Fiddling While Democracy Burns
Don't miss this must-read from Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. May Senator Joe Manchin absorb it on his house-yacht Almost Heaven, and consult his conscience before our country faces veritable hell.
Trump and the GOP have in fact attempted nothing less than a kind of virtual secession from the American political system... Once restored, the Great Leader, unchecked by Congress or the courts, may be expected to pursue authoritarian, kleptocratic politics on a scale merely hinted at during his first four years in office... But more than that, the Republican Party, if successful, will be poised to secure what has been its supreme political goal for a long time, long before Trump, something that the southern Slave Power had hoped to achieve before the rise of the Lincoln Republicans drove it to disunion — a more or less ironclad system of undemocratic minority rule. That new system would block national action over any issue that the red state minority finds objectionable, from civil rights, abortion rights, and gun-safety to economic regulation and progressive income taxes. And by sustaining and reinforcing every undemocratic instrument the system affords, the Republicans could make that minority rule more or less permanent. Without dissolving the Union or amending the Constitution, or assaulting the Capitol, the Republican Party will have replaced American democracy with minority despotism...
With the Supreme Court majority firmly on its side, the minoritarian Republican Party that long ago became a hard right-wing outlier in our politics will have established a firmer a grip on American government — across the board, from top to bottom — than any other party in our history has enjoyed... The Republicans will have triumphed not by repeating Trump’s sedition but instead by manipulating and perverting the system in order to overthrow it. Right-wing Bolsheviks, they will have strangled democracy with its own rope...
Democratic majoritarianism was one of the breakthroughs of civilization, and the truest source of political legitimacy. The framers built on that breakthrough by creating a national government that was supposed to reflect a balanced national majority, vastly expanded today beyond what it was in 1787. Now we must worry about protecting the national majority from the minority. We must recognize a minoritarian danger. In a democracy, what is minority rule if not a subversion, and a seizure of power? In its severest test until now, Abraham Lincoln successfully defended the primacy of the majority principle as the nation’s last best protection from anarchy and despotism. Should we fail the same test today, historians will be left to examine the irony of how the Republican Party that Lincoln helped to found became the vehicle for democracy’s destruction.
The conservative Robert Kagan's piece "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here" is also vital. "The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves," he writes.
Most Americans—and all but a handful of politicians—have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation...
While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life... German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices...
The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power...
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.