Things Can (and Will) Get Worse if We Let Them
Opinion: Outright authoritarianism is a closer reality for the U.S. government than politicians and civilians alike are willing to accept.
Language is a complicated thing. For all the hours you can spend studying a language and how purposeful you can be when choosing your words, different people can still interpret completely different meanings from a single word. “Democracy” is one of those words. It gets thrown around a lot by political pundits, mainstream media, and well-intentioned citizens alike. Then you throw your average political scientist into the mix who has a basketful of different definitions floating around in their head at any given time, and all these people can be talking about the same word while meaning very different things. With that in mind, we need to talk about democracy in general, America's democracy, and why democracy is under attack at home and abroad in 2022 and beyond.
To make this initial discussion about democracy simple, let’s start by sticking with the bare basics Merriam-Webster definition. The dictionary defines democracy as a “government by the people.” But, if you go down another bullet point, they tack on an extra bit: “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” This definition is five times as long and yet still woefully incomplete (in my opinion) of discussing all the ins and outs of a democratic political system. However, it provides us a common starting point to grow from, and one that I am comfortable using for this discussion.
The reason I wanted my first post to touch on the topic of democracy was a segment I saw on one of my favorite YouTube channels this week. I started watching Philip DeFranco’s news show in 2015, around the time when the U.S. primaries were kicking into gear. It has been interesting to watch his format evolve over that timeframe (even more so if you compare it to the content that made him popular on the platform originally), and beyond that, I’ve appreciated his growing dedication to keeping viewers engaged in politics outside of election season. With that in mind, when he closed out his penultimate scheduled show for 2021 with a segment titled “State Legislatures Are Working to Take Over Elections, With Major Implications for 2024,” I was both happy to see the coverage and disappointed by its necessity. I highly recommend giving the segment a watch as well as reading through the cited article written by Barton Gellman via The Atlantic. DeFranco's concern for the 2022 election season speaks for itself, but it is Gellman's article that convinced me of the necessity of this topic.
Gellman details in the opening of his piece a conversation that he had in October of this year with Richard L. Hasen, a UC Irvine professor of law and political science, about potential threats to American democracy. He quotes Hasen as saying, “The democratic emergency is already here.” Shortly after, Gellman shares an even more concerning detail. “Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic.” I have also been cautious in years prior about using such extravagant language to describe threats to our current political system; inciting panic or whipping people into a frenzy is the opposite of the result we want to create by spreading awareness. Nowadays, however, I want nothing more than to get a physical soapbox and a megaphone and stand on the nearest street corner while screaming to anyone who will listen about how dangerously close we are to sliding into authoritarianism.
On January 6th, 2021, I was in my office at work with C-SPAN up on a side browser while Congress worked to certify the votes of the 2020 Presidential Election. Though I do not recall widespread public concern about how the process would unfold, I nonetheless was worried given the weeks of ‘Stop the Steal’ rhetoric, promoting of the Big Lie, and then President Trump’s call for supporters to gather in Washington D.C. that day. Low and behold, as a sudden break was called at 2:13 PM on the Senate floor, I knew something had happened. We would find out in the days after that in that very moment, Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman was herding rioters away from the Senate Chambers (the doors to which were not yet secured) to give Senators time to evacuate. I was glued to my monitor and news coverage until rioters began being pushed out nearer the 6 PM curfew, knowing that what I was witnessing was a historical moment in progress that I never wanted to forget. Only once rioters had started being pushed out of the Capitol that evening did I make the drive home, unnerved and angered by what I had watched play out that afternoon.
By the time that the votes were certified at 3:39 AM on January 7th, the American public had been forced to listen to hours of grandstanding from politicians. Politicians who swore that they would fight to prevent this sort of event from happening again. Politicians who feigned some level of guilt for their contribution to the day’s events. Now, almost one year later, many of those same leaders have seemingly forgotten (willfully or otherwise) that it was their lives that were at risk when rioters broke into the Capitol that day. Meanwhile, Fox News and their poster boy Tucker Carlson recently created a three-part “documentary” in which Carlson paints the attack on the US Capitol as a false flag operation. Right-wing extremists and pundits know the game they're playing, and in downplaying and rewriting the history of Trump’s failed coup attempt, they are preparing to set us up for a successful one in the future.
With these thoughts in mind, I’d like the first series of posts here on Blognob to delve deeper into democracy, its successes and shortcomings, and common misconceptions held about it. Not all posts will be as heavily opinion/personally driven as this piece, but I hope that in sharing my stories and experiences, that you all will 1.) find something of value in them, and 2.) share your own in the comments.