Executive Summary
The only hope left for democracy in the USA is:
- That Democrats win the Executive, the Senate, and the House in the 2020 election.
- That Democrats pass effective legislation to save democracy.
- That such legislation is effective enough to thwart the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) from abolishing democracy.
If these things do not happen, America will forfeit its democracy. American democracy will be at risk the same way Germany was when Hitler came to power. Can America survive that in the age of global warming, nuclear weapons, and global increases in right-wing authoritarian politics?
Background
First off, I am Canadian. I am saddened by the state of society for my American Cousins to the south. This is not entirely an altruistic sadness, but if democracy falls in the USA, it will likely fall in Canada as well. But my main point is I am offering a perspective from someone outside of the USA.
Years ago I wrote a book called “12 Steps for America” where I similarly started out with my concerns for my American Cousins to the south. In my book, I recognized that America had a serious addiction problem, and proposed that what Americal was addicted to was bullshit. I never published the book because I thought it was too over the top, written in the Obama era. Now I look back and realize the book did not go nearly over the top enough. While I still believe America is largely addicted to bullshit, similar to Kurt Anderson’s “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History,” I now realize America has bigger problems than that.
Plutocracy, Kleptocracy, and Authoritarianism
In the late 19th century the ‘Gilded Age’ of America rewarded the wealthy with unreasonable control and influence over the rest of the country. Fortunately, politicians were able to pass legislation that resolved much of the unfair and inequitable state of the day, such as by raising taxes on the wealthy and putting limits on inheritance to minimize the development of powerful dynasties.
By the 1950’s the middle class was growing and more people than ever before were sharing the fruits of technical and economic growth in the US.
By the 1980’s, in the middle of the Sixth Party System, the Regan Era sowed the seeds of a return to Plutocracy and the beginnings of Kleptocracy through the undermining of democracy. One such key change was the Regan Administration reversed a long-time FCC rule that news organizations had to tell the truth. This laid the seeds for organizations like Fox News that increasingly fabricated facts that were red meat for the extreme right, and were generally false or highly distorted truths. The Regan Administration legitimized commercial propaganda.
By the 1990’s the Clinton Administration overturned the last of the economic protections put in place because of the Great Depression, giving banks and bankers free rein to profit by gambling with the economy.
By the 2000’s the Bush Administration ignored economic red flags which led to the 2008 world financial crisis. After 2008, during the Obama Administration, no bankers were held accountable for their roles in the world financial crisis, thereby signaling to the world that America’s plutocracy could not be held accountable, thereby inviting an increasing practice of kleptocracy.
As a Canadian, I like to remember a quote by Tommy Douglas:
Once more let me remind you what facism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. It may even wear a white shirt.
Facism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
America is now at that point where the ruling class is destroying political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege. Fascism is based on Authoritarianism, and not only is Donald Trump clearly an Authoritarian, but the entire Republican Party is gleefully supporting this practice.
America is now at a moment in history where the President of the United States, does not even recognize the constitutional rights and duties of the United States Congress to investigate and oversee the actions of the Executive Branch, and the Republican Party seems complicit in that.
Remedies
Unless Democrats win the 2020 election with the ability to pass new legislation, democracy in America will be forfeit. Republicans will destroy enough of America’s democratic system that they will control and win all subsequent elections, and govern indelibly.
Gerrymandering
The recent SCOTUS decision to ignore state efforts to gerrymander electoral districts has only one remedy. If congress passes legislation to ban gerrymandering, then SCOTUS can no longer ignore the issue. But it has to be iron-tight legislation. Even after SCOTUS ruled that Obamacare was constitutional, it is still under attack, and a new SCOTUS could rule otherwise.
Voter Suppression
There needs to be clear legislation to prevent the increase in voter suppression, especially in Republican-controlled states. The onus should not be on people demonstrating they have a right to vote, rather the onus should be on the state to legally prove someone does not have a right to vote. Furthermore, there should be legislation to prevent any attempts to prevent someone's fair access to the voting booth, including making elections a civic holiday.
Collusion
Much of the difficulty in holding Donald Trump et al accountable for colluding with foreign state actors is that there was not sufficient legislation prohibiting this. While there are no laws against collusion, there clearly needs to be.
Corruption
In retrospective, Donald Trump has committed and attracted unprecedented acts of corruption and illegality. Just as when there is a riot, and people start looting, people have seen the acts of corruption committed by Trump and his supporters, and have felt entitled to act just as corruptly or worse. If America can learn anything from the Trump Era it is that America is not a nation of laws, it was merely a nation of conventions, and Donald Trump and Republicans have successfully destroyed many, if not most, of those conventions.
Congress needs to really take a broad brush protecting some cherished American values, not by conventions, but by clear and effective legislation.
Dark Money
This problem in Americal continues to get worse and worse, fundamentally eroding democracy. SCOTUS basically dared Congress to do something about the famous Citizens United ruling. So the remedy is Congress should pass clear legislation that evades the court’s corrupt interpretation that money is speech. Money is no more speech than ducks bark like a dog.
Much More
There are many other legislative remedies that Congress should define and pass.
Wakeup Call
Finally, Democrats need to have a wakeup call and start thinking and acting more strategically and long term. Right-wing forces in America have been gaslighting America for decades now, pulling the entire country further and further to the right, further and further towards Plutocracy, Kleptocracy, and now Authoritarianism, and Democrats have largely ignored this. Democrats largely seem unable to deal with the evil geniuses on the right. It’s not that Democrats are stupid, it’s just that they have been naive in how corrupt their political adversaries can be.
Conclusions
If these claims seem extreme it is only because, America, and Democrats in particular, have been behaving like the proverbial frog in hot water. The erosion of American values has been deliberately slow and methodical by right-wing forces, as well as strategically brilliant. If Donald Trump had acted before the election like he does today, would he have been elected? It has been the slow and methodical practice of increasing corruption, the training of America and American institutions to tolerate more and more corruption that has let him and others get as far as they have.