CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein joins Jim Acosta to discuss the impact former President Donald Trump’s indictments may have on the Republican party.
So many things never happened before, such as lies, exaggerations, more than 60 court cases, the judges rejecting all accusations of the delusional legal Trump brigades, more manipulations, the firing of officials who resisted the President’s arm twisting. In September/October of last year," Foreign Affairs"(foreignaffairs.com) was alarmed about the “Fragile Republic”, stating “America’s Democracy has never faced so many threats all at once”: Politicians, historians, vociferous masses on Facebook were debating civil war scenarios.
The absolute majority of Trump’s 74 million Presidential voters are convinced that their candidate had been unfairly ejected from office. CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein stated (CNN, January 19, 2021):” Trump leaves America at its most divided since the Civil war.”
Susan Stokes, a political science professor who directs the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, declared a civil war was unlikely since “we are not Yugoslavia, we’re not Spain. But we are definitely in danger of a kind of lower-level violence, decentralized … constant outbreaks, for years to come.” (CNN, January 19, 2021)
The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an election.
The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.
The acute threats to democracy — and the rise of authoritarian sentiment, or at least the acceptance of it, among many voters — have different causes. They partly reflect frustration …
Today, however, falsehoods can spread much more easily, through social media and a fractured news environment. In the 1950s, no major television network spread the lies about Eisenhower. In recent years, the country’s most watched cable channel, Fox News, regularly promoted falsehoods about election results, Mr. Obama’s birthplace and other subjects.
For the other side.
“Roll Call”
Democrats say they’re saving democracy. So why are they bending it?
Biden and his party are making some risky bets
Opinion by David Winston
( David Winston is the president of The Winston Group and a longtime adviser to congressional Republicans. He previously served as the director of planning for Speaker Newt Gingrich.)Is the usual blinkered distorted selective, master of twisting fact into fiction, and fiction into emotionalized faux-facts.
Sadly I can relate to the utter frustration and hopeless infusing so many. Both sides, all sides, have gotten so disconnected from real life and tunnel focused on their own wants.
Hoping people wake up and become aware and concerned, let alone, respectful and frugal, is futile. So okay we are stuck on the raft heading towards those rapids.
I appreciate that for as much as I try to discuss the global, and dream of rational change, it’s not in the cards anymore. It’s just a form of personal therapy. That’s why in a lot of ways, I think one of the most important things moving forward is people simply coming to terms with themselves and who they are. Yes from an evolutionary real world sense that infuses evolutionary awareness into every aspect of our lives.
I didn’t realize how rare that thinking was until listening to David Sloan Wilson’s “Evolution for Everyone” sharing the revelation of how evolution insinuates it way into every aspect of our lives - which is something I’ve been seeing and assuming for decades as self-evident. {Lausten, Wilson has been almost as much of a revelation, as Solms was regarding ourselves and the biology of consciousness.}
Getting a firm footing, the feeling of belonging to oneself and to Earth and even deep time.
Even though our mother ship (that is Earth’s biosphere) is in the middle of floundering, she will go on, no matter how many of her complex animals she winds up having to sluff off over the next thousands of years of Earth’s recovering from the vicious hangover that producing too much humanity is going to inflict over this next couple centuries.
What we are left with is realizing: our moment is now, the future will take care of itself.
I guess that’s one reason I’m pushing the Earth Centrism, evolutionary, bottom up, perspective on ourselves and life so much. It won’t save the world, but I’ll bet it can help save the sanity of some, especially the rational, the one’s who love learning, and who understand and respect science, so are most aware of what’s unfolding and steam rolling towards us as Earth’s fever continues to rise.