The events of the last 10 days remind me of the story of the frog who was put into a pot of lukewarm water. The temperature gradually increases until the water is boiling and it’s too late for the frog to escape. Trump, aided by his Roy Cohn, is moving more quickly towards realizing his dream of being a king with authoritarian powers. I have been doing a lot of thinking about what we should do and the following two articles are helping shape my thinking.
This is not a drill!!
~ Eva
‘There need to be mass protests’: Authoritarianism experts say time is running out for Americans to stop Trump
(February 12, 2020) Americans are running out of time to stop President Donald Trump’s authoritarian slide, experts warned. “There need to be mass protests,” a Yale philosophy professor and expert on fascism told Insider. “The Republican Party is betraying democracy, and these are historical times. Someone has got to push back.”
Since he was acquitted in the GOP-controlled Senate earlier this month, the president has overseen a White House purge of impeachment witnesses, and the attorney general has intervened in the trial of a Trump associate.
Republicans have mostly sat back, with at least one senator conceding that Trump’s behavior did not seem to have changed because of impeachment.
“There is absolutely no reason for him to stop pushing. It goes against both his personality and his experience,” Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, told Insider.
How Protests Can Swing Elections: A study shows that both liberal and conservative protests have had a real impact on U.S. House elections.
(October 30, 2018) From anti-war marches in the 1960s to the Tea Party rallies of 2010 and the almost nonstop progressive protests in 2018, marching in the streets has been a fixture of modern American life.
But do protests actually accomplish anything in terms of election results or the balance of party power?
Absolutely yes, according to a new study based on 30 years of data.
Co-authored by Sarah A. Soule at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Daniel Q. Gillion at University of Pennsylvania, the study finds that spikes in both liberal and conservative protest activity can increase or decrease a candidate’s vote by enough to change the final outcome.
“Many people are skeptical that protests matter to electoral outcomes, but our paper finds that they have a profound effect on voter behavior,” says Soule. “Liberal protests lead Democrats to vote on the issues that resonate for them, and conservative protests lead Republicans to do the same. It happens on both sides of the ideological spectrum.”