The Radical Right is Deliberately Undermining Our Democracy for Partisan Advantage.
Mr. Trump’s claim that our presidential election was won by
fraud is patently false, and it has been rejected out of hand by dozens of
judges as well as several state governors. In spite of the claim’s absurdity,
it has done great harm to our country because millions of Americans believe it,
and as a result, they deny the legitimacy of our government and of our basic,
political institutions.
Our Government Survives Because We Believe It is Legitimate
Our democracy, like any government, has not survived for two
centuries on brute force alone. It has survived because most of us accord
legitimacy to it and to the electoral processes by which our leaders are chosen.
Our government has survived because we accept it and follow its rules most of
the time. We do not actively oppose it or attempt to overthrow it. We believe
that submitting to the government is right and just even when it does not act
justly. We express that belief in the principle that we are a nation of laws,
and that it is an obligation of a citizen to obey the laws. We believe this
because we believe that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed just as our Declaration
of Independence says that it should, and the way that “the consent of the
governed” is expressed is through fair and open elections.
It is true that we also have a strong tradition of civil
disobedience in which people deliberately disobey what they see as unjust laws,
but even in civil disobedience, we accord legitimacy to our institutions. Thus,
the civil rights demonstrators of the nineteen sixties allowed themselves to be
arrested and taken to jail. They placed their trust in the legal institutions
of our country. They demanded change, but they did not propose revolution.
The Claim of Fraudulent Elections Legitimizes Violence
Claiming that our elections are fraudulent shatters the
consensus on which the legitimacy of our government depends and thus legitimizes
violent, armed resistance. Violent resistance in the United States is a real
possibility. Our country has many,
organized armed groups that claim to represent the real will of the people.
It is not clear how many members these groups have, but the
number is estimated at several tens of thousands. Today, the groups are
fragmented and have little power, but their
members have shown a willingness to commit extremely violent acts and to
promote violence against public officials. If the groups were to be brought together in a
national movement, they would become a real threat to our democracy.
Our Democracy May Not Survive
That is the threat presented by the actions of our outgoing
president and his supporters. They threaten to turn a fragmented collection of
violent groups into the violent component of an organized, national movement
with central direction and millions of members. Currently, the campaign against
the legitimacy of Biden’s election is the national organization, and the
violent radical rightist groups that support it form the basis of the
development of an organization like SA.
The violent groups by themselves cannot overthrow our system because they are
too small and fragmented, but if they become the violent vanguard of a national
movement with millions of members, our democracy may not survive. Our democracy
could die as Germany’s did in 1932. In the election of that year, the Nazi
Party received more than 11 million votes, but the
SA, its paramilitary wing (the brownshirts), had only 400,000 members at
that time, and a few years earlier, it had been far smaller.)
The
effects of the nationalization of the violent groups have already appeared
in threats to the lives of election officials and elected politicians, and I
fear that the movement will become more violent and more extreme. The
threat of violence is already being used to maintain Trump’s control of the
Republican Party and to keep Republican politicians in line. The effect may
well be that even if the forms of our democratic institutions survive, they
will cease to function. If the radical right denies the legitimacy of Mr.
Biden’s government, it may well become impossible for Republican legislators to
engage in bipartisan work with Democrats, and our national government will be
immobilized. We will be unable to take action against any of the serious,
national problems that we face.
We must stand firm against the destruction of our democracy
by the radical right and its armed gangsters.
No comments:
Post a Comment