Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Americans Must Focus on 2024 and the Rise of Authoritarianism
August 5th 2020
December 10 march for voting rights (Michael Fleshman)
By Thom Hartmann
America needs to talk about Trump-proofing democracy for 2024 and beyond.
The billionaires with strong fascistic tendencies are carefully watching Trump and his administration to see what works and what doesn’t as he pushes to tear apart our institutions of governance and divide America as a political strategy.
He has already revealed a number of areas where our rule of law is sadly deficient, including the ability to hold a president to account for crimes he has committed while in office and how much damage a president can do by putting lobbyists in charge of almost every federal agency.
Many of the holes, cracks and weaknesses in our republic that Trump has exploited were put into place by the Supreme Court in the 1970s and by Congress after 9/11.
The Buckley and Bellotti Supreme Court decisions of the 1970s gave corporations and billionaires the “right“ to own politicians and political parties, and the Patriot Act and other similar legislation since 9/11 have given the president vast police powers that, throughout history, we’ve only seen in authoritarian, strongman governments.
All of these need urgently to be reevaluated and rescinded or replaced.
In addition, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party need to keep 2024 in mind when picking a democratic vice presidential nominee. On the Republican side, it will most likely either be Mitt Romney or Tom Cotton, a corporate Republican or a fascist.
In either case, the Democrats need to be ready politically for 2024.
But most urgently the entire country needs to be laser-focused on stripping the oligarchic and fascistic elements that have crept into our republic since the Powell memo, multiple Supreme Court interventions, and the Patriot Act with its associated war crimes and torture.
America is at a turning point, and whether we continue our slide into fascism and oligarchy, or pull back to small-d democratic values will depend, in no small part, on the planning and work we do now, and the candidates we support and put forward who will be on the ticket two and four years from now.
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Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.