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20 Sep, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Reading this sends cold shivers up and down my spine.

An open declaration of war on American democracy. The key question now is: Will anyone on the pro-democracy side be willing and able to muster a response that is commensurate with this threat?
Had they succeeded, American democracy would have ended right there and then. Had they just tried it, even without immediate success, chaos and a disastrous level of political violence would have been almost guaranteed to follow. This is terrifying.
What terrifies me most is the fact that the Republican Party - meaning almost all party officials as well as the majority of GOP voters - is still united behind the man responsible for this, the man who so clearly would have loved to abolish democracy on January 6.
Worse yet, they remain united behind Trump, itching to make him president again, not in spite, but precisely because of his disdain for democracy - because of his promise to defend a reactionary political and social order against the threat of multiracial, pluralistic democracy.
No Republican official or voter who stands with Trump should be allowed to present themselves as “moderate,” regardless of what their policy preferences in other areas might be. If you’re still onboard with Trump, you’re down with anti-democratic extremism.
The Trump era was defined by a plethora of “not surprising, perhaps, but definitely shocking” moments, and this might be the most shocking of them all. I really hope we haven’t already become numb to this, because it is definitely time to raise the alarm.

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More from @tzimmer_history

Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
19 Sep
Every “Western” society harbors far-right extremists like Greene who dream of committing acts of fascist violence. That’s not a new development. But the fact that the Republican Party embraces and elevates her constitutes an acute danger to democracy.
If what’s on display here were just the extremist nonsense of a fringe figure, it’d be best to simply ignore it. This, however, isn’t just Greene’s extremism - it is increasingly that of the Republican Party itself.
How do we know that Greene isn’t just a crazy outlier? Because the Republican Party doesn’t treat her like one. Neither her extremist views nor her open embrace of this kind of violence-affirming, fascist symbolism gets her in trouble with her GOP colleagues.
Read 10 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
17 Sep
These are shocking numbers. Whether or not it’s possible to sustain democracy under the circumstances of the current information environment is one of the key questions of our era - and I’m afraid we need to acknowledge that there’s a very real chance the answer might be no.
Crucially, let’s not mistake these numbers as proof of “brainwashing”. There are limits to the rightwing propaganda machine’s power if it tries to go against the underlying anxieties that are animating conservatives. But it’s highly effective in amplifying those anxieties.
The “brainwashing” approach cannot explain why, for instance, Fox News failed in 2013 to get conservatives onboard with immigration reform. After a few weeks of trying, severe pushback from the base had them going back to demonizing any kind of immigration compromise.
Read 7 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
11 Sep
The conservative reaction to the soft vaccine mandate boils down to: “So what if I might be spreading a highly contagious virus that’s killed hundreds of thousands and is devastating everybody’s lives - leave me alone!” The idea that we should all just accept that is bizarre.
We as a society accepted it for far too long, and paid far too high a price for it. It’s been obvious for many months that will have to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic, that we won’t get from a pandemic to an endemic situation unless people get vaccinated. Let’s do it!
America has prioritized the anxieties of an increasingly radicalized minority for far too long - in that way, our public health crisis and our democracy crisis have been closely intertwined, and we need to tackle both.

A more detailed version of that argument in this thread:
Read 4 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
10 Sep
“So is this really how it’s going to be?“ @ThePlumLineGS asks in this crucial piece, as GOP candidates are openly casting any potential election losses as illegitimate. The answer, sadly, has to be yes – because this is what the Republican Party has become. Some thoughts: 1/
It is tempting to describe the Republican candidates in @ThePlumLineGS’s piece as fringe outliers: as either deranged Trumpists or as cynical opportunists who simply want to emulate Trump’s approach in an attempt to charm the Trumpian base. But there is more going on here. 2/
Remember that undermining the legitimacy of democratic elections in such blatant fashion does not get these people in trouble within the Republican Party. Why is that? Because many Republican officials and at least half of Republican voters share the underlying ideology. 3/
Read 15 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
9 Sep
The thing about these “the cancel mob is coming” pieces is that they simply don’t hold up as empirical analysis. They are extremely interesting, however, as evidence of a pervasive reluctance among elites to accept changing standards of what is / is not acceptable behavior.
I wish someone with a big platform would be honest and self-critical enough to say: “Look, I really benefited from the traditional culture of elite impunity, and I liked the fact that I could say and do pretty much whatever I wanted without facing legal or cultural sanction.”
We could potentially have a more productive discussion about individual perceptions of political and cultural change and what to make of these elite anxieties considering that the power structures that have traditionally defined American life have unfortunately held up fine.
Read 6 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
6 Sep
It’s American.

This is such a crucial point - and the same reason why I remain skeptical about the way the term “fascism” is sometimes used to describe Trumpism. It often comes with certain aberrationist implications, separating Trump from the continuum of American history.
There are many good reasons to see Trumpism as a specifically American, twenty-first-century version of fascism. But the term should be used to emphasize fascist traditions and tendencies on the American Right, not to whitewash whatever came before Trump’s rise.
The comparison to Europe’s interwar period can be enlightening if it generates questions about the history of the Far Right in America - but not if it is invoked to mark Trumpism as an aberration, something Un-American, something foreign for which there is no U.S. comparison.
Read 5 tweets

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