President
Joe Biden’s early success in getting Americans
vaccinated, pushing out stimulus checks and generally calming the surface of
American life has been a blessing for the country. But it’s also lulled many into
thinking that
Donald Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen, which
propelled the Capitol insurrection on January 6, would surely fade away and
everything would return to normal. It hasn’t.
اضافة اعلان
We are not OK.
America’s democracy is still in real danger.
In fact, we are closer to a political civil war — more than at any other time
in our modern history. Today’s seeming political calm is actually resting on a
false bottom that we’re at risk of crashing through at any moment.
Because, instead of Trump’s big lie fading away, just the
opposite is happening — first slowly and now quickly.
Under Trump’s command and control from Mar-a-Largo, and with
the complicity of most of his party’s leaders, that big lie — that the greatest
election in our history, when more Republicans and Democrats voted than ever
before, in the midst of a pandemic, must have been rigged because Trump lost —
has metastasized. It’s being embraced by a solid majority of elected
Republicans and ordinary party members — local, state, and national.
“Denying the legitimacy of our last election is becoming a
prerequisite for being elected as a Republican in 2022,” observed Gautam
Mukunda, host of Nasdaq’s “World Reimagined” podcast and author of the book
“Indispensable: When Leaders Really Mattered.”
“This is creating a filter that over time will block out
anyone willing to tell the truth about the election.” It will leave us with “a
Republican Party where you cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in
the East, a Republican Party where being willing to help steal an election is
literally a job requirement.”
This is not an exaggeration. Here is what Representative
Anthony Gonzalez, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, told
The Hill about the campaign within the party to oust Representative Liz Cheney
from her House GOP leadership position, because of her refusal to go along with
the big lie:
“If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing
to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit. Liz isn’t going to lie to
people. … She’s going to stand on principle.”
Think about that for a second. To be a leader in today’s GOP
you either have to play dumb or be dumb on the central issue facing our
Republic: the integrity of our election. You have to accept everything that
Trump has said about the election — without a shred of evidence — and ignore
everything his own attorney general, FBI director, and election security
director said — based on the evidence — that there was no substantive fraud.
What kind of deformed party will such a dynamic produce? A
party so willing to be marinated in such a baldfaced lie will lie about
anything, including who wins the next election and every one after that.
There is simply nothing more dangerous for a two-party
democracy than to have one party declare that no election where it loses is
legitimate, and, therefore, if it loses it will just lie about the results and
change the rules.
That’s exactly what’s playing out now. And the more one GOP
lawmaker after another signs on to Trump’s big lie, the more it gives the party
license at the state level to promote voter suppression laws that ensure that
it cannot lose ever again.
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore
School of Law and author of the book “How to Read the Constitution — and Why,”
writing in The Hill on Monday, noted that “as of late March, state legislators
have introduced 361 bills in 47 states this year that contain limitations
around voting, a 43 percent increase from just a month earlier.
“The measures include things like enhanced power for poll
‘monitors,’ fewer voting drop-boxes, restrictions on voting by mail, penalties
for election officials who fail to purge voters from the rolls, and enhanced
power in politicians over election procedures.”
Although GOP supporters of these bills insist that they are
about election integrity and security, Wehle added, “the lack of actual
evidence of fraud and mismanagement in the American electoral system totally
belies those cynical claims.”
This is the equivalent of lighting a fuse to a bomb planted
beneath the foundations of our democracy.
Personally, I have reservations about where the left of the
Democratic Party is pulling Biden on some economic, immigration, foreign
policy, and education issues. But Biden and his party are putting forth real
ideas to try to address the real challenges that an increasingly diverse
21st-century America needs to address to become a more perfect union. The best
tool for keeping the Democratic Party close to the center-left on more issues
is a healthy Republican Party that hews to the center-right.
We don’t have that. We have, instead, a GOP trying to cling
to power by leveraging a big lie into voter suppression laws that leverage the
party back to power by appealing solely to a largely white 20th-century
America. Trump’s GOP is making no effort to offer conservative alternatives to
the issues of the day. Its whole focus is on how to win without doing that.
Which is why it is incumbent on every American to support in
every way possible the few principled Republican legislators fighting this
trend from the inside — like Liz Cheney, Representative Adam Kinzinger, and
Senator Mitt Romney.
What I learned covering the struggle for the future of the
Arab-Muslim world post-9/11 is that the war of ideas inside is everything.
Sure, it is important for outsiders to condemn bad behavior, but their voices
have limited impact. Real change happens only when the war of ideas is won by
insiders, working from the roots upward.
On Monday, CNN quoted Cheney as telling Republican donors
and scholars at a retreat for the American Enterprise Institute in Sea Island,
Georgia: “We can’t embrace the notion the election is stolen. It’s a poison in
the bloodstream of our democracy. … We can’t whitewash what happened on January
6 or perpetuate Trump’s Big Lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on
January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.” A “peaceful transfer of power must
be defended.”
She could not be more right. And without a war of ideas
inside the party, one that is won by principled Republicans, we run the real
risk of a political civil war in America over the next election.
Things are not OK.
Unless more principled Republicans stand up for the truth
about our last election, we’re going to see exactly how a democracy dies.
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