Click here for a particularly good HCR column, October 26, 2021. Her introduction:
For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today.
We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it.
People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
She emphasizes the usurpation of power that has taken place in Hungary over the last decade or so under Viktor Orbán. Orbán was elected in 2010, and has consolidated his power since then to the point where:
On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man.
Ten short years, from democracy to absolute power. This is the path the United States is beginning to take. If gerrymandering, voter suppression, and control of the election count/certification process can win power for the Republicans in at least the House -- and possibly the Senate as well -- in 2022, that will be the end of bodies such as the January 6 committee. Republicans will be able to pass federal laws cementing their control of the election process at a federal level, mimicking the partisan manipulation they are in the process of carrying out in Republican states.
In their embrace of the illiberal democracy of Hungary, those on the right argue that they are defending traditional American values.
Like Orbán, they focus relentlessly on immigration; “caravans” of immigrants have once again made the right-wing news, as they always do before an election. They worry that traditional families are under attack, hence Texas’s S.B. 8, which outlaws the constitutional right of abortion by empowering vigilantes. They insist that “real” America is being destroyed by multiculturalism; hence the hysteria over Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal theory from the 1970s that is not taught in K–12 schools, and the calls for “patriotic education.”
And, crucially, those on the right are openly embracing voter restrictions and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with partisans.
There have been 33 new election laws passed in 19 Republican states which are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a Republican minority will determine the outcome of elections.
Republicans today are not trying to win the next elections, in 2022, by contrasting their ideas for the future of the country with Democratic ideas; they're actively trying to rig the outcome.
When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Founders said.
This was a truly revolutionary idea in the age of the absolute monarchy. But HCR points out that this viewpoint can be shaken by determined forces, and possibly even overturned. On the brink of civil war, Southern demagogues were declaring:
"... that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was “an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane 'fanatic.' Stephens [Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America] told listeners: 'Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.'"
HCR says:
And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule.
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