It is hard to believe—for me at least— that an entire year has passed since the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The threat to our democracy didn't end with the shameful January Sixth attack on the Capitol and the attempted coup d’état staged by an insane, authoritarian-narcissist president and nearly one hundred fifty seditious lawmakers. On the contrary, democracy has never been under greater threat than it is right now.
A shocking number of GOP leaders—at a
national, state and local level— are actively moving to support state to state
legislation specifically designed to restrict and suppress voting rights, while
continuing to foster insurrection by perpetuating the Big Lie. They are also avidly
going after long-constitutionally-supported reproductive rights, religious
freedom and, indeed, hard-fought women’s rights. But above all, they are overtly
attacking minority rights that civil rights leaders have fought and sacrificed
for since Reconstruction in the post-Civil War days, and which they had apparently
won in the turbulent but democratically victorious nineteen-fifties and sixties
Civil Rights era. While back then no one would have imagined that, less than sixty
years hence the situation for civil rights would do anything but ever-improve,
here we are, in a new era of Jim Crow politics—the worst since the
post-Reconstruction era of the early twentieth century.
While their rhetoric might be crass, and
often openly racist, sexist, xenophobic and unabashedly authoritarian, the
methods all but a handful of GOP leaders are employing to sidestep the
democratic process are somewhat more subtle. After losing the 2020 election,
when the still rational, democratic majority of American voters and electors shouted
a resounding “no!” to a second
four-year term for a president who had proven—not surprisingly to anyone
familiar with his history—morally, constitutionally and mentally unfit to lead
the United States of America, and who pushed the Republic over the brink to the
point of near dissolution on one of the blackest days in the country’s history,
these agents of authoritarianism are attempting to enact legislation that will
make discrimination and voter suppression “legal”, despite its moral and constitutional
illegitimacy. The idea is to blatantly gerrymander voting districts and limit
voting tools in such a way that minorities of color and pockets of liberal Democrats
will be robbed of any means by which to counter the far-right, or to win in the
future when they will no longer be a minority, and when whites will become the
new secondary ethnicity in America.
Not satisfied with pushing passage of state
laws that, in the past as now, hide behind states’ rights as a means of defying
historic Supreme Court decisions and, indeed, the Constitution, through legislation
that flies in the face of civil freedoms and democracy, the GOP is also
actively seeking to change the players in red states where Republican officials
did their sworn duty in upholding the true results of the 2020 election. For
having done what was right, ethical and legal, those elected and appointed Republican
officials are being unceremoniously handed their walking papers. They are being
replaced with officials that the GOP leadership at both the state and federal
level hope—given a similar situation in the 2022 and 2024 elections, and indeed
in all future elections—will put party over country and authoritarianism over
democracy and fudge election outcomes, or simply rig the elections from the
get-go.
To think that everything we are
witnessing here is merely a democratically healthy difference of opinions is naïve
and dangerous. Make no mistake about it: These GOP autocrats have been so
reiterative and intentional in their bid to undermine democracy and promote
single-party autocracy that, according to multiple opinion polls, something
like four out of every ten Republican voters actually believe that the
2020 election—one of the most transparent and scrutinized in the country’s
history—was rigged and that Donald Trump should be the current president.
The members of the GOP leadership who
continue to promote this Big Lie—the same way that Nazi leaders did in their
successful bid to dissolve German democracy and install themselves and Hitler as
the only political power in that nation—for their part, cannot honestly believe
for a minute that the 2020 election was “stolen” from their party. They have
all of the data necessary to know that this is a bald-faced lie. Their repeated
statements supporting that myth are, then, the height of cynicism, born of a
quest for perpetual political power. Their actions and inactions make it absolutely
clear that they are perfectly willing to end the two-and-a-half-century
experiment in democracy that is the United States of America—once the greatest
democratic power on earth, but now a faltering, chaotic shadow of its former
self—if it means clinging to power indefinitely.
On the road to their now clear goal,
there will, hopefully, be staunch resistance. Unfortunately, this promises to
pit democrats and autocrats against one another to an ever-increasing degree.
That is why, for the first time since the eighteen-fifties, political analysts
are weighing the very real possibility of a second American civil war. And what
happened a year ago, during the January Sixth Insurrection, when an American
president and nearly one-hundred-fifty of his lackeys in Congress, in cahoots
with high-rating Fox News commentators, fostered the nearly successful
overthrow of the prevailing democratic order.
