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Colorado GOP Threatens to Go Rogue If Trump Decision Stands
(www.thedailybeast.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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There's a book called How Democracies Die that goes into quite a lot of detail as to how this situation has played out historically.
Basically, it's a nasty situation. The reality of life is, everyone can just get up and do whatever they want to do. A judge can decide he's a Trump supporter and stop prosecuting Trump supporters if they attack people in the streets. A general can decide he will or won't deploy the military against the citizens when the leader orders him to. The military rank and file can obey or not. A lot of "the rules" that constrain people's behavior and keep democracy running are totally made up, and there's a bad, bad problem that happens when people start to abandon the rules.
So, what do you do when the fascists are abandoning the rules? There's an obvious answer: fight back in kind. Add some seats to the supreme court. Kick Trump supporters out of congress. Have the secretary of state decide that a state where polling locations in Democratic areas didn't get enough ballots, should have gone to the Democrats. If the Republican secretaries of state have been doing the same on Trump's side, and the alternative is losing the election, then that's a pretty sensible option.
Except, it's not. As a general rule, if the non-fascist side starts abandoning the rules in kind in order to fight back against the fascist side that is abandoning the rules, then the slippery slope down towards open war accelerates by quite a lot. Generally, the two things that can save a democracy that finds itself in this situation are:
It's a little counterintuitive. But that's what the book says. Now, is kicking Trump off the ballot "breaking the rules"? I honestly don't know. Technically it's 100% legal. But a lot of things are technically legal, including Republican state legislatures turning in vote totals that don't match the will of the voters. Like I say, I'm of two minds about it, but the bottom line is it's not quite as simple as "fuck 'em I don't care." Because "fuck 'em I don't care" energy is what starts civil wars.