Well, the fact that more than 5% of the country supports this move towards authoritarianism is bad enough. But yeah, I think there is a numbness to this, and that's pretty goddamn dangerous.
What percent?
THE US REPUBLICAN Party has become increasingly
authoritarian and extreme in recent years, and it doesn’t seem likely to moderate that in the foreseeable future. Despite performing poorly in the 2022 midterms after running many candidates the public saw as too extreme, the GOP has decided to elevate and empower far-right lawmakers like representatives
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
In Florida, books have been
removed from school shelves as governor Ron DeSantis tries to reshape the public education system in his own image. Republican lawmakers around the US have passed abortion bans that put pregnant women’s lives
in danger. The rights of transgender people are
under attack throughout the country.
Nearly half of Republicans
say they would prefer “strong, unelected leaders” over “weak elected ones,” according to a September Axios-Ipsos poll, and around
55 percent of Republicans say defending the “traditional” way of life by force may soon become necessary. About
61 percent of Republicans don’t believe the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Finding examples of extremism, a lust for authoritarian leaders, and general antidemocratic beliefs in America is not difficult these days—just spend a few minutes online. The question is how far down the rabbit hole the United States has gone and where it may end up in the not-too-distant future.
“To call a party democratic—committed to democracy—they’ve got to do three basic things: They have to unambiguously accept election results, they have to unambiguously renounce violence, and they have to consistently and unambiguously break with extremists or antidemocratic forces,” says Steve Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University. “I think the Republican Party now fails these three basic tests.”
Levitsky says far too many Republican leaders have flirted with using violence to achieve their political goals and spread lies about the most recent presidential election. He says politicians like DeSantis appear to be experimenting with an authoritarian way of governing in their own states that could be applied at the national level should they successfully run for president.
abcnews.go.com
