58%
I remember when Republicans talked about law and order. Must have been a long time ago.
State election officials testified before the January 6 committee on Tuesday, recounting how Donald Trump and his allies pressured them to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election in the weeks leading up to the deadly Capitol attack.
Trump continued his efforts even after members of his own party repeatedly told him that reversing the election results would violate state laws and the US constitution, the officials testified.
As a result of Trump’s persistence, election officials and poll workers were subjected to violent, hateful and at times racist threats from the former president’s supporters.
And yet he’s still not in prison, and if he doesn’t drop dead first he probably will succeed in stealing the 2024 election and the US will plunge all the way down the slope and crash at the bottom.
Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona house, was among those testifying at the Tuesday hearing. Less than an hour before the start of the hearing, Trump released a statement mocking Bowers as a “RINO”, meaning Republican in name only, and claiming that Bowers had said the election in Arizona was rigged.
That man could get into power again.
The Tuesday hearing could bolster calls for Trump to be charged over his role in inciting the deadly January 6 insurrection. According to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll, 58% of Americans now believe that Trump should face criminal charges in connection to the Capitol attack.
Nail him now: it’s our only chance.
Regardless of whether Trump becomes president again I have to say I feel pessimistic for the US – and by extension the rest of us. It’s been clear for decades that the GOP wanted power and was prepared to make pacts with lunatics, arseholes and devils to gain and keep it. They did pretend for decades that they had actual moral, economic, and social principals, but in recent years even that became an increasingly transparent shell game. Now, with the shunning of many of their so-called intellectual and policy wonks for failing to sufficiently bow down to Trumpisim, it’s clear where and what they are. An ugly coalition of fascists, racists, theocrats, sweeping together the mad, bad, and sad.
The question isn’t ‘will it get bad?’ The question is ‘just how bad will this get?’ I fear the answer will be ‘very’. There are a lot of bad state level actors out there who will be more than happy to have the USA collapse inward, or possibly even join them in plundering the planet.
Is Trump stealing the election worse than DeSantis winning legitimately? He was an active impediment to the Party doing what it wanted. Exhibit A: the ACA survived because Trump cultivated a personal animosity with McCain. With Cruz it’d be dead.
I seem to remember Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt saying that the most likely outcome was that the U.S. would become like much of Latin America, technically still a “democracy” but highly dysfunctional and plagued by extreme degrees of polarization, partisanship and “constitutional hardball”, i.e. weaponizing every technicality of the system (the letter of the law) to sabotage anything the other side tries to do (in violation of the spirit of the law). I believe that this was before the last election and it’s aftermath, however, and their assessment has grown a lot more dire since then. Even Levitsky and Ziblatt themselves (often accused of doomsaying) admit that they totally underestimated the degree to which mainstream Republicans would prove themselves prepared to openly embrace authoritarianism.
Putin’s Russia might offer a clue as to where America is heading. There may still be (a parody version of) “elections”, but they will neither be free nor fair and have no real consequences for who gets to govern. Unlike the great tyrannies of the 20th century, people will probably not be required to believe the lies of the regime, or even pretend they do. Those who claim to be “unpolitical” and stay out of the whole fight should be fine as long as they put up with the occasional harassment from the police, pay the required bribes etc. Some minor dissent and even a limited “opposition” may still be tolerated as long as it can be neutralized by disinformation, discredited by conspiracy theories, or drowned out by a cacophony of conflicting messages (should be easy, since we’re already 99% there), and doesn’t pose any significant threat to the Oligarch in Chief. Appointments to higher office will be based not on merit* but on personal loyalty to the leader. There will be no social mobility, since anything you manage to build can be taken from you under some made up pretext by a jealous oligarch at any time** etc. etc.
*This is where attempts to portray Trumpism as simply the logical consequence of what “conservatives” have been up to the whole time fail. As I realized from reading Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy, this betrayal of “meritocracy” in favor of partisan loyalty is probably more intolerable to traditional fiscal conservatives like Applebaum, Frum, Sykes etc. than to liberals and leftists who say there’s no such thing as meritocracy (it’s all just class privilege perpetuating itself through the generations) anyway.
**Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible offers a truly shocking example of this from real life in modern Russia.
I’m not sure anything offers us specific clues on how things shake out; Russia has always been a nation of slaves barring maybe a ten to fifteen year period whereas the United States is a nation of relatively free people and was from the start (with some major exceptions). That and our central government is increasingly weaker. Whatever bad is, it’s unlikely to look like anywhere else.
The Republicans talked about being for Law and Order during Nixon’s original campaign, because of all those pesky protests and riots for civil rights and to end the Vietnam War. They even talked about Law and Order during the 1972 campaign, after the break-in (which deterred no one from voting against Nixon.) It was a case of “yes, he’s son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” reasoning from diehard Nixonians. I get the suspicion that such conservatives aren’t as much for Law and Order, as they are for Order and Law be Dammed. This vein of conservatism has always puzzled me. They hate the government, but love the authoritarian expression of government when they put the “Thin Blue Line” bumper stickers on their cars.
During the Iran-Contra Affair sentencings, people excused Poindexter and North as “doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.” Again, the law be damned. And those same people love Trump because he promises Order. Nothing gets done about police brutality because that would compromise Order and the only fix for unrest is not to address the reasons for unrest, but to add more cops.
Even if they prove to be useless, as in Uvalde.
(I don’t hate cops, I just think they need to be held to higher scrutiny than your ordinary citizen they are meant to serve and protect.)