America is in Terrible Danger

I have long been horrified yet also fascinated by the way Germany fell into dictatorship and then launched a war that cost tens of millions of lives.   Science and legitimate knowledge were done away with whenever they failed to support the Nazi agenda and civil rights for citizens disappeared.  And while all of this happened a significant minority - or perhaps it was a majority, if people were honest - let this all happen.  Indeed, many cheered it on. Fast forward to today and we are witnessing something similar in America where an amoral, narcissistic monster is out to destroy America's democracy and institutions simply to satiate his ego and remain in power. It's treason on a massive scale, yet the Republican Party, now controlled by racists, religious zealots and, of course the greedy, are fully onboard if it means power is retained and taxes are cut. Frighteningly, individuals who I once thought were decent and moral are onboard this nightmare train as well. I am terrified that we are witnessing the last days of the American republic and may soon face a fascist dictatorship.  I am currently reading "Former People" which looks to what happened to the Russian aristocracy following the Bolshevik revolution.  There are parallels with what we are witnessing today with what happened in Germany and Russia because it wasn't just the aristocracy that was targeted.  Rather, anyone educated or who wanted democracy was killed or driven from the country.  Trump's toxic base would likely celebrate the same happening here.  A column in the New York Times looks at the danger America faces at this frightening time.  Here are excerpts:

Toward the beginning of a wise and beautifully stated essay about American partisanship and the response to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the lawyer and political commentator David French wrote, “I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

I don’t think the shudder was confined to the political class. And the day after Ginsburg died, I felt a shudder just as deep.

That was when Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!”

This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace. Trump has not just blessed but encouraged this. On Fox News last month, he bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf.

Color me alarmist, but that sounds like an invitation to do more than just watch. Trump put an exclamation point on it by exhorting those supporters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person, which is of course blatantly against the law.

Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no. That’s the toxic wellspring of the dread that French mentioned. That’s the moral of the madness in Virginia.

We’re in terrible danger. Make no mistake. This country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded, because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground. The Republican Party won’t apply the brakes.

The week since Ginsburg’s death has been the proof of that. Many of us dared to dream that a small but crucial clutch of Republican senators, putting patriotism above party, would realize that to endorse McConnell’s abandonment of his own supposed principle about election-year Supreme Court appointments would be a straw too many, a stressor too much and a guarantee of endless, boundless recrimination and retribution. At some point, someone had to be honorable and say, “Enough.”

Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

So the lesson for Democrats should be to take all they can when they can? That’s what some prominent Democrats now propose: As soon as their party is in charge, add enough seats to the Supreme Court to give Democrats the greater imprint on it. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, so that Democrats have much better odds of controlling the Senate. Do away with the filibuster entirely. That could be just the start of the list.

I wouldn’t begrudge the Democrats any of it. The way I’m feeling right now, I’d cheer them on. But Republicans reach back to Harry Reid’s actions when he was the Democratic majority leader of the Senate to justify their wickedness now. Democrats will cite that wickedness to justify the shattering of precedents in the future. Ugliness begets ugliness until — what? The whole thing collapses of its own ugly weight?

The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

“The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,” the article’s author, Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer winner, wrote. “The mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity.”

Several hours after Gellman’s article appeared, Slate published one by Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Law, with the headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”

“If you had told Barack Obama or George W. Bush that you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.” But Trump? “I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.”

He’s [Biden’s] our best bid for salvation, which goes something like this: An indisputable majority of Americans recognize our peril and give him a margin of victory large enough that Trump’s challenge of it is too ludicrous for even many of his Republican enablers to justify. Biden takes office, correctly understanding that his mandate isn’t to punish Republicans. It’s to give America its dignity back.

There is another school of thought: Maybe we need some sort of creative destruction to get to a place of healing and progress. Maybe we need to hit rock bottom before we bounce back up.

But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.