And let’s remember: The Jim Crow South always held elections. Stable one-party rule by an authoritarian faction determined to uphold white reactionary dominance, all within a system that retained many democratic features, was Southern reality until fairly recently.
https://twitter.com/ruthbenghiat/status/1431972118611304448
Never forget what “democracy” meant in the U.S. before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s: A system that was fairly democratic if you happened to be a white Christian man – and something entirely different if you were not.
What animates large parts of the American Right is not the idea of turning the country into 1930s Germany (although a sizable fringe certainly displays fascist sensibilities) but of returning to an equilibrium in which democracy didn’t interfere with white Christian elite rule.
Too much of the current political discourse is based on the misleading assumption that the country used to be a stable, “consolidated” liberal democracy until very recently - making it hard to explain why so many people “suddenly” turned to authoritarianism.
But there is nothing old, stable, or consolidated about multiracial, pluralistic democracy in America. It only started less than 60 years ago, and the conflict over whether or not it should be allowed to endure and prosper has dominated U.S. politics and culture ever since.
Let’s not think about our current political situation as “Democracy: Yes or no?” The question is: What kind of democracy - reactionary herrenvolk democracy or multiracial, pluralistic democracy? And that conflict has always shaped the American project.
A much longer reflection on the past, present, and possible future of democracy in America, and how to situate the current authoritarian onslaught in the context of democracy’s contested history, in this thread here:
https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1413123780801617920
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