This is not an advocacy diary, but I need to raise this question: The country is heading for a break-up of some kind; what can we do about it?
Two articles, both in today’s WaPo, caught my attention (as they were designed to do). First is by Dana Milbank: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says. The study is by
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, [who] serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence.
While the panel is barred by law from studying the US, Dr. Walter can do so on her own, and did.
Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Milbank cites other studies that have also concluded the US is close to losing its status as a democracy, and asks:
The question now is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans have led us to. There is no more important issue; democracy is the foundation of everything else in America. Democrats, in a nod to this reality, are talking about abandoning President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in favor of pro-democracy voting rights legislation. Republicans will fight it tooth and nail.
(I’ll just add here that it’s about time the Democrats did.)
The other WaPo story is even more pessimistic: 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection.
The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed.
Imagine competing commanders in chief — a newly reelected Biden giving orders, versus Trump (or another Trumpian figure) issuing orders as the head of a shadow government. Worse, imagine politicians at the state and federal levels illegally installing a losing candidate as president.
In essence, the Republicans have long recognized that they will never command a real majority in this country because most voters really don’t like their platform and ideas. Their long-term solution, since Nixon, has been to manipulate the electoral system through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other tools of corruption. That, in turn, gave birth to a generation of Republican leaders who gave up on having any ideas or platform at all other than a desire for raw and permanent power, and who promoted policies primarily according to the criterion of what would get them the most votes that they couldn’t otherwise steal or suppress, regardless of whether they were good for the country (and most of them aren’t).
There is a small irony in all this, in that the Constitution is biased toward them anyway, in the way it gave more power to small states in the Senate and the Electoral College (something I’ve long argued is leading to an existential crisis). But they got impatient. Rather than waiting for the frog to boil slowly (as it were), they turned up the heat so high that the “frog” — ie, the majority of the country — saw the water starting to boil and figured out what was going on.
I suggest that Trump had a unique impact on the GOP in this regard. He seized on their existing authoritarian direction, true. But his impatience, his ego, and his inability to admit to any loss at all, pushed the GOP into boiling the water before they were quite ready to eat the frog.
So, fellow frogs, what choices do we have if the water boils over and the United States is no longer a democracy, but a minority autocracy where political, social, and cultural extremists, driven by a small cabal of the uber-wealthy, dictate to the vast majority* of us how to live our lives? Can we heal the country or is it already too late?
(* One example of this: over 2/3 of the country says that abortion should be legal in some or most cases, yet we are rapidly heading in the opposite direction.)