The Undead Republican Party Seeks to Overthrow Democracy in America

"With hindsight, it is clear that the United States failed the difficult test set by history. In the three decades that followed their triumph [over the Soviet Union] and their coronation, they proved unable to establish a new world order, to build a role as a parental power or indeed sustain their moral credibility, which is probably lower today than at any time in the last century. Their former adversaries have once more become adversaries, but their former allies no longer truly feel like allies. This moral collapse did not occur overnight; it is the culmination of a long series of blunders, gaffes, setbacks and missteps, under the aegis of a series of presidents whose policies were poles apart." Amin Maalouf, Adrift: How Our World Lost its Way "The historic question that must be addressed is: Who is the aberration? Biden and perhaps most of his voters believe that the answer could not be more obvious. It is Trump. But this has been shown to be the wrong answer. The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant, a notion that transgresses the new norms it has created. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy. As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one-the long posterity of Donald Trump." Fintan O'Toole, Democracy's Afterlife It gets tiring constantly having to bash on the political, social, military, economic and media leaders in the United States along with fellow citizens of every class and persuasion. But what is a journalist-and citizen-supposed to do when presented with the petulance of a sitting American president in Donald Trump who, defying precedent, refuses to submit to the fact that he lost an election and simply out of spite is placing land mines-in the form of edicts, firings, appointments and executive policy actions- for the incoming president Joe Biden. And what of the Republican party that enables this dangerous precedent?