No, America Isn’t a Dictatorship
Despite the claims of the New Right, America isn’t Russia and Donald Trump isn’t Alexei Navalny.
Several recent events have put the topic of Russia at the forefront of conservative discourse – the congressional battle over Ukraine funding, Tucker Carlson’s journalistic jaunt to Moscow, and the death in prison of Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny. Through all of these news cycles, there has been a consistent response from the so-called New Right, which overlaps with the MAGA movement. That refrain has been to diminish Russian evils and exaggerate those of the United States.
Moscow has been hailed as a wonderful world metropolis as compared to all American cities, Vladimir Putin’s false history has been lauded as impressive and factual, and Russian leaders have been credited as conservatives worthy of emulation. Most galling, however, is the rising segment of the right that views the governments of Washington and Moscow as essentially the same. They label America as a veiled dictatorship that represses dissent against the ‘regime’ just as much as Russia does. These sentiments have been espoused by everyone from social media influencers and pundits to former Speakers of the House and sitting US Senators. These newfangled useful idiots echo – consciously or not – Kremlin propaganda. And they’re entirely wrong.
The first problem with their attestations of authoritarianism in America is that they are freely able to argue that the country is authoritarian. In nations like Russia, criticism of the government, the leader, or the policies thereof is not only frowned upon, but punished by law. Protests against the government are put down with excessive force. For a current example, just look at how the Kremlin has reacted to the public mourning for Navalny, putting riot police in the streets to target peaceful memorialization of a well-liked politician.
Tucker Carlson, after his visit to Moscow, argued that “press restriction is universal in the United States,” something belied by the very fact that his remarks were widely publicized in the media. Another pundit stated that our criticism of Russia would have more credibility if there were not “government-led censorship campaigns in America.” She is referring to the reports of Biden administration pressure on Amazon to remove books that proffered Covid-19 “disinformation.” This story is indeed disturbing, but the fact that it was revealed by an opposition-party congressman and reported publicly by a variety of conservative outlets confirms the fact that America is itself a free and open country.
The larger problem with the false equivalence between America and Russia, however, comes in the description of how opposition figures are treated by the justice system. Most of these claims are related to figures the New Right sympathizes with politically, including the rioters who invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021. These folks, who have indeed been prosecuted zealously, actually committed crimes that day. Not invented charges crafted after the fact, but legitimate federal offenses that were obvious from the moment they were committed. Another cause célèbre is the case of Douglass Mackey, a notorious social media troll who crafted a series of memes promoting false voting information before the 2016 election. In March 2023, he was convicted for this offense – which is, once again, a legitimately-passed federal criminal statute – and sentenced to 7 months in prison.
One may argue with the appropriateness of the existing laws, the discretion of the prosecutors, or the decisions of the juries, but pretending that these people are ‘political prisoners’ akin to those in Russia is patently absurd. In Putinist Russia, independent journalists are arrested, peaceful protestors are disappeared to reinvigorated gulags, and sentences for speech clearly protected under the US First Amendment range in the span of decades, not months. Oh, and that’s of hard labor, not confinement in American minimum-security facilities.
The most ridiculous assertion in this vein has come to the fore since the murder in custody of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. His persecution at the hands of the Russian government has been compared to Donald Trump’s prosecutions by a number of popular figures, including former New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, the author and pundit Dinesh D’Souza, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. One can oppose the criminal and civil cases against the former president without comparing his treatment to that of Navalny or other Russian dissidents like Vladimir Kara-Murza or the late Boris Nemtsov. Let us count the differences.
For one, Donald Trump is afforded the presumption of innocence and will be given a fair trial by a jury of his peers. He will have the right to appeal judicial decisions about the trials, consult with lawyers, and make his case freely in the press. He is not barred from running for office during these trials, nor is he from traveling to campaign. He is allowed to protest his innocence and fundraise for his defense. If he is convicted, he can pursue appeals to multiple higher courts on the state and federal level. If he is jailed, he will be eligible for parole and will likely reside in a minimum-security facility, if not under house arrest.
Navalny was afforded none of those protections of due process. He was put in front of a judge with the outcome already entirely certain, unable to make a positive case in his defense. The charges were unsupported by the evidence, yet conviction was guaranteed. He was ill-treated in prison, being shifted from facility to facility arbitrarily and capriciously. Prison conditions were utterly abysmal, including at his final stay in a gulag in the Arctic Circle. Finally, he was murdered while in custody. As the Sesame Street song goes, “one of these things is not like the other.”
One thing the New Right should not be like is the Old Left. But it turns out that populist radicals have more in common than they differ. In 1974, the useful idiots on the left excused Soviet communism; in 2024, the useful idiots on the right excuse Russian authoritarianism. The right shouldn’t wholeheartedly embrace the pathologies of the left, in particular virulent anti-Americanism, caping for authoritarians, and chronic hyperbole. They shouldn’t argue that America is a dictatorship far less free than Russia. (I genuinely can’t believe I had to write that sentence.) It can support the Russian way or the American way. Conservatives have a choice, and it should be an easy one.