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I'm reminded of so much of the rhetoric, often out of Europe, about Hungary and its "democratic backsliding," its "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," how it maintains a "quasi-dictatorship" by winning elections (by giving the majority what they vote for); and the invocation of various "democracy indices" whose inner workings reveal a definition of "democracy" in which elections and the will of the voters play a relatively tiny part, and it becomes "undemocratic" to respect the outcomes of elections when the electorate 'votes wrong.'
Sure it will, given — per my previous paragraph — the way they define "democracy." After all, as I once saw some wag online put it (in a snowclone) "'Democracy' is when Democrats are in charge; the more Democrats are in charge, the more democratic it is."
I mean, I've exposed to a lot of melting-down lefties over on Tumblr, and there's quite a few coalescing around the position that if "democracy" means giving the voters a say, but a majority of American voters are either so stupid or so evil to support racist rapist Fascist felon Trump and his pure evil Nazi Party 2.0 over Kamala Harris's "flawless campaign" of "joy, hope and unity" and a Democratic Party that stands for all that is good and right in the world, then "democracy" has got to go — proposed solutions start with massively rolling back the franchise (such as requiring a bachelor's degree to vote), through "reeducation camps," to "kill all Trump supporters."
Well, who do you think "a cabal of CIA and military leaders," deathly opposed to Trump, Vance et al, and seeking to save the Left's hold on the permanent bureaucracy, would choose to install as their puppet in the White House? Newsom? Hillary? Liz Cheney?
I view this as further proof of my presumption that the only way for liberalism to capture a society through democratic (non-violent) means is by boiling the proverbial frog; rhetoric of the sort you mentioned is what is used when this project fails. Boiling the frog does not just entail the Gramscian long march through institutions but also incremental steps to secure limited but permanent political gains while at the same time avoiding generating worthy opposition that actually may be dangerous to your project; all this is to take place while society is distracted by ultimately irrelevant other stuff.
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To steelman this perspective, my lefty sister explained to me that, on a trivial level, democracy doesn't just mean tyranny of the majority: a necessary precondition of a functional democracy is ensuring that everyone who ought to be entitled to the franchise has it and is able to exercise their voting right. If every other Republican was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia by a malicious Dem-voting psychiatrist and carted off by the men in butterfly nets, and hence unable to go to the polls, everyone would recognise that this wasn't a fair election in any real sense. Likewise if gangs of Antifa goons were bussed in to red states to stand outside polling stations and level AR-15s at anyone in a MAGA hat.
From the perspective of these Dems, if you take them at their word, they believe that Trump will do something like this to American democracy. Either he'll abolish it entirely and crown himself Dictator-for-Life (the less outlandish version of this talks about him abolishing presidential term limits); or he'll use various procedural tricks to manipulate election outcomes - taking away the franchise from assorted reliably Dem-voting demographics, straight-up shipping them off to concentration camps, or simply instructing police officers to look the other way when members of these groups are assaulted or mudered. Thus, in order to ensure the long-term survival of American democracy, actions which are surely undemocratic in the short-term must be undertaken, as a "pre-emptive strike" to prevent the destruction of democracy in the long-term.
Needless to say, I don't agree with any of this. No concentration camps will be constructed during Trump's second term, the rate at which black Americans are stripped of their voting rights (e.g. because of felony disenfranchisement) will be no different than under Biden, the murder clearance rate will be largely unchanged (i.e. there will no massive spike in unsolved murders of black Americans, LGBT people etc.).
But if you were one of these people who sincerely believed that the long-term destruction of American democracy was imminent, I could certainly imagine thinking that, therefore, short-term undemocratic actions might be justified to protect. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.
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I would guess it would be a Pinochet situation. The cabal would rule and select one of their own to be the figurehead†. "Let's loop in Kamala" wouldn't cross their minds. Some public facing cabal member would be the new official leader. A Smedley Butler for 2025.
†Mild academic Pinochet of course seized control and his co-conspirators lived in fear of his wrath and never got the chance to co-rule with him. But I think Americans could pull off a ruling council that doesn't degenerate into helicopter rides and torture camps.
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Probably Hakeem Jeffries.
I give him much better odds than Kamala.
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