[dark_crystal]

JACOBIN* 9/24/2020: To Fight Trump’s Rising Authoritarianism, Dems Must Drop Their Learned Helplessness. By David Sirota and Andrew Perez

Donald Trump is making it very clear that he has few qualms about using undemocratic, authoritarian means to stay in power. If they’re serious about stopping him, Democrats will have to stop cowering in fear and act like a real opposition party.When a dictator sees weakness, the dictator tries to increase his own power — which is exactly what Donald Trump has done over the last twenty-four hours.

After Democrats spent the weekend signaling surrender on the Supreme Court vacancy and suggesting they have no appetite to fight over the judiciary or threaten to expand the court, Trump on Wednesday declared that he may not agree to a peaceful transfer of power, and he openly admitted that he is trying to rush through a judicial nominee so that the court can give him a second term. He suggested that he will “get rid of the ballots” and “there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

This is a crime in process — specifically, a coup that will be engineered remotely by Zoom, as Republican lawmakers now plan to leave Washington without passing a pandemic relief bill and return only for votes to install a new Supreme Court justice to throw the election.

Amid this onslaught, Democrats are behaving as if you can stop a coup merely by telling people to vote in an election where their ballots might get thrown out.

But the lesson here is the converse: Democrats’ culture of learned helplessness is no match for authoritarianism.

If opposition party lawmakers don’t stop imagining a return to normalcy and brunch — and if millions of Democratic voters don’t start immediately demanding that their party’s leaders begin fighting to stop Trump’s court pick right now — then whatever is left of American democracy is probably finished.

Yes, the situation is that dire.

* sharing this link not intended to imply objectivity of source