The Second Unfortunate Ex- and I (almost all I) texted the other day:
...Isn’t this the bottom line though: Just as Hitler did in the ‘30’s after the Beer Hall Putsch, Trump and his Scum are passing voter restriction laws in over 20 states and PoJo prioritized infrastructure ahead of voting rights. We are almost sure to lose the House next year and these nuts are winning elections to county election boards that certify the ‘24 election. They are in position to win the WH in ‘24 and have the means in place (redistricting among all the rest) for a permanent Fascist majority, and I doubt (very strongly) that this time the Supreme Court will not intervene.
Yes. Likely true.
Hitler was determined to win the Chancellery of Germany through constitutional means. He did. As someone said on the eve of WW II, “The lights are going outall over Europe. I doubt we will see them lit again in our lifetime.” I know I said ‘16 was the end of America and the beginning of a new country, America 2.0. It took Hitler 9 years but he gained the Chancellery and the lights went out. 2016 and Jan.6 were the Trumpists Beer Hall and early ‘30’s maneuvering. I know I’m coming across as dramatic but so be it. America is losing its democracy. Biden was just an “interregnum.” I truly, rationally believe the lights are going out in America.
You are not alone.
And I am not:
How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return
Political analysts, scholars and close observers of government are explicitly raising the possibility that the polarized American electoral system has come to the point at which a return to traditional democratic norms will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.The endangered state of American politics is the dominant theme of eight articles published by the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, with titles like “Polarization and tipping points”...
The academy is not alone. On Dec. 6, The Atlantic released “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” by Barton Gellman, and “Are We Doomed? To head off the next insurrection, we’ll need to practice envisioning the worst,” by George Packer.
On Dec. 10, The Washington Post published “18 Steps to a Democratic Breakdown,” which warned:
"Democracy is most likely to break down through a series of incremental actions that cumulatively undermine the electoral process, resulting in a presidential election that produces an outcome clearly at odds with the voters’ will. It is this comparatively quiet but steady subversion, rather than a violent coup or insurrection against a sitting president, that Americans today have to fear most."
Michael W. Macy, a professor of sociology at Cornell and the lead author of “Polarization and tipping points,” put it this way in an email:
"Unlike the threat to democracy posed by a military coup, the threat posed by authoritarian populism is incremental. If the water temperature increases only one degree per hour it may take a while before you notice it is too hot and by that time it is too late. We might be better off if we faced an armed insurrection, which might be the exo-shock needed to get the G.O.P. establishment to wake up."
We did! That's was Jan. 6 was.
The political scientist Suzanne Mettler, also at Cornell, used the same metaphor of slowly boiling water in her reply to my query:
"The greatest danger to democracy right now has emerged in one of our two major parties — a longstanding party that helped to protect democracy until recently, and this makes it hard for people to recognize what is going on. Finally, I think that most Americans...are much less likely to be thinking about the health of the basic pillars of democracy, e.g. electoral integrity, the rule of law, the legitimacy of the opposition, and the integrity of rights. Our political system is in crisis..."
Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, writing on Dec. 9, raised similar concerns: “We are experiencing failures on both the elite and mass public level,” he wrote, as Republican elites “have chosen to normalize the violence committed by their extreme right flank on Jan. 6.”
The activist anti-democratic Trump wing of the Republican Party, committed to avoiding at nearly any cost a political system dominated by an Election Day majority of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and social and cultural liberals, has adopted an aggressive strategy to preserve the political power of white people, especially heteronormative white Christians.
Democracy — meaning...crucially, majority rule — has, in fact, become the enemy of the contemporary Republican Party...In the four elections since 2004, the Republican nominee has consistently lost the popular vote to the Democratic candidate, including Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
The widely publicized efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to politicize election administration and to disenfranchise Democrats through gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws testify to the determination of Republicans — especially the 66 percent who say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen — to wrest control of election machinery. On Sept. 2, ProPublica documented a national movement to take over the Republican Party at the grass-roots level in “Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the G.O.P. — and Reshape America’s Elections.”
...
"Even if Republican voters suddenly decide to start punishing extremists in their party...Republican leaders would very likely simply stop listening to Republican voters or ignore elections altogether. Indeed, this is already happening."
I disagree with that, from the authors of a political science paper. That's all they care about; that was the theory Ted Cruz sold to his GOP colleagues in voting against certifying Biden's election: "doing the will of our constituents." How could Republican leaders "stop listening to Republican voters" or "ignore elections altogether"? lol
...
In an email, Macy wrote:"The most likely outcome of increasing polarization is political paralysis in which the parties are more interested in preventing the other side from winning than in solving problems. We have heard politicians even feel so emboldened that they can publicly acknowledge that their goal is obstruction, not problem solving. That is the most likely outcome of extreme polarization. A less likely but more frightening outcome is that the partisan animosity against the opposition becomes so intense that each side now views the other as “traitors” or “enemies of the people.” When that happens, the party in power may feel justified in changing the rules of the game to prevent the other party from being able to hold it accountable."
Well, it has happened. Nothing like predicting the future with the past!
Great anthology of the current literature by Thomas B. Edsall.
