I feel the Skepticism you hear from some when they seem utterly baffled that people would actually believe a second Trump term would bring authoritarian and anti democratic backsliding is rooted in, among other things, 1) not realizing that if something like that occurs, it’s not gonna have…
…the dramatic sweep or bang of a March on Rome, it’s gonna feel a lot more “normal” than that and therefore easier to dismiss by many elite pundits 2) ask an older Black voter if it’s hard to believe that America may no longer be a democracy at some point in its modern history.
For most of its history, America hasn’t been a democracy, by any meaningful definition of the term!
This isn’t some It Can’t Happen Here shit, in a way, it’s already happened. It just may not have directly affected you.
I have a halfway serious theory that exactly this phenomenon is maybe why our democracy lasted for a couple centuries and is now seemingly failing: for most of that time there were whole classes in society denied their rights, even unto death, and the license to oppress them was a relief valve.
A cliche says antisemitism is the socialism of fools, and I think it might have worked the same way in our nation's history for democracy not socialism, and with a whole range of and whole series of vicious bigotries. "democracy" working because the electors could exclude and oppress some Other.
That’s depressing AF, but if you read Calhoun’s speech on the Oregon Territory, it is pretty clear that he thought having a permanent underclass of Black people stabilized class relations Southern society.
