{"id":2555,"date":"2020-12-16T15:18:14","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T15:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=140032"},"modified":"2020-12-16T15:18:14","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T15:18:14","slug":"a-notable-death-in-2020-american-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/16\/a-notable-death-in-2020-american-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Notable Death in 2020: American Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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True story: I used to be a crazy Civil War buff when I was 5 years old. In the year when most normal kids were getting Beatles records or the latest loud offering from Mattel, I asked Santa for my blue Union soldier uniform. I even made my dad get off the Pennsylvania Turnpike and take me to see Gettysburg on our annual pilgrimage to my Midwestern grandparents. Little did I know back in 1964 that I\u2019d get a chance in my lifetime to write about America\u2019s second War Between the States.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what else to call it when 18 U.S. states \u2014 that\u2019s seven more than the 11 that seceded in 1861 and formed the Confederacy \u2014 go all the way to the Supreme Court to have my votes and about 7 million others here in Pennsylvania, and those of three other states, thrown out for absurd reasons<\/a>. It can only be read as, we don\u2019t like who won.<\/p>\n

Something has clearly gone off the rails when at least 18 people with enough smarts to get elected attorney general of an American state sign onto a lawsuit that managed to be frivolous<\/a> yet also argued to end democracy as we\u2019ve known it these last 233 years or so. Or when nearly two-thirds<\/a> of the Republican members of the U.S. House trip over each other to sign on. Or when dozens of state lawmakers in Harrisburg or other capitals fall into line <\/a>trying to invalidate the results in their own state.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis party has to stand up for democracy first, for our Constitution first and not political considerations,,\u201d a Michigan congressman, Rep. Paul Mitchell, who voted for Trump last month, said on Monday<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s not about a candidate. It\u2019s not simply for raw political power and that\u2019s what I feel is going on, and I\u2019ve had enough.\u201d Mitchell\u2019s words came in a letter announcing that he\u2019s leaving the Republican Party to serve as an independent, but what\u2019s stunning is not that he did this \u2014 but how few other GOPers feel the same.<\/p>\n

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Not surprisingly, few if any of the 126 Republican House members who wanted the Supreme Court to ignore the fact that Joe Biden got the most popular votes and the most electoral votes and install Donald Trump as a kind of a dictator spoke up over the weekend when the right-wing Proud Boys and other pro-Trump brownshirts rampaged<\/a> in downtown Washington, D.C, stabbing four people in their rage over the 45th president\u2019s plight.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

And so 2020 continues to be the ultimate glass-half-empty-half-full Rorschach test when it comes to how one views the health of American democracy. The half-full crowd can certainly point to the record number of citizens who voted,<\/a> despite both a pandemic and ridiculous voter suppression laws in some states, and a bevy of Republican-appointed judges and state and local GOP election officials who held firm that these votes must be counted.<\/p>\n

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Personally, I\u2019m feeling a little half-empty these days \u2014 even a day like Monday, when Biden was able to claim his official victory in the Electoral College as another milepost<\/a> on the road to ending Trump\u2019s presidency. That development won\u2019t convince the drunk-on-misinformation majority<\/a> of the GOP electorate that Trump wasn\u2019t cheated in some massive-yet-invisible voter fraud deal, or call off the violent mob and allow the Biden administration to fix a nation where nearly half the citizens think its president will be illegitimate.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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History buffs know that the phrase \u201ccrossing the Rubicon<\/a>\u201d refers to when Julius Caesar violated a Roman order by bringing troops across that river toward the capital city for the staging of a coup (exactly the reason why they didn\u2019t want his army inside the city). The Republican Party, with its leaders\u2019 anti-democratic actions since November 3, has crossed the Rubicon of keeping an American Republic \u2014 believing its cause more important than majority rule.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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At some point \u2014 maybe the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act amid an era of campus unrest, maybe the election of Barack Obama<\/a> as the first Black president in 2008, or somewhere on the road in between \u2014 the Republican Party became less about electing country clerks or getting pork-barrel highway projects and more about preserving a way of life. For them, Democrats weren\u2019t merely their foil in a spirited contest but their enemy in an existential fight, that carries the moral urgency of war.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Sometimes it might seem silly to call it \u201ca war\u201d because in a modern media culture it plays out in such weird ways: a patronizing Wall Street Journal op-ed<\/a> questioning whether to call Jill Biden a doctor, or a moral panic<\/a> when Cleveland\u2019s baseball team is no longer called the Indians. But behind those online kerfuffles, America\u2019s conservatives feel a duty to defend a system of authority \u2014 with foundational elements of patriarchy and white supremacy \u2014 they see as under assault from a more diverse nation and growing demands to share power.<\/p>\n

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To many of the 74 million who voted for Trump, conceding the election \u2014 or the reality that 81 million supported not only a different guy but a different worldview \u2014 is an unconditional surrender they can\u2019t abide. And Biden\u2019s main message \u2014 delivered yet again<\/a> on Monday night, about healing America and its divisions now that Trump and his vainglorious bluster will be leaving the White House \u2014 is the last thing they want to hear. Here in Pennsylvania, a Wall Street pro-business Republican like Pat Toomey is on his way out<\/a>, and an anti-mask-wearing conspiracy theorist like state Sen. Doug Mastriano is on his way up<\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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I\u2019m not sure how this plays out in the 2020s. I don\u2019t think blue and gray troops are going to be massing on the border between Minnesota and South Dakota \u2014 not now, anyway \u2014 and I have no plans to order another Union Army uniform, 46 years later. I just know things look very different on this side of the Rubicon. It seems pretty clear that the core of the Republican Party won\u2019t see Biden as a legitimate president, but then I and many others now question the legitimacy<\/a> of 126 House members and those 18 states willing to toss out a free and fair election. That doesn\u2019t feel like a democracy. It feels like something that will get worse before it gets better.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

True story: I used to be a crazy Civil War buff when I was 5 years old. In the year when most normal kids were getting Beatles records\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2556,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2555\/revisions\/2556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}