What could slow down the GOP march toward authoritarianism?

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that Biden has pardoned perhaps thousands of US service members who were convicted of consensual gay sex. These convictions came from the military’s criminalization of sodomy in 1951. In 2013 that law was rewritten to prohibit only forcible acts. The pardon allows former service members to recover lost pay and benefits (such as access to VA hospitals). Those now pardoned are able to apply to get proof their conviction has been erased. This is all good news! As great as the news is, those convicted of the same crime but under a different name, such as “indecency,” are not automatically included in the pardon. People with those convictions will need to request clemency which will be handled individually. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s criticism on electric vehicles. Yeah, we get that these complaints are a way to signal allegiance for the oil industry. But some of his complaints are quite strange. He has talked about EVs being able to go only 15 minutes between charging while diesel trucks can drive coast to coast without refueling (neither is true). That all EVs are made in China (news to Elon, perhaps he should say something?). That Army tanks need batteries so so big the tank needs to tow a wagon like a child (battery run tanks don’t exist, yet). Since all of these claims are obviously wrong and easily disproven one wonders why no one calls him on them. I’ve mentioned Project 2025 several times now. It’s a document close to a thousand pages long describing how the next Republican president can turn America into an authoritarian state. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote the authors are starting to enact it. The actions so far are to go through the backgrounds, social media accounts, and anything else they can look at of high-ranking civil servants of the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the purpose of all this inspection is to determine which employees are loyal to the nasty guy. Government employees who are civil servants are not appointed by the president and are protected from politically motivated firings. That’s something the nasty guy wants to elimiate and tried to do during his first term. Once all the info is gathered the group intends to post 100 names to a website. And nothing good came come of that, even if the nasty guy never sets foot in the Oval Office again. The damage will come from the mistrust the list will create among the employees. For those who are loyal to the job and the country they will get threats from the MAGA hordes. And it will come when the list is posted, months ahead of the election. The nasty guy’s first attempt would have affected about 50,000 federal employees. A second attempt will affect far more. And will mean the federal government will stop functioning. Way back in 2021 I saved a tweet by Brian Klass. Yeah, almost three years later I’m looking at that tab. In the meantime Elon Musk bought Twitter and blocked my access to all but the first tweet of a thread. So I found it on Threadreader – with a whole bunch he’s written since. I would have simply closed the tab for something that old. But this one still resonates. Klass is an associate professor in Global Politics at UCL. He’s written a book and contributes articles to The Atlantic. In this thread from Sept. 21, 2021 he is pessimistic about American democracy because of one question: “What could slow down the GOP march toward authoritarianism?” Republicans who don’t bow down to the nasty guy are primaried with someone who will. Gerrymandering means in many places a Democrat has no chance. Because of social media nasty people like Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t expelled, they’re treated as social media stars. Republicans who defend democracy are treated as pariahs. The Capitol attack didn’t break a the party, instead it became a loyalty litmus test.

The point is this: there are huge pressures pushing Republicans toward embracing authoritarian extremism. And here's the problem: there are no countervailing forces. There's nothing that rewards being a sober moderate who believes in democracy and tries to govern by consensus. ... Here's the bottom line: nobody has come up with a convincing explanation for how this authoritarian trend reverses itself. That's why, as someone who studies these dynamics for a living, I'm worried that the GOP is becoming irreversibly authoritarian. (Sorry to be depressing)

On November 22, 2021 Klass had a bit more to say on that subject.

When a despotic leader emerges in a democracy and captures a party, the party has two choices: push back hard and prioritize democracy, or re-make the party in the image of the would-be authoritarian. The GOP clearly chose the latter.

So how might we as a society get rid of the Republican authoritarianism? Alas, possible methods are implausible. There could be a massive voter rebuke. But so many states are so highly gerrymandered (and made more so before the 2022 election) many Republicans will win anyway. Media could call them out. But media polarization means Republicans don’t watch any source that might. A national crisis could be a jolt. And we had them – the Capitol attack and a pandemic. And they made no difference. All the incentives for zealots, like MTG, are for them to get worse. Incentives for moderates are to move further right or be primaried.

Democrats need to protect democracy, reform institutions to make them more robust, and understand that for the foreseeable future, their political rivals are authoritarian. They must therefore act accordingly.

They’ve done a bit of strengthening institutions, but not nearly enough.