Dictablanda

Today, I want to address a subject that I think is important. I will rely on my life growing up in Mexico City to explain the concept. Because the question of what the United States is is quickly becoming a huge question. And while we are living in an authoritarian nightmare with a society that is quickly closing, we are not yet in a full fascist nightmare. I hear a lot of people online going, but this is fascism. And there are some things we are watching take shape. Which makes this even harder to classify.

So what are we? I will argue that we have been moving towards this moment, starting after 9/11, with the passage of the US Patriot Act. At the time, many of us with training in history or political science, in my case both, started screaming. The US Patriot Act had certain familiar elements of a closed society. It was sold and accepted as a war measure. Because let’s face it, nobody wanted a second attack on the homeland, and people who are afraid are willing to give up a lot of rights. Some were temporarily surrendered by Americans after Pearl Harbor as well. After the war, these rights arguably came back. Chief among them was the acceptance of a wartime necessity, military censorship, which the press willingly subjected itself to.

But the US Patriot Act had certain provisions that stated that some rights would be closed down. For example, whether we liked it or not, we were all subjected to increased surveillance. Whether that was the postal service, for obvious reasons after Anthrax was mailed through it, or the telephone service. A lot of this was normalized.

This is why a lot of us who were aware were troubled. Unlike the Second World War, some of these measures continue to this day. What we moved into was familiar to political scientists and historians specializing in Latin America. What is called a Dictablanda, a soft dictatorship. I remember calling it this way at a place Democratic Leadership Council types used to read, not that they bothered reading, or for that matter, understanding. Dicatablandas are not fully closed societies, and they maintain the illusion of democracy and freedom. I will use Mexico, for example, because having grown up there, I am utterly familiar with how it worked. And yes, during the years of the dirty war, after the student movement of 1968 was quashed, it looked a tad more like a full-on dictatorship, with the disappearance of thousands of students. So here are some of the characteristics from that Dictablanda I grew up under, and if this sounds somewhat familiar, you will know where we are.

* A controlled media: Yes, newspapers, television, and radio were free to report on anything, but were careful to never openly criticize the government. It was understood to be the best way to do things. Ergo, there was no investigative journalism because that was dangerous to the state. While this started after 9/11, with media consolidation in the hands of the powerful and connected, this is more the case in the United States.

* Single Party system: While officially Mexico had an opposition party, the Partido the Acccion Nacional, it did not achieve control of the government. It was there for shadow boxing. This is exactly what Republicans want from Democrats, though it is slowly getting to the point where we will not have a two-party system.

* You watched what you said on the phone. I still remember my dad admonishing me about that when I was five. Because you knew it was a party line. See the USPA; it made obtaining national security warrants much easier, so party lines with your local Fed are more the norm these days.

* You were somewhat wary of what you said in front of strangers for the same exact reason.

* Juniors were common. These were the children of the well-connected, above the law. And yes, we called them Juniors, and they knew this well. Any scandal involving a Junior, including drug use, driving while intoxicated, rape, or financial crimes, was quickly suppressed. If you were part of the oligarchy, you could do whatever you wanted to do. The rest of us, not so much.

* Police was used to suppress protests, often in violent ways, often with people injured or killed.

Was this a full on dicatartorship? No, it was not. It was a type of totalitarian system that allowed some freedoms, serving as a social release. People felt that we could say what we really felt, with little to no consequences. This is a place where people knew voting was an exercise in folly, yet people still voted. Not because it was going to change things in the present, or be counted correctly, but someday it might matter. This is the way I vote these days, by the way.

We are, however, moving towards a full fascist nation. That is what the current crop of Republicans wants, not just Donald Trump. He is just voicing it very well, plus we are watching a full-on narcissist collapse. This is why he is signaling he will go after any opposition in an open, violent way. But are we a fascist nation? No, not yet. We are well on the way, if we are not able to stop this.

Not only do they want to grow on what was done under the USPA, but they also want to transform the country into a white Christian nation. One where we will have castes, where if you are catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or any other religion or non-religion, you will be a second-class citizen. This is a place where non-whites will be ethnically cleansed. This is not my imagination; the threat to deport 100 million people has been made. And now that base is starting to fracture, because for some reason Americans don’t want to milk cows. So here we are, at one of the most dangerous moments in American history.

Yet, the camps are getting built, and no, I am not going to shy away from what those camps are: Concentration camps.

So yes, we are moving away from that dictablanda where the illusion can be maintained to something far scarier. ICE's move to airports is exactly about this. And of course, doing this before the World Cup sounds like the ideal way to make sure the event fails. But this is not about sane washing this, though sports. This is about hardening the stance from a Dictablanda to a full-blown dictatorship.

With the expansion of the Iran war, the government will have even more excuses to close in even further. And given the threats from all sides to go after essential infrastructure, be ready for attacks on the homeland, a term I despise, but in this case, real. If you think two oceans will protect us, you do not understand modern war.