The gop is now in the footsteps of places like Turkey, Cuba, Hungary, Russia, Iran and oh about a third of the world's countries who are authoritarian. I have worked and lived in countries that were failing to authoritarianism and this is what it is.
Plutocrats operate primarily under the premise, "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner". The Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments, the law--altogether insufficient in their view because they have so much more of value than others--are used, abused, or ignored entirely depending on what particular fight to keep and accumulate property and privilege they find themselves in. Also in the toolkit, to be used when convenient, hidden when not, are arguments from meritocracy, the free market, globalism, greed is good, the invisible hand (aka the Laissez Fairey) and trickle down, squads of lawyers, the police, invasion, assassination, defamation, surveillance, etc. Also important is the strategy of divide and conquer, enraging the working class along lines of natural weakness like fear of the unknown in others' religion, language, customs, and skin color.
And it all ends with clowns, voting clowns into high offices. And those elected clowns, appointing more, yes-men, clowns into high offices. If half, give or take, the citizenry are clowns, then half, give or take, the people running the country will be clowns. Clowns don't understand what makes a democracy work. Clowns don't understand what makes a democracy fail. Clowns don't mind corrupt officials as long as they tow their line. We have allowed half the citizenry to become clowns via our incompetent educational system. Academic knowledge itself is not equivalent to competency. We have an incompetent educational system due to the election of incompetent and corrupt(able) officials; and due to failing to hold officials accountable for their incompetence and corruption. We have, and have had these types of officials because we place our personal desires above the most important thing: officials that will be loyal to a democratic government, above all else; above abortion issues; above governmental benefit issues; above foreign policy issues; above immigration issues; above environmental issues; above all else. Due to our silence; our lack of concern; our apathy; our empire will go the way all others have. Like the dot com bubble; or the real estate bubble; few can see the deep, quick decline we are about to experience. This clown show is only in the beginning stages. _______________________ "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."--John Adams Our Constitution doesn't work with clowns.
I seem to recall a segment by Jon Stewart I want to say on how the GOP states were intentionally defunding the education system as studies had shown that a more educated population would vote democrat. One would've thought it was a problem of dumb con priorities, but the purpose appeared to be more pernicious after all.
I absolutely agree. The situation is exasperated by social media and clown trolls interested in the demise of the U.S.