Larry Wilkerson: Is US Democracy Dying a Slow and Barely Visible Death?

A Republican, mind you, and former aide to Colin Powell; a chunk followed the whole video:

I would point to Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, as a quintessential example of the person who leads in this movement of retrogression. The white male fundamentalist Christian in many cases, but Christian nonetheless, who wants to hold onto power so desperately, that in seeing the reality of America—That is to say, that they are now outnumbered and will be increasingly outnumbered as time goes by. Why else is Trump so bent on stemming immigration? They see brown, they see other colors, they see other religions, other beliefs, other sexual orientations— you name it— taking over their country. And they are desperate to hold onto power and will use any means at their disposal to do so. And they harken back to the time when the only thing we got rid of with the 750,000 casualties, people dead in The Civil War, was slavery as an institution. We didn’t get rid of, as you just pointed out, sharecropping that would replace it. We didn’t get rid of disenfranchising anybody we didn’t want to vote by having guns at a polling place— and if you voted, you got shot— or having a test, and so forth and so on.

That’s the mechanisms that they hearken back to. With modern sophistication and more complexity to it, those are the institutions they’re bringing back— whether it’s poll taxes, or fright, get them away from the polls, or it’s gerrymandering. You name it. Any means legal and a lot of these means are because our Constitution is so ambiguous. Legal, in the strictest sense, but increasingly many of them are not legal. Donald Trump is the personification of that not legal aspect of it. Just look at how many things he’s done that 50 years ago, 60 years ago, we’d probably already thrown his ass out of the White House. [MARC laughs] This is incredible what we’re doing to ourselves. We’re ruining the movement that you just cited, post-World War II in particular, when it looked like we were moving towards a—What was it the founders said? A more perfect union. We are now trying to destroy that more perfect union in the name of predatory capitalism, national security, endless wars— you name it. The very complexity of the challenges might be in itself a strength for those of us who want to restore democracy because there are so many competing elements, all moneyed to the hilt, trying to defeat democracy.