MY God, it's now or never: The Atlantic (paywall, I know) Morning Joe to focus on this all week

[Joinfortmill]

"In a new cover story for The Atlantic, anchoring a special issue of the magazine devoted to American democracy in crisis, staff writer Barton Gellman demonstrates with urgent clarity that Donald Trump, abetted by a complicit Republican Party, is gaining strength for a second attempt to seize office, and that he is better positioned to subvert an election now than he was in 2020. By pushing the Big Lie and enforcing its acceptance by the Republican Party, Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including violence. January 6 was practice. Today, Gellman writes, there is a “clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2021/12/atlantic-special-issue-american-democracy-crisis/620913/

[empedocles]

1. M Joe to constituencies we want to reach all week.

[USALiberal]

2. One sentence about the topic would've been nice.

[snowybirdie]

3. The Atlantic

is going to focus their entire Jan and Feb issues on the Jan 6 insurrection.

[Joinfortmill]

4. Just added.

[quaint]

5. It's a press release, here (meh):

December 6, 2021, 6:30 AM ET Press Room

“The next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already. Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real.”

In a new cover story for The Atlantic, anchoring a special issue of the magazine devoted to American democracy in crisis, staff writer Barton Gellman demonstrates with urgent clarity that Donald Trump, abetted by a complicit Republican Party, is gaining strength for a second attempt to seize office, and that he is better positioned to subvert an election now than he was in 2020. By pushing the Big Lie and enforcing its acceptance by the Republican Party, Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including violence. January 6 was practice. Today, Gellman writes, there is a “clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it.”

Gellman’s reporting describes how, over the past year, Trump and his allies have identified weak points in our electoral apparatus and worked methodically to exploit them. They have censured and removed officials who certified the election for Joe Biden or refused to “find” extra votes. They are testing new legal strategies to allow state legislatures to throw out the vote after it’s tallied and instead supply electors of their choice.

Central to this playbook, Gellman’s reporting shows, has been the revisionist narrative of the Big Lie, which has created what one researcher calls “a new, politically violent mass movement.” He writes: “The Trump team achieved something crucial and enduring by convincing tens of millions of angry supporters, including a catastrophic 68 percent of all Republicans in a November PRRI poll, that the election had been stolen from Trump. Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before. Even Confederates recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost.”

The Atlantic is devoting much of the journalism in its January/February 2022 issue to the real threat that American democracy faces in 2024. In an editor’s note to lead the issue, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes that the crisis is in good measure a crisis of the Republican Party. In its catastrophic turn toward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracism, the party now “threatens the republic that it was founded to save.” Goldberg continues: “A healthy democracy requires a strong conservative party and a strong liberal party arguing for their views publicly and vigorously. What we have instead today is a liberal party battling an authoritarian cult of personality.”

Also appearing in the issue is a series of pieces that illuminate the political, moral, and cultural challenges we face. They will publish across the next several days and include:

Staff writer Tim Alberta’s profile of freshman Republican Peter Meijer, who in the days after January 6 believed that he was part of a mission to rescue the party from itself. Now he laughs at his own naïveté.

An investigation by staff writer Vann R. Newkirk II into the extraordinary Republican efforts to prove that voter fraud is real, systemic, and being committed on a massive scale. Newkirk documents that these false notions have become an excuse to enact laws that make voting harder for everyone, but especially for voters of color, those who are poor, those who are old, and those who were not born in the U.S.

Staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany on the conspiratorial thinking that has led well-meaning Americans to raise awareness about a child-sex-trafficking epidemic that simply does not exist. Kicked into motion by QAnon, the present panic has been sustained by wildly inflated statistics that are passed along on social media. Tiffany asks how a moral panic in the age of the social web comes to an end. Once started, does a panic continue in motion, possibly cleaving communities along lines of those who believe the panic and those who reject it?

And an essay by David Brooks, who writes that the rich philosophical tradition of conservatism that he fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression. “To be a conservative today,” he says, “you have to oppose much of what the Republican Party has come to stand for.”

In “January 6 Was Practice,” Gellman writes: “Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without. Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.”

The Atlantic’s special January/February 2022 issue is launching today, and will publish online over the next two weeks. Please be in touch with questions or requests to interview our writers about this reporting.

[bullwinkle428]

6. This is the point that I'm desperately trying to get so many others

to understand - he won't need a violent coup to take power in 2024, because he's overseen the installation of so much of the corrupt machinery that will allow it to take place.

[dwayneb]

22. I hear you loud and clear

What frustrates me is that for many Democrats, it is business as usual. Many of them don't seem to really get it; this is not just a hypothetical discussion, this isn't a temporary setback - we are on the precipice of losing the American democracy.

I'd like to be more positive, but I think they will succeed. Our Constitution and our government had many weaknesses from Day 1. All it took was someone willing to exploit them. Looking back at history, no democracy has been able to stand given a concerted continuous effort to destroy it from within.

[TheRealNorth]

37. Some of us understand what is at stake...

But yeah, I think there is too much faith that things will turn out if we have faith in a system that the right-wing continues to corrupt.

[Hortensis]

42. At the STATE level in red states. Then, the FEDERAL government did not fail,

but held against the attempted 1/6 self-coup d'etat by the sitting president, including the military. Other states opposed also. The traitors failed to get control of the military, DC'scivil authorities, legislatures, judiciary, communications, transportation,...? Everything else needed to establish control.

The Senate majority then was still dangerously in question, awaiting the results of the GA runoffs; that time McConnell and Pence did their duty.

So NOW, Democrats hold the executive branch and many judiciaries and state governments are loyal. Whatever the third branch, the high court, might do to support a coup attempt, it has no power to require compliance and the other branches and loyal states could choose to ignore. Many subversive laws are currently being appealed and some will be blocked.

We should assume much that we can do is being done to beef up control of the military and other institutions the traitors need control of, to use them in a coup/keep them from being used to stop them. Very much identifying and rooting out or neutralizing subversives everywhere we can.

We know they're increasing their power in some ways, but so are we. So in that sense I don't worry in the same way as you -- of course we've already dismantled most of their corrupt (and mostly incompetent) machinery at the federal level, and are still at it.

If we could know we'd increase, or even hold, our power in congress in the midterms, I'd feel much safer in my ignorance. But, what I worry about is a corrupted, divided electorate bringing ourselves down. Could we in effect lose the battle to save our republic next November 8? Even if the takeover didn't finalize until after the next presidential election in an electoral coup? I'm sure we're trying to strengthen our position against that eventuality, just don't know enough to guess what can and is being done.

Btw, I'm currently reading Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny's novel about a crisis in a fictional administration following one just like tRump's. It's a hoot and a warning.

[area51]

53. +1 n/t

[LiberatedUSA]

7. This should be the standout line as a wake up call:

“Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election…”

[Ilsa]

8. Good. Maybe someone

in the "Deep State" will find a way to send him to Moscow or for an eternal dirt nap.

[Joinfortmill]

25. Yup

[Eyeball_Kid]

9. And STILL: No DOJ indictments. n/t

[msfiddlestix]

10. ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ n/t

[Poiuyt]

17. Infuriating

[Hortensis]

45. Would those save us or be used to "prove" we were the traitors?

We've already established that well over a third of voters are newly outraged and energized against us by every action we take.

Also that another third are confused, want to be left alone, and are inclined to resent Democrats for stirring up trouble and bothering them with our claims. Which they can't believe because, you know, Democrats are "as bad as them." They're all corrupt." "They all lie." What's on TV?

How to develop and use what they have without risking bringing on the deluge?

[Wingus Dingus]

11. So we are probably in our last couple years then, in America as we knew it.

I don't believe this is an enemy we can defeat. This isn't north against south, people's minds are poisoned across the country.

[dwayneb]

13. I completely agree with you

The real question is how we will all move forward after the coup? Not whether it's going to happen.

Enjoy these last years, after 2022 if Republicans regain control of Congress, the January 6th investigation will effectively be stopped. And they will begin setting the stage for the next attempt at a legislative coup in 2024, if it is needed. One-party rule has always been the goal of the Right, and the blood is in the water at this point.

The weird thing is that many Democrat legislators don't seem to understand the significance. Once we slide into authoritarianism it will be damned difficult to ever recover. Why are they so passive?

[NJCher]

19. one reason, among many

Why are they so passive?

Is that they're (Democrats) in it to the job as it's defined by the Constitution. Not all of them, but most.

Republicans are not really a political party, but they pose as one because what they really are are people who are in it for the money. Their goal: maneuver themselves and their cohorts into a position where they have access to the American tax kitty. It's a form of mass robbery. The chances of getting punished are low, even if one is caught.

Sadly, the desire for money brings out a vicious kind of person who, while not smarter, has other traits that put them ahead of the pack.

[Wingus Dingus]

23. Dems have no coherent message or strategy. There's no battle plan because

it's not regular politics anymore--Republicans in Congress and in state governments are America's internal enemies, destroying our Democracy from within. It's not about getting bills passed anymore, getting talking points out on Sunday shows, etc. Dems are still using that playbook, "If we deliver results for the American people, we'll win!" That's a sideshow now. That's just how they're keeping busy while the Titanic sinks.

[Tree Lady]

31. Yes its like dems are still wanting to play

By the rules while watching the other side win at any cost. We win in areas and states run by dems where rules still followed but more and more they are taking over the positions that decide victory, step by step in the states that go both ways. Soon they will have most of the states while we have a few solid blue ones. We have more people only because of CA and New York and other large cities.

Its so frustrating watching this and wanting to shake our leaders and say wake up, you can't sit and cry to mom because John stole your cookies, mom packed her bags and your on your own.

[dwayneb]

33. Democrats don't seem to understand - we are at war

"keeping busy while the Titanic sinks" - yes that's a good way to put it.

January 6th was just a trial run, a shot across the bow to see the nation's reaction. For most folks it is business as usual, Americans are so mesmerized by their petty worries and immersed in the self-indulgence that they don't understand (or want to understand) what is ahead.

[toughtony]

12. They're a bunch of screwups

The fact that they are putting all this weight and expectations on trump tells me that they are bound to fail. So they can write all the spooky articles they want, trump and his merry band of screwups will fail.

I ain't shook!

[PortTack]

15. I tend as many others, including those once close to him, Michael Cohen for one, that he will not ru

[calimary]

16. But don't be tempted to get complacent.

The minute we good guys start rolling our eyeballs and shrugging this off as a “not gonna happen” thing, we’ll have already LOST.

[hay rick]

18. Snooze alarm.

Thanks for your call to inaction. Like all problems in the real world, we can solve it by ignoring it!

[uponit7771]

21. Not true, they're *EXTREMELY* successful and voter denial and suppression and have been doing this

... before Putin's Whore got into office.

They don't need to take control with guns, just with our help via silence

[dwayneb]

28. Complacence in the end will destroy us

Part of the problem is that Americans are spoiled and lazy. We have not had war on our soil since the 1860's, we've had decades of prosperity. Most Americans would rather play with their electronic toys and pretend that all of this is happening in some far away place, and that bad things could never happen to THEM. They don't understand enough about history to realize that yes, it CAN happen here.

On top of voter denial and suppression and gerrymandering we have to remember that in 2016 and 2020 about 1/3 to 1/2 of the voting public didn't ever bother to cast a ballot. I guess they will continue to sleepwalk their way through life until they are under the boot of the authoritarian Right.

Dismissing the Trumpists as being unsuccessful or clumsy or ineffective is a strategy for defeat. Whether we like it or not we are at war, and one of the most important realities is to NEVER underestimate your enemy. The propaganda machine of the fascist Right has been very, very effective.

[uponit7771]

29. Dems have to do a better job at talking to the 50% of eligible PoC who didn't vote in 2020. We ...

... mostly focus on the conservative male mindset vs going after communities of color that will not fair well with racist asshole MAGA in charge.

Miami Dade and South Texas were a tradgedy in 2020

[AngryOldDem]

32. This is EXACTLY the attitude too many had back in 2015-16.

“He’s a joke. He won’t last.”

He now has a machinery behind him that is now calling the shots. It’s a cult that has thoroughly corrupted the GOP and will not stop until it has trashed all our institutions. Trump is just a figurehead, the bright, shiny object to keep the dumbfucks stirred up and keep the coup moving along.

This is why indictments, etc., must happen NOW.

But continue to keep your head in the sand. This attitude explains precisely how we got to where we are today. Infuriating that some haven’t learned a damn thing.

[dwayneb]

36. Infuriating - and saddening

We went through two World Wars to defeat fascism and to keep our freedoms intact in the USA, hundreds of thousands dead, many more wounded. This is the most disgusting aspect of what the fascist Right is planning to do to this nation. They will violate the memory of every one of those soldiers, and for that we should never forgive them.

Are people so stupid that they don't understand that what happened in Europe in the 30's and 40's could happen here again in the 2020's? And that with today's technology the fascists have a weapon of war that is more powerful than any battleship or destroyer - the Internet?

[Lonestarblue]

14. Here's another must-read article from the December issue of The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-autocrats-are-winning/620526/

The article’s focus starts with the last election in Belarus and how Lukashenko lost the vote but refused to acknowledge his loss, forcing the real winner to escape to another country. With help from Putin, Lukashenko used government forces to lock up and torture protesters—no due process allowed—and killing some. The article goes on to show how global wealth and power are supporting authoritarian governments. We all know that Trump aligned himself with authoritarians and pushed away our democratic allies. And that is exactly the scenario he has planned for 2024, with help from the corrupt Republican Party. Trump will be installed as president no matter what the real vote is because Republicans have put the mechanisms in place to do that, and we do not have either a DOJ or a Supreme Court to stop them.

“Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.”

Now imagine it’s 2024 and Trump is claiming a win. Will we see Putin and Russians aiding him in establishing himself as president for life? I cannot discount the idea.

[calimary]

20. DON'T discount the idea.

That schmuck refuses to admit he’s a loser. And he’s vengeful. With way too many ardent believers and fans.

[Orrex]

24. When I express concerns about this, I'm accused of outraged whining

With no clear indication of any forward motion against Trump and his accomplices in Congress and elsewhere, we're urged to have faith that the AG and DoJ are busily working to bring these traitors to justice.

No doubt those high-minded message police among us will likewise jump all over Gellman for his outraged whining.

[Joinfortmill]

27. We hear you.

[orleans]

39. +1 nt

[Fla Dem]

26. Boycott Morning Joe. See how well he survives without an audience.

[Farmer-Rick]

30. Our voting system was corrupted before Trump

Remember when W won by getting his Supreme Court to Stop letting Florida count ballots? Ever since they voted in W and trampled on our votes, our elections were rigged.

By allowing jerrymandering, the Supreme Court has given it's blessing on rigging boundaries to win seats.

By claiming corporations are people too, the Supremes have ensured unlimited bribes for politicians

And when W won after moving votes through GOP computers and back, democracy screamed.

Then there were all those weird results in states where KKK members or obvious right wingers won democratic elections....and Democrats had no problems with the rigged results.

No Trump didn't create this rigged voting system. He used it and made it worse. And the democrats have done very little to stop the rigging.

So now, here we are where Trump is blatantly setting up a rigged count system to add onto the already severely damaged and corrupted voting system. This will guarantee he takes back the white house. It's long pass time we stood up to GOP vote count rigging.

It's not who votes that counts but who counts the votes and Trump will be counting all future votes now.

[dwayneb]

41. Democrats have done very little to stop the rigging

Glad to know that I'm not the only one that sees where this is going F-R.

Trump did what no one previously had been willing to do - use the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of our Constitution and our election systems to set the stage for one-party rule, once and for all.

The founders always assumed that we would have a rational electorate and they assumed that at the end of the day, every leader would act for the good of the country as a whole. Now we know how flawed these idealistic assumptions were. This combined with technological advances that they could never have envisioned, may well spell the end of the American experiment as we knew it.

[AllaN01Bear]

34. its december 6, where are the big big fish? and the little fish get light scentances .

humbug.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

35. When The Atlantic published a story about this issue prior to the 2020 election.....

…. the usuals here howled that this was fake news and sour grapes (for some reason worrying that trump would try to steal the election was sour grapes).

Loyola Law published a paper about this in 2019.

If it had come down to Pennsylvania only, trump would have likely stolen the election. Arizona and Georgia saved our asses.

[TheRealNorth]

40. Yup

Had it been PA or WI, we would have had 4 (or more) years of TFG and Democracy would be dead.

[niyad]

38. KNR and bookmarked.

[CTyankee]

43. Re:paywall. You can try Googling it. That often works for me.

[Stuart G]

44. Donald Trump is a killer, loves his own ass and nothing else, stupid, hates Vets who died for...

America, totally selfish, etc...etc...etc..

It is my opinion, that he will never get elected to anything. He will be primaried and lose, if he runs.

His total incompetence with the Covid 19 Virus, is his name, and life calling card.. Trump will get elected to
absoultely nothing..ever!!

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION?

Is it ratings time for Morning Joe? Ratings are all they really care about..Do you know why??
............IT'S ALL ABOUT MONEY, HONEY!!!.......RATINGS, RATINGS, & HIGHER RATINGS!!.........

[Nevilledog]

46. No Paywall link

https://archive.ph/lttmJ

[Hekate]

48. Thank you. This is such a gift.

[Nevilledog]

50. ...

[Hekate]

47. KnRnBookmark

[Cha]

49. KR TY

[Corgigal]

51. The Atlantic is at least trying

to get peoples attention. I read in one of their articles today we will either go the way of Ireland during the troubles, or Putin’s Russia of today.

Scary stuff.

[CousinIT]

52. Time to yell at POTUS, VP SenateDems HouseDems, your reps and goddamned manchin

THE BIG HOLDUP is Senate Dems/Manchin.

POTUS seems utterly oblivious to the threat.

Elected Democrats CAN and MUST save our Democracy NOW. They don't seem to even RECOGNIZE that it's under threat.

NO. This isn't a "nothing we can do" issue.

ELECTED DEMOCRATS CAN AND MUST:

lift filibuster
pass FTVA and John Lewis VRA
FIX THE DAMN ELECTORAL COUNT ACT
Pass women's health protection act
abolish the debt ceiling.

THEY CAN DO HALF OF THIS IN ONE DAY. Yet it's not even on their RADAR.

If you're on Twitter - start @SenSchumer @SpeakerPelosi @SenateDems @HouseDemocrats @TeamPelosi @POTUS @VP @WhiteHouse @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris @RonaldKlain @SenatorManchin

SHARE the article with them. MEDIA IS SCREAMING that they act. Merrick Garland and Justice Dept have ASKED THAT CONGRESS ACT (yesterday when they announced the suit against TX for gerrymandering).

EVERYBODY needs to be screaming at them.

They're asleep at the damn wheel while Republicans are driving our Republic over a cliff.