American democracy is in even worse shape than you think - The Washington Post

Joe Biden so far has been an effective president, particularly in terms of managing the coronavirus vaccine rollout and making hard but necessary policy decisions such as moving to withdraw U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. But even with a terrible president out of office, America is still headed in a terrible direction — and at a much faster pace than I expected when Biden took over.

We have four huge problems. I don’t see solutions to any of them.

By far the biggest problem is the Republican Party. Presented with a clear chance to move on from Trumpism after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the GOP has instead continued its drift toward anti-democratic action and white grievance. The future looks scary. A Republican-controlled House could attempt to impeach Biden in 2023 and 2024 on basically any pretext, as payback for Trump’s two impeachments. If Republicans win the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year, taking total control in those key swing states, they could impose all kinds of electoral barriers for the next presidential election. The Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory should the GOP hold a House majority.

“The radicalization of the Republican Party has outpaced what even most critical observers imagined,” Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer told me. “We need to grapple with what that should mean for our expectations going forward and start thinking about real worst-case scenarios.”

And all indications are that another group of Republicans, the six GOP appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court, either embrace the party’s anti-democratic drift or aren’t going to do much to halt it.

The Republican path wouldn’t matter too much if it seemed like voters were going to punish them. But the GOP appears unlikely to suffer an electoral backlash because of our second, huge problem: America appears intractably polarized into Team Blue and Team Red.

America could at least prepare for an anti-democratic GOP, but the past four months suggest our third huge problem: Our institutions aren’t up to it. Many news outlets, particularly at the local level, avoid honestly describing the Republican Party as increasingly at war with democracy. Businesses are backtracking from their initial decisions to stop donating money to Republicans who wouldn’t certify the 2020 election results, and social media companies are wary of acting to stop misinformation, which disproportionately comes from conservative sources. Nonpartisan institutions, faced with a choice of maintaining neutrality or upholding their core values, are often choosing the former.

I hope I am overly alarmed about all of this. But I don’t think I am. Perhaps democracy dies faster in darkness. But it could also die slowly in the light, as all of us watched but didn’t do enough to save it.

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American democracy is in even worse shape than you think - The Washington Post
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