Journalist (And Other Media) Must Constantly and Forcefully Defend Democracy Against Would Be Tyrants Like DJT...
Defending democracy is part of a journalist’s job
In a lawsuit filed last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that last month's elections in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia “suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities.” The suit asked the Supreme Court to allow the Republican-controlled legislatures in those states to appoint delegates of their own choosing to the Electoral College. As those legislatures would almost certainly appoint pro-Trump electors, a win for Paxton would’ve effectively flipped four states won by President-elect Joe Biden to President Donald Trump, invalidating Biden’s win and handing the president a second term.
Legal experts eviscerated the suit, calling it “frivolous,” “anti-American,” and “procedurally defective.” But other Republicans couldn’t resist joining. In total, 126 Republican members of Congress, along with 18 Republican state attorneys general signed on in support of Paxton’s attempt to steal the election for Trump.
On Friday, the Supreme Court declined to hear Paxton’s case. But the press can’t let Republicans who signed onto his efforts to overturn the election off the hook.
The past four years have been a long-running example of normalcy bias in the press. Normalcy bias is our collective tendency to believe that things will continue as they are currently going, even when we’re aware of serious risks. The way we talk and think about the American democratic system is steeped in normalcy bias. We have assumed there will be midterm elections in 2022, that 2024 will be another presidential election year, and that there will be an orderly and peaceful transfer of power should incumbents be defeated. For the most part, those assumptions are fair. Those things are all probably true, and will probably happen.
In September, however, Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the election. All he had to say was “yes.” Instead, he started ranting that mail-in ballots were “a disaster” and that if we “get rid of the ballots,” then “there won’t be a transfer, frankly; there’ll be a continuation.”
It was an alarming thing to say. But the next morning, the story was nowhere to be found on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, or the Chicago Tribune. Trump expressing his willingness to upend democracy was a blip on the press radar.
As my colleague Matt Gertz wrote at the time:
The newspapers’ treatment of the story resembled what happened in July, when Trump baselessly accused former President Barack Obama of treason. If something like that happened elsewhere in the world, it would be interpreted as a sign that the state’s democratic institutions were imperiled. But Trump’s comments were largely ignored by the press.
The emergency lights are flashing, and it’s likely to get worse. With the nation careening toward a democratic crisis, journalists can’t look away.
Those emergency lights may have been flashing, but many journalists couldn’t bring themselves to take Trump’s threat seriously. Normalcy bias is why Trump’s clearly authoritarian proclamation was met with a shrug and reported on as though it was just bluster. In hindsight, it’s obvious journalists should have been taking the threat he posed to democracy more seriously.
To avoid making that same mistake again, journalists now need to apply those lessons to how they cover the Republicans who took part in Trump’s antidemocratic assault.
“Right now, the most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of our country is underway,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said last week in a straightforward accounting of what’s happening. “Those who are pushing to make Donald Trump president for a second term, no matter the outcome of the election, are engaged in a treachery against their nation.”
Now compare that to the opening line of this December 8 NBC News article: “Talk about another awkward day for a country where the outgoing president has yet to concede to the incoming president-elect who clearly defeated him a month ago.”
In truth, what’s happening is less “awkward” than horrifying. There’s absolutely no reason to discuss the overthrow of democracy the same way one might discuss two women who showed up to a party accidentally wearing the same dress. Attacks on democracy are scary, but normalcy bias helps explain why journalists might downgrade this to simply being “awkward.”
What Trump and Republicans have been doing since November 3 can only be described as an attempted authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
It was a bad legal argument, but it was also disturbingly antidemocratic. Voters in other states chose Biden as president, but the Texas attorney general wanted to have the election handed to Trump on a technicality, itself based on a dubious understanding of election law.
This is uncharted territory for the U.S., even if Republican hostility to democratic principles is hardly a new phenomenon.
A study released in October from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden meant to measure the health of democracies around the world had some disturbing findings about U.S. political parties. On its “illiberalism index,” which measures a commitment to democratic norms compared to authoritarianism, V-Dem found that while the Democratic Party’s position on that chart hasn’t shifted significantly since 2000, the Republican Party has been rapidly abandoning democratic norms. At this point in time, the report says, the Republican Party is more similar to authoritarian parties like Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Hungary’s Fidesz than it is to either the U.S. Democrats or even the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party. (emphasis mine)
“This rise of illiberalism is not like mere disagreement about policy issues,” V-Dem Deputy Director Anna Lührmann said in the report. “Lacking commitment to democratic norms signals a willingness to also erode these norms once in power.”
What Lührmann described is exactly what we’re seeing right now in the Republican fight to overturn the election. The Republican crusade against democracy is being fought in the name of the very thing the GOP is trying to restrict. White House deputy press secretary Brian Morgenstern recently appeared on Fox News to make the audacious, Orwellian claim that Trump’s attempts to disenfranchise millions of voters are part of a commitment to “free and fair elections.” This only goes to show that enemies of democracy rarely come right out and say what they’re trying to do.
There certainly exists some non-authoritarian minded republicans, although they've become few and far between. There was even a very small number of republicans who congratulated Biden on his resounding victory over trump in the most secure election our nation's history. Unfortunately the vast majority of the GOP signed on to the doctrine of Trumpism. Which is to say a cult of personality and authoritarianism reminiscent of fascism in Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany in the 1920's and 1930's.
Our main stream media MUST NEVER let the seditious republicans of the trump era ever live down their un-American and anti democracy activity trying to overturn the free, fair, and secure election of 2020.
The 126 representatives in congress who backed the attempt by corrupt Texas AG Paxton to invalidate millions of legitimate ballots in battlegrounfd states in his attempt to overtrn the results of the election should to be ostracized and not allowed to participate in any congressional activity. Effectively boxing then out until the 2022 mid term elections and beyond iuf neccessary. Insuring the integrity of our democratic republic and its democracy is far more important than to allow seditious bastards to destroy our democracy and its institutions.
Hopefully the republican party will learn a valuable lesson by their behavoir during the dark age of trump. But I for one sure as hell won't put money on it.
Much of the artice BELOW the FOLD.
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