I vacillate these days from being a political science teacher and a history teacher. Not pedagogically, but how I look at the world.
The political science teacher looks at Trump and the GOP and sees a descent into racial hatred and demagoguery, corruption and authoritarianism. The GOP enjoys - for the moment - a demographic advantage in the Senate and series of natural and artificial gerrymanders in the House. This has allowed a minority of Americans to elect a manifestly unsuitable president, a Congress that has no consideration of the opinions of the majority of Americans and a Supreme Court that thinks the 1880s were too liberal.
The history teacher would note that America has always had racist demagogues, the politics of division and a strain of authoritarianism. I'm a fan of Edmund Morgan's thesis that racism and slavery allowed democracy to take root in America, because white Americans enjoyed a relative equality vis a vis African slaves. And for much of American history, whites have excluded minorities from political power. The election of Obama didn't end this, so much as create a virulent rearguard action to preserve white supremacy. We've done this before, walked this road. We came out the other side and we should again.
Unless... and I hate to even type these words... if Democrats have been so gerrymandered out of power that election day does not bring at least one House of Congress into Democratic control... As Josh Marshall notes, breaking all the rules worked. It worked for Trump. It worked for McConnell. It has now worked for Kavanaugh. Every branch of the federal government is under Republican control, because they broke the rules and a minority of Americans is able to force their will upon the majority.
If that doesn't change, then we are headed for a very dark place.
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