Sarah Churchwell asks whether American democracy can survive Trump, in a must- read article that explains how and why the rotted out Republican party has increasingly turned to totalitarian methods and means. Here's a brief snippet:
“A society becomes totalitarian,” Orwell warned in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, “when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” The flagrancy is part of the point. At present, that flagrantly artificial power in the US depends on a president who refuses to concede, an administration that repudiates the results of an election that was transparently fair (as corroborated by independent international election observers), the Republican leadership complicitly silent or actively encouraging these falsehoods and surrogates who flatly lie about the election outcome. The result is that some 70% of Republican voters currently believe that Biden’s win was “rigged” – although they don’t explain how a Republican Senate was returned in this same “rigged” election. The Republican party, funded by vastly wealthy donors, has turned itself into America’s ruling class, clinging to fraudulent power by refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of its opponents, withholding the consent of the loser that is necessary for democracy to function.
For Trump and his enablers to create the corrosive fiction that he "won" the election that he overwhelmingly lost is the first step toward what will be the 21st Century's version of the "Lost Cause" myth that's kept the fundamental truth of our nation's founding from being accepted by a large swath of the public. It could well unravel our democracy, even if it's thoroughly and continuously debunked.
