The American future of authoritarianism is unique

Early voting for President Donald J. Zeldin: A story of political violence and racial profiling in the era of the Capitol

On the day that the U.S Capitol was trashed, a lawmaker from New York went live on Fox News with a shaky camera.

Other Republican leaders had already begun distancing the party from President Donald J. Trump, whose monthslong campaign to overturn his election loss helped incite the violence. Mr Zeldin was ready to exonerate him that evening.

“This isn’t just about the president of the United States,” he said, referring to what prompted the riot that he condemned. “This is about people on the left and their double standards.”

The intruder shouted, “Where is Nancy?” and then bashed Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, sending him to the hospital with a fractured skull. Members of Congress have pushed rhetoric toward the Speaker in a violent manner for years.

The current moment is not the result of any trends other than the embrace of conspiratorial and violent ideology by many Republican politicians during and after the Trump presidency. Donald Trump became the first American president to order an armed mob to enter the Capitol. Taken together, these factors form a social scaffolding that allows for the kind of endemic political violence that can undo a democracy. Ours wouldn’t be the first.

While the internal bulletin warned federal agencies of a heightened threat period, it identified “lone offenders” as the most likely to commit violence, rather than organized extremist groups. A number of grievances that may motivate the actors are debunked claims of widespread election fraud and divisive social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights.

“If we look back to 2020, we saw very little violence around Election Day itself,” she said. “There was lots of preparation and has been even more preparation by government, non-government groups to ensure that that’s the case this year again.”

Still, early voting in some places has been fraught. In Arizona, people in tactical gear showed up at the ballot boxes to watch voters. The activities, which prompted claims of voter intimidation, have been encouraged by Republicans across the country since 2020.

One of them is Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for Arizona secretary of state who has spread baseless claims of election fraud and who has encouraged his followers to monitor vote operations in their communities.

I am the one who’s responsible for maintaining your election. Finchem said at a rally last year, which began with those in attendance pledging allegiance to a flag that was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “You need to be at the polls. You can’t leave this to someone else.

Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said recently the RNC had trained more than 30,000 poll watchers ahead of this year’s midterms.

The 35 poll watchers that the Republican clerks of Weld County approved for the June primary had links to election denial groups, according to Colorado Public Radio.

That can make a complicated situation difficult to understand. On the other hand, having conspiracy-minded volunteers involved in the process can provide them with a chance to learn about the way elections work.

If people are set in their beliefs that there is a lot of fraud, that can also be a powder keg, according to Spencer Overton, voting expert at George Washington University.

“It’s about political activism and vindicating an election from a few years ago and it’s not about volunteering, it’s about that,” he said. That can lead to conflict.

Researchers say that the days following an election may pose a greater risk of violence than Election Day itself.

Oren Segal is the Vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “They have seen that denial is a way forward, that you’re able to create a community of conspiracy around that. I do not think violence is that far behind.

Denial is a way to create a community of conspiracy around that. I think violence is not that far behind.

Creating Evidence in the Midterms of the 2020 Election and Implications for the Establishment of the Republican Party and the Center for Investigating the Capitol Attack

Some influential voices on the right are readying for litigation that could potentially be related to races that don’t favor the Republicans.

Tape recently surfaced of former Trump lawyer John Eastman, whose involvement in trying to overturn the 2020 election has been a central theme of the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation into the attack on the Capitol, encouraging a crowd in New Mexico to scrutinize their election officials and take detailed notes that can be used in future lawsuits.

“You are allowed to make a written record of anything you see not going on correctly,” Eastman said, according to audio obtained by the watchdog group Documented. Creating evidence is what it’s called.

Hiller, of the Bridging Divides Initiative, said she expects the field of locations where threats of violence are most pernicious to narrow fairly quickly. She is keeping a close eye on the swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, where false claims of past election fraud have been embraced by some political leaders as well.

She said senior leaders of the Republican Party are already calling into question the results of the election and have a history of advocating for violence around it.

Hiller is positive that the institutions that have preserved the democratic process recently will have the resources they need.

Many of the fail-safes worked, that is one of the stories of 2020. The court systems were working well. A lot of the recounts that happened were incredibly effective. And folks were able to surge resources to those locations,” she said. “So we’re in for another election that’s going to test those resources and that resolve.”

With the upcoming presidential election in four years time, many are looking closely to see what this cycle will portend. Experts believe that the effort to undermine democracy in the upcoming midterms could affect the race for the White House, which many think will be a “dry run” for the presidency in four years.

“This should be a dry run for people who want to protect democracy,” he said. “Our law enforcement, our governmental institutions, our leaders, this is a dry run for them to make sure that they’re doing whatever they need to do to protect our democracy moving forward.”

Additionally, the midterms will test whether local organizing of far-right groups around challenging voter rolls and vote counting, and increased presence as election workers, will bear fruit. If it does, those efforts would be expected to continue or ramp up into the presidential election cycle.

“Groups have been preparing day in and day out,” she said. “Even if some small incidents occur, if there’s someone in a polling place trying to purposely create issues, then I think that the vast majority of polling locations, of counting locations, are going to be really well prepared for that. There’s been a lot of thought done about how to support people with de-escalation skills.

Segal thinks it’s critical that local and national institutions and leaders show how they will handle a political event in the coming weeks.

The September 6, 2018, Capitol Attack: When Congress finally took down the President’s name and the National Mall, President Joe Hawley did not fight like hell. The case of the U.S. Capitol

Editor’s Note: Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, is chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Yet the nation is not powerless to stop a slide toward deadly chaos. Organized violence in the service of politics can still be pushed to the fringes if institutions and individuals do more to make it unacceptable in American public life. Eliminating extremists from the country’s two main political parties is more difficult and more necessary when they are a part of the other party. A well-functioning democracy demands it.

In January 2021, hours before the tragic January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Trump declared to his followers on the National Mall, “[I]f you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Mo Brooks told a group of Trump supporters that it’s the day that American patriots take down names and kick ass, before saying that the ancestors sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears. GOP Sen.Josh Hawley of Missouri pumped his fist in solidarity as the capitol was filled with people demanding the election be overturned.

In the aftermath of the attack, insurrectionists testified in court that they were only “following presidential orders,” when they breached the Capitol and threatened the lives of all who work there.

According to experts at the University of Chicago, an estimated 13 million Americans believe force would be justified to restore Trump to the White House, and an estimated 15 million Americans would support using force to prevent the former president from being prosecuted. These startling numbers again underline that our safety and security – as well as the rule of law – are under attack.

The FBI executed a search warrant on top of highly classified documents at the former president’s beach club, which led to their reaction. The Department of Justice followed the law and normal procedures when they tried to get classified documents on their own. Although no one is above the law in this country, Trump and MAGA extremist politicians’ immediate reaction was to attack the rule of law and dog-whistle at violence.

What ensued has been all too predictable. Twitter posts about “civil war” rose nearly 3,000% in a matter of hours after the search. There have been increased threats against federal law enforcement. A week later, a man attempted to break into an FBI office in Ohio before engaging in a standoff with police. The incident ended when the man pointed his firearm at police and was shot and killed.

Why authoritarian movements of the Republican Party have failed in 2020: How do they channel their energies into politics? A critical analysis of the United States

The US Republican Party has become increasingly authoritarian and extreme in recent years, and it doesn’t seem likely to moderate that in the foreseeable future. While the GOP performed poorly in the 2020 election, they decided to elevate and empower far-right lawmakers like representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.

In Florida, the books have been taken out of school shelves in order to make the public education system look better. Republican lawmakers around the US have passed abortion bans that put pregnant women’s lives in danger. The rights of transgender people are under attack throughout the country.

Around 55 percent of Republicans say defending the ‘traditional’ way of life by force may soon become necessary, as nearly half say they would prefer strong, unelected leaders over weak elected ones. About a fifth of Republicans don’t think the election will make a difference.

Steve Levitsky, a professor of political science, says the party needs to accept election results, repudiate violence and break with extremists if they want to be called democratic. The Republican Party has failed three basic tests.

Levitsky says far too many Republican leaders have flirted with using violence to achieve their political goals and spread lies about the most recent presidential election. If politicians succeed in running for president, the authoritarian style of governing they are experimenting with in their own states could be applied at the national level.

It’s difficult to find an apt comparison between the Republican Party and authoritarian movements that have risen elsewhere for a variety of reasons. Donald Trump made the party more authoritarian, after nearly 170 years, when he took over. Historically, authoritarians tend to start their own parties. A small percentage of the populace was able to exert great power under Trump.

Levitsky says that there is a minority of the population that is pretty reactionary and authoritarian in Western democracies. “The question is, how are they channeled into politics? 25 percent of the United States was able to wield national power. Is there a similar party to the one in Europe? Yeah. With the exception of maybe Golden Dawn in Greece, though, probably more openly authoritarian.”

There are hurdles and windows of opportunity present in the US government system and political parties, which is why authoritarian movements of the past have been common here.