It's A Great Day To Be White, Conservative, Christian, and Heterosexual in America
If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying
The U.S. has been added to an annual list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time, with the intergovernmental organization behind the analysis citing election disinformation, voter disenchantment and the coronavirus pandemic among the reasons for the decline.
The report released Monday by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, based in Sweden, finds that the U.S. has fallen “victim to authoritarian tendencies” in recent years with this decline following a larger five-year trend seen globally.
“More than two-thirds of the world’s population now live in backsliding democracies or autocratic regimes,” states the Global State of Democracy (GSoD Indices) report, which was first launched in 2016. “The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression.”
That American democracy has been declared to be “backsliding” should come as a surprise to no one who’s been paying attention since the day Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015. From the moment he declared his candidacy for the Presidency, the assault on democracy has been constant, unrelenting, and, worst of all, effective.
We now live in a time where discussions of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale no longer feel like hyperbole or overreaction. Both of those books feel like prequels to where America may well be heading.
One need not have a Ph.D. in Political Science behind their name to understand why American democracy is imperiled. If you have a sense of the tone and tenor of the public discourse over the past six-plus years, you understand why we are where we are. Who knew there were so many truly, deeply horrible people in America?
First, we have one of our two major Republican parties that believes the Big Lie that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump. Many Republicans on Capitol Hill still can’t/won’t confirm that they believe Joe Biden is the legitimately-elected and legal President. Despite a victory margin of more than seven million votes, millions of Americans and their Republican representatives in Congress believe that Trump won in a landslide.
Right. Tell me you’re in a cult without telling me you’re in a cult….
The report says that democratic backsliding is often a gradual process that ends with either the democracy breaking down or it returning to normal health. This takes an average of nine years from the onset of backsliding, it said.
Globally, the report found that election results have become more contested, even when the elections were found to be largely free and fair. The report cites former President Donald Trump’s questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results as “a historic turning point” in this growing theme that has damaged public trust in elections.
“Trump’s baseless allegations during the 2020 US presidential election have had spillover effects, including in Brazil, Mexico, Myanmar and Peru, among others,” the report states. “Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021.”
Despite Trump and his supporters’ claims that they have overwhelming evidence of fraud, cheating, and all manner of skullduggery, no evidence has EVER been produced to support their case. All they’ve done is repeat the Big Lie and prove Josef Goebbels’ theory to be correct.
Thousands of Trump supporters didn’t storm the Capitol on January 6th because they got lost looking for the Congressional gift shop. No, they’d been propagandized and manipulated into believing that Trump had actually won by a landslide when quite the opposite was true.
(When you have no moral center and core beliefs of your own, you’re going to be susceptible to charlatans and populists selling pat and easy solutions.)
All Trump and his minions had to do was present solid, unassailable evidence to support their incendiary claims. That they couldn’t- and didn’t- proves that they were lying then and they’re lying still.
I remain optimistic that American democracy will survive, DESPITE the best efforts of Republicans in Congress and in statehouses around the country. States such as Texas, North Carolina, and Michigan have been so heavily gerrymandered that it’s become virtually impossible for Democrats to win a majority of Congressional seats in those states…and others.
Republicans firmly believe that they should be choosing their voters, when in fact voters should be choosing who they want to represent them. So firmly ensconced is cheating in the Republican ethos that rather than work to win elections, they’d rather cheat their way to power.
Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, cheat ‘em.
A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by a majority.
Booker T. Washington
What frightens me is the outsized impact Far-Right “news” outlets such as Fox News Channel (FNC) have on millions of Americans. Though they claim to be “fair and balanced,” the reality is that FNC is anything but. If they were “fair and balanced,” America would be suffering far less strife than it is now. No, the late Roger Ailes baked the worst impulses of humanity and journalism into FNC. Objectivity has become a thing of the past, useful only for losers and Liberals. FNC talking heads push a racist, classist, oligarchic agenda that has become the de facto thought process and talking points for millions of White Conservative Christian heterosexuals.
They think they’re Conservative…when all they’re really doing is acquiescing to their own continued subjugation.
It’s hard to have a conversation about the future of American democracy when one side insists on showing up to the discussion armed with their own set of “facts” provided courtesy of Fox News Channel.
So, yeah, AmeriKKKa’s in a world of hurt at the moment, and our democracy could easily slide into something vaguely a cross between Gideon from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the set from Idiocracy.
The question is whether or not Americans will wake up in time to reverse the damage.
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