A Democracy In Peril
Can It Be Saved?
Democracy is at grave risk! Saving it may be more problematic than most people want to believe, are able to grasp, or haven’t paused to consider consequences of its failure.
As a child during WWII and growing up in the 1950s with the advent of TV, I somewhat took on a political interest, always watching both the Democrat & Republican National Conventions. Remaining a lifelong Democrat, while voting for Republicans at times, I admit to some consternation and intrigue over the years as to what has been going on in the GOP. For example, Jackie Robinson and his contingent walking out of the Goldwater GOP Convention in 1964; Nixon’s and Reagan’s southern political strategy; Lee Atwater, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn political-hack-types of which there’s been no equivalence in the Democrat Party, that I’ve ever known. A line of virulent-political-cultural of extremism – an undercurrent or in open view – through many years, brought infamy to the party; in part, it has been a growing discord causing paralysis in the U. S. Congressional body. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their book The Broken Branch of 2006, documented the party (GOP) primarily responsible for congress’s descent, since falling to near incapacitation.
Meanwhile, a potentially larger problem looms in State Houses. Of major concern is Gerrymandering and ‘election of biased court members’ who would fail to protect the drawing of fair congressional districts. Of chief growing influence in state governments, since the organization of ALEC (1973 American Legislative Exchange Council), an ongoing hard-right policy – in opposition to immigration, environment, labor unions, gun control, and for strict voter identification – has been backed by big-money of the Kock Brothers. Not only did/are they effecting policy in state houses, they supported the Tea Party, a vitriolic hatred against President Obama.
Don’t forget the influx of dark money granted by Citizens United assisting the Federalist Society’s entrenchment to ensure a political-right Supreme Court – brought to its all-time low repute. This is the Supreme Court by which Trump’s team of lawyers thought it might be possible to stop electoral count and overturn the 2020 presidential election. As The Washington Post reported (11/2): In an email sent hours later, Chesebro reiterated that he viewed “the best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress” would be to get a case “pending before the Supreme Court by Jan. 5, ideally with something positive written by a judge or justice, hopefully Thomas.”
Otherwise, we have Murdock’s Fox News – competing with Newsmax and OAN – to hold onto their revenue and audience with programming tailored to political-right and MAGA extremist. Without FOX much of the above mentioned could not have aggressed to the extent of control it has taken on. Rupert Murdock’s ruthlessness – to maximize wealth notwithstanding democracy’s peril and at the nuisance of his children’s fate – is quite astonishing. (If you haven’t seen The Murdocks, a series (currently 7 episodes shown) on CNN, I highly recommend.) Moreover we have a failure of ethics and morals across the economic-political spectrum. A case in point may be: Too much money in the hands of the irresponsible; Elon Musk buying Twitter and immediately spreading conspiracy.
Wealth is in the driver’s seat: As Robert Reich writes, “… this power shift lies at the heart of Trumpism and widening inequality.” It is the power of money, the power of pricing by large corporations that brought us ‘double inflation’ as a result of price gouging. Yes, the GOP is winning on cultural wars and thus the vote of those less fortunate affected by inequality and often misinformed. Unfortunately, ‘negative-inducement’ persuasion to the disillusioned garners more votes than a positive ‘straightforward-policy’ message. With Citizens United, Democratic candidates became more dependent on corporate money, thereby losing clear face with those on the short-end of economy.
As for Trumpism: It’s not a cause but an effect, political exploitation, which has brought us to this demarcated political left/right divide. People of goodwill, of any virtuous quality, have no choice but separate themselves; On right are unchecked boldfaced lies and conspiracy, the likes of QAnon, a depravity representative of Alex Jones, the very definition of evil. It is a psychosis, of severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are impaired that contact is lost with external reality.
How did we get here? Unmoored ethical bearings? Immorality? Conspiracy? I would make the case that effectively what brought us Trumpism goes back at least seven decades. It’s what stimulated my interest to muse the past, remembering some political storms during my life’s epoch: thinking of Joe McCarthy’s communist witch-hunt, Robert Welch’s organization of The John Birch Society, a place for kooky conspiracy; all that and more, dating back to the 1950s. (Quite often I watched the commentary/interview program of William Buckley, an intellectual conservative, who overcame his racial views and finally did denounce the John Birch Society.) That’s the history I’ve been intrigued by, waiting to be chronicled, going back to its origin-roots.
Reading several Trump books since his presidency began, and by otherwise observation, I felt sufficiently informed as to his tragically-unmoored occupancy of the White House. (If by now anyone doesn’t know who ‘Trump is’ and ‘who Trump is not’ – I would question their news sources or if that person favored democracy.) But these books did not educate me on the source of the Trumpism; just what caused it and led us to this unsettling time in history? I was eagerly waiting the book to be written covering – what I believed to be – the breeding-ground of the last seventy years, resulting in a Trump-breed constituency.
In September Dana Milbank’s book The Destructionist was published, which was an excellent review of the last three decades, primarily beginning with the Newt Gingrich episodes. Not the full history I was looking. A few days later David Corn’s American Psychosis was published, which was closest to what I had been waiting to be written. Corn covers the full saga, including Jerry Falwell to Pat Roberson who said, “We are seeing the Christian Collation rise to where God intends it to be in this Nation, as one of the most powerful political forces that’s ever been in the history of America.” The book truly is a history of the GOP’s treading ‘in and around’ the ‘political swamp,’ a failure to shake off or denounce the rabid culture on the far-right, that had origins seventy-years earlier.
Don’t mistakenly take ‘my words’ to discredit or disparage the many capable, honorable Republican servants in our local and state governments. Many are my friends. However, only they can throttle this infectious breed – engrained to live beyond Trump. This sordid culture has grown to 40%, maybe 70% or more, in the Republican Party. And the problem can’t be fixed until the cause is acknowledge and action taken, which can only come from within the GOP. (Of course all of us individually have an obligation to speak, we being taught right from wrong, to be truthful, not to lie; if we don’t speak out, do we not become complicit in furthering immorality?)
FiveThirtyEight reports (10/31), “Out of 552 total Republican nominees running for office, we found 199 who FULLY DENIED the legitimacy of the 2020 election.” Short of the party eviscerating this cancer, it will take many goodwill-GOP members (former included) and the largest force of engaged Democrats and Independents – going to the polls – to keep our democracy secure.
Are either of these remedies possible? We may know when more GOP representatives of Liz Cheney’s and Adam Kinzinger’s character speak the truth. Meanwhile democracy hangs in balance between a ‘free egalitarian society’ or ‘an oligarch-autocracy,’ led by extremist right-wingers.
In the early 1960s: “In a letter to the Los Angeles Times endorsing an editorial criticizing the [John Birch] society [Richard] Nixon observed, ‘One of the most indelible lessons of human history is that those who adopt the doctrine that the end justifies the means inevitably find the means becomes the end.’”[1] (How ironic!)
Alert! The MEANS is buckling down. When and to ‘what end’ will come the seven-decade-psychosis? Democracy????????????
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