Continuing Dangers to American Democracy

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

Those who cast the vote count for nothing, those who count the votes count for everything. – Joseph Stalin

The Republican Party of America has, almost unanimously, decided to entrust the leadership of the Party to a former defeated president and his cult. A cult whose members have been persuaded not to believe facts and evidence right before their own eyes; who still believe in the Big Lie of a stolen election; and most ridiculously, that the insurrection of January 6 was carried out, not by Trump supporters, but by Democratic Antifa and Black Lives Matter sheep in Trump wolves’ clothing.

An insurrection in which the mob carried Trump banners, Confederate flags, with even one sick Nazi rioter, wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt. The sweat shirt contained the slogan “Work Brings Freedom”, in apparent homage to the German saying “árbeit macht frei” which was emblazoned at the gates of Auschwitz, the most infamous of Hitler’s death camps in pre-World War II Germany.

Over 700 of those domestic terrorists have already been arrested and imprisoned. Many have stated in their defence that they were assembled in Washington, D.C. on that fateful day by Trump. They had been incited by a defeated president to wage war against the government of the United States. The government represented by members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, Republican and Democrat, who had assembled in the Capitol to fulfil their formal, constitutional duty of certifying the election of President-elect Joe Biden. These insurrectionists have been charged with minor felonies, and have received mainly very light punishments.

The stakes were raised last week when Attorney General Merrick Garland arrested 11 rioters of the Trump cult, the “Oathkeepers”, leaders behind the insurrection, on charges of “seditious conspiracy”. Garland stressed that the investigation of the Department of Justice had just begun and will persist, wherever it leads, however high or low, as long as it takes.

“Seditious Conspiracy”, according to Wikipedia, is defined as follows:

“If two or more persons in any state or territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

“For a seditious conspiracy charge to be effected, a crime need only to be planned. It need not be actually attempted.”

Would it be possible to define the insurrection of January 6 with more accuracy?

However, leaders of the Republican Party, including Kevin McCarthy, minority leader of the House, whose own life was threatened, and was heard pleading with Trump to call off his dogs of war during the attack on the Capitol, has refused to testify before the legally convened, bipartisan Committee to inquire into the seditious attack on the government on January 6. A subsequent McCarthy speech in the House, a week after the insurrection, recognizing Trump’s responsibility in the coup, has now been covered up. The refusal of Trump loyalists to testify before the January 6 Committee, even at the risk of facing charges of criminal contempt and imprisonment, is clear evidence of Trump’s leadership role in the seditious attack on the government.

Trump himself boasted during a recent interview with a branch of the Radical Right propaganda network, One America News (OAN), that his “Stop the Steal” speech at the Ellipse just ahead of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was “the biggest crowd I’ve spoken before”. In this speech, he incited his minions to march towards the Capitol and “fight like hell”; that they would lose their country if they did not do so. In his ignorance and his colossal ego, Trump did not seem to realize that this boast was a public admission that his supporters were responsible for the attack.

I had really not been too interested in American politics, even after I emigrated to the United States in 1990. Like everyone in the world, I had followed the racial tensions in the US before the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Vietnam war, the Moon Landing, the Nixon scandal were front page news, which held global attention. The Reagan presidency of the 1980s, which has ultimately proved to be a bigger disaster than Watergate in economic terms, interested me only because of Nancy Reagan’s White House affair with Frank Sinatra.

My contempt for the Republican Party began with the Bush/Cheney administration and the illegal war against Iraq. I worked in the lowest capacity in the Obama campaign in Phoenix, Arizona in 2008, doing vital jobs like licking stamps and answering phones in my heavy Sri Lankan accent.

I was in political heaven when Obama won the American presidency, and really believed the then-host of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart, who completed his post-election show in 2008 with the statement that “we have at last become the nation we always said we were”. A statement which has since been proved by the Trump presidency and administration to be the complete antithesis of the truth. We have now become the nation we were before the Civil War, on the cusp of another, even more violent civil war, threatening the oldest democracy in the world.

I had retired to Sri Lanka after the war in 2009. I had always enjoyed writing, and started writing essays, for my own pleasure, during the Trump campaign in 2016. I submitted one of these essays to the Sunday Island. It was published, and as Shashi Tharoor, the renowned Indian orator and politician puts it, “I can tell you seeing your name in print as the author of an article the first time is the equivalent of that first bar of chocolate or whatever you are addicted to……the first time you see your name in print, you are addicted, and you want to keep writing”. This is true, whether you are a world renowned writer and orator who had his first articles in print when he was 10-years old, or a mediocre, wannabe journalist who had his first article published when he was 75-years old.

So I kept writing, which became easier as my hatred against Trump and his white supremacist tribe grew to be an obsession with each passing month, with each act of criminal incompetence, with each example of fraudulent nepotism and vulgarity, after 2016. Hatred blending with fear, reaching a crescendo with the Trump-incited insurrection of January 6, and the continuing sycophantic behaviour of the Trump cult. A cult which has strong claims of winning a majority in both Houses in the mid-terms of 2022, culminating in the winning of the 2024 presidency, thus permanently destroying democracy in the USA.

Permanently, because Republican states are already enacting laws to make voting more difficult for minorities, voter suppression laws which a new Republican administration will consolidate from 2024. Kevin McCarthy said the other day that, as Speaker of the House from 2022, his only actions would be blocking all Democratic legislation and retaliating against Democrats who had acted against Trump. And once the Republicans claim the presidency with Trump, Desantis or any of those white supremacist presidential aspirants in 2024, the Republican controlled Congress will ensure that there will never be another free election.

I can understand the Radical Right, Christian white supremacists, who are taking this route to contain their white privilege against the approaching Brown Invasion. It is predicted that whites in the USA will be in the minority by 2050, which means, in the eyes of white supremacists, the end of white privilege which has dominated the country for 400+ years. The current Republican Draconian voter suppression laws are aimed at marginalizing voting rights of these minorities.

I can understand these movements of white supremacy spreading in Europe. Countries like France, Germany and Italy are also facing this monster, and their history of racism and anti-Semitism is recent enough for white supremacy to present a real threat to their democracies.

I can even understand the support of conservatives in the USA defending Republican policies, who eschew the idea of a welfare state, which they equate with communism. Even though the greatest Republican president since WWII, Eisenhower, continued with the New Deal social security and welfare policies of Roosevelt. During Eisenhower’s regime, taxation rates for corporations and the wealthy were in the 90%s, which made for a thriving middle class.

A middle class destroyed by successive Republican administrations which reduced these tax rates to 39% (Reagan), 29% (Bush) and Trump (21%). Republican majorities in Congress have thwarted all efforts by subsequent Democratic presidents to increase corporate and wealth tax rates, and so reduce the deepening chasm in income inequality. Efforts by the Biden administration to increase these tax rates by a few percentage points have been blocked in spite of a Democratic majority (50/50) in the Senate, because of opposition by two Democratic Senators from battleground states, Arizona and West Virginia. Democratic Senators Sinema and Manchin are more concerned about securing their own re-election than the welfare of the country. They are also blocking Biden’s signature Build Back Better infrastructure legislation and the Voting Rights Act.

But I cannot understand the mind-set of brown skinned minorities, including Sri Lankans in the United States and Sri Lanka, from the lower middle classes to highly educated professionals, who support a cult completely controlled by the most vulgar, incompetent, narcissistic, fraudulent, treasonous, white supremacist sociopath this planet has seen since Adolph Hitler. A maniac who would classify them as sub-human as Hitler classified Jews, however rich they are; a racist who would undoubtedly classify our nation as a shithole country.

It will take me too much time to list examples proving each of the adjectives I have used to describe this crook. But I will, if required. If these wannabe whites can only get their eyes and asses out of radical right controlled media like Fox News and the One America Network (OAN) for a moment, they will see the truth, even urgency, of my abuse, and recognize the clear and present danger this movement presents to the oldest democracy in the world.

But they won’t and they can’t. Trump reigns supreme in their blinkered eyes and cult-addled brains. I have been writing of the imminent danger to the democracy of the United States posed by this sociopath and his white supremacist enablers in this column over the past few years. I would welcome one of these brown-skinned Trumpers to respond to my vitriol, and prove me wrong.

Again, they won’t because they can’t.