Putting on my preachin’ suit and poufing my hair. But first, a little warm-up act.
Anand Giridharadas edited his opening monologue to reinforce his warning about the clear and present danger to the republic represented by a “crock-pot coup” already simmering ahead of the 2024 election. “[I]f democracy dies in America, it is unlikely to resemble our mental picture,” Giridharadas explains.
“That death would be, the experts tell us, completely above board. Fully legal, even constitutional. The i’s will be dotted; the t’s will be crossed. The paperwork will be submitted properly and on time, in triplicate.”
Giridharadas writes at The Ink:
The various expressions of this slow-simmering coup appear to share a common object: laying the groundwork for states to declare their own election systems to have been contaminated by fraud, and thereby usurping from the people the power to allocate electoral votes.
In short, these states are creating a legal framework to do what former President Trump asked them to do in 2020 — overturn their own elections.
The cynically, tragicomically Orwellian name for these Republican machinations?
Election. Integrity.
If democracy does ultimately die in America, it will be “election integrity” that did it.
What is the answer to the crock-pot coup?
Urgent, concerted democratic reform.
“To save our democracy, we must democratize it,” the scholars Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write. “We must expand access to the ballot, reform our electoral system to ensure that majorities win elections, and weaken or eliminate antiquated institutions such as the filibuster so that majorities can actually govern.”
A radical idea.
Amid the summer of the Delta variant and of those wildfires and of looming evictions and a last-ditch moratorium on those evictions and the possibility that we will, at long last, have our infrastructure week, the crock-pot coup may feel at once less immediate and more daunting.
But perhaps no other ongoing story in this country so deserves our attention.
This you know already. And I’m not doing enough to stop the real steal in the planning. But I’m doing what I can, exploiting electoral angles others have missed, much of it behind the scenes.
I spoke yesterday with an old friend I had not talked to in years. He’s lonely and depressed. He’s watching society crumble in ways he’d predicted for decades. After so long out of touch, he didn’t need me to hear that rant again.
He’s been shamed by the climate activism of Greta Thunberg. So young. So fearless. For years, he seethed but had not acted. He’s fighting despair. She’s fighting global powers. Win or lose.
Sometimes in politics you get run over. But being in the fight means I stopped feeling like road kill decades ago. The antidote to cynicism and despair is stepping back into the fight the way Rick Blaine does at the end of Casablanca. I told him it’s empowering especially when you feel powerless.
Also, the struggle must bring out the Irish in me, I said.
Is this a private fight or can anyone join?