A month after the midterm elections, it is beginning finally to seem as if we can afford to exhale. Extremism was decisively, if not completely, repudiated. We have for the moment avoided catastrophe, avoided the inauguration of a fascist state. The question, of course, is why we faced this crisis in the first place. It is the question we have been asking, in various forms, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Why has this happened? As recently as the Obama years, there were predictions that Republicans would soon be unable to win another election because changing demographics are against them. The predictions were perhaps not quite as naïve as they now seem. The far right maintains itself in power in large measure only through various forms of manipulation: through gerrymandering, through arcane pseudo-procedures like the filibuster and raising (or refusing to raise) the debt ceiling, through stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing hacks by means of unethical and at times outright illegal procedures (the refusal to confirm Merrick Garland, the willingness of candidates to lie during the confirmation process), and by the brazen political partisanship on the part of all the right-wing members of the Court. The power exercised by the far right is greatly in excess of its actual popularity.
December 9, 2022
December 9, 2022
December 9, 2022
A month after the midterm elections, it is beginning finally to seem as if we can afford to exhale. Extremism was decisively, if not completely, repudiated. We have for the moment avoided catastrophe, avoided the inauguration of a fascist state. The question, of course, is why we faced this crisis in the first place. It is the question we have been asking, in various forms, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Why has this happened? As recently as the Obama years, there were predictions that Republicans would soon be unable to win another election because changing demographics are against them. The predictions were perhaps not quite as naïve as they now seem. The far right maintains itself in power in large measure only through various forms of manipulation: through gerrymandering, through arcane pseudo-procedures like the filibuster and raising (or refusing to raise) the debt ceiling, through stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing hacks by means of unethical and at times outright illegal procedures (the refusal to confirm Merrick Garland, the willingness of candidates to lie during the confirmation process), and by the brazen political partisanship on the part of all the right-wing members of the Court. The power exercised by the far right is greatly in excess of its actual popularity.