Democracies Die

In its current form the Republican Party has a vestigial brain. It works just well enough for the party to stumble backwards.

The problem began with President Rutherford Hayes, who traded Black America into Jim Crow, but more recently we should look at Dick Nixon. In Nixon's youth, the openly racist part of our population was divided fairly equally between the two major parties. This division tended to keep institutional racism anchored in place, but it also diluted the openly racist vote by dividing it between Democrats and Republicans. Nixon set out to gather the entire openly racist vote inside his Republican party.  Racism boosted the Wall Street party and gave the 1%  control of regulations and tax cuts--and then racism and nativism got out of hand, producing the Tea Party and Donald Trump and the overthrow of the Wall Street Republican leaders. They became followers. The national party devolved into many stupid local parties, lacking in vision but well stocked with fear and hatred of people of color, immigrants, women, science, the government, education, reality and rational thought. The nativist movement, such as it was, gathered together a range of voters from torch-waving Nazis to defiant child molesters. 

I was reminded recently that so-called democracies have, since the invention of Greek history, failed again and again. They eventually elect an autocrat and become dictatorships. It happened in Germany and Italy 90 years ago. We've seen it happen recently in places like Turkey and Russia. It can happen here. Americans must resist.