Once Again, Under the Shadow of Authoritarian Power, Americans Must Decide What Kind of Nation We Will Become

[marmar]

Once Again, Under the Shadow of Authoritarian Power, Americans Must Decide What Kind of Nation We Will Become
Will we stand with the generations who expanded freedom through resistance and sacrifice or surrender self-government to fear, force, and authoritarian power?

Thom Hartmann
Jan 27, 2026


There is something deeply unsettling about Lincoln’s famous phrase “four score,” meaning eighty years. It’s roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be.

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What typically triggers those moments, historians will tell you, is when inequality has grown extreme, political power has hardened into the hands of a few, and democratic norms have been eroded or even openly attacked. The country then is forced to choose: either expand freedom and rights, or slip toward authoritarian rule.

Nobody’s sure exactly why this keeps happening every eighty years. It may be because when the people who lived through the last catastrophe have just died off, their lived memory of repression and violence is gone with them. The guardrails then weaken, the warnings are forgotten, and people take leaps without remembering the lessons from the past.

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And here we are, eighty-one years after the end of WWII, once again facing an authoritarian crisis that’s forcing Americans to decide afresh who we are and what form of government we want.

Trump and his gang of lickspittles, toadies, and incompetent hangers-on are hell-bent on turning America into a Russia-like authoritarian state with single party rule. Almost without exception, they’ve cowed the entire Republican Party into a frightened silence as their Brownshirts spread across the country to terrorize any city whose citizens had the temerity to vote against them. ................(more)

https://hartmannreport.com/p/once-again-under-the-shadow-of-authoritarian-211