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The people can't be trusted to choose liberal democracy
https://www.editorialboard.com/the-people-cant-be-trusted-to-choose-liberal-democracy/Democracy, wow. I just don’t know sometimes. This time last year, I thought we were heading in the right direction. The political energies of anti-racism and anti-Trumpism conjoined to create the biggest winning coalition in the history of presidential elections. I was so optimistic, I wrote a piece arguing the “culture wars” had finally reached an end.
Ha!
Then came Glenn Youngkin’s election. Despite Virginia going to Joe Biden the year before, voters in 2021 apparently decided the fascist threat was over. It was safe to elect for governor a rightwinger yammering about kids being brainwashed by their pedo-communist “CRT”-loving teachers. Now he’s going after LGBT-plus people the way his red comrades are. Now he’s undermining public education like his fellow Repubolsheviks. It’s anti-democracy disguised as democracy.
Youngkin’s election was the first sign of the Biden coalition coming unglued. Turns out a lot of respectable white Virginians felt they were so immune to the effects of white power that they didn’t mind white-power policies as long as the former president wasn’t involved.
Last week’s primaries are another sign and another blow.
A harder blow.
Who needs an insurgency?
More than 100 GOP primary winners are Big Lie senseis. A third of the way through this year’s primaries show voters picking candidates who believe the 2020 election was rigged, according to analysis by the Post.
District by district, state by state, voters in places that cast ballots through the end of May have chosen at least 108 candidates for statewide office or Congress who have repeated Trump’s lies. The number jumps to at least 149 winning candidates — out of more than 170 races — when it includes those who have campaigned on a platform of tightening voting rules or more stringently enforcing those already on the books, despite the lack of evidence of widespread fraud.
*snip*