This is as grotesque and inflammatory a lie as any Trump has ever told.
And in today’s GOP, that’s totally fine. Truth, decency, norms: None of that matters. Who cares if the “Libs” are guilty of this particular crime - they’re an “Un-American” menace, and so anything goes.
Let’s be clear how deranged and dangerous this is. This is one of the leaders of a major party accusing the political opponent of deliberately allowing the killing of newborns, and women and medical personnel who are dealing with incredibly hard decisions of murder.
As with many of these bizarre rightwing lies and demonizations: Imagine having your mind poisoned by this stuff day in and day out, until you start to believe it’s an accurate characterization of the political opponent - or at the very least *could* be true of the enemy.
And if you believe this - after all, it’s not just coming from the internet, not just Facebook: It’s a Republican leader saying it! - then how can you just sit there and allow these people to govern? To kill! To murder babies, and murder real America in the process! You can’t.
At the very least, you would have to vote for whoever promises to be most relentless, most ruthless in the fight against this Godless, Un-American liberal menace. Because you feel like your side has been losing for too long, and defeat is not an option in a fight of good vs evil.
You can’t sustain a democracy in which the leaders of one party tell their voters that the other party wants to kill babies.
If you think about it, it’s astonishing that America doesn’t have *more* political violence. This stuff is so dangerous.
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This piece is spot on: Instead of pretending that individual politicians are the problem, we need to acknowledge what @ThePlumLineGS calls the “larger truth”: That the Republican Party itself has become an anti-democratic force and an acute threat to American democracy. 1/
As @ThePlumLineGS rightfully notes, not every Republican has gone as far as Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia in their open disdain for democracy, the rule of law, and those who protected it on January 6. 2/
But let’s remember that calling the insurrection a "normal tourist visit," as Clyde famously did, or acting the way he did towards a man who risked his own life to defend American democracy, does not get you in trouble within the Republican Party. 3/
And if Germany’s “conservative” party were to enact such a Holocaust ban as part of a general attempt to restrict critical debate and punish dissenters, U.S. journalists and observers would not hesitate to warn of this anti-democratic, far-right, authoritarian faction.
I find such hypothetical analogies very instructive. Because of the Holocaust’s prominent place in the American national imaginary, they sharpen the awareness for how a society chooses to address the mass crimes it committed in the past, and their lasting legacies in the present.
I know Bryan Stevenson, the founder of @eji_org, often talks about discussing the death penalty with a German audience, and how outrageous it would be for the post-1945 German state to keep executing people, and for Germany to execute a disproportionately high number of Jews.
Yes! And this isn’t just opportunism or cynicism. The underlying ideology is that Democratic governance is per se illegitimate, that Democrats are pursuing an “Un-American” political project fueled by a coalition of people who don’t deserve their place in the body politic.
Of course McConnell is a shameless opportunist and unabashed cynic. But ideology circumscribes and defines the realm of opportunity. For all those supporting McConnell and his party, this kind of “hardball” is a viable option because they see it as a strategy in a noble war.
The context-free focus on opportunism and lust for power is inadequate analytically, if we want to understand what animates the Right; and it is problematic politically: It obscures the fundamentally anti-democratic (small d!) tendencies among conservatives.
By the way, I’m as tired of thinking about the Senator from West Virginia as everybody else is. It’s not exactly the sign of a healthy democratic system that no one seems to have a clue how to get a member of America’s sole pro-democracy party to actually defend democracy. 2/
Unfortunately, in the system that we have, Joe Manchin’s motivations matter a great deal, and it is important to explore his view of the world. Broadly speaking, there seem to be two schools of thought out there: Political opportunism vs reactionary convictions. 3/
These are excellent suggestions. But if @perrybaconjr is right - and I’m afraid he almost certainly is - that we need all of these things to happen in order to save American democracy, the situation is grim indeed.
What @perrybaconjr is outlining here is absolutely how we would expect a functioning democratic system to react. Unfortunately, however, a functioning democratic system is not what America is.
The final point @perrybaconjr brings up - mobilizing a pro-democracy movement - strikes me as particularly urgent. As it’s becoming obvious that the slide towards authoritarianism is unlikely to be halted from within the political institutions, such mobilization will be crucial.
As you would expect, @AdamSerwer demolishes the exculpatory myth of Republicans being afraid of and/or seduced by Trump and gets right to the heart of the matter: Republicans are convinced that if democracy yields Democratic governance, then democracy has got to go.
That’s why the intense focus on Trump’s #BigLie is actually somewhat misleading. It can easily obscure the real problem when it is taken to suggest that Republicans were wholeheartedly embracing democracy until they were seduced and overwhelmed by Trump’s brilliant propaganda.
What we need to focus on is that the “Big Lie” can flourish and have such a massive effect because it builds on longstanding anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the American Right and among conservatives.