DEMOCRACY IS NOT TREASON

Americans Yawn as the Nation Drifts Towards A Single Party State

The shining city on the hill is in flames

What the hell is going on in American politics?

I was born in the United States, and when I came to Canada at the age of five, I took great pride in being American. I could already recite the Pledge of Allegiance by heart, and because my father was a historian, had at least a child’s understanding of the American Revolution and the noble ideals that birthed the Republic.

Even as an adult, when I realized the Pledge was kind of fascist, and that “the American Way” meant something quite different to many in places like Cambodia or El Salvador, at some level I still thought of America as “the shining city on the hill” — flawed but striving towards the high-minded goals of its founders.

These days, if that city is shining it’s because it’s on fire.

Polarization, corruption, and all-around weirdness have always been a part of American politics. The Civil War comes to mind, and gerrymandering, voter suppression, and whatever the hell the electoral college is, go back to the beginnings of the Republic.

But now we’re seeing members of Congress openly suggesting that voting Democrat, or encouraging others to do so, is certainly cheating and probably treason.

Rand Paul, the ophthalmologist and senator from Kentucky who has shattered the myth that medical doctors must be intelligent or rational, recently tweeted an article from The American Conservative which accuses Democrats of stealing elections by convincing Americans to vote for them.

For those unfamiliar with the electoral process, the process above is called “getting out the vote” and is how elections work.

However, Rand Paul is a paragon of logic and civility compared with celebrated nutjob and Representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I can’t link to her tweets because her Twitter account was permanently suspended for incessant tweeting of misinformation about Covid 19. But prior to that, she tweeted an article suggesting that blue state residents moving to red states should not be allowed to vote, or at least should undergo an unspecified “cooling off period” before they do (presumably time to come to their senses in the liberating air of Florida or Texas).

To be clear, this is a Republican member of Congress advocating that Democratic voters should be disenfranchised specifically because of their political beliefs, and finding at least tacit support from her party.

This is a short step from the old Soviet Union, where it was judged that dissidents who disagreed with the ruling party were by definition insane, and hence could be, and were, locked up in psychiatric facilities.

Given that the United States remains a key driver of the global economy, and in theory exercises moral leadership over what used to be called the free world, there’s an awful lot at stake here for Americans and non-Americans alike. The planet can’t afford a return to Trumpism, with its cult of personality, isolationism, and focus on promoting anger and conspiracy ideation over solutions to desperate problems like climate change.

And the world certainly can’t afford an authoritarian single-party state in the U.S. , which looks like an increasingly open ambition for mainstream Republicans.

American voters are the only ones who can stop this slow-motion train wreck. But short of Jesus coming down from Heaven flanked by angels wearing Biden t-shirts, the Democrats will likely lose control of Congress in November.

Is that what half of America really wants? Because Joe Biden may be uninspiring, and the Democrats just as enmeshed with corporate interests as the GOP, but it’s still a two party system.

There are checks and balances, weakened by years of bitter partisan combat, but so far still holding. The Republic still stands, and it's up to Americans to keep it that way.

There are a lot of us outside the borders rooting for you.