I spent many years under governments that preferred statues to citizens: first thirty years in the Soviet Union, and then three years in Putin's Russia. Censorship, political repressions, the whole sulfurous inventory, those were the thunderclaps everyone heard. Yet what lingers in my memory are the quieter tremors: the leaders' portrait wedged above every blackboard, the municipal hall suddenly renamed for the leader’s mother. Tyranny, like a magician, distracts with grand gestures while doing its finest work in the margins.
That is why the recent rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a self-styled immunologist makes me twitch. Kennedy is, to be fair, an able environmental lawyer with a Harvard B.A. in American history and a J.D. from the University of Virginia. What he is not, even on weekends, is a virologist, epidemiologist, or bench scientist. Nevertheless he insists that one childhood vaccine formulation is superior, that another is a covert toxin, and that the global medical consensus is merely a cartel of dull minds lacking the spark of his singular insight. Replace “vaccine” with “five-year plan” and you have the classic strongman monologue: I alone know what's going on.
Autocrats survive on the conviction that they possess a mystical surplus of competence. Humility is not merely inconvenient; it is subversive. A leader who admits ignorance invites comparison, inquiry, ultimately accountability. Thus the soft autocratic move is to dismiss experts (they are “bureaucrats”), elevate personal instinct (“I trust my gut”), and surround oneself with flattering stagecraft.
Americans usually fixate on the epic assaults: who will muzzle the press, who will subvert the courts. They should; institutions deserve defense. Yet institutions are easier to rally around precisely because their violation is visible. We raise money, litigate, march. What escapes notice are the minor vanity projects that prime a populace to accept disproportionate power. When a hotel lobby in Florida features a forty-foot oil portrait of its proprietor, or when a candidate boasts he will “hire only the best people” yet purges each aide who utters a discouraging word, we shrug: branding, personality, harmless showmanship. In the country I once called home, those flourishes were the early sirens. By the time the statues went up, the locks were already on the ballot boxes.
Kennedy’s hubris is not the same as gulags, and I am not suggesting equivalence. The United States still bristles with checks: governors, media, courts, muckraking podcasters, and a citizenry that can weaponize sarcasm within seconds of a livestream. That layered resilience makes me a bit more sanguine about surviving a frontal assault. What worries me are the micro-doses of autocratic style that accumulate like heavy metals. Celebrate military parades on civilian avenues often enough and uniforms start to feel more legitimate than suits. Slap your name on the new White House ballroom, and every subsequent ribbon-cutting becomes an affirmation that private vanity and public good are the same enterprise.
Democracy runs on the unglamorous fuel of self-doubt. In higher education, we try to instill critical thinking, which first has to apply to oneself. Democracy asks its leaders to check footnotes, convene committees, lose arguments on C-SPAN, and apologize when they bungle the statistics (not fire the statistician). None of that photographs well, which is precisely the point. A system that relies on ordinary mortals must normalize ordinariness. When a politician insists he is the oracle among clerks, reach for your skepticism as instinctively as fastening a seatbelt.
So yes, America can withstand a would-be autocrat. The constitutional levees are high. But vigilance is less about scanning the horizon for cavalry and more about noticing the confetti at our feet. Dictatorship creeps in on cat paws wearing a custom-tailored sash. If we learn to laugh at the sash before it becomes mandatory attire, the thunderclap may never come.
