deathmtn

Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright.

After 1945, Germany's center-right was refounded on a different basis. The CDU separated itself from extremists and authoritarians—it was founded primarily by conservative figures (such as Konrad Adenauer) with "unassailable" anti-Nazi credentials. The party's founding statements made clear thar it was directly opposed to the prior regime and all it had stood for. CDU leader Andreas Hermes gave a sense of the scale of the rupture, commenting in 1945: "An old world has sunk and we want to build a new one...." The CDU offered a clear vision of a democratic future for Germany: a "Christian" society that rejected dictatorship and embraced freedom and tolerance.

…

The rebuilding of German conservatism, of course, followed a major catastrophe. The CDU had no choice but to reinvent itself. The question before Republicans today is whether such reinvention can occur before we plunge into a deeper crisis. Can leaders muster the foresight and political courage to reorient what has become an increasingly dysfunctional political party before further damage is done, or will we need a catastrophe to inspire the change?

Seeking to diminish minority groups influence in the party-and we cannot emphasize this strongly enough—is the wrong way to reduce polarization.
It would repeat some of our country's most shameful mistakes.
The founding of the American republic left racial domination intact, which eventually led to the Civil War. When Democrats and Republicans finally reconciled in the wake of a failed Re-construction, their conciliation was again based on racial exclusion. The reforms of the 1960s gave Americans a third chance to build a truly multiethnic democracy.

Two U.S. citizen children were sent on their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras without the opportunity to speak with attorneys, leaving a 4-year-old boy with Stage 4 cancer without access to his medication, according to the National Immigration Project.

Watters again: “If we can't talk about ‘bias,’ and if we don't have civil rights protections, then what exactly do supporters of AI think is going to happen with the automated instruction and algorithmic decision-making?!”

Bukele’s first move was to bring the courts under his effective control. On the day the new Assembly first convened in May 2021 with his party in the majority, it fired the attorney general and all the members of the country’s Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court. This was clearly illegal, but there was nowhere to challenge it, so now he had a Constitutional Chamber that would not rule against him. Bukele followed this with an ostensibly neutral civil service “reform” that forced the removal of any judge in the country over 60 years old or with more than 30 years of service. Among those removed were judges hearing human rights-related cases and those who had shown independence. Those judges who were left can be taken off a case or moved around the country at the will of the Supreme Court, leaving them vulnerable to summary removal if they angered the authorities. In one of its first decisions as, essentially, Bukele’s pet court, the reconstituted Constitutional Chamber in September 2021 found him eligible for reelection, despite clear constitutional language to the contrary.

And when the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for cracking down.
This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez.
Although the first few years of Chávez's presidency were dem-ocratic, opponents found his populist discourse terrifying.
Fearful that Chávez would steer Venezuela toward Cuban-style socialism, they tried to remove him preemptively-and by any means necessary. In April 2002, opposition leaders backed a military coup, which not only failed but destroyed their image as democrats. Undeterred, the opposition launched an indefinite general strike in December 2002, seeking to shut the country down until Chávez resigned. The strike lasted two months, costing Venezuela an estimated $4.5 billion and ultimately failing. Anti-Chávez forces then boycotted the 2005 legislative elections, but this did little more than allow the chavistas to gain total control over Congress. All three strategies had back-fired. Not only did they fail to knock Chávez out, but they eroded the opposition's public support, allowed Chávez to tag his rivals as antidemocratic, and handed the government an excuse to purge the military, the police, and the courts, arrest or exile dissidents, and close independent media outlets. Weakened and discredited, the opposition could not stop the regime's subsequent descent into authoritarianism.

After Republican- Pat McCrory's 2012 gubernatorial victory gave Republicans control of all three branches of govern ment, the state GOP tried to lock in its dominance for the long haul. Armed with the governorship, both legislative chambers, and a majority on the state Supreme Court, Republican leaders launched an ambitious string of reforms designed to skew the political game. They began by demanding access to background data on voters across the state. With this information in hand, the legislature passed a series of electoral reforms making it harder for voters to cast their ballots. They passed a strict voter ID law, reduced opportunities for early voting, ended preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, eliminated same-day registration, and slashed the number of polling places in several key counties. New data allowed the Republicans to design the reforms to target African American voters, as a federal appeals court put it, with "almost surgical precision." And when an appeals court suspended the execution of the new laws, Republicans used their control of the state's election boards to implement several of them anyway.

A second, much darker future is one in which President Trump and the Republicans continue to win with a white nationalist appeal. Under this scenario, a pro-Trump GOP would retain the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the vast majority of statehouses, and it would eventually gain a solid majority in the Supreme Court. It would then use the techniques of constitutional hardball to manufacture durable white electoral majorities. This could be done through a combination of large-scale deportation, immigration restrictions, the purging of voter rolls, and the adoption of strict voter ID laws. Measures to reengineer the electorate would likely be accompanied by elimination of the filibuster and other rules that protect Senate minorities, so that Republicans could impose their agenda even with narrow majorities. These measures may appear ex-treme, but every one of them has been at least contemplated by the Trump administration.

She teaches pipe organ lessons both privately and through the Young Organist Initiative with the American Guild of Organists (AGO). Finding inspiration in how music can bring people of all walks of life together, she is Musical Director for the One Spirit Foundation, conducting the jazz ensemble in their interfaith Prayers Beyond Boundaries program. She earned a Bachelor of Music in Organ Performance with a Specialization in Church Music from the University of North Texas and a Master of Sacred Music from Boston University’s School of Theology with a concentration in organ.

She helps her clients find healing and wholeness through various modalities with custom healing treatments. She is a Reiki Master Teacher, Divine Oneness/LuMarian Energy practitioner, Sound Healer practitioner, and Advanced Certified Akashic Records practitioner. Healing sessions, readings, and Reiki practitioner trainings can be scheduled in-person or remotely, using one modality or a mixture of several.

Despite its purges and threats, however, the administration could not capture the referees. Trump did not replace Comey with a loyalist, largely because such a move was vetoed by key Senate Republicans.

During his first week in office, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing federal agencies to withhold funding from "sanctuary cities" that refused to cooperate with the administration's crackdown on undocumented immi-grants. "If we have to," he declared in February 2017, "we'll defund." The plan was reminiscent of the Chávez government's repeated moves to strip opposition-run city governments of their control over local hospitals, police forces, ports, and other infrastructure. Unlike the Venezuelan president, however, President Trump was blocked by the courts.

Although President Trump has waged a war of words against the media and other critics, those words have not (yet) led to action. No journalists have been arrested, and no media outlets have altered their coverage due to pressure from the government.

Democracy's fate during the remainder of Trump's presidency will depend on several factors. The first is the behavior of Republican leaders. Democratic institutions depend crucially on the willingness of governing parties to defend them-even against their own leaders. The failure of Roosevelt's court-packing scheme and the fall of Nixon were made possible, in part, when key members of the president's own party-Democrats in Roosevelt's case and Republicans in the case of Nixon—decided to stand up and oppose him. More recently, in Poland, the Law and Justice Party government's efforts to dismantle checks and balances suffered a setback when President Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice Party member, vetoed two bills that would have enabled the government to thoroughly purge and pack the supreme court. In Hungary, by contrast, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faced little resistance from the governing Fidesz party as he made his authoritarian push.
The relationship between Donald Trump and his party is equally important, especially given the Republicans' control over both houses of Congress. Republican leaders could choose to remain loyal. Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves.

Another factor affecting the fate of our democracy is public opinion. If would-be authoritarians can't turn to the military or organize large-scale violence, they must find other means of persuading allies to go along and critics to back off or give up.
Public support is a useful tool in this regard. When an elected leader enjoys, say, a 70 percent approval rating, critics jump on the bandwagon, media coverage softens, judges grow more reluctant to rule against the government, and even rival politi-cians, worried that strident opposition will leave them isolated, tend to keep their heads down. By contrast, when the government's approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent. Fujimori, Chávez, and Erdogan all enjoyed massive popularity when they launched their assault on democratic institutions.

We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist attack, he would exploit this crisis fully-using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our view, this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today.

Or take another example: In 1901, a routine White House press release was issued on behalf of new president Theodore Roosevelt headlined, "Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with the President last evening." While prominent black political leaders had visited the White House before, a dinner with a leading African American political figure was, as one historian has described it, a violation of "the prevailing social etiquette of white domination." The response was immediate and vicious. One newspaper described it as "the most lamnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any itizen of the United States." Senator William Jennings Bryan ommented, "It is hoped that both of them [Roosevelt and Vashington] will upon reflection, realize the wisdom of abandoning their purpose to wipe out race lines."

Sarahi had accidentally driven onto the Ambassador Bridge while en route to Costco, and she was arrested by immigration officials and taken to an office building nearby. According to Ruby Robinson of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, Sarahi was being held in a CBP office building next to the Ambassador Bridge, a building that is now being used for detention.

Sarahi says what followed her arrest "felt like a kidnapping." She told NPR that her family was placed in a windowless office space near the bridge. For close to six days, she said they were given no access to a lawyer, told to sleep on cots without proper accommodations for the children (no diapers or appropriate food). She says a few days in, her children began to get sick, and there was no first aid available.

If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States.

For most of the twentieth century, American parties were ideological "big tents," each encompassing diverse constituencies and a wide range of political views. The Democrats represented the New Deal coalition of liberals, organized labor, second- and third-generation Catholic immigrants, and African Americans, but they also represented conservative whites in the South. For its part, the GOP ranged from liberals in the Northeast to conservatives in the Midwest and West. Evangelical Christians belonged to both parties, with slightly more of them supporting the Democrats— so neither party could be charged with being "Godless."

Together with black enfranchisement, immigration has transformed American political parties. These new voters have disproportionately supported the Democratic Party. The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to 44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minori-ties, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.

He described Congress as "corrupt" and "sick." He questioned his Democratic rivals' patriotism. He even compared them to Mussolini and accused them of trying to "destroy our country." According to former Georgia state Democratic Party leader Steve Anthony, "the things that came out of Gingrich's mouth ... we had never [heard] that before from either side. Gingrich went so far over the top that the shock factor rendered the opposition frozen for a few years."

America's democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War Il and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

McCarthy repeatedly impugned Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson as a traitor, intentionally confusing his name with that of accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss. Eisenhower initially resisted joint appearances with McCarthy, but at the insistence of the Republican National Committee, the two men campaigned together in Wisconsin a month before the election.