You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.
Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.
Not really.
In some countries, they have this idea of Defensive Democracy which would allow the government (via court ruling) to ban political parties that are deemed to be a threat to democracy.
In post WW2 Germany, the nazi party was banned, and later a “far-left” (aka: Marxist-Leninist) political party was banned during the cold war, because they meet Germany’s definition of being anti-democratic.
Unfortunately, the US constitution does not have this concept of Defensive Democracy.
I mean we do have impeachment… but we all know how that is (doesn’t work at all).
You say “unfortunately” but do you really trust the GOP with this kind of power?
Had the defensive democracy been in place after the civil war, we could have banned Confederate symbolism, the Dixiecrats and the then Democrat party.
A new conservative party would probably have been created.
The problem with any government system is that it’s still operated by humans. It would have become corrupted but hopefully with a system in place to overturn the corruption.
I don’t think so. Reconstruction ended in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as a political compromise to settle the disputed 1876 election. Even if the Democratic Party in name didn’t survive, a new party would have formed, doing the exact same thing and that party would have been given the go ahead to implement Jim Crow at that time.
And then accomplished what? I mean many more people should’ve been executed or spent their life in prison, that’s for sure, but after the civil war there wasn’t a threat to democracy to defend against.
There’s been a political theory that the alt right of today is only emboldened due to the south never really being “punished” for seceding from the union. They didn’t have to pay reparation and it took literal gunpoint for them to fully integrate blacks into schools.
(Aside: the north is guilty of segregating blacks from whites but using capital power, not political power but let’s keep to the point)
As an example, many Confederate statues were erected not shortly after the civil war but in the 1950-1960s, right when civil rights were being decided and enforced. Defensive democracy would have stopped these from being erected.
You have to remember that these people only want democracy so long as it aligns with their goals.
I’d say there definitely was a threat to defend against, because shortly after the end of Reconstruction, the Klan effectively suppressed the vote of black people in the South and they couldn’t vote for a hundred more years.
That seems outside the scope of the conversation. Remember that we were talking about defensive democracy; the Klan thing was straight up terrorism and not an issue of anti-democracy positions being allowed in politics.
PS: I just learned about this today while looking things up for this convo so I might be overlooking something or straight up wrong.
I mean, if implemented properly, it can work.
Do you think Germany should legalize nazi salute and swasticas, because of “potential abuse” of the power that was used to ban those things? (Those things mentioned are currently illegal in Germany btw).
I mean there’s no right answer here, but do note that the same power of the state to ban Nazi symbolism and rhetoric is also used against pro-Palestinian activists, and this is from a perfectly democratic Germany. If people like the AfD come into power expect many more kinds of speech to become illegal.