Each week brings us further confirmation that Donald Trump and the Republicans staged a coup attempt. It appears abundantly clear that they will face few if any consequences.
The Guardian offers new details about Trump's leadership role in the January coup attempt, which was more extensive and serious than previously known. According to Hugo Lowell's reporting (drawing on multiple unnamed sources), Trump made several calls from the White House to his "top lieutenants" at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the afternoon of Jan. 5 and the morning of Jan. 6, all on the topic of "ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election win."
These conversations "reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard," Lowell writes, and "also show Trump's thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack."
The coup was not defeated; and America's democracy crisis is worsening.
Our failing democracy is close to being fatally undermined by a rigged electoral system designed to ensure that it will be almost impossible for Republicans to lose an election. In the end, a plurality of Americans, if not a majority, through tacit consent or just plain indifference, are surrendering to the neofascist tide and allowing themselves to be submerged in it. Trump's followers and other "conservatives" are energized by their belief that the rising fascist tide will carry them back to their imagined "greatness" as the "real Americans."
America's supposed pro-democracy leaders should be rallying the people to resist the Republican fascist assault. Most are not. In the most high-profile example, President Joe Biden is choosing to publicly embrace "bipartisanship," in the empty hope that the Democratic Party's legislative successes will somehow blunt the power of the Republican-fascist movement.
America is not the first country to experience such a crisis. Lessons of the past are supposed to help us better understand the present as to avoid repeating those same mistakes. That becomes more difficult in a country afflicted with organized forgetting.
In his book "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45," Milton Mayer reflects on his experiences living under the Nazi regime in Germany. In one passage, he shares a friend's insights:
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted,'"that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice — "Resist the beginnings" and "Consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
If America really falls to fascism, its enforcers will become heavier if the Republicans do well enough in the 2022 midterms to take control of the House and the Senate. Things could accelerate after that.
Anyone in public education, from kindergarten through advanced degree institutions, is fair game in red states. South Carolina is considering a bill to abolish tenure at public colleges and universities. It will also be increasingly dangerous, no matter where you live, to be a transgender person. One should start exploring their options now if you are in a threatened category of people.
The fascist disease affecting America is fatal and time for effective treatment is rapidly running out...