Sublime

Il ne s’agit pas ici de discuter du caractère fasciste de l’extrême droite contemporaine, mais de la capacité des habitus démocratiques et des institutions républicaines actuelles à résister aux solutions autoritaires.

Russia’s efforts to undermine the 2020 presidential election confirmed what all Americans should have known about disinformation in 2016: that the Kremlin does not really care who wins elections as long as large numbers of Americans doubt the legitimacy of the result and the newly elected leader is weakened by those doubts.

the Tea Party. If they became organized, they would become an irresistible force in the party. Inevitably, someone would come along to organize them, but it had to be someone outside the party, someone not trapped in the web of relationships that accepted the basic economic and social model.

Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson sprang to Ike’s defense. McCarthy’s proposal “placed a loaded gun at the President’s head,” said LBJ.6 Johnson immediately recognized the opportunity McCarthy had provided to put the Senate on record supporting Eisenhower and to embarrass the GOP’s Old Guard at the same time. With Senator George’s cooperation,

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny.

And even within democracies, hard-won freedoms are fragile, because the risk of power becoming concentrated in the hands of a few who will fight fiercely to defend their privileges is always present.

Sensing that the price of failure is permanent marginalization, partisans on each side are girding for a crisis in which they are ready to break any guardrails to prevail. Everything is now on the table: gerrymandering, tilting election rules, subpoenas, impeachments, nuking the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and—in extremis—mobilizing mobs

One of the principal vices of the elective system is that it always introduces a certain degree of instability into the internal and external policy of the State.