The greatest danger to American democracy is not coming from inside the House

AlterNet Logo

The greatest danger to American democracy right now is not coming from Russia, China, or North Korea. It is coming from the Republican Party. 

Only 25 percent of voters self-identify as Republican, the GOP’s worst showing against Democrats since 2012 and sharply down since last November. But those who remain in the Party are far angrier, more ideological, more truth-denying, and more racist than Republicans who preceded them.

And so are the lawmakers who represent them. 

Today’s Republican Party increasingly is defined not by its shared beliefs but by its shared delusions. Continue reading.

Historian: How MAGA’s ‘culture of resentment’ has a lot in common with Nazi Germany

AlterNet Logo

William A. Galston‘s recent essay “The Bitter Heartland”begins, “We are living in an age of resentment . . . [that] shapes today’s politics.” The more I read of it (and more about it later), the more the great resentments of Hitler’s followers came to mind. They resented rich Jews, the victorious Allies who in 1919 had imposed the “unfair” postwar Versailles Treaty upon them, civilian German politicians who had signed the treaty, communists, who had taken over in Russia and were a rising force in Germany, and the “decadent” godless ways of Berlin, as hinted at in the play and film Cabaret.

The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up land to their west and east and also their overseas empire. It also imposed strict limits on its armed forces and weapons. But perhaps most bothersome of all to the average German was the imposition of war reparations, which many Germans believed contributed to their great financial agonies. This was especially true during the great inflation of 1923 – by then a loaf of bread could cost billions of Reichsmarks – and the Great Depression. Historian Peter Fritzsche notesthat “between 1929 and 1932, one in three Germans lost their livelihoods. At the same time, young people had no prospect of entering the labor force . . . German farmers suffered terribly as commodity prices slumped.”

Fritzsche also relates some of Hitler’s early tactics like boycotts that “relied on entrenched resentments against allegedly wealthy, rapacious, or tricky Jews,” and he writes that “the Nazi leader appealed to popular fears and resentments and transformed them into final judgments and the promise of direct remedial action.” Moreover, Hitler used a we-versus-they approach, “pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world.” Continue reading.

‘We could lose our country’ because GOP politicians won’t ‘hurt Trump’s feelings’: DC insider

Raw Story Logo

Democracy in America could end and the cause could be the refusal of Republicans to hurt Donald Trump’s feelings.

At a campaign rally in October, Trump worried about what would happen if he lost to Joe Biden.

“Could you imagine if I lose?” Trump said at a rally in Georgia. “My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say, ‘I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics.’ I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.” Continue reading.

Can GOP Autocracy Outlaw American Democracy?

National Memo logo

Hey, you, get away from those polling places! No trespassing! We don’t want your kind here! Scram!

How’s that for a winning political message? It is stupid, shameful and ultimately self-defeating, yet being blatantly anti-democratic and anti-voter is the official electoral strategy being enthusiastically embraced nationwide by Republican officials and operatives. Admitting that they can’t get majorities to vote for their collection of corporate lackeys, conspiracy theorists and bigoted old white guys, the GOP hierarchy’s Great Hope is crude repression — rigging the rules to shove as many Democratic voters as possible out of our elections.

They’re banking on a blitz of bureaucratic bills they’re now trying to ram through nearly every state legislature, using government red tape and the iron fist of government autocracy to intimidate, divert and otherwise deny eligible voters the ability to exercise their most fundament democratic right. The main targets of the GOP’s vote thieves are people of color, but they’re also pushing measures to keep students, senior citizens, union households and poor communities from voting. Continue reading.

Researcher who tracks racist far-right groups fears the possibility of a ‘post-democratic’ society in America’

AlterNet logo

During the Trump era, researcher Emily Gorcenski has been carefully tracking far-right extremist groups — including the Proud Boys. Gorcenski discussed her findings in an interview with The Guardian, and they are incredibly disturbing.

The Guardian’s Sam Levin explains, “Using court files and other public records, the anti-fascist researcher has catalogued hundreds of criminal cases, connected the dots of dangerous neo-Nazi networks, and revealed links that journalists and authorities have missed. These days, it can be difficult to keep up. Far-right violence has escalated dramatically under Trump, who has ignored his own government’s domestic terrorism warnings and encouraged vigilante violence against leftists.”

Here’s the ironic part. Fearing for her safety, Gorcenski has left the United States and relocated to Berlin, Germany — a city that was overtaken by fascists during the 1930s. But in 2020, ironically, Gorcenski feels safer in Germany than she does in the United States. Continue reading.

Democracy is in decline around the world — and Trump is part of the problem

Washington Post logoFor the 14th year in a row, a major annual report on the health of global democracy warned of its decline. In its survey evaluating 195 countries and 15 territories, Freedom House, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan advocacy organization established in 1941, found that political freedoms and civil liberties across the world are backsliding more often than they are improving.

“Democracy and pluralism are under assault,” read the opening sentence of its report, written by Sarah Repucci. “Dictators are toiling to stamp out the last vestiges of domestic dissent and spread their harmful influence to new corners of the world.”

The usual suspects remain among the worst offenders. Freedom House decried China for its “totalitarian offensive” in Xinjiang and other campaigns of repression, and it warned of Beijing’s “relentless campaign to replace existing international norms with its own authoritarian vision.” It pointed to Russia’s “stage-managed elections” in 2019, in which the genuine opposition was largely shut out. Iran’s leadership, even as it sowed “discord” in neighboring countries, deployed security forces that used live ammunition to crush demonstrations last fall, killing hundreds of people.

How The Supreme Court May Enable Trump To Reshape Government

An obscure case before the Supreme Court has the potential to reshape the federal government in a fundamental way. If conservative activists get their wish, President Donald Trump — and any president that comes after him — will have even more power to bend federal agencies to his will.

The case is Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that was the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). As part of her desire to free the mandate of consumer protection from the political winds, winds that are frequently at the backs of powerful business interests, Warren ensured that the director of the bureau couldn’t be removed by the president from the post except under extraordinary circumstances. Unlike the members of the Cabinet, then, the directorship wouldn’t be expected to change hands with every new president, and a business-friendly president couldn’t remove an aggressive director without good cause.

It’s this feature of the bureau’s structure that Seila Law, a firm being investigated by the CFPB, sought to challenge in arguments before the court on Tuesday. The firm argues that the independence of the bureau from the presidency violates the Constitution. This argument relies on an idea common in conservative legal thought: that the president has sole and unmediated authority over executive branch agencies. Inherent in this authority, they say, is the power to fire executive branch officers. Continue reading.

Schiff Says CIA, NSA Withhold Relevant Documents From Congress

On ABC’s This Week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff confirmed a grim report that surface last week: The nation’s top intelligence officials are pushing Congress to cancel their usual annual testimony to Congress on the nation’s top national security threats because they don’t want to publicly contradict Donald Trump’s false intelligence claims.

“Unfortunately, I think those reports are all too accurate. The intelligence community is reluctant to have an open hearing, something that we had done every year prior to the Trump administration, because they’re worried about angering the president,” Schiff responded.

It isn’t an idle concern, from intelligence officials. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was forced out of his position shortly after confirming to Congress that despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, the U.S. had no evidence Iran had an active nuclear weapons program. Trump had a public meltdown, which is a now-daily occurrence, and Coats was given the boot; in the latest degradation of this nation into a kleptocratic and autocratic state, government officials are now reluctant to testify in public about the true dangers facing the nation because if their pronouncements do not match Dear Leader’s political claims, Dear Leader will mark them as personal enemies. Continue reading.

Why the Impeachment Fight Is Even Scarier Than You Think

Political scientists have studied what our democracy is going through. It usually doesn’t end well.

For decades, Republicans and Democrats fought over the same things: whose values and policies work best for American democracy. But now, those age-old fights are changing. What was once run-of-the-mill partisan competition is being replaced by a disagreement over democracy itself.

This is particularly evident as the president and many of his allies crow about the illegitimacy of the House impeachment inquiry, calling it an attempted coup, and as the White House refuses to comply with multiple congressional subpoenas as part of the probe.

This marks a new phase in American politics. Democrats and Republicans might still disagree about policy, but they are increasingly also at odds over the very foundations of our constitutional order.

View the complete October 31 article by Thomas Pepinsky on the Politico website here.