A pitiless crackdown on on illegal immigration. A hardline approach to law and order. A purge of “gender ideology” and “wokeness” from the nation’s schools. Erosions of academic freedom, judicial independence and the free press. An alliance with Christian nationalism. An assault on democratic institutions.
The “electoral autocracy” that is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has been long revered by Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement. Now admiration is turning into emulation. In the early weeks of Trump’s second term as US president, analysts say, there are alarming signs that the Orbánisation of America has begun.
I’m sorry, but I chafe at the notion that America was a democracy within the recent past and has ceased to be particularly in the last month.
America was a weak democracy throughout its entire history; it has become weaker in the last generation, but still affords more democratic power – even under a fascist leader in the process of attempting to further dismantle it – than most citizens in the world enjoy today. A lot of people literally risk their lives for the political power that we often take for granted.
We should absolutely be disturbed and angry about the loss of civic power. We should also avoid defeatism or doomerism, as there is still a lot of room for this to get better or worse depending on what each of us do. And, we should absolutely reject any framing that suggests that the oligarchy we had last year and every year of our lifetimes before that was some sacred ideal.
America neither was a true democracy previously, nor has it ceased to be one at all. Ergo: democracy has not died.
Only in a real democracy could an idiot like trump become president the first time round. Even the russians were surprised, they never expected Hillary could lose. Now is the Democratic party a democracy? Eh, no, it’s a superdelegate oligarchy, with what happened to Bernie and got into this disastrous timeline.
Fair points.
But I still believe there was a tiny bit of democracy left, up to the last election, otherwise democrats would not have accepted a peaceful transition. As a Canadian, it make no doubts in my mind that US will try to annex us in the coming months or years. I will be fighting against it and I hope we can build a resistance we some of the US citizens.
I don’t mean to come at you in particular, but when I hear a phrase like “a tiny bit of democracy left”, I can’t help but think about the fact that there is so much unexercised democratic power available to citizens in the US, and the primary tool for disenfranchisement is just demoralizing and inactivating people.
Let’s just set aside all the people who just do not pay attention to politics and focus on folks in this thread. Within a thread of people who follow and react to international news, how many know who their county representative is? How many people vote in the primaries that determine who gets to run for their city council?
I’m not blaming anyone. It’s a ton of work. Until recently I didn’t know these things. But if we’re looking for a revival of democracy, we should all be working together to solidify power among the people who control our local cops and school boards and have authority over our state national guards and our state-level medical records, and regulate labor rights in our states and counties, and so on. This is really a key point at which we can either push fascism back to the fringes or let it actually end democracy.
