Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on the Holocaust and authoritarian regimes, has just issued a dire warning about the state of American democracy, and that is worrying.
Snyder, who has written about nine books on the subject and its era, compares the January 6th uprising to September 11th.
He writes: “It is so obvious where all this is going. President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged. This empowers him and others to pursue power in an extra-democratic way. The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting and gives state lawmakers the right to decide how to vote in presidential elections. “
The scenario then looks like this. Republicans will win back the House and Senate in 2022, thanks in part to electoral repression. The Republican candidate will lose the referendum by several million in 2024 and the vote by a few states. State lawmakers alleging fraud are changing the election count. The House of Representatives and the Senate accept this revised count. The losing candidate becomes president. We no longer have a “democratically elected government”. And people are angry.
Snyder, who wrote a book with titles like On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, adds, “Nobody tries to hide that this is the plan.”
While not naming it, Snyder appears to be suggesting that HR1 / S1’s For the People Act is the only way to stop this Republican takeover of America.
When Trump told his big lie, the plane hit the building. What then unfolds has a certain logic. It can be stopped, but only if it is understood. Everything happens quickly. It’s so easy to look the other way, to imagine that it was all a fluke, to believe that institutions will save us. They will only save us if we save them first.
The anti-voter laws proposed and passed by Republican Parliaments across the country take the scenario to the next step. Stopping them might be the only way to stop the scenario as a whole.
Well-known journalism professor Jay Rosen supports Snyder’s warning:
I agree with Timothy Snyder. This is where it goes, and there is currently nothing in sight to stop it. https://t.co/osvhqph8IN pic.twitter.com/7NPzevHtZv
– Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) June 6, 2021
Read Snyder’s entire essay here.
Comments are closed.