Democracy Survived Trump, But The Fight Is Far From Over
As of not long before this was posted, Joe Biden is the President of the United States.
First and foremost, I want to thank everyone that contributed to that, as well as the Democrats taking the Senate and House. I’m grateful we’ll never know just how lucky we are that it didn’t go the other way.
I started writing this blog in 2019, because I saw the Republicans’ assaults on our democracy and other fascist tendencies, and knew that if they succeeded in overthrowing America’s democracy, it could prevent the human race from ever overcoming climate change. I’m just a single citizen with a relatively small impact, but when the long-term fate of human civilization was literally on the line, and too few Americans realized it, I had to at least do whatever I could.
When COVID-19 hit, shortly after I started this blog, I made the bold prediction to some folks that, while COVID would make for a bad 1-2 years, when the dust settles and the history books are written, it will have saved the world. Today, I’m happy to say, that prediction is looking as strong as ever. The incompetence of COVID handling and the summer of protests, mixed with more free time during quarantine, led Americans to pay closer attention to politics than before. I often say that the cause of many of America’s problems is that things are “good enough” for enough people that we don’t put the due attention to fixing the problems that do exist. COVID helped to change this, and engagement increased, as we saw from both Presidential candidates getting more votes than any before. I wish we could’ve learned the lesson the easy way rather than the hard way, but at least the lesson was learned: politics matter. When everyone in the country participates, we don’t end up with nearly as many politicians who are criminal con artists who walk all over the Constitution, violate our rights, and try to overthrow democracy. And that, of course, is a good thing.
The 2020 election cycle was a success; it could’ve been better, but it also could’ve been much worse. Imagine if the guy who led a coup attempt against the United States had 4 more years to plan and put henchmen in important positions before attempting that coup. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, it’s clearer than ever that democracy itself was on the ballot in 2020. So, once again, thank you to everyone who chose democracy over fascism, science over deception, and decency over division. Democracy is never guaranteed, it is only through the American people choosing democracy, that we get to keep it. The Founding Fathers would be proud of the choice the American people made this election cycle.
But there’s a very important point that we need to keep in mind after all this: Donald Trump was NOT the problem.
Sure, Donald Trump was a problem, but he was never the problem. If the Republicans in the Senate had upheld the Constitution instead of putting party over country, then they would have removed him after the House impeached him the first time. The only reason it got to the point where Trump was able to lie about election results and rile up supporters to attempt a coup was because the rest of the Republicans helped him.
The entire Republican party is this problem, not just Donald Trump.
The people who elected Donald Trump and other wannabe fascists will still be here in 2022, 2024, etc., and you can bet they are going to vote. The unfortunate fact is that democracy will be on the ballot every election until the Republicans are thoroughly rebuked, either eliminated from relevance or changed to a FAR more moderate position. We need to keep the same energy we had in 2020 in all future elections.
Let’s look at how the entire Republican party is responsible for this:
For decades, Republicans have been gerrymandering voting districts, which gives them an undemocratic advantage in the House of Representatives and state legislatures (who are often the ones responsible for gerrymandering, creating a cycle that’s hard to break). They also suppress votes, targeting Democratic neighborhoods and demographics, to achieve the same result. Here’s a video of an influential conservative openly admitting that Republicans should and do suppress votes to stay in power, in 1980. So, yeah, the Republicans have been assaulting democracy for over 40 years. Both of these efforts give the Republicans more power than they should have, given their level of support. The Senate and Electoral College also have the same effect. This is significant, because parties that maintain power with only minority support can have more radical beliefs, since they don’t need to appeal to a majority of voters. These actions are dangerous, and long predate Trump becoming President.
A big part of Trump’s stolen election lie was pointing out how he was ahead early in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania until more votes came in and things flipped. This effect, called the “red mirage”, happened because they could only start counting mail-in ballots in those states after polls closed, so it took a while to count them. Florida, for example, could count them earlier, and had results quickly. There were many articles written before election day about the coming red mirage, some even explaining how that would be used by Trump to fuel a voter fraud narrative (as it was), so this clearly was not unexpected. Knowing this, it would make sense for states to allow mail-in ballots to be counted as they come in, to avoid controversy. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, wanted to do just that, but the Republican-controlled state legislature blocked it. So, the elected Republicans in Pennsylvania caused the vote count delay, knowing Trump would use that to convince his most radicalized supporters that there was widespread fraud. There wasn’t any widespread fraud, but the state-level Republicans helped bolster Trump’s lie that there was.
Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and many other Republicans tried to block Biden’s Electoral College confirmation even after the Capitol was attacked by the people they provoked. In 2024, there will be multiple Republican Presidential candidates trying to win over the MAGA base, and Hawley and Cruz are likely to be among them. Others to look out for are Tucker Carlson, Mike Pompeo, Ron DeSantis, Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, Matt Gaetz, and Trump’s kids, who all use similar rhetoric to Trump. These people are all dangerous, as a more competent version of Trump could very well be the last democratically-elected President of the United States.
Republican Senator Lidsey Graham pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find ways to throw out legally-cast ballots. Raffensperger refused, but before we start painting him as an example of a “good Republican”, let’s point out how he wrongfully purged almost 200,000 voter registrations, which is one of the key tactics Republicans use to suppress voting. So, yeah, even the “good Republican” who stood up to Trump & Graham was… just another anti-democracy Republican.
Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was caught suppressing COVID death numbers to help Trump and other Republicans look good. For good measure, he then sent police to raid the home of the woman who blew the whistle on the cover-up, because, well, that’s what fascists do. The police pointed guns at her family, including children, for no reason other than to intimidate.
Before the 2020 election and subsequent coup attempt, even I knew Trump would not accept defeat in the election. Frankly, it didn’t take much critical thinking, when the man didn’t even accept the 2016 election that he won, and was spewing lies about voter fraud before the 2020 election even happened. All this is to say, if a random citizen with no access to insider information knew this was coming, anyone who has the political sense and connections to get elected or get to a leadership role in one of the parties definitely knew this was coming. Despite that, every single congressional Republican, except Mitt Romney, chose to keep him in office, which in itself was blatantly corrupt, considering he admitted he did both impeachment charges. But on top of that, they knew this attack on democracy was likely coming in the future if they didn’t remove him, and they chose an attack on democracy over holding him accountable. Also, the RNC, in an unprecedented move, chose their entire 2020 platform to be: “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda”. Throwing uniform, unquestioned support behind a man you know wants to overthrow democracy is only something you do if you also want to overthrow democracy. The entire party is compromised. And, as I explain in point #3 here, a unified party is critical to ending democracy. The Democrats have often-publicized disagreements within the party, like progressives vs. centrists, but it took until Trump literally sent a mob intent on killing them, before any Republicans broke from Trump. Those that did finally break from Trump were too little, too late, aside from Mitt Romney. The rest of them allowed all of this to happen by having Trump’s back every step of the way. Now that he’s a sinking ship who tried and failed to overthrow our government, it’s too late for them to act like this isn’t on them.
There are plenty more examples of this, but I think the picture is clear at this point. And on top of the wild corruption from the Republicans in office in 2020, the Republicans added some real winners to their ranks this election cycle:
Lauren Boebert, elected Representative from Colorado, tweeted during the Capitol attack about Nancy Pelosi’s location while the insurrectionists were trying to find and kill her. There’s also mounting evidence that she gave reconnaissance tours before the attack so that the insurrectionists would know where to find the congresspeople, so they could kidnap and/or kill them. She also supports QAnon, the easily-debunked far-right conspiracy theory about a worldwide network of powerful, satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles. Supporters believe Trump is taking on this cabal, and they host “Save the Children” rallies. It’s a somewhat surprising thing for her to support, considering her husband was arrested for exposing himself to minors. And the craziest part of that story, which happened before she married him, was that she was one of the girls he flashed. The other two reported him, but clearly she didn’t mind and later married the guy. Oh, and her rap sheet doesn't fit on one page.
Marjorie Taylor-Greene, elected Representative from Georgia, is also a QAnon supporter, as well as other conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and denial of several mass shootings, like Parkland. Her wikipedia page has an entire section, with three sub-sections, dedicated to her support of various conspiracy theories. Many of them are easily debunked, like Pizzagate, which alleges the Clintons run a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza shop … that doesn’t even have a basement. Someone who’s shown such a lack of critical thinking skills in believing these ridiculous theories shouldn’t be trusted to decide the laws of this, or any, country.
Mary Miller, elected Representative from Illinois, gave a speech the day before the Capitol attack in which she quoted Hitler, even saying “Hitler was right”. And this was not some diamond-in-the-rough quote she found from Hitler that was surprisingly poignant and not, you know, Hitler-esque. It was: “whoever has the youth has the future”. Here are some alternatives she could have used:
“Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.” - JFK
“Our children are the rock on which our future will be built.” - Nelson Mandela
“I believe that children are our future.” - Whitney Houston
When faced with the choice between quoting John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Whitney Houston, or Adolf Hitler, all of which saying the same thing, Mary Miller chose Hitler. That’s telling, but unfortunately not a surprise coming from the party that uses the name of the American Nazi-aligned party as a slogan (America First), and whose President posts ads with Nazi symbols. When a party starts going out of their way to associate themselves with the Nazis, it should be taken as a sign that something’s seriously wrong with the party and its ideology.
So the good news is that the Republicans have lost control of the House, Senate, and Presidency, but the bad news is that the fight to stop fascism is still far from over. The Democratic majorities are razor-thin in congress, so they’ll have trouble passing a lot of the bills they want to pass. Then, midterm elections are typically bad for the party of the President, so there’s a real chance the Republicans will retake the House and Senate in 2022. At that point, they would obstruct anything the Democrats want to get done, and two years of no progress between then and 2024 could lead to low enthusiasm for Democrats, meaning a Republican President in 2024. That President could very likely be just as, if not more, damaging to the country and our democracy as a second Trump term. If we want to save our democracy (not to mention planet), we can’t let that happen. Every election counts. The same energy we saw this election needs to channeled in 2022, 2024, 2026, ...
I’ll end this post with a song of the day. Recorded in 2017 in response to Trump being elected, this song is just as relevant today as it was then:
