“We have eight months to save our republic,” so warned Elizabeth Cheney, noted renegade Republican. Noteworthy indeed! Cheney is the loyal daughter of perhaps the least likely vice president in American history to be singled out as a champion of democracy this side of Andrew Johnson (and that’s not being entirely fair to Johnson). And until she was ousted as chair of the House Republican Conference (the third-highest position in the party’s House leadership), Cheney, like her father, would have been no one’s pick to die on her sword warding off an “existential threat to our democracy.”
Yet there she was and is. Nor was she then, nor is she now, alone. Long before Cheney rang the alarm, an astonishingly wide spectrum of public opinion had formed a consensus. Cognoscenti from liberal publications like the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and New Republic to more left-leaning ones like the Nation all identified the same “existential threat.” So too, of course, did the whole Democratic Party, everyone from Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders, from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. The highest officials of the national security establishment, people not ordinarily seen as defenders of democracy — indeed more regularly associated with clandestine efforts to undermine it around the world — suddenly proclaimed that the “threat to democracy” shall not pass. Electronic media, both social and old-style, joined the chorus. Book titles offered to explain How Democracy Dies or asked, Did It Happen Here? Imminent civil war was made into a movie.
Belief that an “existential threat to democracy” exists has become conventional wisdom (albeit outside the world of MAGA, admittedly a rather large world, but more on that later)….
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Steve Fraser
