There is a tendency for the most ruthless and autocratic countries in recent history to use democratic norms for cover. With the conviction of Donald Trump, the US has moved closer towards them.
Why do despots run elections? Why do dictatorships bother with parliaments and other appendages of democratic societies? Think of the countries run by the biggest dictators of our day: Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc. All of them have “elections” In the case of Iran, the supreme leader is above any elected official and thus renders those elected powerless. Still, for good measure, they winnow the candidates to only those they approve. People like Assad Junior typically receive over 95% of the vote. Why do they go through these machinations which have no real impact on who’s in charge and how things are done?
The NKVD and KGB infamously tortured endless prisoners to get them to sign confessions presented at their trials. Why? Either skip the trial and kill the guy or send him to a gulag. Alternatively, fake his signature and keep the defendant out of court or drug him so heavily that he can’t say he never signed it. Drugging and insane asylums were two tools popular in the eastern bloc, especially with the East German Stasi.
The world’s despots run sham elections, hold theatrical trials, and pretend to have the trappings of democratic institutions in order to blunt the advantages formerly presented by Western democracies. The freedoms offered in the West as well as the generally more pleasant lifestyle were appealing to those under the communist boot. But if the Russians, Chinese and others could pretend to show Western-style institutions including parliaments, courts and periodic elections, the leaders could blunt the supposed superiority of Western democracies. This mentality is as old as mankind.
There is a funny set of stories when Moses and Pharaoh meet. The first of the ten plagues filled Egypt’s waterways with blood. What does Pharaoh do in response? He has his generation of Tony Faucis do the same thing. Now why would Pharaoh want to add more blood to a bad situation? He needed to show Moses, the Israelites pining for freedom and his own people that he was no less powerful than the God behind his plague. Ditto for frogs—who would want more frogs, but Pharaoh had to show that the other side was no better, no stronger, no more powerful than he and his advisers, magicians, and wise men were.
Is this situation so different today when Putin or Kim Jung Un run elections? There is no doubt in the outcome, and in the latter case no one is even allowed to run against the “Great Leader”. The despots of the world need the external trappings of democracy such as elections, parliaments and black-robed jurists so as to say to the West: you are no better than we are. We have the same institutions that you have. The trump card the West had was that anyone could see that Western leaders could lose their elections. It is said that Stalin could not understand how Churchill, who had saved England, could lose to his nemesis, Atlee. Yuri Dubrinin related that Brezhnev and the politburo could not understand why Nixon, the leader of the free world, had to leave his office over such trivial events surrounding the Watergate affair.
The West held the moral advantage to the point that people would risk their lives to get through the Berlin Wall or cross from Cuba to Florida. How many died or were imprisoned in their attempts to leave countries with fake elected leaders to countries with truly elected leaders? But what happens when those unique aspects of the West have been corrupted to the point that the Chinese and American court systems are nearly identical?
The Democrats at the time of Obama had to make a choice. They could either preserve American institutions that made the country a beacon for those seeking freedom and a better life or they could remain in power. They could not have both. So they decided that power was more important than preserving the true American way. The filibuster was abandoned for some judicial appointments. They jailed the J6 protesters on charges well beyond the parading and property damage that they actually performed. They flooded the country with millions of illegal aliens. They added tens of millions of paper ballots, added months to “election day”, removed signature verification for mailed-in ballots, and fought tooth-and-nail against the most basic requirement for voting: a picture ID to prove that you are who you claim to be. The FBI was used to surveil parents and the DoJ selectively prosecuted people based on their voting preferences more than their actual crimes.
But the Democrats could not stop there. They saw Donald Trump as a real threat to their power and the continuity they need in Washington to “fundamentally transform” the United States. Open borders, codifying guys in women's sports, mainstreaming trans, reducing opportunities for whites—these projects take time and they can only come to full fruition if the Democrats remain in control. So they threw the bomb and indicted Trump on numerous charges in multiple venues. The guilty verdict reached on Thursday was a foregone conclusion: by location, by the judge and his prejudicial actions, by the lack of a clearly defined crime, with an attempt to use NY law to claw into a federal crime that the feds chose not to prosecute. They decided that cutting down Trump justified permanently damaging the justice system.
What is the difference between the Soviet trials where the outcome was known from the start, the confession was obtained through force, and the judge understood his instructions and what we saw in New York? I am not a lawyer but from the things I read I understood that the judge rejected many of Trump’s lawyers’ requests while giving Alvin Bragg incredible leeway to press his case, to the point of not requiring 12 jurors to agree on a single charge, something that law professors had never heard of before.
So where does America go? Will we have the perfunctory elections of Russia and the ersatz “people’s house” of Iran or will America still be the land of the free and the home of the brave? Tune in this November.