Loyal readers of Bad Dogs and Bakeries will recall that I wrote a piece on September 3, 2020, which I called “Would you rather live in a white country or a democratic country?”, in which I explained that a majority of Republicans have no attachment to democracy and would prefer to live in a non-democratic white country.
How could it be otherwise? Republicans are an ever-shrinking minority in this country, and cling to political power only through the clever exploitation of anti-democratic and anti-majority-rule tactics. Our peculiar constitution, based as it is on geography rather than population, makes this possible for them.
No reader of these pages could have been surprised when on January 6, President Trump sent thousands of his followers to the U.S. Capitol to overturn the outcome of the November 3 democratic election which was won by President Trump’s rival, Joe Biden. This was just another escalation of President Trump’s four-year war against democracy and democratic norms.
President Trump’s rejection of democratic norms began during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that he would not accept the outcome of the election if Hillary Clinton were to be declared the winner. The erosion of democratic norms continued throughout the Trump presidency. When I wrote last September that most Republicans value “keeping America’s power structure white” more than they value democracy, we were watching the president attempt to discourage voting and delegitimize the coming presidential election. I ended the essay by asking to what extent Americans would accept the non-democratic steps President Trump would take to cling to power and the White House if he lost the November 3 general election. We found out. Tens of millions believed the president’s lies and supported his efforts to reverse the election outcome
After the election, officials in 18 states and more than half the Republicans in the House of Representatives supported a lawsuit trying to reverse the result. These leaders of the Republican Party were willing to toss out the country’s democratic traditions to support a power grab. It was a remarkable campaign against American democracy.
Then on January 6, the date on which both houses of congress were to certify the results of the electoral college vote to elect Joe Biden, 140 Republican representatives and 13 senators voted against the certification. This was just a politer version of the invasion of the Capitol that same day by a mob of Trump supporters with the same goal of upending our democracy.
If this were some other democratic country, we would never have witnessed a mob invading the national legislature. But this is America. That’s why it happened.
