this is funny because it’s true that the republican party has been a threat to democracy since 1968 or so, unless you downplay black voter suppression to the point where (white) people agree it doesn’t really count
That’s been the thing about the whole debate to me. It kind of comes down to semantics and whether people should be alarmed about the expansion of racist discriminatory policy that’s been aimed at Black people forever. There aren’t any stakes in it imo except to properly categorize oppression.
And I totally get being annoyed with people who act as if Trump is the spring from which all harms have flown but I don’t understand how acting like those things are just fine and good and acceptable as regular business helps anyone.
I am an academic working on this stuff, and this is how I distinguish the two problems: inclusion and machinery.
Who gets to vote? - that’s an inclusion question. Can one group control the government so that no one gets to vote again? That’s a machinery question.
The fights in American democracy since the war have been inclusion fights. The machinery hasn’t been an issue. But now, machinery is THE problem, and all the public discourse around democracy is still set up for inclusion fights.
