Democracy, on the other hand, can be frightening. It's messy. It's not always under control. The majority who make the decisions in a functioning democracy may not look or think like us, which adds to our confusion.
For a person frightened by uncertainty, a person whose childhood fears turned them into "authoritarian follower" adults, democracy seems unnecessarily complex and dysfunctional; just putting an authoritarian strongman in charge is such a straightforward solution.
He will protect them, restore order, and make sure that everything in the future is consistent, predictable and safe. He will give them the comfortable, secure world they've craved their entire lives. (Authoritarian leaders in modern society are almost always men.)
Nazism built slowly for a decade, and then swept Germany when enough Germans became convinced that Hitler's simple answers, clear definitions of the villains, and assertion of their victimhood was correct. In just a short year or so, the country flipped from a fully functioning democratic republic into an authoritarian nightmare.
It only took authoritarian-friendly German media (Hitler used rightwing "talk" radio and the "conservative" German press very effectively) to convince enough German people to buy his siren song of authoritarianism. Once that tipping point was reached, Nazism flowed across the country like a tsunami. It was unstoppable.
Today we're watching in real time as that very process plays out within our body politic and among rightwing movements who've adopted Trump as their leader and authoritarianism as their ideal.
Including, apparently, the majority of America's Republicans. Most of today's GOP no longer believes in democracy; the party of Dwight Eisenhower is nearly dead.
If today's Republicans did believe in democracy, they wouldn't go out of their way to sabotage it so effectively year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation.
We see it in Carl Rove's 2010 REDSTATE gerrymandering program; in Mitch McConnell packing the courts with young neofascists; in Republican officials sabotaging the electoral process in neighborhoods filled with minorities, college students or Social Security voters by selectively closing polling places, reducing the number of voting machines in certain neighborhoods, and aggressively purging voting rolls in those same communities.
Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton's former Press Secretary, yesterday tweeted: @joelockhart "Being a Republican Senator now means nothing matters. Nothing matters. Not the storming of the Capitol, not an attempted coup, not trying to overturn a free and fair election. Nothing matters. The party of Trump. Nothing matters."
Joe's onto something, but to say "nothing matters" about these people is not quite true. The power, control, orderliness, predictability, and safety that Trump's simple lies, convenient scapegoats, and easy solutions offer are what "matters."
We are at the threshold of a fascist authoritarian takeover. America is rapidly turning toward oligarchy. January 6th was America's Kristallnacht.
The cowardice of Senate Republicans voting to not hold Trump responsible for five deaths and the sacking of the US Capitol should shock and chill us all. They are our Neville Chamberlains.
Democracy must reassert its power and moral authority with investigations and prosecutions of the traitors who tried to kill our Vice President and Speaker and take over our country.
Thought and economic leaders in our nation must step forward and unequivocally condemn not only the fascist leaders who've taken over the GOP but also the fascist media supporting and encouraging them.
Our press must explicitly point out the difference between the American invention of a democratic republic and Trump's 21st century neofascism, and tell our citizens in blunt terms what the end point is of the direction we're heading.
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