The Republican Party is Waging War on American Democracy
By: Brian Diveley
Tags: Sedition, Democracy, Trump, Tyranny, Republican Party

(Photo Source: ABC News)

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within… He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

— Taylor Cadwell

After the 2020 General Election, Congressional Republicans became faced with a defining choice: do they right the wrongs of the past four years and move past Trumpism, or do they remain the same craven, power-hungry cultists that Trump forced them into submission to be?

They, of course, chose the latter.

Over a month after the end of the election, with all fifty states and the District of Columbia having certified their results, and the Electoral College meeting on December 14th to officially reaffirm the will of the people, the Republican Party is engaging in the most brazen assault on our democracy since the Civil War. Even the likes of McCarthyism pale in comparison to the systematic warfare the Party is waging in the aftermath of President Trump’s defeat.

What started as just Trump’s most staunch allies attempting to manufacture excuses to justify his loss to Joe Biden and humor the narcissistic demagogue, has now garnered the support of the entire GOP Infrastructure, save a few honorable defections like Pat Toomey and Mitt Romney. In a perfect example of the Republican's inability to exist on their own after the four-year rebranding from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump, democratic norms and the integrity of our institutions can’t even satisfy the lust for power and relevance.

The Party seems to be living in a complete fantasy world, where up is down and down is up. To them, it is “impossible” for a candidate like Biden to beat their lord and savior Donald Trump, “impossible” for so much a turnout increase compared to 2016, “impossible” for COVID and the Racial Justice Movement to have derailed their grasps on power. Rather than finding reasoning from indisputable facts and a realistic view of the political, social, and economic factors leading to Trump’s defeat, Republicans are unwavering in conspiratorial nonsense and misplaced hope. We are seeing the dangers of this fantasy every single day, whether it be the continuing erosion of trust in our elections or the more outright death threats against public servants who are performing their duties to the letter of the law. Instead of taking accountability for their failures and accepting the loss those failures led to, the Republican Party is forcing the American people to pay their tab, and the irreparable harm that is doing will be near impossible to rectify.

Not since the Civil War has American democracy resided in such a polarized and precarious state. Back then, it was the racists and profiteers of the Confederacy who rose in open revolt and secession against the Union, sparked by the victory of Abraham Lincoln, whom they refused to even place on their ballots. In the years that followed, the shedding of blood in the effort to restore the soul of the nation, to break free of the chains of bondage and slavery, and to put the country on a path towards equality and progress, was immeasurable. Arguably, we are still bearing the costs and struggles as a result of the despicable actions of history. We are always taught to learn from the lessons of history, as to not repeat the mistakes of the past, yet here we as a nation are again, at the precipice of unparalleled division and tyranny. Today, we are facing an open revolt against the lawful election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who with the historic support of over eighty-one million Americans cleared the 270 electoral vote threshold to win. Instead of repeating the doomed idea of secession, however, Republicans today are engaging in the undermining and subversion of our Union that, like the Civil War, will bear harsh repercussions for decades.

For clarity, none of these frivolous attempts to overthrow the results of our democratic election will succeed. None of them have any basis in fact or legal standing to even come close to receiving their desired outcomes. The Texas Decertification Lawsuit has already failed, as will the remaining cases spread out across the battleground states. The attempts to have State Legislatures unconstitutionally overthrow the results of their states in favor of the President will not come to fruition. The desperate ploys to come up with any profound reason to cling onto office and power have all collapsed. The emboldening of states to make voting harder and less accessible to suppress turnout will too fail. Nonetheless, Republicans have sadly succeeded in one aspect: irreparable damage has already been done to our nation and our democracy.

Trump himself attacking our institutions and the integrity of our elections was nothing new; he did it back in 2012 and continued to do so throughout his presidency, so much so that it’s become a staple for his floundering presidency. However, the fact that he was joined by seventeen states, all Republican governed, as well as over half of the entire Congressional Republican caucus, should shake us all to our core regardless of partisanship. This was an attempted harbinger of constitutional collapse and should be viewed as an incompatible affront to all we hold dear in our democracy and the norms we value as freedom-loving people.

We’ve been here before, we’ve seen the chaos and destruction that such assaults against the very fabric of the United States can cause, and it’s up to us to stand up: to safeguard against the repetition of the worst in our history. It’s up to us to protect our democracy, to make it better and more accessible to all Americans regardless of race, religion, gender, orientation, partisanship, or creed. That’s the potential and power of our democracy, not to distrust and undermine the will of the people, but to embrace and strengthen it. Our democracy is imperfect and prone to injustices, but it is well worth fighting to make more just; well worth defending against those who would seek to do it harm.