Sunday, June 6, 2021

9/11 and 1/6 - Thinking about...Timothy Snyder

9/11 and 1/6 - Thinking about...
By Timothy Snyder

...The scenario then goes like this.  The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression.  The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states.  State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote.  The House and Senate accept that altered count.  The losing candidate becomes the president.  We no longer have "democratically elected government."  And people are angry.

No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan.  It is right there out in the open.  The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, are all running on a big lie platform.  If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way.  The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one.  Any candidate who tells it is alienating most Americans, and preparing a minority for a scenario where fraud is claimed.  This is just what Trump tried in 2020, and it led to a coup attempt in January 2021.  It will be worse in January 2025.

9/11 led us to the invasion of Iraq, the foreign policy disaster that marked our century.  1/6 leads us to a catastrophe on that scale, but inside our own country.  It is not at all clear that the plan to take power undemocratically will work, but it is clear that it will generate a lot of resistance.  African Americans are right now being told the absurd lie that the problem in America is that it is too easy for them to vote.  As the scenario plays out, all Americans will face an open denial of everything they have been told about their country. 

In such a scenario, it is not clear what the armed forces or civil servants would do.  Most likely they would fracture.  An oath to defend the Constitution is hard to honor when it is unclear what it means.  Both those who were stealing an election and those who were defending votes would claim that the Constitution was on their side. ...

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