Member-only story
Toward a New Political Journalism
As I have stated over the past few weeks, going forward it is my intention to focus this blog on efforts we as Americans can take to combat the ongoing attempt by Big Lie Republicans to seize control of the republic and establish a right wing autocracy.
Because make no mistake: that is what is going on, and there has hardly been an existential emergency of this magnitude for the United States since the Second World War. And this one is in some ways worse, as the call is coming from inside the house! It’s one thing to be conquered by a authoritarian foreign power, which, to be frank, the US did not come close to in the Forties, because we stormed Normandy Beach and stopped that threat on European shores, where the fascists had already wreaked plenty o’havoc. It is another to willingly tear down your own 240-year-old democracy and institute a homegrown autocracy. And to my knowledge, no such domestic Operation Overlord is in the works to arrest that trend.
In that regard, we have to go back to the Civil War to find a comparable danger….and as Barton Gellman wrote in a recent, widely-heralded piece for The Atlantic, even the sickness at the core of the threat was not so sweeping. “Even Confederates recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost.” What we are seeing now is an even more basic rejection of the…
