The Right is a Threat to American Democracy
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American media has finally noticed the existential threat to American democracy. CNN has run a few special reports, for example. They cover familiar ground and serve as a good introduction. They do lay out some of the complexity in our present moment. The danger to American Democracy is the Big Lie No the election was not stolen from the former president. But it is repeated often enough that a large percentage of Americans believe it. This is particularly the case with Fox bad OANN viewers. This is not happening abroad in a Third World country. This is in the here and now in the United States.
I started writing about this early in the 2000s at a place called Democratic Underground. They believed I was exaggerating. Over the Trump presidency, they sounded like me. We Cassandra’s rarely got any credit though. I also wrote about the danger of an American Civil War at that same site, and have continued to the present.
None of this is academic anymore. We are heading towards a very dark era of American history. The election of Joe Biden may have stalled this process. But until we become more active and take these threats seriously this is not over. We need a much healthier civil society with people getting involved at all levels of government. Voting is not enough. However, for the right election integrity is a politically laden term. It is central to the Big Lie.
Some Democratic Senators, by inaction, are active in this exercise as well.
For the American right elections are all about control. Legally minorities can vote. This is a problem for the American right. Why? Because they keep telling us minorities and immigrants vote for Democrats. African-Americans used to vote for Republicans at one point. Republicans used to be the party of civil rights. This was back a century. All this changed in the 1960s when many Dixiecrats switched parties when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and famously lost the South for a generation. What we saw was a party realignment. The seeds for the current moment were laid down by Richard Nixon and the southern strategy. Let’s be clear. While Nixon had authoritarian tendencies, he threatened American Democracy nowhere near where Donald Trump has.
