My argument is not that Donald Trump possesses the full mentality of a dictator. If that statement strikes you as blatantly false or as at best hyperbolic and unconstructive, I urge you to read on. On November 8, 2016, the United States took its first step toward dictatorship. Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority.”īut, Rand cautioned, if “America drags on in her present state for a few more generations (which is unlikely),” the American spirit would further erode, and “dictatorship will become possible.” No matter what the nation’s current problems, therefore, she said one thing is certain: “a dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. . . . An American would rebel to the bottom of his soul.” “A European,” she wrote, “is disarmed in the face of a dictatorship: he may hate it, but he feels that he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is right. The people will too jealously demand and too jealously guard their freedom.Īyn Rand, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the midst of the nation’s political-cultural chaos, offered a fascinating comparison between the European and the American mind. It’s a land where you shouldn’t even be able to imagine a dictator arising. The United States, having discarded most forms of tyranny, and having fought a bloody civil war over its toleration of the glaring, depressing exception of slavery, is more than the land of liberty. The Statue of Liberty symbolizes this vision, beckoning all who yearn to breathe free. The Declaration of Independence expresses the viewpoint eloquently: that individuals possess “certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The United States is founded on a political philosophy, and a profoundly revolutionary one at that. Hand Donald Trump power - and wait to see what he does with it.” Because understanding Trump and the political support he enjoys is as important today as it was then, we are presenting a lightly edited version of this November 17, 2016, essay here in New Ideal. Just a few days after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, ARI’s Onkar Ghate warned that America had taken its “first step toward dictatorship.” In a passage that eerily foreshadowed the January 6 mob’s attempt to forcibly overturn the 2020 election, Ghate wrote: “When Trump was asked whether he would accept the election’s result if he were to lose, and he answered that America would have to wait and see, he captured the entire flavor of his campaign.
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