Last Saturday my wife and I hosted the monthly meeting of a Salon discussion group that we've been part of for many years. Everybody in the group leans liberal, some more than others, naturally, because us liberals, like cats, are notoriously resistant to being herded.
One thing that we all agreed on is that it's going to be tough to maintain a semblance of calm between now and the 2024 election this November. President Biden is roughly tied nationally with Donald Trump, but Trump has the edge in some of the all-important swing states.
I tried to be as understanding as possible toward conservatives when I told the group that while us Biden supporters worry that if Trump is elected it will be a disaster for our country, supporters of Trump feel the same way about Biden getting another four years in the White House.
However, while this is true, there isn't a genuine symmetry between the anxieties of liberals and conservatives. We on the left have much more to fear than you on the right.
Conservatives worry that if Biden is elected, there will be a continuation of: an influx of migrants through an excessively open border, inflation wrecking the purchasing power of Americans, wokeness infecting our schools, morality plummeting through attacks on religion, abortion remaining legal in many parts of the country, our adversaries not taking the United States seriously, and budget deficits markedly increasing via liberal spending -- among other concerns.
Liberals worry that if Trump is elected, he will create massive problems in just about every aspect of domestic and foreign policy. So in this regard, the concerns of liberals are more or less a mirror image of what worries conservatives about Biden being reelected.
Here's the big difference, though.
There's no substantive concern among conservatives that if Biden wins this November, democracy in our country faces a serious long-term risk. Sure, Trump blathers on about the 2024 election being stolen from him just as he fantasizes the 2020 election was, but there's zero evidence that such is going to happen this year, or that it did in 2020.
Thus the worst-case scenario for conservatives is that they'll have to endure a painful additional four years of a Biden presidency, after which they can both hope and work for a victorious Republican presidential win in 2028.
After all, this is what those disappointed with their favored candidate losing a presidential election have done since our country was founded: lick their political wounds and move on to the next battle.
This prospect is much less likely if Trump is elected this November and has four years to implement his undisguised plans to aggressively take over every aspect of our democratic institutions. Not Democratic, democratic, as in what supports our democracy.
A story in Democracy Docket tells the tale well, albeit scarily. Here's an excerpt from "Donald Trump's Plot Against America."
Donald Trump is plotting to overthrow American democracy. It is not a secret, and he is not subtle. The only question is whether enough people will care enough to stop it.
Trump is not hiding his intentions for a second term. Echoing Hitler’s rise to power, he has called his political enemies “vermin” and promised his supporters that, if elected, he would be their “retribution.”
Trump’s enablers have outlined a plan for him to replace tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA loyalists and to take personal control of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute his political rivals. He is almost certain to use an old law — the Insurrection Act — to convert the military into his personal domestic police force.
Since his power comes from a bottomless capacity to lie, he has contempt for the free press, which he calls the “enemy of the people.” He recently suggestedthat the government should censor or shut down media platforms he dislikes.
His most brazen attacks on democracy manifested in the aftermath of 2020. Since his loss to President Joe Biden, Trump has advocated for discarding lawful ballots, tampering with election certification and throwing out entire states’ results.
He supports voter intimidation and voter suppression, often with a racist dimension. Recently, he unveiled a new “guard the vote” strategy, urging his supporters to monitor the vote-counting process in blue cities like Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia. If Trump regains power, these abuses would just be the beginning.
Though state laws generally govern elections, Trump would assuredly use the federal government to seize voting machines and ballots. Anyone who thinks that a re-elected President Trump would not insist on controlling ballot counting and certification has simply not been paying attention.
Authoritarians like Trump are able to use democratic institutions to rise to power, then destroy those institutions from within, which makes it next to impossible for opponents of the authoritarian to unseat him.
This is the biggest fear of liberals like me -- that Americans will be swayed by Trump's rhetoric and their dislike of Biden to elect Trump in November, after which Trump and his cronies will dismantle the institutions that Trump used to get elected.
Conservatives have no comparable fear, because Biden is an institutionalist who would protect our democracy if reelected. Hopefully that's what will happen. Otherwise the United States will be in deep trouble.
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