The GOP Wants a Totalitarian-Fascist America. The Midterms Will Decide if They Get One.
Trump speaking at a rally earlier this year. Image Credit: Mario Tama
The Midterms Are American Democracy’s Penultimate Chance
by umair haque
It’s time to use a word that doesn’t get used often. Penultimate. Know what it means? It’s OK if you don’t, I didn’t for a long time. It means the second-to-last chance. And the subtext is interesting too — it conveys a sense of rising pressure, urgency, of accelerating stress on a person or system. Penultimate doesn’t just mean “No problem! Just go ahead and wait for the last chance!” It means: “You’d better take this one, because the odds are getting slimmer every time, and they’re disappearing before your eyes. You really don’t want it to come down to the last chance, because then, well, the chances aren’t very good.”
Why do I use this strange and funny word? Well, because — you should know by now.
The midterms are American democracy’s penultimate chance. Not just American democracy — but more than that, in fact: America’s chances at becoming a modern society, any vaguely sensible notion of freedom, progress towards a better future, a functioning economy, a culture not dominated by hate, spite, and fanatical lunacy.
This is America’s next-to-last chance. And just like the subtext of penultimate means — nobody sensible should want to leave it to taking the last one, which is the next Presidential election, because by then, well the odds are going to be slender to none. Let’s take things one by one.
America’s lucky to have this chance. Very, very lucky indeed. Remember the events of Jan 6th? It’s not that they’ve been forgotten — but their larger meaning has. American democracy came within millimeters — not yards — of dying that day. What the Jan 6th committee has described as a “sophisticated, multi-part plan” had a point — to kill democracy, stop it dead in its tracks. And it almost succeeded.
If Trump had marched down Pennsylvania Ave like we now know he wanted to do — allegedly grabbing the steering wheel from his own security detail and trying to crash the car — leading groups of, as we also know now, armed militants…to the Capitol…where the plan was to stop the vote count by any means necessary, right down to invading the Chamber and executing the Vice President and leader of the opposition…what would’ve likely happened next would’ve been chillingly obvious. The vote count would have stopped. Trump, remaining de facto President, would’ve attempted to declare martial law — that too, we know now, was part of the plan the Jan 6th Committee revealed. And that way — through the violent disruption of the peaceful transfer of power — democracy would have come to a halt.
It would’ve been left to the military to attempt to undo all that — a rogue President, surrounded by militants and fanatics, who was clinging to power. Not a good place for a country to be. Not exactly a task that a military carries out under any circumstance but very, very reluctantly.
Let me put that more plainly. The coup came within seconds of succeeding. We know now that the militants descending on the Capitol really were looking to do very serious and real violence. They came within yards of figures like the Vice President and opposition leaders and members. If they’d found them? Who knows. It was a brave handful of Capitol Police officers who — wisely — directed the militants away, and managed to prevent further bloodshed, and many of them paid with their lives. That’s how close American democracy came to dying. It owes figures like Eugene Goodman a greater debt than it fully recognizes yet.
This point isn’t widely understood yet, not nearly enough — that American democracy almost did die on Jan 6th. Let’s keep going, with more context.
What was Jan 6th? “A” coup? That’s the wrong way to see it. It was the culmination of a series of coup attempts. Attempts to finish off a democracy follow a predictable, repeating, regular pattern, well documented by now in failing states. First come the soft coups, and when those don’t work, finally, hard coups are attempted. At every step of the way, the fanatics double down. And that’s precisely what we saw in the months leading up to Jan 6th — first, absurd court challenges about “voter fraud” which were unceremoniously tossed out, then attempts at pressuring figures who certify vote counts, and when that didn’t work, attempts at overtly manipulating the electoral college with slates of fake electors.