump’s turn away from democracy and toward unrestricted authoritarian governance. He is currently arguing in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that U.S. presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal charges arising from their actions including ordering the assassination of a political opponent. In another legal controversy, he is arguing that outgoing presidents have authority to claim all government documents including classified documents accrued during their tenure as their own. He has identified the January 6th rioters or insurgents as patriots and hostages and has promised to pardon them immediately upon being sworn in as our next president.

Trump has said of Hitler, “He did some good things.” Trump recently hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at Mar-a- Lago. In recent years, Orban has eliminated rival political parties, taken control of Hungarian courts and the civil service system, suppressed the press, and gerrymandered voting districts to guarantee continued election victories for him and his party. Trump praised Orban as a noncontroversial figure because he just has to say, “This is the way it’s going to be and that’s the end of it, right?” Trump seems to relish the fact that there are no boundaries impacting Orban’s rule. MAGA supporters appear to believe the same as Orban and other global authoritarian figures have been welcomed at recent Conservative Political Action Committee conferences along with Trump and VP aspirant Kristy Noem. Most recently the MAGA controlled CPAC Conference began with an address from Trump surrogate, Jack Posobiec, who proclaimed “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this, right here.” The attendees cheered. If Posobiec’s words do not alert Americans to what Trump and his MAGA supporters are all about, it is impossible to understand what will.

Some of Trump’s MAGA support can be found among those who subscribe to White Christian Nationalism. They sense that their goal of a Christian theocratic state cannot be achieved in the absence of an authoritarian leader. They seem completely willing to abandon the guardrails created by our system of constitutional representative governance to achieve their goals.

Other Trump MAGA supporters have convinced themselves that all this is just Trump being Trump and that Trump will not bring authoritarian rule because our system of separation of powers and checks and balances will prevent that from happening. In response, we must acknowledge that Trump’s words in praise of authoritarian rule must be taken seriously. He is not speaking just to appease a fringe element of his base. He covets unrestricted power. We must also recognize the anti-autocracy guardrails found in our system of separation of powers and checks and balances are meaningful only to the degree that the first loyalty of individuals elected or appointed to executive, legislative and judicial branch positions is to the protection of our constitutional democracy and not to their own political future or the ambitions of an aspiring dictator. Unfortunately, recent decisions of appointed judicial officials and elected legislative officials give us cause to question their first loyalties.

Our hope for the future of our constitutional democracy is found in our right to vote which itself is under attack by authoritarian advocates. We must fight through barriers to citizen voting and stand united again in full support of our constitutional democratic system of governance as opposed to authoritarianism. I do not want my successors in teaching American Political Issues at SDSU or any other university to include authoritarianism versus democracy as a present day domestic issue.