Tag: Republican War on Democracy

The Rise of ‘Competitive Authoritarianism’

Buck Banks

“The kind of authoritarianism I fear is emerging in the United States, which political scientists call ‘competitive authoritarianism,’ doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition or formal martial law. … Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.”

— Zack Beauchamp

What’s a Good Citizen, Charlie Brown?

Pensito Editors

In 1970, students in a fifth-grade class at Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills were assigned to write a letter to someone they admired, asking them, “What makes a good citizen?”

Joel Lipton, 10 years old at the time, wrote to Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz. This was Schulz’s reply:

Good grief! Schulz still hits the salient points in a single paragraph here, some 50 years later.

Kinzinger Knows Who the REAL RINOS Are

Buck Banks

“Madison Cawthorn can invoke coming bloodshed, and Paul Gosar can flirt with white nationalism, and they’re signing a letter asking to have me kicked out of the caucus. This is how far the Republican Party has fallen. They call me a RINO but I haven’t changed. The Republican Party has changed into an authoritarian Trump organization. They’re the RINOs. Trump is a RINO.”

— Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), quoted by The Atlantic.

Orlando Sentinel Apologizes for GOP Endorsement

Buck Banks

“We apologize to our readers for endorsing Michael Waltz in the 2020 general election for Congress. We had no idea, had no way of knowing at the time, that Waltz was not committed to democracy. … During our endorsement interview with the incumbent congressman, we didn’t think to ask, ‘Would you support an effort to throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans in four states in order to overturn a presidential election and hand it to the person who lost, Donald Trump?’ … Our bad.”

— From an Orlando Sentinel editorial

Texas Lawsuit Is the New Conservative Litmus Test of Trump Loyalty

Buck Banks

106

“The Texas lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory has quickly become a conservative litmus test, as 106 members of Congress and multiple state attorneys general signed onto the case even as some have predicted it will fail,” the AP reports. David Graham: “This embrace of the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election is both shocking and horrifying… Republican officials have gone from coddling a sore loser to effectively abandoning democracy.”

GOP’s Dangerous Attack on Democracy

Buck Banks

“These power grabs highlight one of the most disturbing facts about American politics today: The Republican Party has become institutionally indifferent to the health of democracy. It prioritizes power over principle to such an extreme degree that it undermines the most basic functioning of democracy. … In the long run, the GOP’s turn against democracy could well be a greater threat to the American experiment than anything President Trump has done.”

— Zack Beauchamp