Crisis of Democracy
From Salon:
In a recent interview with MSNBC, former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt (pictured) issued a stern warning to Americans who have not yet grasped the nature of our present crisis of democracy. “We have an autocratic movement teeming with violence and the intimations of violence in this country,” he said, inviting viewers of the liberal news channel to imagine “that domestic terrorist, that criminal who desecrated the American flag by wrapping it around his head, who committed violence in the name of right-wing extremism.”
American political scientist Norm Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C. conservative think tank , agrees, adding, “This is the same roadmap we saw in Germany.”
My personal opinion is all this violence is going to go nowhere, for three main reasons:
• Hundreds of the January 6th insurrection are going to prison. Yes, the sentences are lighter than they might have been had the President of the United States not commanded them to do this, but some of the more violent offenders will be behind bars for many years. It’s very clear that the Justice Department will come down hard on future idiots of this type. Moreover, tomorrow’s insurrectionists have run fresh out of wanna-be dictators to give them (grossly illegal) orders.
• The former president is in a morass of legal woes himself. Now that it’s been revealed that he and his team had made a comprehensive plan to overturn the 2020 election, one has to think that his days as a free man are numbered, even if he manages to skate on the many alleged felonies he’s believed to have committed. Watching your boss/hero getting indicted, convicted and incarcerated for treason, a case which relies on a huge depth of irrefutable evidence, will take the fight out of at least some of these morons.
• The Big Lie is in the process of imploding. The recount in Arizona made it clear to many Trump supporters that we had a free and fair election, one that Trump lost by eight million individual and 74 electoral votes. Regardless of how many times Trump claims that the election was rigged, this lie is rapidly unraveling.
Call me naïve, but I expect something of a mass epiphany here. I heard a judge say once that prison is a good punishment because everyone hates it: rich or poor, black or white, it doesn’t matter. One has to believe we’ll have people thinking: look we just saw a few hundred insurrectionists get sent away. This seems like a very bad idea.
