This week I plan to demonstrate that any democratic government—by its very nature and under its own terms—will have a dangerous anti-democratic opposition. The opposition can be blunted and, with constant work, can be prevented from weakening or toppling the democratic institutions, but anti-democratic opposition can never be eliminated because:
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you so much for writing it. I appreciate that you quoted Heather Cox Richardson. I think she has been more focused than most on the fundamental historical explanation for the takeover of the Republican Party by right wing authoritarianism: The refusal of the people who controlled the Republican Party before 2016 to accept the need for Keynesian economics in the United States.
Realizing as early as the mid-1930s that they would never get their laissez-faire economic ideas into law again if they directly and accurately represented their proposal for a return to a pre-New Deal United States to the American electorate, these republicans looked for groups they could incite to support them in spite of their economic agenda. Kevin Kruse has a particularly nice documentation of how they initially reached out to evangelicals in his book One Nation Under God, but dog whistling about race after the Civil Rights era was what ultimately allowed them to assemble a winning coalition.
Over the last 40 years, in the midst of the suffering imposed by neoliberalism, these republicans have had to continually intensify the authoritarian base's agitation in order to keep a coalition together. The Democratic Party's triangulation strategy, also accepting much of neoliberalism, fueled this intensification of the Republican Party's reliance on an agitated authoritarian base to win elections. Ultimately, the base seized control. Now, it is a really good question whether democracy will survive. I really appreciate, though, how well you demonstrate that the struggle of this present moment is not unique and is indeed endemic in some form to any democracy.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you so much for writing it. I appreciate that you quoted Heather Cox Richardson. I think she has been more focused than most on the fundamental historical explanation for the takeover of the Republican Party by right wing authoritarianism: The refusal of the people who controlled the Republican Party before 2016 to accept the need for Keynesian economics in the United States.
Realizing as early as the mid-1930s that they would never get their laissez-faire economic ideas into law again if they directly and accurately represented their proposal for a return to a pre-New Deal United States to the American electorate, these republicans looked for groups they could incite to support them in spite of their economic agenda. Kevin Kruse has a particularly nice documentation of how they initially reached out to evangelicals in his book One Nation Under God, but dog whistling about race after the Civil Rights era was what ultimately allowed them to assemble a winning coalition.
Over the last 40 years, in the midst of the suffering imposed by neoliberalism, these republicans have had to continually intensify the authoritarian base's agitation in order to keep a coalition together. The Democratic Party's triangulation strategy, also accepting much of neoliberalism, fueled this intensification of the Republican Party's reliance on an agitated authoritarian base to win elections. Ultimately, the base seized control. Now, it is a really good question whether democracy will survive. I really appreciate, though, how well you demonstrate that the struggle of this present moment is not unique and is indeed endemic in some form to any democracy.