A dictatorial US would be much more dangerous and difficult to stop than Nazi Germany

In October, Mitchell Peterson of the news website Medium — a site admittedly regarded by commentators upon media bias as far from reliable — argued that democracy in America is almost definitively doomed. This is impossible to argue. As Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page demonstrated in their 2012 ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’ and the concurrently published Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, the US is — and has been since at least 1980 when their data started — an oligarchy controlled by elite interests in which mass-based interest groups have zero influence upon policy. Additionally, as Sebastian Lamb demonstrated in his 2010 ‘Settlers and Anti-Racist Working Class Politics’, the ruling class of the United States has never had interest in even a nominal democracy. It prefers either

1. a Herrenvolk republic with racially based suffrage, or
2. an electoral oligarchy with suffrage based upon property

What Lamb also strongly implied but never discussed in adequate detail is that the US ruling class has and has had ever since its formation greater ability to divide the nonelite that any other major ruling class in the world. Rigidly diving the nonelite ipso facto eliminates the possibility of a genuine democracy responding to mass interests. A Herrenvolk republic, as David Rödinger noted in his 1991 classic The Wages of Whiteness, constitutes the perfect way for the rich to divide the nonelite by creating a division between (white) citizens and (nonwhite) anticitizens. In America, these nonwhite anticitizens were and largely are viewed incapable of independent work within the private sector. They were also de facto excluded from power in the private sector except at an extremely local level in isolated all-nonwhite communities. Crucially, making involvement and ownership in the private sector the crucial criterion for citizenship absolutely precludes the US becoming a genuine democracy. Both Hans Hoppe on the far right and Trotskyists on the far left have constantly demonstrated that private property is ipso facto incompatible with a society ruled by the interests of the majority.

If Peterson’s latest article ‘Why the Year 2025 Might Be the Last for America as We Know It’ be correct, we could see horrific consequences. There is no way by which left-wing forces could defeat the politically hegemonic upper class, while the “centrist” policies of the Democratic Party over the past fifty years have been a definite failure as Ricardo Torres noted last October. This can only mean that the US is headed towards what Patrick Martin of the Socialist Equality Party in 2014 called:

“a counterrevolutionary bloodbath of such proportions that it would make the crimes of imperialism in the twentieth century pale by comparison”

If this bloodbath predicted by Martin does come, the question is whether it can be kept within the boundaries of the United States, and it is easy to doubt that it can. A Republican Party dedicated towards the elimination of nonwhite voters and of political — even academic — opposition to its extreme capitalist system would find it difficult to stop at the United States borders. Certain commentators upon Mitchell Peterson’s original post last October argued that the US would become such a bad place to live that people with a choice might wish to move abroad, and these people would undoubtedly attempt to oppose the new authoritarian system from outside the United States. Foreigners in democratic nations would similarly be almost certainly much more opposed to a fascistic superpower than to either a nominally democratic or a nominally socialist superpower. (Consider how it was mass pressure that made Britain end attempts by its ruling class to ally with Hitler against the Kremlin). This would mean that, unless there be extreme restrictions of a financial nature, the foreign media in liberal democratic nations would become much more opposed to the United States than it has ever been before.

The combination of authoritarian, hyper-capitalist Republican rule in the United States and an increasingly anti-American foreign media, however, is likely to be very unstable. I cannot see that a US with a hegemonic Republican Party would kindly accept foreign hatred. Instead, we will likely see a state that is dangerous to anybody abroad not completely allied with it, rather than a state dangerous merely to strategic enemies in resource-rich tropical and arid regions. This new authoritarian United States will likely demand a world of puppet or colonial states that do not criticise it even privately, and would be willing and able to gain this demand, in the process creating a war that becomes impossible for anywhere to escape. (Compare the likely future US to the Nazis. Even if we imagine an alternate scenario where the Nazis did not face politically powerful and independent working classes as Britain and France possessed, the Nazis would still have been limited by the power of other large colonial states to defend their possessions. This limitation would apply even if the Nazis had been able to destroy and take over the USSR without interference from Britain or France.)