The only problem with a rightward lurch is there’s no way for adherents to say “that’s enough”. Like cocaine, more is never enough. They’ll veer off into total insanity every time.
In 10 years we’ll have “right wing death squads” facing off with real law enforcement in some parts of the country. In others, as in Colombia at various times in teh not so distant past, the “right wing death squads” will be composed mostly of law enforcement.
America is facing the danger to democracy most feared by Founding Father James Madison: the violence of faction.
In Federalist 10, Madison defines a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
The danger, Madison stated, is “the instability, injustice, and confusion (factions have) introduced into the public councils have been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”
…
The writer concludes (and he’s WAAAAY more optimistic than I am):
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The American people, however, will break the disease. American political thought traceable to the early founding period is grounded upon two principal assumptions: Americans are a virtuous people with a willingness and ability to seek the common good, and who, with time and information, will distinguish the good from the malignant and choose the good.…
Though electoral history projects Republicans will likely recapture the House of Representatives — with the Senate now being a tossup — it is unfathomable to believe that in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections, the American people, fully aware of the peril, would choose a party whose fealty is to a twice popularly defeated, twice-impeached and likely by then legally embroiled figurehead whose inspiration for election is grounded upon an outlandish, dangerous and easily demonstrable lie.
My bold.
The word “unfathomable” doesn’t have the meaning it used to.
And anyway The People won’t choose the president in 2024. By then the voting system will be fixed so no Democrat can ever again be elected president.
It’s politically inconvenient because the only reasonable direct answer embarrasses the Republican party. 
‘are your friends selfish vote suppressing sore losers?’
‘weelll everyone agrees that we should have a fair system’
‘that’s not what I asked you’
‘yeah well look at 2000, when the loser conceded. That’s the right thing to do, unlike what happened with this time’
article: Liz Cheney suggests her friends aren’t selfish vote suppressing sore losers
~Max
It is inconvenient when the truth is embarrassing, but that’s what happens when people do embarrassing things.
Is that an actual quote from the interview?
No. The question in the interview was about the fact that the same conspiracies that led to 1/6 also led to the current round of voter suppression laws.
Cheney is in perfect agreement that her GOP colleagues won’t accept a legitimate election result. What she wouldn’t condede to was the extremely uncontroversial point Jonathan Swan made which was that the 2020-2021 voter suppression laws came out of the same rhetoric Trump used to cast the election in doubt and foment the 1/6 riot. I would go a lot further - I think the GOP has been using very similar unfounded rhetoric about illegal voters to justify voter suppression for years if not decades and in their quest to erode voting rights gave Trump fertile ground for his campaign against accepting the election results.
Once again - voting rights don’t need to be controversial. In a normal democracy political parties are perfectly capable of hating each other’s tax policies without basic questions about voter fraud conspiracies being controversial or embarrassing to any of them.
This is how The Guardian characterizes the conversation:
In order to be embarrassed, one must first have a sense of shame.
No, it is my paraphrasing. If you want the straight dope, you can watch the (copyrighted) interview, 2 1/2 minutes long,
~Max
I mean, duh, Cheney doesn’t have a problem with vote suppression tactics that rig the processes of democracy for the benefit of Republicans, as long as it’s done in accordance with legal protocols. What she doesn’t like is Republicans going full-on reality-denying terrorist nutbag, because that potentially endangers fellow Republicans and risks disrupting Republican campaign donations.
If the Republican Party would return to its traditional tactics of gerrymandering, partisan sabotage of governmental accomplishment, exploiting workers, upward wealth transfer, etc., all under its former business-friendly veneer of sober pragmatism, Liz Cheney would have no problem with it at all. She doesn’t fundamentally object to undermining democracy to enable Republican permanent minoritarian control; she just wants it achieved with a fig-leaf of legitimacy and decorum.
Beautiful. Just beautiful.
Exactly right. She wants the end result, but she’s afraid that the Trumpist nutbags are going too far, and/or exposing the actual plan. She’s afraid that they are fucking up the end game so that they won’t succeed at destroying democracy.
She’s fine with the result; she just thinks the Trumpists won’t achieve it.
In the alternative she thinks that they will achieve it. But once the pitchfork-equipped hard right rabble have the bit in their teeth and their man running the executive, that person and the “organs of the state” as the Soviets used to say, will be turned against the oligarchs who are Cheney’s actual sponsors.
IOW, she wants a RW plutocracy / oligarchy, not a RW populist apartheid theocracy. Given where the electorate is today, the team of OANN + Trump or a smarter Trump replacement like e.g. De Santis can and will deliver the latter, but almost certainly not the former.
I’m inclined to agree with you – because of things like this:
The Republicans are not fucking around; they are going for democracy’s jugular. They’ve realized that suppressing the vote might not be enough now; they have to actually find ways to declare the votes invalid. If Republicans were a basketball team, they’d be losing in the 4th quarter and sending some of their players to beat up the referees, the score keeper, and the league commissioner to ensure that their loss is recorded as a win.
A serious constitutional crisis in 2024 is increasingly inevitable.
If the recent week on Twitter is any indication, some significant parts of the media are waking up to the concerns voiced frequently in this thread.
“Cue the casting of aspersions on the auditors, please” said the conservatives:
Dang; I forgot to add this quote from the story; I expect to see a lot more of this if/when the Arizona fracas concludes.
Republican attacks on democracy, Trumpism are pretty much in a feedback loop. They push to suppress the vote and invalidate elections, which drives out more anti-Republican activism and voters, which only fuels their sense of urgency to strip away all of democracy’s machinery. This will not change because they’ve pushed, and continue to push, anyone with a shred of moderation out of the party. The ones who are left are those who are quite comfortable with the country being more small ‘r’ republican than small ‘d’ democratic. What’s going to happen, most likely in 2024, is that there will be an election in which the winner is obviously a proponent of small ‘d’ democracy but small ‘r’ republicans (read: illiberal democratic, kleptocratic, oligarch authoritarians) will find ways to invalidate the vote. This will set off a clear and obvious political crisis.
“They didn’t find what I was expecting, so therefore they’re crooked!”
Let’s face it-- that is the intended outcome of these so-called “audits,” not to reassure people and lay their fears to rest, but to sow even more distrust and suspicion.
Another day to be mortified that one is a Texan.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas Republicans dug in Saturday for a final weekend vote on some of the most restrictive new voting laws in the U.S., putting the last touches on a sweeping bill that would eliminate drive-thru voting, empower partisan poll watchers and limit voting on Sundays, when many Black churchgoers head to the polls.
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But none have drawn backlash like Senate Bill 7, which Republicans packed with a raft of new voting restrictions that would alter how the country’s biggest red state conducts elections. Democrats have virtually no path to stop it from passing, thereby putting Republicans on the brink of a major victory in their nationwide campaign to impose new voting restrictions driven by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
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President Joe Biden released a statement calling the Texas bill’s final form “wrong and un-American.”
“Today, Texas legislators put forth a bill that joins Georgia and Florida in advancing a state law that attacks the sacred right to vote. It’s part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year — and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans,” Biden said.
The final version of the bill was hashed out behind closed doors by negotiators from the state House and Senate, nearly all of whom were Republicans. They preserved the elimination of 24-hour polling stations and drive-thru voting centers, both of which Harris County, the state’s largest Democratic stronghold, introduced last year in an election that saw record turnout.
GOP legislators are also moving to prohibit Sunday voting before 1 p.m., which critics called an attack on what is commonly known as “souls to the polls” — a get-out-the vote campaign used by Black church congregations nationwide.
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The bill passed the Texas Senate at 6 o’clock this morning after an all-nighter, and has to pass the House tonight in order for it to enacted during the current session. Democrats are trying to knock it off with points of order, but it’ll be close.