Following up on my previous post about who bears responsibility for our crisis of democracy (and on Greg Sargent’s observation on that), Dan Froomkin asked for some crowd-sourced help on Monday:
Our neighbors to the north are unnerved enough to wonder aloud if their once-stable, once-democratic neighbors to the south might well be by 2030 “a right-wing dictatorship.”
Let’s listen for a moment to Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar of violent conflict (from 12/31/21):
We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.
Does it show?
I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.
In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.
The precipitating factors are many and familiar. We don’t need to be told. Homer-Dixon warns that should Republicans regain control of Congress, Trump’s return is that much more likely. His agenda will be personal: vindication and vengeance.
Hoping Trump’s “manifest managerial incompetence” and U.S. federalism will prevent him from consolidating dictatorial power is perhaps the best of outcomes, Homer-Dixon explains, “because there are far worse scenarios.” Including something resembling civil war, or even the growth of an “infrastructure” of ideas that “sets” an extremist mindset and allows someone with similar dictatorial aspirations and more managerial skills to succeed Trump and … succeed.
For that “Canada is woefully unprepared.”
On this side of the 49th parallel, Froomkin returns to his observation from earlier this month that failure to hold Trump accountable has simply made things worse:
This failure to hold Trump to account has been consistent ever since he declared his candidacy. When he actually won in 2016, the heads of our major newsrooms made a terrible mistake: They clung to their devotion to treating both political parties with equal deference – even though that meant abandoning their even more fundamental commitment to truth-telling and accountability. “Balanced” treatment of a profoundly unbalanced situation normalized Trump’s and his party’s behavior, no matter how dishonest, extreme and anti-democratic it was.
Well before Jan. 6, Trump had thoroughly proven himself to be dangerous, inept at governing, corrupt and demagogic. In one of my first columns for Press Watch, in October 2019, I wrote that the main storyline of the 2020 election should be that we made a terrible mistake in 2016 and we need to fix it.
For a few days post-Jan. 6, the press found its voice, and found Trump blameworthy. But that did not last.
If trying to steal an election does not disqualify a political party from governing, what does, Froomkin wants to know. Yet even as it is clear that the Party of Trump is laying the groundwork for another insurrection, the elite press “can’t bring itself to say what kind of party that is” or to state clearly the stakes. It is not “Democrats vs. Republicans here. It’s us-who-support-democracy vs. them-who-don’t.”
Froomkin lists a series of accountability fails on the part of the press, but the blame for Trump does not fall exclusively on the press:
Repeatedly calling out the Republican Party as unfit and undeserving to compete in a democratic election sounds awfully partisan. But wanting to hold the powerful accountable is hardly an endorsement of the Democratic Party.
In fact, outside of the media, one of the biggest reasons for the low expectations of accountability for government officials is the precedent set by Barack Obama, when he refused to hold anyone accountable for the Bush-Cheney administration’s torture of detainees. Not demanding some form of justice or recrimination from a president, vice president, on down – the people who proposed, approved, or performed brutal and unforgivable acts on human beings – was one of the most disappointing things ever for those of us who consider ourselves accountability journalists.
Not shouting from the rooftops that democracy is under assault is what just might bring those roofs down on our heads.