The Next Republican President Will Be The Last Elected President: Politico [View all]

[appalachiablue]

Daily Kos, Nov. 26, 2020.

No, that’s not the exact headline, but it’s the essence of the final sentence in this doom-and-gloom Politico article:
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- 'Did American Democracy Really Hold? Maybe Not.' By Jeff Greenfield, Politico, Nov. 25, 2020. www.politico.com/…
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/25/did-american-democracy-really-hold-maybe-not-440595

["..Like the German military who saw the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for the Luftwaffe, the GOP may come to see 2020 as the election that illuminated the path to seizing power over the will of American voters...]
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Let me just get two points out of the way:

Yes, I know that Politico has an affinity for clickbaity articles about anything and everything being doomed.
I’m normally not an Eeyore about the future of the country as a whole. But.

While the article doesn’t state anything we didn’t know already, it pretty concisely lays out the exact steps a future Republican president could, and likely will, take in order to finalize the collapse of American democracy that Trump started, and how Republican legislatures could and will play into that agenda.

And frankly, it’s hard to see how the US didn’t just get a 4-8 year lease on normal life with something much worse to come after. The anger and insanity that has all but consumed every American right of center is not going to go away; rather, it’s going to be a litmus test for all future Republican nominees to run on. The next Republican president will be elected on his or her (but probably his) innate ability to surf that wave all the way to the inevitable conclusion.

There’s no way we keep Republicans out of the White House indefinitely, so I guess the question here is, what can Biden really do to turn the tide in a term or 2, given that:

Non-loyalists will be fired at all levels on day 1 after the inauguration of a Republican prez. What Trump is doing in this regard right now during his lame-duck period is a preview of what had been planned for his second term, and there’s absolutely no reason for the next MAGA president to not clean house immediately.
It took Trump a year or 2 to do away with any pretense at sticking to decades-old norms. One or 2 Biden terms won’t be enough to establish new norms of presidential decency that any future R-prez won’t just ignore from the get-go...

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/25/1998384/-Politico-The-next-Republican-president-will-be-the-last-elected-president