Ramón Del Castillo, PhD
Posted May 8, 2025
How are tyrants, dictators, and totalitarian leaders created and how do they usurp power from institutions they represent, Congress, and the common citizenry? Power, when it is weaponized, incipiently grows, festers in hate, and becomes a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. In the hands of someone who thirsts for power insatiability is bred. Americans are watching the dismantling of democracy in their living rooms, as Trump and Musk continue to slice away at what is left of the Constitution.
What keeps a democracy sane? How are institutional norms created and how do they persist? A centrifugal force, created by the good will of human beings, comes to life and is used to create a mantra of decency where, in this case, democracy can thrive. It can be a force that instills positive values, humane attitudes, and civilized behavior into a process. Democracy has been characterized as an experiment in governance and civil society. When practiced accordingly, it can become institutionalized and serve the common good. The result is a set of social and institutional norms that maintain balance and provides civility through difficult times in the governance process. The final outcome can be the development of a democratic process that protects our liberties and freedoms.
When Congress winces on its authority to provide checks and balances with the president, it loses its own power.
To disregard the process and use personal and/or institutional power to negate institutional norms, creates enormous problems. When masterminded by a totalitarian in control of the social apparatus, it destroys the infrastructure of democracy.
What specific attitudes, values, and strategies have to be maintained and institutionalized to preserve democracy? How is it then transformed into a totalitarian state? In a book, “How Democracies Die,” written and researched by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors at Harvard University, inform readers how democracies have been destroyed and morphed into totalitarian states. Institutional forbearance is mentioned as a key component of a democracy. The practice of this includes politicians practicing self-control, restraint, and tolerance in the process of democratic representation.
Will American democracy survive through the current onslaught of disorganization and the current deterioration of historical norms that govern political behavior? It will not without another component of democracy called mutual toleration—an important ingredient used in debate and dialogue in a democracy. Mutual toleration is an ability to be broad minded, realizing the fallibility of human beings. It fades away as politicians engage in incivility towards each other, resort to power struggles, negating the issue of serving their constituents. This type of social interaction results in the withering away of civil discourse, which is a perquisite to building a civil society and conversely when abused, destroys a society.
What secret roadmap has been used by Trump and Associates to chip away at American democracy? A critical element to the establishment and sustenance of a totalitarian state is control of the mass media. Characteristically, totalitarian leaders gain unlimited or absolute power over media outlets. Through an abuse of some type of presidential mandate—such as executive privilege, decisions are made without any democratic processes in place. No one is allowed to criticize the ideology of the totalitarian leader without being punished. Guardrails are dismantled.
When Congress winces on its authority to provide checks and balances with the president, it loses its own power. When it is supplemented with support from right-wing media that applauds the totalitarian’s approaches, institutional norms suffer. In the case of Trump, he created a false illusion that voter fraud had taken place in the 2020 elections, plastering it over all of his media outlets. His distortions were repeated so much, that he created doubt first among his cult, then with other groups of people. This abuse caused the voters to lose trust in their government. Propagandistic manipulation can be convincing to a confused population.
Totalitarians generally have an uncanny ability to distort truth, convincing masses of people about their lies. Maintaining a false narrative requires control of communication mechanisms. Linguistic engineering, or the manipulation of the truth, is used to cause confusion, for example the concept of “fake news.” In the “Death of Truth,” author Michiko Kakutani, uses Lenin as an example, and states, “His incendiary language, Lenin once explained was ‘calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, and contempt.’” This, in turn, creates confusion, distortion, and untruth, with an outcome of undue fear amongst the populace. People fearful of retribution simply cave in. Those who stand to prosper from this type of behavior, simply go along for self-aggrandizement or selfish interests.
The authors identify three characteristics that interplay in creating the Master Ruling Classes’ attempt at total control. An initial ingredient has to do with repercussions for those who follow rules and those who purposefully break rules. What happens when someone, in this case a person in power, refuses to follow the rules? What happens when the structure that is designed to control and/or manage the norms begins to dissolve? In this case, Republicans out of fear of retaliation, rather than adhere to the rules, applaud and openly violate the rules of their leader. An example would be the continued denial of the 2020 elections. When this is supported by the Supreme Court, the guardrails dissolve.
One characteristic necessary to operate is institutional forbearance defined as leaders’ abilities to practice self-control, restraint and reasonable tolerance. When the structure has lost its ability to practice institutional forbearance, the decaying process begins. The structure then moves into what Kevitsky and Ziblatt call “constitutional hardball.: playing by the rules but pushing against their bounds and ‘playing for keeps. It is a form of institutional combat aimed at permanently defeating one’s partisan rivals—and not caring whether the democratic game continues.” The final characteristic needed to destroy the institution is polarization, or what the Romans referred to as “divide and conquer.”
Trump has openly declared war, euphemistically called retribution, against those who wronged him. He hurls a barrage of continuous verbal assaults against his enemies. He insults through name calling, in Trump’s case, labelling them with animalistic or some other negative caricature features. His continued declaration of innocence has been his only argument. Courts of law have found him guilty on several charges. However, his piles of money have been used to pay constitutional lawyers to keep him out of jail. His manipulation of the institutional norms, has been callous and deliberate. His supporters, augmented with the decision of the Republican Party to use funds to pay for his legal shenanigans, has resulted in creating tons of cash to continue his journey towards totalitarianism.
Polarization is a tactic used to divide and keep humans from interacting humanely toward each other. This includes putting Congress and the masses of the people in a state of trauma. Voters from all sides build camps with invisible barriers, more psychological in nature, to protect their interests. Effective communication comes to a standstill as totalitarianism moves along its path of destruction. Voters do not know who to pledge their allegiance to.
Let me add in racial antagonism to the list of attributes that totalitarian persons adhere to. History is full of dictators that kept groups of people in perpetual states of oppression, generally Persons of Color. Currently, the growth of multiracial groups induces fear among the majority population who have governed this nation at the expense of the denigration of other groups, whose growth in numbers presents a vile threat. With Trump, his insidious attacks on People of Color, hidden under the rhetoric of his love for and protection of the Jewish population, is part and parcel of his psychological ammunition. His mistreatment of Venezuelanos and Mexicanos on the borders is filled with hate. His blatant use of birtherism against President Obama, was malicious at its best. Trump manipulates language in what he believes is a suave and debonair method, never admitting any mistakes.
A Constitutional crisis exists irrespective of what liberals think. They need to takeoff the colored lenses, take a deeper dive through a set of critical lenses into American society as it is, and work with local communities to take action against the backward thinking that put America in this position.
What is the antidote? Perhaps, it has already taken form as free citizens realize that their freedoms are disappearing within the internal corrosion of the democratic system that was designed to protect them. Politicians need to join in unity with local and national groups in mass movements. Only the movements of the masses of the people will curtail the continued abuse of power and destroy the road to a totalitarian state.
Dr. Ramón Del Castillo is an Independent Journalist. © 5-5-2025
