America’s First True Dictator

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Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate hundreds of workers across federal agencies if he becomes president again. Consolidating power and placing friends in key roles are textbook autocratic maneuvers, but they also are not new in the United States. This episode revisits the story of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who sought to take over the apparatus of government in his state, just as illiberal leaders have done in other countries.

This is the third episode of Autocracy in America, a new five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Pomerantsev: Anne, one of the main features that I experienced when I lived under authoritarian regimes is this sense that the institutions of the state, the police, the tax services, the bureaucracy—they’re essentially these dangerous animals that are not working for you but working in the interests of the powerful.

Applebaum: Right. As though they could come after you if you get in the way.

Pomerantsev: So you have all these institutions, which in a democracy are meant to serve you, the people, but in an authoritarian regime, they are, well—they’re captured.

Applebaum: In fact, “state capture” is the term that political scientists use to describe this, and I watched it happen in Poland between 2015 and last year. An autocratic, populist party won a legitimate election but then began to act like they owned everything. They fired civil servants. They replaced them with people’s friends and party loyalists. They allegedly arranged for state institutions to give money to foundations, which eventually wound up enriching party members or else funding their election campaigns—that’s being investigated right now.

They used the tax office and the prosecutor’s office to investigate their enemies, their political rivals— including me. My husband and I had to hire lawyers and spend a lot of time going through documents in order to counter false accusations. And it was not amusing. It was a form of state-backed political harassment. Now, I guess it’s the kind of thing Americans can’t imagine they would ever have to deal with, because, I don’t know, Our tradition of checks and balances is too long. Americans would never stand for that. We would protest and struggle. No way.

Pomerantsev: Yes way is what I found out. (Laughs.) There is the pervasive sense in America that it’s exceptional. And, obviously, America is very, very special. But since I started researching this show, I’ve found that maybe America isn’t quite as exceptional as sometimes people feel, because a leader did rise to power here and manipulate the levers of power to his desires.

[Music]

Richard D. White Jr.: Huey Long did more good for any American state than any politician in history. The paradox is that Huey Long did more harm than any politician in any state in American history.

Applebaum: I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America.

Pomerantsev: In this podcast,we are not talking about some distant, dystopian totalitarian state.

Applebaum: This is not a show about the future of America. There are authoritarian tactics already at work here.

Pomerantsev: And we’re going to show you where.

Applebaum: Psychological corruption, widening apathy, perhaps the birth of kleptocracy.

Pomerantsev: And in this episode: the takeover.

Huey P. Long: How many men ever went to a BBQ and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat? The only way you will ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain’t got no business with.

[Crowd applause]

White: Huey liked to brag that he grew up barefoot and hungry, but really, he didn’t. He grew up in a large, middle-class family, a two-story frame house. They had electricity. They had water.

Pomerantsev: Richard White is the author of Kingfish, a biography of Huey Long.

White: When he was up north Louisiana, he would brag to the audience that when he was a kid, he’d hook up the horse and buggy and take his grandmother to a Baptist church on Sunday. When he was down south, he would brag to the audience that on Sunday, he would hook up in a horse and buggy and take his grandmother to Catholic mass.

A local politician said, you know, Huey, how can you tell those lies? And he said, Hell, we didn’t even have a horse.

Pomerantsev: White has chronicled how Long basically invented a playbook for how one man could take over the institutions of a place—in this case, Louisiana—for his own private gain.

White: It was a state that was split, and either you were absolutely for Huey Long or violently against him. There was very little in between.

Pomerantsev: Anne, what I find so fascinating about Huey Long is that, in a way, he became a classic and very recognizable autocrat but at the same time a really, really American one.

Applebaum: In what way?

Pomerantsev: Well, look—he was an entertainer and a salesman, literally. You know, one of his early jobs was as a salesman going around Louisiana, and he always continued being an entertainer and a salesman, even as he took away people’s rights.

Applebaum: Hmm.

Pomerantsev: He had a very dramatic story. He died unexpectedly. He was killed in the Louisiana state capitol. He was assassinated by the son-in-law of a political rival. Though, again, it’s a confusing story. There was some question about whether that man merely punched him, and then Long was shot by a deflected bullet when his own security detail opened fire. What’s for sure is that he was cut down at the peak of his powers. But his life in politics actually started with a loss.

[Music]

White: In 1924, he ran for governor. He didn’t do well. He ran in third, but as soon as he lost in 1924, he never stopped campaigning. And for the next four years, he did nothing but campaign for governor.

Pomerantsev: What was Louisiana like at that time?

White: At that time, the country was going through the Depression. Everyone was looking for an answer, and every extreme group you can come up with, whether it be far right or far left, was very active during that time.

Pomerantsev: What was his pitch to the voters? What made him unique?

White: Oh, he promised them everything.

Pomerantsev: (Chuckles.)

White: And I don’t think they really cared whether he was truthful or not. He was the only one giving them any hope, whether it be false or not.

Applebaum: How many times have we heard that before—I will solve all your problems; only I can do it—from someone who craves power?

Pomerantsev: Right, Anne. And often they promise things to people who have very little, and then they don’t deliver. But actually, in the beginning, when Long was finally elected, he did deliver on some of his big goals. Louisiana was one of the poorest states in the U.S.A., and there was a lot to improve.

White: He built thousands of miles of new roads. He brought Louisiana out of the horse-and-buggy days. He gave the farmers a homestead exemption. He gave the schoolchildren free schoolbooks so they could finally go to school.

Pomerantsev: So, Anne, these were popular policies, but they weren’t cheap. Long, first as governor and later as a U.S. senator from Louisiana, dove headfirst into spending. One of the things he wanted to do was impose a tax on the giant oil companies in Louisiana to raise funds. Some legislators pushed back, so Long kind of went at them. He would smear them with fake stories, for example.

White: Crazy, crazy stuff. He was very creative.

Pomerantsev: He accused a war hero of having syphilis. Others he just called names.

White: One of his opponents had a beard, and he was “Old Feather Duster,” for example.

Pomerantsev: A block of legislators opened up an impeachment against Long for 19 charges, which included corruption, favoritism, oppression in office, gross misconduct, and just general incompetence.

White: It came down to the last minute. He bought off a couple of senators. He gave them money and women and anything he could, and finally he survived impeachment. After that, he was a different person. There were two Hueys: the Huey before the impeachment, who did all those good things, and the Huey after the impeachment, where he became vengeful. He wanted to crush every one of his enemies, and he did.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: In Louisiana in the 1930s, the governor of the state, Huey Long, became, in the words of a contemporary, “the first true dictator out of the soil of America.”

He put in place a playbook that showed how a wannabe American dictator can capture the state, can overcome checks and balances, can make the powerful unaccountable to the truth.

Step one: capture the legislature so it succumbs to your every whim.

White: He started with the legislature. He would buy off the sheriff, buy off the big wheels. One by one, he conquered the legislature.

He would walk onto the house floor, and off the top of his head, he would dictate law after law after law.

He would gerrymander political divisions. He would change election dates. He would change the length of office. He would choose the people who counted the votes. In one election, for example, in St. Bernard Parish, you go to the records, and you’ll see that the voters of that election voted in alphabetical order. Can you figure that out?

Pomerantsev: That’s pretty sloppy cheating.

White: No, it’s not sloppy. It’s blatant. They let him do it!

Pomerantsev: So, Anne, so much of this stuff is familiar to me from Eastern Europe. When an autocrat like Putin fakes an election, he wants everyone to know that he’s faked the election, in order to show his power.

It’s not about kidding people. It’s not like, A ha ha, I cheated on the election. It’s more like saying, I’m cheating on the election, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Applebaum: Yes, because sometimes when you lie, the point isn’t to convince people. It’s to show how powerful you are.

Pomerantsev: Right. And in order to wield that power, there is a second step Long took. So first he got the legislature under his thumb. Second, supposedly independent bodies were dominated by Huey Long too.

White: He would choose all the boards and commissions. Every schoolteacher had to get permission from Baton Rouge for their job. And if they were from a family that opposed him, they lost their job.

Pomerantsev: Long continued with his playbook, including steps three and four: You capture the courts and intimidate the media.

White: He packed the courts. He got rid of the few judges who opposed him. And once you have the courts and the legislature, and you’ve already got the executive, you have all three branches of government, including passing a gag law on newspapers that prohibit them from criticizing him. So that’s the fourth branch, be it may.

Pomerantsev: So basically censorship.

White: Yes. Absolutely.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: And finally step five: violence.

White: During an election, when people would get kidnapped and disappear for a while, Huey was doing it. I mean, his people were doing it. He used both the state police force and the National Guard as his own personal police force. He would arrest his enemies. He set up machine gun nests around the capitol. He declared martial law in several towns that opposed him.

There was nothing off the books for Huey.

Pomerantsev: If I were to arrive to Louisiana in, I don’t know, 1933, would I realize that I was in a quasi dictatorship, or would it look like any other American state?

White: Well, you would recognize right from the beginning you either had to be for Huey or against him. Huey Long was not a politician. He was a demagogue.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: So there you have Long’s playbook for state capture: Capture the legislature, take over independent institutions, intimidate the media, and then employ violence. And the whole is made possible with a propaganda that strategically divides the state, where you have blind loyalty from your voters, who will always support you for anything—and I mean anything—you want to do.

Applebaum: And you have to ask, what was the long-term effect of all that? His tenure didn’t lay out a system designed tokeepthe state out of hard times indefinitely. And fast-forward to today: It’s still an incredibly poor place.

Pomerantsev: It’s still near the bottom of the list for poverty, life expectancy, literacy, overall health.

Applebaum: The most amazing thing that I have learned recently about Louisiana is that this kind of politics continues to this day. There are still attempts to capture Louisiana’s institutions. Just this summer, the governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, made a move that Huey Long himself might have been impressed with.

[Music]

Applebaum: He called for a constitutional convention, making it possible, in theory, to rewrite the entire Louisiana state constitution, with all of its checks and balances, changing all of the rules without any public consultation in the space of a couple of weeks.

Governor Jeff Landry: It’s kind of like maybe cleaning up your yard in springtime, right? Raking the leaves, taking some of the weeds out of the landscape, making the place beautiful and more attractive.

[Music]

Ashley Kennedy Shelton: This was absolutely about, you know, creating a scenario where there’s absolute power.

Applebaum: Ashley Kennedy Shelton is the founder, president, and CEO of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a voter-engagement organization in Louisiana.

Shelton: Jeff Landry ran on wanting to have a constitutional convention. This is a, you know, conservative governor with a conservative house and senate. He’s not been clear with anybody exactly why he wants to open the constitution. Once you open it, it is open, and they can do whatever they want.

Pomerantsev: So, Anne, why is this a big deal? Does this never happen in the U.S.?

Applebaum: To be clear, a constitutional convention in and of itself, though rare these days, is not unheard of. The last one to take place in Louisiana was back in the 1970s. But that one took place with some really different arrangements.

Shelton: So in 1974, when we had the last constitutional convention, you know, it was a process to actually begin planning the constitutional convention years prior. The citizens of the state actually voted on delegates to participate in the constitutional convention and created a real process through which they would evaluate and address, you know, the issues within the constitution that they felt were critical and important.

Applebaum: But this time around, things were approached differently.

Shelton: We’re trying to do one in two weeks, which doesn’t make any sense. And nobody’s disagreeing that our constitution probably needs to be tidied up. But what doesn’t make sense is that there’s absolutely no citizen input and that there’s this two-week period.

Applebaum: And the tradition of autocracy—how does this fit into that?

Shelton: You know, I think when you look at Louisiana historically, we’ve had so many lively characters, right? From Huey P. Long to Edwin Edwards to our current governor, Jeff Landry. You know, like, everybody puts their spin on it.

Applebaum: Peter, I can see the skeptics sort of turning away from this story, shrugging this off as a local quirk.

Pomerantsev: It does feel pretty enticing to chalk this up to some sort of Louisiana tradition.

Applebaum: Right, except that you and I know from studying how democracies diminish that this could be a sign of something bigger. And I asked Ashley Kennedy Shelton what she thought about that idea.

Applebaum: Are you seeing this happening in other places? You think this is a national plan?

Shelton: (Chuckles.) Much like most bad policy, it gets seeded in the Deep South— Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama—and then kind of sent wholesale to the rest of the country. We have talked to our folks in Alabama. You know, it’s happened there recently. It’s been maybe a year.

But I think that this constitutional convention was about normalizing this idea of opening up state constitutions, with the ultimate goal of opening the United States Constitution.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: So, Anne, what happened in the end?

Applebaum: Essentially, time ran out. The Louisiana legislators didn’t take up the governor’s request. Shelton and others organized a kind of statewide campaign against it. They put everybody on high alert that this could be dangerous, this could undermine rights, this could undermine other kinds of institutions. But it doesn’t mean the idea won’t come back.

Pomerantsev: But so how likely is this at the federal level?

Applebaum: We’ll get to that after the break.

[Break]

Pomerantsev: Anne, hearing you talk with Ashley Kennedy Shelton and thinking back to the story of Huey Long, it sort of makes me wonder: If this could happen in Louisiana, could a takeover by one person really happen at the national level?

Applebaum: Well, theoretically, it’s not supposed to be able to happen in the U.S., because of our system of checks and balances. In other words, if we had an executive who overreached, then he would be blocked by the courts or blocked by Congress.

If Congress became too greedy for power, then the other institutions would check them too. That’s the nature of the system. It’s supposed to make exactly this kind of state capture impossible.

Pomerantsev: Right. But recently I’ve learned that the systems of government meant to protect the U.S. are more malleable and spongy than I thought. I talked to Amanda Carpenter. She’s the former communications director for a Republican senator, Ted Cruz, and now she works at Protect Democracy. That’s an NGO that brings court cases to defend democratic values and rights.

Carpenter: Modern-day authoritarians do not come into power by brute force. Modern-day authoritarians typically come to power competing in and winning democratic elections, but then once they get into power, tilting the levers of government, tilting all the levers of power in their favor.

Pomerantsev: The levers of power she’s talking about—turns out they can have a big impact when it comes to how federal agencies are run.

[Music]

Donald Trump: Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all.

Carpenter: Donald Trump has said explicitly: On day one of his presidency, he’s going to implement an order known as Schedule F.

Trump: —restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.

Carpenter: That would provide the basis for him to purge up to tens of thousands of career civil servants, then creating openings in which he can replace those positions with loyalists.

Trump: We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national-security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.

The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe.

Applebaum: Peter, every U.S. president regularly chooses thousands of people to work for them: agency heads and cabinet members. But what is being described here is a bit more serious than that.

Pomerantsev: Yes. The threat is to fire experts—get rid of people who have worked in their job for years, people who understand how to make the system work for the public. To me, it definitely sounds like Huey Long.

Applebaum: It’s exactly the kind of thing that the Polish far right or the Venezuelan left or the Hungarian government has tried to do in order to capture the state—to use that term again—take it over, and stuff it with loyalists.

Carpenter: In the years that Donald Trump has been out of power, his allies have been closely studying the government and creating a sort of intellectual framework that would allow Donald Trump to act on all his authoritarian impulses.

A lot of it centers on the idea that there’s no such thing as any independent government agency. You know, here in America, we do sort of operate under the norm that the Department of Justice, the FCC, the EPA, all these government agencies operate with some amount of independence, meaning that the president cannot directly interfere with their day-to-day activities. That is a norm.

Applebaum: And a norm is not a law. A norm is a convention. It’s a thing that we all agree about, but it’s not written down anywhere. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s not in any other kind of law. If it’s broken, there isn’t a legal way to fix it.

Pomerantsev: Right, and it’s not hard to imagine, is it—how this might play out with an agency that’s linked to an industry that a wannabe autocrat openly despises?

[Music]

Pomerantsev: So take the Federal Communications Commission. That’s the one that regulates media. Once you have loyalists all throughout an agency like that, the agenda of a leader with autocratic tendencies could be more efficiently pursued.

Carpenter: Should Donald Trump be successful in implementing his ideas to take away many of these career civil servants and replace them with his loyalists, what’s to stop him from withholding the FCC license from certain broadcast outlets? What’s to stop him from tripling the postage rates to punish Jeff Bezos?

There are so many tools available in our government if there is someone who actively seeks out to abuse those powers, and that is something that authoritarians explicitly do.

Pomerantsev: It turns out that just like Long used the tax authorities to attack his enemies in Louisiana, a wannabe authoritarian at the federal level can weaponize the IRS.

Carpenter: The IRS is certainly a vector for abuse of power. I think President Nixon targeted political enemies. And then even in the first Trump administration, you’ve had his former chief of staff, John Kelly, tell the press President Trump wanted to use the IRS to harass former FBI Director James Comey.

Applebaum: Amanda Carpenter makes it all sound pretty easy. One could follow in Long’s footsteps and capture the courts, the bureaucracy, the tax authorities; attack media and nobody would stop you.

Pomerantsev: Yeah, but look—attacking the media is one level of menace, but Long used violence as well, and he employed the security services for his own gain. Amanda Carpenter thinks even that kind of direct violence could be, well, pretty possible.

Carpenter: One scary way that this sort of comes into focus is President Trump, during his first term—and this is well reported—has asked his security officials, Well, how come you can’t just shoot immigrants coming over the border? How come we can’t just shoot protesters? And the answer is: Because that is a violation of the law.

I mean, Not only is it immoral, but we will not do this for you. The idea of stamping out independence at these agencies is so that no one actually tells the president no.

President Trump has said many times, in true authoritarian fashion, I have Article II power to do whatever I want.

[Music]

Nichols: We’ve been lucky. I shouldn’t say lucky. We’ve had a good system of civil-military relations.

Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Tom Nichols. He’s your colleague at The Atlantic, but he’s also a professor emeritus at the Naval War College.

Nichols: We have imbued our men and women in uniform with the idea that interfering in politics is repulsive to them, that it violates their sense of their own identity.

Pomerantsev: We’ve been talking about a whole variety of levers of power and types of control, but I wanted to talk with Nichols about the military.

Applebaum: The vision of those boots on the ground is very hard to shake, but, at the same time, it seems super far-fetched.

Pomerantsev: Well, this is what I thought, too. But in talking with Nichols, I became increasingly and alarmingly aware of how much more within reach it might be.

Nichols: Everything in this country operates on the functional equivalent of a handshake. And that’s good. Let me just be really clear: That’s good.

I had a wonderful philosophy professor in college who was trying to explain to, you know, a bunch of unmarried kids how you don’t want to have a law and a contract for everything, right? If you’re married, and you have a contract that says, “I will take out the garbage. You will do the dishes. I will tell you once a day that I love you. You agree at least once a day to hug our children,” and so on, then you don’t have a marriage. You know, marriage, like a lot of social relationships, functions on trust and cooperation and love, and democracies function on trust.

Countries that have, like, really long, detailed constitutions tend to have problems (Chuckles.) because they felt the need—

Pomerantsev: (Laughs.)

Nichols: —you know, they felt the need to write every single thing down that you could possibly do wrong.

Pomerantsev: It’s like a very bad marriage. We’re going to put everything into a list now, yeah?

Nichols: Right. It’s like having a 57-page prenup.

Pomerantsev: (Laughs.)

Nichols: You know, maybe if you have to have a hundred pages of a prenup, maybe this marriage wasn’t a great idea to begin with, you know.

Pomerantsev: (Laughs.)

Pomerantsev: So, Anne, Tom Nichols laid out for me a somewhat frightening—okay, actually, a very frightening scenario about how an aspiring autocrat could capture the military. It starts with appointing “yes men” and “yes women” in the top spots. And when you’re unable to do that, you just leave the office empty.

Nichols: Let’s look at what happened at the end of the Trump presidency, where, as one of my friends in the military—a retired military officer—said to me, The two most common names on doors at the Pentagon were vacant and acting.

If you don’t care about Senate confirmation, if you don’t care about the guardrails, if you don’t care about the norms and the laws that govern these institutions, then you can just say, You know, the president has the power to just fire people.

Applebaum: And of course, the idea that you have acting heads of departments or temporary people in charge contributes to the idea that there’s something plastic and fake and empty about government, that it’s just not working anymore, that we don’t have real people in real jobs.

Pomerantsev: As I was talking to Tom, I was kind of still left wondering: Practically, what would a wannabe autocrat do when they controlled the military at home? What would they do with them domestically? How would it impact democracy here?

Nichols: If you have a governor, for example, or political allies, you could have the military show up to their events in uniform and make it clear that you support them.

You know, putting National Guard units working with Homeland Security or SWAT teams—there’s all kinds of mischief that you could do that really could just be a way of flexing muscle and trying to intimidate the civilian population, especially if you’re about to do something pretty shaky, constitutionally.

If Donald Trump wins, he’s talked about mass deportations. We don’t have a big enough Army to deport 11 million people but, you know, that could get into an ugly situation.

There was this kind of harebrained scheme that seems funny in retrospect, but less funny now, where the idea was to seize voting machines to be, you know—and I’m making little air quotes here—to be “examined” for fraud. And then, there was even one step further, where there was some talk about, Let’s rerun the presidential election under the watchful eyes of the military, so there could be no fraud. You’re not betraying the Constitution; you’re saving it by protecting the sanctity of our elections, by going in and being the armed guards around polling machines.

Pomerantsev: The Russians like to do this in places they’ve occupied. Like, you know, Eastern Ukraine, they’ll have military soldiers come around to—I’ve seen the videos, you know—the military will come around and knock on people’s doors. There’ll be some granny who opens the door, and they’re like, Hello. We’re here to get your vote. And there’s, like, a guy with a Kalashnikov and a balaclava.

Nichols: Which I think most Americans would find scary and many others would find—and I’m one of them—would find deeply objectionable and un-American. That’s functionally a military coup.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: Okay, Tom, we now have a scenario to get the military to protect an election. How many of your guys would you need in the system? What’s the level of penetration that you need?

Nichols: It depends on where they are in the chain of command. I mean, if you have a couple of people—if you have a handful, five, six in the right positions, and then they can deftly use the chain of command to issue orders that are not obviously illegal, or at least illegal on their face, you could get tens of thousands of people who are obeying three or four or five people.

Applebaum: Three, four, five people.

Pomerantsev: Mm-hmm.

Applebaum: Five people is not very many.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: Autocracy in America is hosted by Anne Applebaum and me, Peter Pomerantsev. It’s produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank, edited by Dave Shaw, mixed by Rob Smierciak, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Our managing producer is Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Autocracy in America is a podcast from The Atlantic. It’s made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.

[Music]

Applebaum: Next time on Autocracy in America:

Applebaum: The U.S. is the leader of an international democratic alliance, but there is another network of nations who work together, too.

Leopoldo López: We are fighting a global fight. We are fighting, really, against Maduro but also against Putin, against Xi Jinping, against the mullahs from Iran, because they are the lifeline of Maduro.

Applebaum: We’ll be back with more on that next week.