Well yes, but the thing is, even strongly anti-liberal leftists (and this quest's membership is probably a fairly leftist crowd) tend to view "democratic" and "good" as being to some degree synonymous. So I wanted to go well out of my way to 'disown' the implication that just because I am describing an action as taking place within the envelope of a democracy's "republican traditions" that I am trying to justify the action as moral or as being legalistically acceptable.
Because we've all seen, for instance, people try to call the secession of the Confederate States 'legal' as a way of deflecting attention from the fact that
they were fucking slaver scum trying to preserve their slave power.
I'm trying to be clear that that is
not my intention, since I do not feel much trust that my good faith intentions will be taken for granted in this matter.
I know that "republican tradition" has positive connotations but, for this particular argument, I would prefer to describe it in a more neutral manner. "Republican tradition" does not mean (for the sake of the argument) that they are a shining beacon of democracy, instead, it means that the governmental institutions of the US hold a particular view on how the system naturally works.
This view is formed by traditionally liberal (18th century liberal) values such as separation of power, rule of law or secularism. This values are generally considered neutral because they are "natural" (they have been there since the US gained its independence), changing them is like changing science. Anyone can dislike scientifically proven facts as much as they want but noone can deny that they are true.
Fascism really breaks those rules because it wants to create an ideological religion (an state functioning through the rule of an ideology instead of law). They invent a collective which they can call "the nation", "the culture" or "the race" (it doesn't really matter how they call it, they all have in common that they are a vague concept which must be reclaimed if they want to return to the good ol' days) for which the individuals must sacrifice their rights (they also tend to add the vague promise that once the crisis is over the rights will be returned) if they want to achieve collective salvation.
We are broadly speaking in agreement here.
Summarising, Reagan is trying to convince the american institutions that their natural form is x while this institutions think that their natural form is y. The obvious outcome is that Reagan is going to rely on extra-legal means (read: Soup letters agencies, the army, paramilitaries...) to achieve his objectives instead of the judiciary or the legislative branches of the state.
Yes.
Of course, the trick here is that many people among those extra-legal institutions may believe that the natural form of the institutions is Y, too. Reagan would need to first reforge the military-security-intelligence complex into the Gestapo he needs to build,
then use it to crush competing centers of power.
My own main point is that given that he couldn't even win a presidential election fairly in 1980, he's probably fighting something of an uphill battle to maintain legitimacy. He's
massively underperforming the OTL Ronald Reagan, for example, who won in a devastating electoral blowout that gave him an extremely strong mandate. Whereas in this timeline, Reagan's method of gaining office was blatantly grabby and questionable, involving a "recount" that cannot possibly have been under anything other than shady circumstances likely to trigger a constitutional crisis.
OTL, lots of people were arguing that Ronald Reagan
should not be the president of the United States, due to his illiberal views, his anti-intellectualism, his alliance with religious fanatics, and so on. But nobody was arguing seriously that Reagan
wasn't the president, that he hadn't actually obtained the job title legally.
Here, that's probably still ambiguous or even questioned by some significant voices within the establishment. I'm talking about people who have real legitimacy of their own and who would cause a lot of trouble if they started getting disappeared. And these powerful bastards may well be just about as anti-communist or gay-bashing as the median 1980 Republican voter... But on some level, they still think Walter Mondale (or whoever Carter's running mate was) should be president, and whose interests were trampled in the process of making that happen.
Reagan's gotten away with a huge power grab, but having done so, he's got a fairly complex situation where careless moves could undermine him fatally.
Of course, this makes civil war in the US if anything MORE likely, not less.
