Admittedly, I am a life-long Democrat, but a democracy like ours needs various opinions, arguments, disagreements, then compromises, and solutions. Give me an honest Republican, maybe a fiscal conservative, a preserver of nature, a strong defender of good education for all, and a spokesperson for our military, for instance, and someone who upholds ethics and morality, then I would have no problems voting for him/her. There are certainly some Democrats I do not agree with at all.
What we learn, however, day by day, is that there are many Republicans, such as Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs in Arizona, or Lauren Boebert (CO) and Marjorie Greene (GA), who explicitly aim at the destruction of our democratic system and who would like to enthrone former President in the White House again, illegally, contrary to the will of the people, and in open opposition to our constitution. The riot on Jan. 6 was not a popular or legal movement, a justified protest by the people; instead, it was well prepared by Trump’s henchmen even within Congress, trying to overthrow the government and to destroy democracy. Incredibly, this fascist take-over failed, some Republican lawmakers in DC and across the country refused to partake, and the legal system held up. But our entire election system is frayed, distrusted, and viewed as skewed, and so our government, thanks to those who are hypnotized by Trump and have lost the basic idea of what democracy entails.
Who was in power during the 2020 election and who would have had the most opportunities to manipulate the election? Certainly not the Democrats. Trump’s enablers know that they lost across the board, but they are not willing to accept a ‘no’ for an answer, which is either an infantile reaction or a fascist mentality, as in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. The fact that former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, defied a subpoena from the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol Riot clearly signals that he, like many other nefarious Republicans and the right-wing news outlets (e.g., Fox News) is betting on Trump’s help to undermine the legal structure and to defy the laws so they can take over power in a possible coup d’etat (sorry to say, ha, the military is not on your side, not yet at least!). Similarly, the Republicans in Congress do everything in their power to obstruct the government by Pres. Joe Biden on a daily basis by means of the filibuster which is a disastrous political tool that pretends to be democratic in principle, but is a toxic instrument for a strong minority to blockade everything the government is trying to do. Of course, they have every right to criticize and to object to new policies or laws, but this radical obstructionism is a highly dangerous, foolish, and destructive strategy representing a fundamental opposition to democracy, to elections, to justice, and to freedom for all.
As is obvious to all who can read, those Republicans bank on people’s ignorance and gullibility to replace our political system with kingship or dictatorship. Unfortunately, they are quite successful in obfuscating their own true motives (greed for money and power, war against women, fight against minorities and asylum seekers and migrants), and since fewer and fewer people in the United States are truly well informed today or just don’t care (unless they are hypnotized by ‘their leader’), our democracy is almost at the brink of collapse. Indeed, hypnosis is the right term in this context. There is the former Pres., who has always been a disaster as a businessman but has always successfully pretended to be the opposite. To avoid taxation and legal prosecution, he entered politics and was similarly a complete disaster. But none of that matters to his followers who are virtually in a trance over ‘their’ somehow charismatic but evil leader.
Tragically, democracy as a political system is on the decline worldwide, whether we think of Poland, Hungary, France, or Brazil. Even in Germany, a highly nasty, vicious political party on the extreme right has gained considerable cloud nationwide (AfD) and is now represented in the Bundestag (parliament). I am afraid that more and more people in the West turn blind to the real conditions and blithely follow big leaders who speak sonorously yet are completely ignorant and un-Democratic. As in the past, naked greed and power hunger are taking over step by step under the disguise of right-wing rhetoric. This is the direct path toward Fascism.