this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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American presidents have never been dictators before, at least not in the US itself. They support dictators and overthrow legitimately elected governments but not at home.
I mean, tell that to Andrew Jackson. Or William McKinley. Or Jefferson Davis. However you square it, the Confederacy at least was an undeniable dictatorship that controlled half the country.
Even outside the Civil War, the Presidency has been an imperial office. American presidents have a well-defined line of succession and a party mechanism to guarantee the position of ex-presidents within the plutocracy once they leave office. But we've had plenty of periods in which a single party dominated the White House and governed at the head of a completely subservient legislature.
The period from Jackson to Taylor was indistinguishable from any military dictatorship you'd find in 20th century Europe or Latin America. The era from Hayes to Eisenhower was functionally an armed occupation, from the perspective of any African-American or Latin American or East Asian migrant. The 19th/20th turn-of-the-century labor revolts were pockmarked with American military firing on factory workers, miners, and farmers until they fled, died, or were forced back to subsistence living. What else do you call that?
This guy histories. 🤌🏼