Why the Stakes in this Election Are So Enormously High
Democracy itself is on the ballot. If Trump wins, the extreme Right will be in a much better position than ever before to abolish it.
Some thoughts from my new piece - while we all nervously wait:
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https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/why-the-stakes-in-this-election-are
Consider this my closing argument: As of right now, only one of the two major parties in the United States, the Democratic Party, for all its many flaws, is a (small-d) democratic party. The other one is firmly in the hands of a radicalizing ethno-nationalist movement. 2/
The fault lines in the struggle over whether or not the democratic experiment should be continued map exactly onto the fault lines of the struggle between the two parties. Democracy itself is now a partisan issue. Therefore, in every election, democracy itself is on the ballot. 3/
In a stable democracy, the stakes shouldn’t be that high. Elections should be competitions between political factions that accept the legitimacy of their opponents and are committed to upholding the democratic system. In America, that’s evidently not the case. 4/
This whole notion that as long as you have elections, you have democracy, reveals an incredibly naïve understanding of politics. Democracy is not just a bunch of formal procedures, it does not just mean elections. It comes with substantive commitments. 5/
The fact that we can’t just complacently rely on elections to always produce outcomes that sustain democracy is the reason why we create rules and institutions tasked with upholding and fostering a democratic political culture and defending constitutional self-government. 6/
We are here because of a system-wide failure to hold Trump accountable and mount an effective defense against the onslaught of authoritarian minority rule. And so, we are left with an election as the desperate last stand of a democracy under siege. 7/
If the leader of an increasingly fascistic movement can attempt a coup and incite a violent insurrection only to return to power four years later, without ever facing real consequences and while explicitly promising to establish a vindictive autocracy, democracy will not persist. 8/
The idea that a second Trump presidency would basically just be more of the same, a kind of rerun of the first, is diagnostically not plausible at all, and it is politically dangerous. Both Trump himself and the rightwing forces around him have drastically radicalized. 9/
@tzimmer_history additionally these right wing tendencies have bled into other right party movements across the globe.
