The Authoritarian Threat Is Not Overhyped

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

A week after the 2020 election, when President Trump had just begun plotting to delegitimize and overturn the election in order to retain power, an anonymous senior Republican official characterized the party’s thinking to the Washington Post. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the official said. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.”

That complacent view has characterized the party’s mainstream throughout Trump’s term. While privately contemptuous of Trump’s capabilities, they dismissed him as a hapless clown annoyingly weighing down their party’s prospects, rather than recognizing him an authoritarian threat. That view is expressed again today by Ross Douthat, who renews the case against alarmism that he has been pressing, in the face of accumulating evidence to the contrary, throughout the Trump era.

Douthat addresses his argument to over-pessimistic “progressives” who believe the Republican Party is seeding a future crisis the next time Democrats win a close presidential election. (He does not mention that more than 100 professors who study democracy signed an urgent warning that “our entire democracy is now at risk.”)

While progressives (and democracy scholars) express concern that the Republican Congress overwhelmingly rejected an inquiry into the insurrection, Douthat sees a silver lining: Yes, 175 Republicans did vote against a January 6 commission, but “35 House Republicans defied him and voted for the Jan. 6 inquiry.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-authoritarian-threat-is-not-overhyped/ar-AAKPIqy

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

Suppose Trump had dropped dead in January. Would Republicans not be passing vote suppression laws? They very likely would. And the reason is that, while Trump is an extreme manifestation, his authoritarian impulses are not purely idiosyncratic. Skepticism of democracy as a value has deep roots in conservative thought. While conservative parties in other countries accommodate themselves to democratic control over the economy generations ago, the American right has never relinquished its belief that allowing majorities to redistribute income at the ballot box is a fundamental violation of liberty.

Not a likelihood, it's a certainty