It Can’t Happen Here? Yes it Did

Look at Hong Kong

Donald Trump has promised, if he wins Tuesday’s election for the US presidency, to jail his political opponents, members of the press, the top former members of the military who called him out as a fascist and anyone else who disagrees with him. There are growing concerns that he means it. In Pennsylvania earlier this month, according to the New York Times, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn said that after a Trump victory: “Katie, bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell – my hell – will be unleashed.” That troubling image was reinforced by Trump’s crude and racist rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on October 28 rally, which called up characteristics of an ominous pro-Nazi event on February 20, 1939, in the same venue and left Trump and his allies insisting that he is “not Hitler.”

With just a day to go before the polls, much of the American conservative political establishment and the electorate appear to be going along with Trump in the belief that the country’s democratic foundations – the courts, the police, the press, the military – are so steeped in democracy that they will block his more outrageous impulses. The American Civil Liberties is planning ways for Congress to plug gaps in the president's emergency powers, and ways for governors and mayors to direct their police to refuse to participate in federal law enforcement task forces.

But liberal institutions, once breached, disappear alarmingly quickly. Anybody who thinks these institutions will provide a bulwark against repression had better take a look at Hong Kong, once the most securely liberal city in Asia. Prior to 2021, when Beijing introduced its draconian National Security law, it was still a city where political protest was viable, where 180 years of British jurisprudence prevailed, where a tradition of press freedom allowed a cadre of international journalists to base their international offices there along with a strong group of human rights lawyers…