The reality is that this isn't something that happened overnight. Ensuring that the conservative voters have a new boogeyman after the fall of the USSR has been run like a deliberate and well-funded machine. This story caught my eye the other day. I highly recommend reading it.
If armed violence erupts in 2024, the fate of the nation might well be decided by a simple fact: a big subset of the Republican Party has been systemically arming itself for this very reason.
www.newsweek.com
These people and their views are not going to simply disappear. What we are seeing now is a younger, more radical and dumber breed of "politicians" (I am reluctant to use that word without feeling dirty) from the GOP. I realise that many US citizens just want to be left in peace to live their every day lives, but they may wake up one day and not be able to recognise their own country any more.
It does alarm me that in the event of an attempt to flip results of an election. people who "just want to be left in peace to live their every day lives" might simply shrug --as some did and continue to do after the violence of the 2021 insurrection.
They might be partisans in favor of overturning a lost election, or they might just keep figuring, even in the face of massive net evidence to contrary (through decades of legislative, agency and judiciary rulings and related subsequent data) that "It doesn't really matter who wins..."
From there it could be a short step for some people even to accept the GOP tacking on "
... or how they won."
They could be seen as almost half right, because of what we have already allowed to happen, since it's K street calling the shots on a lot of stuff for a long time now, and we all know that both mega-corporations and industry sector lobbies do try to buy both sides of the aisle in Congress.
It does indeed tend to be "business as usual" after an election. It is really hard to turn the ship of state. It was meant to be difficult, so to give "stability" its due weight in maintaining the welfare of the nation, but it was not meant to be impossible.
Still, anyone who shrugs off a blatant attempt to use force or vote-suppressive mechanisms to alter what means "consent of the governed" in the USA is giving a wink and nod to traitors.
What is normal is to be disappointed over an election loss and then move on. That's what half a country's worth of voters did in the year 2000, for instance, when the Supreme Court said "ok stop counting already, Bush won, it's over." The margin there, ostensibly, was as small as 537 popular votes in the state of Florida, finally putting its electoral votes and so a national win in the Bush column. Yet Gore conceded and his disappointed supporters mourned the loss without assaulting the Capitol or our system of confirming presidential election results.
Before anyone starts asking for apologies "from both sides" over past governance, let's make it clear that there can be no excuses for attempts to overthrow a sitting government doing its constitutionally mandated task to certify an election that 50 states had already validated, some of them two or three times via recounts or audits.
There's a difference in asking for apologies and asking for acknowledgments. I want the Republican Party to acknowledge that whatever its beef may be with the way elections turn out, voter suppression and conniving to flip unwanted outcomes are not a legitimate wave of the future, and a violent attempt to overthrow Biden's 2020 election was not in in the national interest. I want the holdouts to quit denying that the 2020 election was free, fair and won by Biden-Harris. I want ordinary people to be able to get back to being annoyed when their preferred candidate loses, and then shrug and figure "next time".
