Yes, We Have Gone Bananas
While some other Western Hemisphere countries try to reform their corrupt systems, the United States embraces authoritarianism.
In light of recent events revealing the extremes to which the U.S. political class will go to keep their hold on power have brought appropriate concerns that the United States is rapidly transforming into a banana republic. Meanwhile, some neighboring countries are moving in the opposite direction.
The prosecution and conviction of former president Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business records, plus the multiple other cases brought against him by people aligned with the opposing political party, are unprecedented in the United States. President Joe Biden has been unable to resist indulging in mockery at his predecessor’s expense. None of this is appropriate to a nation operating under rule of law.
Some countries in North and South America that have experience with authoritarian rule are doing their best to move away from that egregious form of government. Last fall, Argentina elected to the presidency Javier Milei, a libertarian economics professor who promised radically pro-market economic reforms for his inflation-crippled country—and has delivered. Also last fall, voters in Ecuador rejected a democratic socialist candidate in favor of a center-left businessman, Daniel Noboa.
In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, a former businessman, initiated a crackdown on drug gangs that has reduced the country’s homicide rate from 38 per 100,000 people in 2019 to 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023—the lowest murder rate in the Americas except for Canada. Opponents characterize Bukele as authoritarian, and he calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” yet he won reelection in February with 83 percent of the vote.
Current left-wing leaders in Latin America are losing popularity even after moderating their views slightly away from the heavy socialist-authoritarian Hugo Chavez (Venezuela) approach of the century’s first fifteen years:
Source: Americas Quarterly
Here in the United States, by contrast, we have a national government and local prosecutors subjecting a former president and current presidential candidate to criminal trials in multiple venues on exceedingly dubious charges, the first time that has ever been done to a former U.S. president. This was clearly political, as The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted on Wednesday:
Democrats thought the Manhattan trial would hurt Mr. Trump, but so far he’s gained in the polls. Now they think a guilty verdict will take him down, and they want to gloat about it. But voters may conclude that stretching the law to turn a misdemeanor offense into a felony is more politically significant as an abuse of the justice system.
If Mr. Biden tries to exploit a conviction as a campaign theme, voters will have even more reason to believe Mr. Trump when he says the prosecution was political from the start.
Meanwhile, Democrat members of Congress, the president, a captive press, and assorted lunatics (do I repeat myself?) are interfering in the processes of the U.S. Supreme Court by relentlessly intimidating sitting Justices, even leading to assassination attempts.
The United States has increasingly been subjected to mob rule in recent years, overwhelmingly in the interests of the most radical elements within the nation’s largest political party: the Occupy movement taking over parts of cities during the Great Recession; the desecration and destruction of historical statuary and other pro-American art; mass rioting and looting ostensibly in protest against very rare instances of police brutality; an invasion of the U.S. Capitol (the participants in which are being treated abominably because of their opposition to the political regime, “as horribly as one might be treated in any third world nation,” as Patricia McCarthy notes at American Thinker); takeovers of college and university campuses by openly antisemitic and America-hating hordes; attacks on sitting jurists; and more.
Both physical and verbal abuse are being deployed on behalf of the regime to intimidate the few remaining uncooperative government officials, as columnist Auron MacInytre notes at The Blaze:
Progressives were enthusiastic about the [U.S. Supreme] court’s ability to override the will of the majority when popular opinion wasn’t on their side but now they have embraced mob rule. The left has invested heavily in the ability to manipulate mass democracy and would like to see it become the only legitimate authority. The framers of the Constitution heavily restricted the influence of democracy, ensuring that it would only directly select one half of one third of the government. Over time, however, those restrictions have fallen away. Democrats have deployed mass immigration, mass media, and mass public education to ensure that the rising tide of mass democracy worked in their favor.
Democrats are now openly attempting to remove every constitutional impediment to mob rule by attacking the disproportional representation meant to protect smaller states in institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate. Due to its domination of consensus manufacturing institutions and access to an endless stream of replacement voters through mass immigration, the left is now all-in on rule by manipulated majority.
That, too, is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
Now we have spent $320 million on a floating pier intended to enable the delivery of further millions of dollars of food and other aid to Palestinians in Gaza, while helping finance the Israeli government’s military intervention there, and the structure has broken free and floated away into the sea because it was designed for waters far calmer than those in which it was placed.
The inability to build a reliable floating pier is a metaphor for the stunning incompetence of our nation’s current leaders. The prosecutions of Trump and harassment of other political opponents demonstrate the leaders’ malevolence. The combination of gross ineptitude and unbounded malice toward political opponents and their supporters is a hallmark of corrupt regimes throughout the world.
We Americans used to shake our heads in wonder upon hearing about such things occurring in other nations. Now those of us who still have a moral compass shake our heads in shame at what our own country has become.
Writing at his Tell Me How This Ends Substack, commentator Chris Bray summarizes the rapid recent descent of the United States into corruption and failure:
The madness of the Trump conviction is a sign of incipient cultural death. It’s illness embodied. The same goes for the era of elevated mediocrities. … The absurd conviction of Donald Trump on a list of made-up noncrimes is a demonstration of stupidity, ineptitude, and mindless evil. The “mainstream” establishment complex is dying, as a cultural formation, and something else is coming.
Caveats: The death throes can go on for a long time, and damage everything they touch, and the dead thing may be replaced by something worse. But none of this merits anything but contempt and loathing. These people are the scum of the earth, and their time is passing. There will be some profoundly ugly days as they make their way off the stage.
While not endorsing all of Bray’s rhetoric, I agree fully with his summary of current conditions. Self-appointed elites’ quest for ever-greater power over the people of the United States has become so demented that the nation has abruptly taken on the characteristics of a banana republic. We await our Milei, hoping and praying that new leaders of decency and good sense will arrive before the nation’s institutions are irrevocably destroyed by the present regime’s ineptitude and malice.