OLD NEWS

As the improbable begins to look more and more probable, that America’s choice for the White House in 2024 is going to be between a late septuagenarian and an early octogenarian, there isn’t much new to write about, also because it is a year without national elections. While most of the time no news is good news, I don’t see it that way in this instance. Of course, there are interesting little tidbits to write about, like the ethics (or lack thereof) of justice Clarence Thomas – Anita Hill saw that in 1991 much better than Joe Biden – or the victory of Dominion Voting Systems over Fox News leading to a little bit of a bloodletting for Rupert Murdoch’s company and the unceremonious sacking of Tucker Carlson, but really nothing of consequence. As I’ve stated before, the nation and the world are kept in a state of suspense. In the meantime, the state of our democracy requires action and reinforcement that isn’t coming. America is limping along with only one functioning party and a cult-like populist movement that is harking back to the good old days of white Christian supremacy, bigotry, book banning, chauvinism, and xenophobia.

No news is bad news. What we keep waiting for is an unequivocal repudiation by the American People of the authoritarian streak that was the hallmark of Trump’s presidency and that has since metastasized all through the Republican Party. Trump and his followers are dying for a second term in office so that he can finish the work, shatter the ‘deep state’, finish the border wall, and keep all immigrants out indefinitely, deploy military power domestically against any street opposition, replace public with patriotic education, and create Mussolini style ‘Freedom Cities’ on public land.

What we are waiting for is for the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, and his team to finish their work and finally advise the Department of Justice to hold Trump criminally accountable for his attempts to subvert the democratic underpinnings of our constitutional republican system of government.

What we keep waiting for is a mandate from the American people to strengthen our democracy−and protect it from future attempts to subvert it− by simple common-sense steps like expanding the House of Representatives, automatic voter registration, banning gerrymandering, making Election Day a National Holiday, and eliminating the ‘winner takes all’ rule in the apportioning of State Electors to the Electoral College.

In sum, what we keep waiting for is a clear signal from the American People that it has no tolerance for antics that put us on a slide path towards authoritarianism of the kind that we have seen happening to the Weimar Republic, and in modern times to Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Turkey, and Poland. Odds are that this signal will come in due time, if not conclusively in 2024, over the next election cycles. The reason for this optimism is found in the peculiarity of the American election system where few people vote in the primaries and, as things stand today, GOP contenders are chanceless if they fail to capture the MAGA faithful. This forces Republicans running for office to espouse extreme populist (I deliberately don’t use the word ‘conservative’ here) positions on issues like abortion, critical race theory, book banning, and LBGTQ rights, where they will veer far away from public opinion, thus making them less electable in a general election. The youth vote, that represents an ever-increasing part of the voting public and has already shown in recent elections to be strongly averse to MAGA rhetoric, will have to save the day. Which is only appropriate since the future belongs to them even if octogenarians and septuagenarians are slugging it out in the battle for the White House and are still disproportionally represented in Congress.

It is old news, a little tired and less than uplifting, but the best chance to keep the Republic as intended by the Founding Fathers is to let the MAGA flame burn itself out by forcing Republican contenders for public office to take ever more extreme positions that are sure to alienate all but the most Trumpist fanatics in the voting public.