Speaker 1: You know, back in, I guess it was 2017, late 2016, as this transition into the
Trump era began, many of us started talking about creeping authoritarianism and hyper
normalization and how we really needed to sort of keep our guard up about these slow
moves, attacking press freedom and fighting against rights that we believe to be and know
to be integral to what the United States is sort of founded on and on and on.
There were some who said everything's fine.
You don't really have to worry about it.
But we now we're at a point where historians who are taking a sort of broader look at what
the last four to five years of the Republican Party have done and have represented.
Historians are increasingly horrified by the Republican Party's very direct march towards
authoritarianism.
And I want to look at a couple of articles that that look at exactly this.
There's an interesting article by Ben Jacobs and Vice called The Republicans Off the Rails.
March towards Authoritarianism has historians worried where the article says, Last week,
Senate Republicans successfully blocked legislation to create a bipartisan commission to investigate
the failed push on January 6th, which resulted in five people dead and over 400 people arrested.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of seven Senate Republicans to support the measure,
expressed her disgust at her colleagues vote.
Are we going to acknowledge that as a country that is based on these principles of democracy
that we hold so dear?
And one of those is that we have free and fair elections and we respect the results
of those elections and allow for a peaceful transition of power.
I kind of want that to endure beyond just one election cycle.
And this is a concern that is echoed by more and more scholars who study American history
and the rise of authoritarianism around the globe.
While republics are often fragile, they see the United States in a unique position as
a mature democracy at the point of fracturing.
As Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, coauthor of How Democracies Die, put it bluntly,
I think we are headed for a crisis.
Many scholars say that fracturing is without historical precedent.
Levitsky coauthor Daniel Zib lot from Harvard writes, A mainstream Democratic Party that's
small d Democratic Party, one of the major parties in a country going fully off the rails.
The radicalization and increasing authoritarianism of the Republican Party is what is to blame.
And the book argues American democracy is not inherently exceptional.
The norms that hold it together were rendered vulnerable by the rise of former President
Donald Trump.
The underlying assumption when we wrote the book was that an important, even a dominant
faction of the Republican Party was committed to the Democratic rules of the game.
But that no longer is the case.
The GOP, over the past four years and far more quickly and far more thoroughly than
I expected, has become a party capable of stealing an election, willing and potentially
able to steal an election.
And I would not have taken this seriously when we wrote the book.
This is how the creeping hyper normalization works.
You say, well, yeah, OK.
I mean, they're trying to suppress the vote kind of casually.
And this has been going on for a while.
They tried it in 2008 a little bit and they tried it more in 2012 and then more in 2016.
And then it went completely crazy in twenty twenty.
And they're just going to try to keep doing more of it.
But each little step.
We're now at Bambu Fiber's during an audit in Arizona six months after the election and
much of the country supports it.
More than half of Republicans don't believe Joe Biden really won.
Look at how far we've come, and as I've said before, if I had given you the list, if on
November 15th, 2016, before Trump was inaugurated, I gave you the list of the things we would
see in 2020, even I would have hesitated and said I'd be a lot of this just doesn't seem
plausible, and yet it happened.
There's another very interesting article in Common Dreams called Our Entire Democracy
is now at risk because of Republican attacks worn more than one hundred scholars.
This is by Jessica Corbett, a staff writer at Common Dreams.
And this also points out that more than one hundred scholars of democracy put out a joint
statement of concern calling on Congress to combat ongoing Republican attacks on voting
rights and ensure fair and free future US elections.
With federal legislation published online by the think tank New America, the scholars
statement comes as Republican lawmakers nationwide continue to propose and enact state level
voter suppression bills.
So what I think is important here to keep in mind is we don't want to be hyperbolically
fear mongering, but we have to resist the normalization.
These are scholars with a wider view than many of us who look at right now and the last
two years and the last four years and the last few presidents.
When you take a view that is the last hundred years in the United States and the last hundred
years around the world, and that is your area of expertize, as it is for many of these historians.
And they say we are starting to see signs in the United States of the Republican Party
looking more and more like these hyper nationalist authoritarian regimes as they have become
historically around the world.
We need to be listening to that.
And, of course, the right is going to say, oh, come on, David, that is just liberal academics
trying to scare us because they want Democrats to win, read their actual work, dig in to
some of these Check-Out we're linking to the vise in the Common Dreams articles.
Check out the citations, do the work, and you will very quickly see that, if anything,
we are not ringing the alarm enough about this issue.
We're going to continue covering this and have more about it.
But it is a seriously scary thing that is going on at this point in time.
This is exactly why by oh, I wanted to mention this is also, you know, there's a reason why
we have separation of church and state, because in in history, when there is not a separation
between church and state, it often points to the exact type of authoritarianism that
we are now seeing now.
Much of what is going on.
Trump, you know, he claims to be religious.
He's not a religious guy.
He had the assistance of evangelicals and the more religious nuttery that we saw within
the Republican Party, people like Ted Cruz and others.
But when you don't have separation of church and state, we've seen really bad things happen.
When you don't have separation of military and state, we've seen really bad things happen.
And so we are seeing this happen in a sort of different context.
But I do think it's important to remember, you know, the idea now of the coup that Michael
Flynn said should happen and that Donald Trump is reportedly saying he'll be back in power
by August.
I don't think it can happen without help from the military.
I don't think it's a realistic possibility without help from the military.
But it doesn't make it any less horrifying that there are people openly talking about
it.
And the that's an important aspect of this to remember as well