Authoritarian Trends

We are facing a global attack on democracy. It is not just the Russian Federation, or Hungary, or a few other miscreants. We are facing this ourselves, and we will be tested. We are already getting sorely tested. We need to look at this from two places. The first is the January 6 insurrection. The intent was to stop the peaceful transfer of power. It was a direct attack on traditions returning to the country's beginning. It was the first time in American history, including the civil war, that we did not have a peaceful power transfer.

This matters and why there is minimizing by the same authoritarian forces that don’t like democracy. You may ask, why? Democracy means that groups of people they don’t like can vote and help determine the country's path. This is why, particularly in red states, we are seeing a direct attack on voting rights, especially for minorities. The simple reality is that many of these people seek to reverse the gains made during the civil rights era and stop the growth in both economic and political power. Never mind, there is still a vast financial and political gap, but the fact that we had an African-American president and now a vice-president that happens to be a woman and African-American of Indian descent is leading to a moral panic among people who are used to wielding power, and a country that was a caste system. They would love apartheid.

This is the window we must use to look at two other trends. The first is making all women effectively second-class citizens and the passage of state laws to stop the free movement of…