I borrow a familiar saying, “If it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, it is a duck.” Pity the duck for, in this case, the duck is a marking of ways and means toward tyranny’s control of democratic institutions. Democracy is not automatically self-correcting.
If you are determined to abolish democracy, here is how to “put your ducks in a row”:
1. Divide humankind into two diametrically opposed ideological universes.
2. Feed the division daily with hyperbolic rhetoric (such as the Big Lie).
3. Buy yourself a loyal army for intimidation — Proud Boys, Oath Keepers — demanding unquestioning loyalty over any sophisticated inquiry.
4. Be certain to dehumanize your adversaries — “vermin.”
5. Don’t miss references to lower prejudices—“Blut und Boden” (blood and soil); assert that impure blood dilutes our superiority.
6. A barbaric leader (führer) elevates us. (“Only I can MAGA,” “I am your retribution.”)
Questions remain. Why ever would a national political party choose to be taken over by a pathological misfit? To exchange a viable role in government for wild conspiracy? Did it misplace its field guide to tyrannical tendencies — or order its burning? What is its checklist to identify antidemocratic measures and fascist tendencies?
In 1940, John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard University was published as the book “Why England Slept.” Could the somnolence have been the normalizing of the signals of tyranny?
Am I being unfair to ducks by overly humanizing them? They oddly waddle and serenely paddle out of God-given necessity. Why do humans?
Eugene Clemens
Elizabethtown
