US Politics

The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factionsNobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see what’s coming.On the eve of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had no weapons.In Washington, in the winter of 1861, Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, declared that “not one man in America wanted the civil war or expected or intended it”. South Carolina senator James Chestnut, who did more than most to bring on the advent of the catastrophe, promised to drink all the blood spilled in the entire conflict. The common wisdom at the time was that he would have to drink “not a thimble”.Next Civil War book illustrationThe United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible.The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls.The consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. The Capitol police have seen threats against members of Congress increase by 107%. Fred Upton, Republican representative from Michigan, recently shared a message he had received: “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your family dies.” And it’s not just politicians but anyone involved in the running of the electoral system. Death threats have become a standard aspect of the work life of election supervisors and school board members. A third of poll workers, in the aftermath of 2020, said they felt unsafe.Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power.The United States has burned before. The Vietnam war, civil rights protests, the assassination of JFK and MLK, Watergate – all were national catastrophes which remain in living memory. But the United States has never faced an institutional crisis quite like the one it is facing now. Trust in the institutions was much higher during the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act had the broad support of both parties. JFK’s murder was mourned collectively as a national tragedy. The Watergate scandal, in hindsight, was evidence of the system working. The press reported presidential crimes; Americans took the press seriously. The political parties felt they needed to respond to the reported corruption.You could not make one of those statements today with any confidence.Two things are happening at the same time. Most of the American right have abandoned faith in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of the name every year.An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.Michael German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.” The watchlists are among the most effective techniques of counter-terrorism, but the FBI cannot use them. The white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.Recent calls to reform or to defund the police have focused on officers’ implicit bias or policing techniques. The protesters are, in a sense, too hopeful. Activist white supremacists in positions of authority are the real threat to American order and security. “If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power, they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence, and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says, ‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,’ and the government says, ‘Oh my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I will go after these thugs.’ And of course once that broad power is granted, it isn’t used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official security apparatus or an auxiliary force.”Anti-government patriots have used the reaction against Black Lives Matter effectively to build a base of support with law enforcement. “One of the best tactics was adopting the blue lives matter patch. I’m flabbergasted that police fell for that, that they actually support these groups,” German says. “It would be one thing if [anti-government patriots] had uniformly decided not to target police any more. But they haven’t. They’re still killing police. The police don’t seem to get it, that the people you’re coddling, you’re taking photographs with, are the same people who elsewhere kill.” The current state of American law enforcement reveals an extreme contradiction: the order it imposes is rife with the forces that provoke domestic terrorism.Just consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times.At this supreme moment of crisis, the left has divided into warring factions completely incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment. There are liberals who retain an unjustifiable faith that their institutions can save them when it is utterly clear that they cannot. Then there are the woke, educational and political elites dedicated to a discourse of willed impotence. Any institution founded by the woke simply eats itself – see TimesUp, the Women’s March, etc – becoming irrelevant to any but a diminishing cadre of insiders who spend most of their time figuring out how to shred whoever’s left. They render themselves powerless faster than their enemies can.What the American left needs now is allegiance, not allyship. It must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.There will be those who say that warnings of a new civil war is alarmist. All I can say is that reality has outpaced even the most alarmist predictions. Imagine going back just 10 years and explaining that a Republican president would openly support the dictatorship of North Korea. No conspiracy theorist would have dared to dream it. Anyone who foresaw, foresaw dimly. The trends were apparent; their ends were not.It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t. Americans have believed their country is an exception, a necessary nation. If history has shown us anything it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations.The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit, and I don’t mean that as some kind of inspirational quote. I mean that, if it is to survive, the United States will have to recover its revolutionary spirit. The crises the United States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they require starting over. The founders understood that government is supposed to work for living people, rather than for a bunch of old ghosts. And now their ghostly constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirit that animated their enterprise, the idea that you mold politics to suit people, not the other way around.Does the country have the humility to acknowledge that its old orders no longer work? Does it have the courage to begin again? As it managed so spectacularly at the birth of its nationhood, the United States requires the boldness to invent a new politics for a new era. It is entirely possible that it might do so. America is, after all, a country devoted to reinvention.Once again, as before, the hope for America is Americans. But it is time to face what the Americans of the 1850s found so difficult to face: The system is broken, all along the line. The situation is clear and the choice is basic: reinvention or fall.TopicsThe far rightRepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Capitol attack panel in race against time as Trump allies seek to run out clock A barrage of delay tactics as Republicans are expected to do well in 2022 midterms that would give them control to shut down inquiryThe House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the Capitol is facing a race against time in 2022 as Trump and his allies seek to run out the clock with a barrage of delay tactics and lawsuits.Bannon and allies bid to expand pro-Trump influence in local US politicsRead moreRepublicans are widely expected to do well in this year’s midterm elections in November and, if they win control of the House, that would give them control to shut down the investigation that has proved politically and legally damaging to Trump and Republicans.The select committee opened its investigative efforts into the 6 January insurrection, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, with a flurry of subpoenas to Trump officials to expedite the evidence-gathering process.But aside from securing a trove of documents from Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the select committee has found itself wading through molasses with Trump and other top administration aides seeking to delay the investigation by any means possible.The former US president has attempted to block the select committee at every turn, instructing aides to defy subpoenas from the outset and, most recently, launching a last-ditch appeal to the supreme court to prevent the release of the most sensitive of White House records.His aides are following Trump in lockstep as they attempt to shield themselves from the investigation, doing everything from filing frivolous lawsuits to stop the select committee obtaining call records to invoking the fifth amendment so as to not respond in depositions.The efforts amount to a cynical ploy by Republicans to run out the clock until the midterms and use the election calendar to characterize the interim report, which the bipartisan select committee hopes to issue by the summer, as a political exercise to damage the GOP.The select committee, sources close to the investigation say, is therefore hoping for a breakthrough with the supreme court, which experts believe will ensure the panel can access the Trump White House records over the former president’s objections about executive privilege.“I think the supreme court is very unlikely to side with Trump, and part of it is the nature of executive privilege – it’s a power belonging to the President,” said Jonathan Shaub, a former DoJ office of legal counsel attorney and law professor at the University of Kentucky.“It’s hard to see how a former president could exercise constitutional power under a theory where all the constitutional powers are vested in the current president, so I think Trump is very likely to lose or the court may not take the case,” Shaub said.Members on the select committee note that several courts – the US district court and the US appeals court – have already ruled that Biden has the final say over which White House documents are subject to executive privilege, and that the panel has a legislative purpose.A victory for the select committee at the supreme court is important, members believe, not only because it would give them access to the records Trump has fought so hard to keep hidden, but because it would supercharge the inquiry with crucial momentum.The select committee got its first break when House investigators obtained from Meadows thousands of communications involving the White House, including a powerpoint detailing ways to stage a coup, and are hoping the supreme court can help to sustain their pace.“It’s pretty clear that these documents are serious documents that shed light on the president’s activities on January 6 and that may be quite damaging for Trump,” said Kate Shaw, a former Obama White House counsel and now a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.“They could make a difference to the record being compiled by the committee and thus they could give the process additional momentum,” Shaw said. “That’s probably why Trump is resisting their release as hard as he is.”More generally, the select committee says they are unconcerned by attempts by Trump aides and political operatives to stymie the inquiry, since Democrats control Washington and the panel has an unprecedented carte blanche to upturn every inch the Trump administration.“The legislative and executive branches are completely in agreement with each other, that this material is not privileged and needs to be turned over to Congress,” said congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee. “Things have been moving much more quickly.”But the select committee acknowledges privately that they face a longer and more difficult slog with Trump aides and political operatives who are mounting legal challenges to everything from the panel’s attempts to compel production of call records and even testimony.The trouble for the select committee, regardless of Democrats’ controlling the White House, Congress and the justice department, is that they are counting on the courts to deliver accountability for Trump officials unwilling to cooperate with the inquiry.Yet Trump and his officials know that slow-moving cogs of justice have a history of doing nothing of the sort. House investigators only heard from former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn this past summer, years after the end of the special counsel investigation.The House has not even been able to obtain Trump’s tax returns – something Democrats have been fighting to get access to since they took the majority in 2018 – after repeated appeals from the former president despite repeated defeats in court.Trump and his aides insist they are not engaged in a ploy to stymie the investigation, though they admit to doing just that in private discussions, according to sources close to the former president.When the select committee issued its first subpoenas to his former aides Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, Trump’s lawyers told their lawyers to defy the orders because it would likely serve to slow down the investigation, the sources said.The result of Trump’s directive – first reported by the Guardian – is that Bannon and Meadows refused to appear for their depositions, and the select committee now may never hear their inside information about the Capitol attack after they were held in contempt of Congress.It remains possible that Bannon and Meadows seek some kind of a plea deal with federal prosecutors that involves providing testimony to the select committee in exchange for no jail time, but the court hearing for Bannon, for instance, is scheduled late into the summer.The reality for House investigators is that the cases are now in the hands of a justice department intent on proving it remains above the political fray after years of Trump’s interference at DoJ, and therefore indifferent to the time crunch felt by the 6 January committee.The situation for the select committee may be even trickier with Republican members of Congress involved in 6 January, as they just need to stonewall the investigation only through the midterms, before which the panel hopes to release an interim report into their findings.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment on the outlook for the investigation and their expectations for the supreme court hearing in the case against Trump, which the panel, cognizant of their limited timeframe, has asked to expedite.Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the select committee, originally aimed to have the final report completed before the midterm elections, but the efforts by the most senior Trump officials to delay the investigation means he could need until the end of the year.Either way, sources close to the investigation told the Guardian, the select committee is hoping that the supreme court will deliver the elusive Trump White House records – and that it could pave the way for the investigation to shift into yet another higher gear.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansUS supreme courtnewsReuse this content More

The year 2021 will be remembered for an unprecedented event in U.S. history: the January 6 assault on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 election results.

This was not an attack on a building, but on Congress itself. Its members were in session and had to stop their vote, hide under their seats and the building was urgently evacuated in a state of panic.

Five people died during the riot and its immediate aftermath, and hundreds have subsequently been charged with federal crimes. Since July, the events of January 6 have been under investigation by a bipartisan House Select Committee in charge of investigating “one of the darkest days of our democracy”.

The “Big Lie” and its consequences

While the Capitol has been the scene of much violence in the past, it has never been attacked on this scale by US citizens emboldened by a president attempting to overturn a legal and legitimate election. Beyond the question of whether this amounted to an attempted coup, this violent assault was certainly the dramatic culmination of a long process of undermining America’s democratic institutions.

In the preceding weeks, a small circle of Republican lawmakers from the ultra-right Freedom Caucus that includes former Tea Party members, worked with the president and the White House through chief of staff Mark Meadows to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

They pressured local elected officials, lobbied the Department of Justice, and flooded the courts with appeals that always lost. Yet even today, Donald Trump and his allies continue to promote the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from them, amplifying false allegations and conspiracy theories, with the help of media allies like Fox News and the One America News Network.

A rioter holds a bust of Donald Trump after storming the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP

In the aftermath of January 6, it might have hoped that such an appalling event would unite the country, and that elected officials on all sides would put aside their divisions in the face of such an assault on democracy.

Yet just hours after the riots ended, as Congress reconvened on Capitol Hill, the vast majority of Republican representatives and several senators objected to the certification of the vote.

And even though Republican leaders – Kevin McCarthy in the House and Mitch McConnell in the Senate – spoke of the moral responsibility of Donald Trump in the attack on the Capitol, they refused to support the impeachment of the former president and opposed bipartisan commissions to investigate the events.

In the end, only ten Republicans voted to impeach Trump over the events of January 6, and seven voted to convict.

The role of right-wing media

The reason for this reluctance to hold the former president accountable may be that a large majority of Republican voters seems to have bought into the big lie, a belief now shared by some 65 million Americans that has persisted for more than a year.

An astonishing 9% even think that the use of violence is justified. That is potentially 23 million Americans.

These polls also show a correlation between willingness to believe in the most far-fetched theories and news sources such as Fox News and the far-right media.

Outflanked on its right by the small but rising extremist channels Newsmax and the One America News Network, Fox News personalities like Tucker Carlson and their congressional darlings (Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz) quickly promoted revisionist narratives: the events of January 6 were mostly a peaceful exercise of free speech, and the violence was committed by the radical left or undercover FBI agents who infiltrated the crowd, or, alternatively, it was justified by the desperation of patriots fighting for the survival of the republic and democracy.

Trump, for his part, still gives a clear alternate version of the events of January 6: “The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!” he wrote in a statement released by his fundraising group in October.

Red states and midterms

The reality is that massive national electoral fraud is nearly impossible precisely because elections are the responsibility of the states, which means the real issues are at the local level.

Those issues include gerrymandering, which on its own could give Republicans a majority in the house in the 2022 midterm elections. In the senate, where the Republicans are already over-represented compared to their real electoral weight, ten races will determine the next majority. In the end, there is the real possibility of a Congress being ruled by a minority.

Beyond the issues of congressional control, these midterm elections will be important for new laws enacted at the state level under the guise of “election integrity.”

Currently, 19 red states (where Republicans control both the legislature and the governorship) have passed laws making voting more difficult. In other key states, laws have been or are being passed that many fear would allow legislatures to disregard the results of an election.

All this increases the possibility of a constitutional crisis that would end up in front of the heavily politicised Supreme Court.

Project Trump in 2022

The other major issue in 2022 will be the Republican primaries. Donald Trump has signalled his intent to primary any Republicans who dared to criticise him. This includes those who voted for his impeachment or conviction, including Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Wyoming’s Liz Cheney. The latter is also participating in the congressional committee investigating the January 6 uprising.

Liz Cheney has provoked Trump’s ire by voting to impeach and participating in the investigation into the events of January 6.
Olivier Douliery/AFP

Conventional wisdom says that Trump will only run in 2024 if he is sure he can win, which seems more likely as the deck is stacked in his favour. His power could be undermined if his candidates lose out in the primaries, especially after he lost his bid to oust McConnell. He also faces numerous legal challenges, though the GOP has agreed to pay some of his legal fees.

His recent rallies have been poorly attended, and according to a recent poll, 44% of Republicans want him to run for president in 2024.

He may also be outpaced by his own movement as he was recently booed for promoting vaccination.

The point of no return?

In the end, the main question may be about whether the events of January 6 and their consequences are a sign that the country has reached a critical level of polarisation from which there is no return, even in the face of a common enemy like a pandemic.

The congressional investigation should not have much of an impact: 77% of Republicans do not believe it will be fair and reasonable, and fewer and fewer think it is important for law enforcement to prosecute the rioters.

The real battle will play out in the ballot box. What types of Republicans will win in 2022? Can traditional conservative Republicans like Liz Cheney win back the party? Even if Trump were to disappear, there is the possibility that Trumpism sill outlive him.

Many scholars and journalists have sounded the alarm about the threats to American democracy, including the threat of a simmering coup d’état, further political violence, and even civil war.

But there are other risks, including that of low electoral turn-out, which could lead to a less spectacular but more likely slow death of democratic institutions amid the generalised indifference of a population more concerned with immediate cultural, identity or economic issues than the fate of democracy. More

Democrats bid to change Senate rules if Republicans thwart voting rights reformVoting rights reforms have repeatedly stalled in 50-50 SenateSchumer: ‘We hope they change course and work with us’ Democrats are seizing on this week’s anniversary of the deadly US Capitol riot to renew a push for voting rights legislation to safeguard democracy.Bannon and allies bid to expand pro-Trump influence in local US politicsRead moreMajority leader Chuck Schumer announced on Monday that the Senate will vote on changing its own rules on or before 17 January, the federal Martin Luther King Jr Day holiday, if Republicans continue to obstruct election reform.The deadline appears part of a concerted effort to use Thursday’s commemorations, marking a year since a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, seekingto overturn Joe Biden’s election win, to give fresh impetus to the long-stalled legislation.In a letter to Senate Democrats, Schumer argued that the events of 6 January 2021 are directly linked to a campaign by Republican state legislatures to impose voter restriction laws.“Let me be clear,” the New York senator wrote. “6 January was a symptom of a broader illness – an effort to delegitimise our election process, and the Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic or else the events of that day will not be an aberration – they will be the new norm.“Much like the violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol nearly one year ago, Republican officials in states across the country have seized on the former president’s Big Lie about widespread voter fraud to enact anti-democratic legislation and seize control of typically non-partisan election administration functions.”Sweeping voting rights reforms have stalled in the evenly split 50-50 Senate, repeatedly blocked by a Republican-led filibuster, leaving Democrats unable to find the 60 votes needed to advance. Schumer went further than before in calling for a filibuster exception for voting rights.“We must ask ourselves: if the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can we in good conscience allow for a situation in which the Republican party can debate and pass voter suppression laws at the state level with only a simple majority vote, but not allow the United States Senate to do the same? We must adapt. The Senate must evolve, like it has many times before.”He added: “We hope our Republican colleagues change course and work with us. But if they do not, the Senate will debate and consider changes to Senate rules on or before 17 January, Martin Luther King Jr Day, to protect the foundation of our democracy: free and fair elections.”Although Schumer’s words were ostensibly aimed at Republicans, there is little prospect of any members of that party shifting their position.On Monday, Republicans swiftly condemned what they described as a threat. Senator Mike Lee of Utah said: “Senator Schumer’s rash, partisan power grab should be seen for what it is – desperation and a failure to do what Joe Biden and Democrats ran on: unify.“If this rule change were to pass, the people of Utah and the United States would suffer immeasurably as the Senate devolves into a strictly majoritarian, Lord-of-the-Flies environment. Senator Schumer and his disastrous plan must be stopped.”But Schumer’s true target, amid blanket media coverage of this week’s anniversary, is likely to be Democratic holdouts Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have resisted abolishing or changing the filibuster.The senators from West Virginia and Arizona contend that if and when Republicans take control of the chamber, they could use the lower voting threshold to advance bills Democrats oppose.Schumer’s announcement is likely to set up 6 January vigils and Martin Luther King Jr Day events as rallying points for voting rights activists who have criticised Biden and the party in Congress for failing to prioritise the issue.But the president has become less cautious and more direct.Last month, he told ABC News: “If the only thing standing between getting voting rights legislation passed and not getting passed is the filibuster, I support making the exception of voting rights for the filibuster.”Schumer’s announcement was welcomed by Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights activist and chairman of the Drum Major Institute.“There is no better way to honor my father’s legacy than protecting the right to vote for all Americans,” he said.Ex-NFL star Herschel Walker posts baffling video promoting US Senate runRead more“The King holiday is historically a day of service, and we hope the United States Senate will serve our democracy by passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.“We applaud Senator Schumer for his commitment to expanding voting rights, but we won’t halt our plans for action until legislation has been signed.”Also on Monday, the US Conference of Mayors sent a letter signed by 146 bipartisan mayors to Schumer and the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, urging them to act this month. It noted that in the past few months alone, 19 states passed 34 laws that made it harder to vote. The mayors wrote: “American democracy is stronger when all eligible voters participate in elections. Yet voting rights are under historic attack and our very democracy is threatened.“These bills would stop this voter suppression. They would create national standards for voting access in federal elections that would neutralize many of the restrictive voting laws passed in the states.”TopicsDemocratsRepublicansUS voting rightsUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

The risk of a coup in the next US election is greater now than it ever was under TrumpLaurence H TribeRepublicans are busy undermining the next election. But giving up on democracy isn’t an option. We must fight back, and here’s how Only free and fair elections in which the loser abides by the result stand between each of us and life at the mercy of a despotic regime – one we had no voice in choosing and one that can freely violate all our rights. So everything is at stake in the peaceful transfer of power from a government that has lost its people’s confidence to its victorious successor. It was that peaceful transfer that Trump and his minions sought to obstruct and almost succeeded in overthrowing when Joe Biden was elected president.A year has passed since Trump’s attempted coup and his supporters’ violent storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a nearly successful effort to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s decisive loss of the election to Biden. Watching the images that day of the seat of US democracy overtaken and defiled, it was impossible not to viscerally feel the grave danger that confronted the republic. In the tumultuous year since, the immediacy of that sensation has waned – and the magnitude of the stakes has receded from memory.In the rubble of the insurrection, the sheer shock of the moment jarred loose hints of long-lost bipartisanship and national unity and rekindled an appreciation of why a successful coup would have meant the end of all we care about. The House of Representatives expeditiously moved to impeach Trump for his role in fomenting the attack and 57 Senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict him on 13 February after a masterful presentation led by Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. After Trump had become the first American president to be impeached twice, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump from the Senate floor, justifying his and many other Republicans’ votes to acquit only on the thin reed that, by the time of his Senate trial, Trump was no longer president.Alas, the moment was short-lived. With Trump himself out of office and in exile at Mar-a-Lago, public attention quickly faded, Republicans abandoned their increasingly half-hearted search for accountability, and the leaders of their party began planning their next bite at the poisoned apple of power, an apple they told themselves had been stolen from them despite all evidence to the contrary.Rewriting history and turning reality on its head, Republicans in Congress and their allies in rightwing media began absurdly to describe the deadly insurrection as a “mostly peaceful” protest, described rioters who brutally beat Capitol police as “political prisoners”, and suggested that any violence was attributable to some unidentified group of leftwing “antifa”.To be sure, we have seen the rise of a veritable cottage industry of commentary warning sharply that America remains subject to what some have called a “slow motion insurrection” or that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” Yet the vast majority of Americans have turned their attention back to other concerns – from new and more infectious variants of the Covid-19 virus, to burgeoning inflation and increasingly palpable signs of global warming, to the myriad other problems that bedevil our nation and the world.But for those of us who have continued to investigate the sources and facets of the assault on constitutional democracy, a sobering realization has become unavoidable: our country, and the legal and political institutions that prevent it from descending into despotism, are in even greater peril today than they were at the time of last November’s election.That assault began in the runup to the 2020 election, when Trump and his cultlike followers spread the corrosive view that American elections had become inherently untrustworthy as demographic changes broadened the eligible electorate and thus that any outcome other than victory for Trump would necessarily be the result of fraud and must therefore be rejected by all means necessary.With each passing day, more details about the means Trump’s team devised to undo the results of the November 2020 election have cascaded into public view, even though Republicans in Congress have made concerted efforts to obstruct the work of the special House committee created to uncover the sources of the attempted coup and the ensuing insurrection. The committee was charged to propose legislation to reduce the danger of a repeat performance, but because curing a disease requires diagnosing its cause, Republicans have seized on the committee’s search for causes to claim that its purposes were solely vindictive and not legislative.In the course of designing possible remedies, the committee has uncovered evidence of a conspiracy broader, more far-reaching and better organized than was initially thought. That conspiracy featured deceptive PowerPoint presentations and duplicitous talking points designed to propagate the big lie that Democrats had indeed stolen the election and to lay out a blueprint for “stopping the steal”.Understanding that blueprint requires appreciating the byzantine constitutional structure dating to our founding, a structure in which the presidency is awarded not to the winner of the national popular vote but to the candidate receiving the most “electoral votes”. Those votes are allocated among the states according to a formula slanted toward less densely populated states – states that have tended over time to favor the Republican candidate – with each state’s legislature determining the method for deciding how its electoral votes will be awarded.As Representative Raskin, a leading member of the special House committee, described it to me, the basic plan for Trump to seize power despite his loss of both the popular vote on 3 November and the electoral vote on 14 December had been to pressure various officials to “find” enough nonexistent votes to flip the results of several key states in which the election’s outcome had been the closest.Failing that, the plan was to pressure Vice-President Mike Pence, presiding over the 6 January joint session of Congress required under the constitution to count the certified electoral votes, to reject and return the slates of electoral votes certified by Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, depriving both candidates of the requisite majority of the electoral votes cast.At that point, the choice of president would fall “immediately” to the US House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation casting a single vote in the resulting “contingent election”. That in turn would have made Trump the president-elect despite having lost the election, because more state delegations in the House were in Republican hands at that point than in the hands of the Democrats.Part of the plot, we are now learning, featured Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act to declare something like martial law to put down the chaos and bedlam he and his inner circle would by then have unleashed on the Capitol, all the time blaming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for not keeping order, a form of sinister gaslighting the Republicans have deployed ever since 6 January. Talk of that military option led the CIA Director to predict that “we are on the way to a right-wing coup”.But most terrifyingly, we have learned over the past year that the Republican party plans to do it again. Some retired generals are warning that, without decisive action to hold all the wrongdoers to account, we will witness a march to another coup attempt, and one more likely to succeed, if Trump or another demagogue runs and loses. Trump’s Republican party has all but erased or openly embraced the violence of 6 January. And the party faithful have already set out to use state-level elections and legislative processes to better set the table to steal the 2024 election should that be necessary to their return to power.And why wouldn’t they?Those involved in the last attempt have – at least as of today – faced few if any social, political or legal penalties. Only the foot-soldiers, those who physically invaded the Capitol, have faced criminal punishment. And even they have been charged with no offense more serious than corruptly obstructing an official proceeding. As I have elsewhere argued, it would seem more fitting to charge those who organized, funded, and otherwise led the nearly successful overthrow of our government with insurrection or sedition.Indeed, in the topsy-turvy world of Trumpian logic, the political base of the Republican party now appears by a large majority to believe that the real coup and insurrection took place not on 6 January 2021 but on 3 November and 14 December 2020, when Joe Biden and the Democrats supporting him were guilty of a “big steal” of the national election.Students of how democracies fail and tyrannical regimes arise from the dust they leave behind uniformly teach that such groundless myths of wrongful defeat at the hands either of enemies within or of enemies without are invariably part of the demagogue’s narrative and of its hold on popular consciousness.The specter of another coup attempt in 2024-25 may, at first blush, seem counterintuitive. After all, whether Donald Trump or another aspiring despot runs next time as the Republican party’s nominee, that candidate will have no access to the powers of the presidency when the national election occurs. But the corrupt actions that threaten soon to bring our constitutional republic to an ignoble end sadly do not require either an exercise of presidential power or the abdication of presidential duty.They require only that the cult of Trump repopulate with party hacks the bureaucracy of honest vote-counters and nonpartisan election personnel at the state and local levels, and that Trump-backed lawmakers elected to state legislatures rig the voting rules to dilute the influence of all who might oppose a Republican victory. Because these steps are well under way, we face a challenge more daunting than we did even when the powers of the presidency were in Trump’s hands.Nor can we count on the congressional voting integrity measures brilliantly designed with the help of Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, the Democratic representatives who led Trump’s two Senate impeachment trials, to save us from what the growing number of Republican state legislatures seem only too eager to do. For one thing, even before the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats control too few seats in the Senate to overcome the antiquated filibuster rules that make enactment of such voting rights measures with fewer than 60 votes an impossibility. For another, the US supreme court, as packed by means of dubious legitimacy by Trump during his presidency, is poised to hold unconstitutional virtually any meaningful voting protection or electoral reform Congress might enact even if that 60-vote obstacle could be carved away in a limited class of cases.Even if something should derail another Trump run at the presidency, the means for another coup exist, and the temptation to seize power, this time cementing it more permanently, will surely tantalize a political party that seems openly hostile to the very premises of democracy.Of particular concern to students of fascism – a governing form that almost always comes wrapped in violence – was the violence woven through the rise of Trumpism to the siege of the Capitol which was, of course, brutally violent. Participants came armed with body armor, firearms, knives, bear mace, Tasers and everything in between. They brought a gallows and chanted that they were going to hang the sitting vice-president. They brutally beat Capitol and DC police officers.Nor was the violence limited to that day. Leading up to the 2020 election, Trump supporters had run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas, plotted to kidnap the Democratic governor in Michigan and stirred up brutal attacks across the country. In the period after that election, they physically surrounded and intimidated senators on an airplane and in an airport, calling them “traitors” and promising consequences for their perceived defection from Trump. They showed up at state capitols armed to the teeth and threatening retribution if state legislators did not allocate their electoral votes to Trump, or at least pursue fraudulent “audits” of the election results.Far from being condemned, in the intervening year that sort of violence has been increasingly glorified by the mainstream conservative movement. In recent weeks, a congressman posted a Photoshopped video of himself murdering a Democratic colleague. A Fox News host discussed – to a crowd of radicalized anti-vaxxers – how they might most appropriately assassinate our nation’s chief epidemiologist with a “kill shot” in “an ambush”. Large crowds venerated a juvenile vigilante who shot three people on an American street.The base is being primed for more violence in the run-up and aftermath of the next election. And the Trump-packed supreme court is poised to do its part by gutting what is left of America’s laws against carrying guns anywhere and everywhere – including maybe in courthouses, polling places and the like. It is no accident that the 6 January hotel command center of the group led by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone was christened the “war room”.So what is to be done?
We must resist state-level attempts to make voting more difficult. Instead, we must make vote-counting easier and use all legal means at our disposal to challenge publicly and in state and federal courts legislative district maps designed to dilute minority voters’ influence or to amplify the power of incumbency, as well as laws empowering state officeholders to designate presidential electors at odds with their state’s popular election results.

We must use boycotts and grassroots political organizing to oppose the replacement of honest with corrupt election officials and the enactment of anti-democratic state laws.

We must encourage the 6 January committee to complete its work thoroughly but quickly, including holding public hearings that spotlight the damning details of the plot that nearly succeeded, and making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice of all public officials – from members of Congress to the former president – suspected of such federal crimes as obstructing an official proceeding, aiding and abetting an insurrection or conspiring to commit sedition.

We must fight back against suggestions that the justice department’s criminal investigations of the highest-ranking public officials should await any such criminal referrals from the committee.

We must redouble our determination to hold criminally accountable, and potentially disqualify from ever again holding public office in the United States, everyone involved in the obscene trashing of constitutional democracy.

We must publicly repudiate whatever misguided notions have led the Biden administration’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, to exercise extraordinary restraint in the pursuit of such full accountability, effectively placing the highest officeholders above the law.
Above all, we must not let the difficulty of the task ahead turn realism into resignation and sap the energy we will need to bring to this mission. As the distinguished Yale historian Joannne Freeman recently wrote, “Accountability – the belief that political power holders are responsible for their actions and that blatant violations will be addressed – is the lifeblood of democracy. Without it, there can be no trust in government, and without trust, democratic governments have little power.” And when democracy loses its grip as a guiding ideal, despotism fills the void and liberty is lost.This is a battle we must not, cannot, will not lose.
Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University Professor emeritus and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University and an accomplished supreme court advocate
TopicsUS Capitol attackOpinionRepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicscommentReuse this content More

For the first time, the United States has been classified as a “backsliding democracy” in a global assessment of democratic societies by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental research group.

One key reason the report cites is the continuing popularity among Republicans of false allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

But according to the organization’s secretary general, perhaps the “most concerning” aspect of American democracy is “runaway polarization.” One year after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Americans’ perceptions about even the well-documented events of that day are divided along partisan lines.

Polarization looms large in many diagnoses of America’s current political struggles. Some researchers warn of an approaching “tipping point” of irreversible polarization. Suggested remedies are available from across the partisan spectrum.

There are two types of polarization, as I discuss in my book “Sustaining Democracy.” One isn’t inherently dangerous; the other can be. And together, they can be extremely destructive of democratic societies.

Two kinds

Political polarization is the ideological distance between opposed parties. If the differences are large, it can produce logjams, standoffs and inflexibility in Congress and state and local governments. Though it can be frustrating, political polarization is not necessarily dysfunctional. It even can be beneficial, offering true choices for voters and policymakers alike. Deep-seated disagreement can be healthy for democracy, after all. The clash of opinions can help us find the truth. The clamor of ideological differences among political parties provides citizens with shortcuts for making political choices.

Belief polarization, also called group polarization, is different. Interaction with like-minded others transforms people into more extreme versions of themselves. These more extreme selves are also overly confident and therefore more prepared to engage in risky behavior.

Belief polarization also leads people to embrace more intensely negative feelings toward people with different views. As they shift toward extremism, they come to define themselves and others primarily in terms of partisanship. Eventually, politics expands beyond policy ideas and into entire lifestyles.

But that’s not all. As I explain in my book, as society sorts into “liberal” and “conservative” lifestyles, people grow more invested in policing the borders between “us” and “them.” And as people’s alliances focus on hostility toward those who disagree, they become more conformist and intolerant of differences among allies.

People grow less able to navigate disagreement, eventually developing into citizens who believe that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees with them. That is a profoundly antidemocratic stance.

Even when demonstrators are part of the same group, as the photographer reports these two are, they can have differing views.
John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The polarization loop

Belief polarization is toxic for citizens’ relations with one another. But the large-scale political dysfunction lies in how political and belief polarization work together in a mutually reinforcing loop. When the citizenry is divided into two clans that are fixated on animus against the other, politicians have incentives to amplify hostility toward their partisan opponents.

And because the citizenry is divided over lifestyle choices rather than policy ideas, officeholders are released from the usual electoral pressure to advance a legislative platform. They can gain reelection simply based on their antagonism.

As politicians escalate their rifts, citizens are cued to entrench partisan segregation. This produces additional belief polarization, which in turn rewards political intransigence. All the while, constructive political processes get submerged in the merely symbolic and tribal, while people’s capacities for responsible democratic citizenship erode.

Managing polarization

Remedies for polarization tend to focus on how it poisons citizens’ relations. Surely President Joe Biden was correct to stress in his inaugural address that Americans need to “lower the temperature” and to “see each other not as adversaries, but as neighbors.”

Still, democracy presupposes political disagreement. As James Madison observed, the U.S. needs democracy precisely because self-governing citizens inevitably will disagree about politics. The response to polarization cannot involve calls for unanimity or abandoning partisan rivalries. A democracy without political divides is no democracy at all.

The task is to render people’s political differences more civil, to reestablish the ability to respectfully disagree. But this cannot be accomplished simply by conducting political discussions differently. Research indicates that once people are polarized, exposure even to civil expressions of the other side’s viewpoint creates more polarization.

This is a case of the crucial difference between prevention and cure. It’s not enough to pretend polarization hasn’t happened, or to behave as if it’s a minor concern. In the current situation, even sincere attempts to respectfully engage with the other side often backfire.

Yet Americans remain democratic citizens, partners in the shared project of self-government who cannot simply ignore one another.

[Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Polarization is a problem that cannot be solved, but only managed. It does make relations toxic among political opponents, but it also hurts relations among allies. It escalates conformity within coalitions, shrinking people’s concepts of what levels of disagreement are tolerable in like-minded groups.

It may be, then, that managing polarization could involve working to counteract conformity by engaging in respectful disagreements with people we see as allies. By taking steps to remember that politics always involves disputation, even among those who vote for the same candidates and affiliate with the same party, Americans may begin to rediscover the ability to respectfully disagree with opponents. More

Progressives concerned as Eric Adams takes helm as New York mayorHomelessness, safe housing, police brutality and racial injustice – does Bill de Blasio’s replacement have the policies to fix them? For many New Yorkers, the inauguration of Eric Adams as the 110th mayor of New York City – and only the second Black person to serve in the position – has evoked a range of feelings, from excitement at the possibility of change to confusion and concern.‘Generals don’t lead from the back’: New York mayor Eric Adams seeks bold start Read moreAdams’ rise through city and state politics was fairly typical. In addition to serving as a New York police captain, he was the Brooklyn borough president and a state senator. But he remains an unconventional, even enigmatic figure. There are questions surrounding his home address and curiosity about his plant-based diet, but information about his actual policies remain scarce.“Where Eric Adams has thrived, in many ways, is in really failing to lay out a vision,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, director of the New York Working Families party. “His transition has been defined by personality, less [by] an agenda for the city.”Progressives and advocates working across multiple sectors have voiced concerns at the slow emergence of Adams’ plans and priorities, and worry about positions he has taken including increasing the use of the heavily criticized “stop-and-frisk” policy and resurrecting plainclothes policemen units.Adams’ ascent comes at a crucial time in New York history, as the city seeks to emerge from the pandemic and the economic and social chaos that has come with it.New York’s ballooning homelessness crisis, primarily caused by a lack of affordable housing, is one of the largest issues Adam must contend with. In 2020, more than 120,000 people, including children, slept in the New York municipal shelter system, with homelessness reaching the highest levels since the Great Depression.Covid presented additional challenges, spreading rapidly among homeless populations.Advocates have widely supported Adams’ priority of increasing permanent, affordable housing in a city which has some of America’s most expensive rents. But many have raised concerns about Adams’ main plan: converting 25,000 hotel rooms into permanent apartments, noting zoning and conversion requirements many hotels do not meet.Public housing, managed by the New York Public Housing Association, is another area where Adams has faced pushback. Adams supports privatizing public housing units as well as selling air rights above public housing units. Activists have said such actions, presented as an opportunity to raise capital for blighted buildings, are ineffective and that oversight for private landlords when it comes to addressing housing issues like mold and lead paint would become even more difficult.“His focus is going to be on his big-money donors. That’s been his track record all along. That’s not a secret,” said Fight for NYCHA core member Louis Flores.“We expect him to continue down that road, and for public housing that he’s going to support policies that benefit the real estate development industry at the expense of the public housing residents.”Slice of life: New York’s famed $1 street pizza under threat from rising costsRead moreDespite ambiguities around some of Adams’ plans for addressing homelessness, some experts are hopeful delays in appointments – and Adams’ reputation for flexibility – could be an opportunity for his administration to receive input from community leaders on how to address the crisis, including through the creation of a deputy to oversee homelessness and affordable housing.”Having a bit more of a deliberative process is ultimately going to be more impactful than coming out on day one with an ambitious target for the number of units of affordable housing that should be created that might not actually have the impact of reducing homelessness and housing insecurity,” said Jacquelyn Simone, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless.Proposed changes to policing are another point of tension.Adams, who has described assault at the hands of an NYPD officer as inspiration for joining public service, has faced criticism for his plans to resurrect controversial plainclothes units, an anti-crime department in the NYPD involved in a number of shootings, and increase use of stop-and-frisk, a policy critics have condemned as racially discriminatory.While Adams and his newly appointed NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell, the first Black woman to lead the department, have supported these policies and vowed to use properly trained, “emotionally intelligent” officers, progressive have argued that previous training attempts have failed, with many officers continually excused for misconduct.“What does the emotional intelligence of an officer matter if he’s got you up against the wall, patting you down,” said Kesi Foster, a lead organizer with the nonprofit Make the Road New York and a steering committee member with Communities United for Police Reform.Simone said: “The ways to solve unsheltered homelessness is not through policing and pushing people from one corner to another.”Other policing initiatives Adams has sponsored have met criticism, specifically when it comes to New York’s troubled jail system.While Adams has publicly supported closing down Rikers Island, a jail with notoriously poor conditions where several people have died in pre-trial custody, he has also promised to bring back solitary confinement to Rikers, reversing a previous ban on a practice several experts have called “inhumane”.Eric Adams sworn in as mayor of New York CityRead moreAdams has publicly opposed bail reform measures, meant to curtail pre-trial detention but rolled back, citing debunked claims that releases have spurred increases in crime.“Changing the bail bill is not going to achieve the outcome the mayor wants. We’re hoping that we can convince him of that during his tenure,” said Marie Ndiaye, supervising attorney of the Decarceration Project at the Legal Aid Society.“Getting wishy-washy on bail reform is pretty scary because there’s a pretty linear correlation between the rollbacks and the jail population increasing,” said Sara Rahimi of the nonprofit Emergency Release Fund.In general, advocates contend there is more to be learned about Adams as more appointments are made, but given his comments so far, many are approaching the mayor-elect with caution and timid hope of being able to advance progressive policy.“Cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic all at once would be the way to go there,” said Ndiaye.TopicsNew YorkUS politicsUS policingUS crimeUS domestic policyHomelessnessHousingnewsReuse this content More