Demokratie? Nein, Danke.

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 23:00
Updated
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 23:00
“We do not want to be a democracy”* Republicans want to roll back the 20th century a quarter of the way into the 21st. They’ve made no bones about it for decades. In his heyday during the George W. Bush administration prior to the September 11 attacks, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform busily strong-armed Republicans into signing his anti-tax pledge. He dreamed of returning America to “the McKinley era, absent the protectionism.” He wanted, famously, to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist was a radical for his day. But not so radical that he imagined chucking the Constitution itself along with the last 100 years. Among today’s MAGA Republicans, he’s a RINO. Nancy MacLean, author of “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” suggests the remnant of the southern planter class, economic royalists and academic libertarians, undertook affecting a restoration of elite dominance beginning in the late 1940s. Their goal: to save capitalism from democracy. They want to roll back the 20th century and have been patient about achieving it. And subtly incremental, rarely revealing the sweep of their plans. “One fish, one hook,” as Norquist put it. Then came the first black president. Subtlety was for pikers. McKinley? They want to roll back the Enlightenment, modernity, the works. Give us feudalism or give us death! David Frum was late to his own party when in January 2018 he declared, “If conservatives become convinced…