Whatever happens this week, our democracy and open society are in critical condition

[marmar]

Whatever happens this week, our democracy and open society are in critical condition
Republicans are obsessed with "safety." But their malignant pessimism and bigotry are the real threat to America

JIM SLEEPER
NOVEMBER 3, 2020 11:00AM


(Salon) Financier and philanthropist George Soros must have seen Trump coming as early as 2011. He certainly saw where a disturbingly large proportion of American voters were going. "The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect," he wrote in the New York Review of Books in June of that year.

George W. Bush's reelection in 2004 had convinced Soros "that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership." The public had proved "unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems."

Will the American public now reconfirm Soros' observation? This year's campaign has given us plenty or reasons to worry.

By the end of Bush's second term in 2009, few Americans denied the harsh realities of the Iraq war fiasco and of failed federal responses to Hurricane Katrina's devastation and to tsunamis of predatory financing that were throwing millions of people out of their homes and jobs. Yet Soros insisted that much of the public, reluctant to face other realities, grasped at vague, easy hopes that Barack Obama's 2008 campaign offered but that his presidency proved sometimes unwilling and sometimes unable to fulfill, especially against a Republican Congress after 2010.

The ongoing public flight from reality only accelerated with Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, when millions of voters sought scapegoats to blame for rising dangers and craved simplistic directions to safety and salvation. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/03/whatever-happens-this-week-our-democracy-and-open-society-are-in-critical-condition/

[magicarpet]

1. We need to fix this before Ivanka or Donnie Jr. try to resurrect the trDump,...

.... 300 years dynasty. If the Rethug Party does not make some substantial changes Donnie Jr. is far more the crazy Nazi than his sicko father. Jr. would relish the chance to land his Fascist ass in the Oval Office. Could you just imagine this Nazi frat-boy leading AmeriKKKa.

We need to fix this so Fascists do not sneak in the backdoor and commandeer the People's Government out from under us if we momentarily glance the other way.