You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.
Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.
And then accomplished what? I mean many more people should’ve been executed or spent their life in prison, that’s for sure, but after the civil war there wasn’t a threat to democracy to defend against.
There’s been a political theory that the alt right of today is only emboldened due to the south never really being “punished” for seceding from the union. They didn’t have to pay reparation and it took literal gunpoint for them to fully integrate blacks into schools.
(Aside: the north is guilty of segregating blacks from whites but using capital power, not political power but let’s keep to the point)
As an example, many Confederate statues were erected not shortly after the civil war but in the 1950-1960s, right when civil rights were being decided and enforced. Defensive democracy would have stopped these from being erected.
You have to remember that these people only want democracy so long as it aligns with their goals.
I’d say there definitely was a threat to defend against, because shortly after the end of Reconstruction, the Klan effectively suppressed the vote of black people in the South and they couldn’t vote for a hundred more years.
That seems outside the scope of the conversation. Remember that we were talking about defensive democracy; the Klan thing was straight up terrorism and not an issue of anti-democracy positions being allowed in politics.
PS: I just learned about this today while looking things up for this convo so I might be overlooking something or straight up wrong.