American policy is heading at breakneck speed towards a collision between two halves of countries that hate each other and which, 160 years later, have never completely ended the Civil War.
At stake: nothing less than civil peace and democracy, as a system for peacefully settling fundamental disputes relating to the economy, the environment, identity, immigration, freedoms, foreign policy.
The two parties, under the sway of a mutual hostility which has become the main driving force of political action, have taken dangerous tangents.
On the left, a sort of explosion threatens the coalition from within, a Democratic Party that is increasingly forced into an ideological “widespread”.
On the one hand, the harshest identity “wokism”, which controls a large part of the world of education, publishing, media and art, with a priority on “culture wars”, a tyranny protesting minority groups, followers of direct action, censorship or rewriting of the “non-conforming” and shunning traditional representative politics.
On the other hand, embodied by the Biden government, a centrism that still wants to believe in the institutions and the power of “big politics” (the presidency, the elected chambers, etc.). This centrism is traditional, moderately redistributive and interventionist in the economy, environmental activist, internationalist, even imperial in foreign policy, despite the objectively reduced capacities of this “liberal imperialism” in 2023.
But, at the strictly political level, and despite a few counter-examples (such as the Democratic National Committee’s tricks against the left-wing candidate Bernie Sanders, in 2016, to favor the representative of the establishment Hillary Clinton), the Democratic Party does not has not — in general — turned its back on democratic rules and can still bear its name.
Opposite, what do we see? A Republican Party which, with or without Donald Trump, is moving at high speed towards fascistic authoritarianism, and which is increasingly turning its back on democratic compromise as a way of resolving conflicts. The party is not giving up, despite its relative defeat at the federal level, in the mid-term elections (November 2022).
What is happening at the state level (Wisconsin, Michigan, Tennessee, etc.) is perhaps more indicative of what is to come. Even as Democrats “hold on” at the federal level, they are increasingly being pushed out of power in the states.
Examples from the immediate news illustrate the trend. What happened in Nashville last week is quite chilling: two Democrats from the Tennessee House of Representatives were expelled for ideological reasons.
Why exactly? Because these two (black) representatives had protested Tennessee’s failure to implement stricter gun controls, after the March 27 shooting at a Nashville school (which killed three nine-year-old students and three adults ). Fact to report: a third legislator, who had also demonstrated, was not expelled from the Chamber… As it turns out, he was white.
In this country, in 2023, at the state level, elected representatives are expelled for ideological deviance, in this case on firearms. THE gerrymandering (manipulation of electoral maps to guarantee, for example, 55% of the seats with 40% of the votes, or 67% of the seats with 50% of the votes) is becoming widespread, especially in states with a Republican dominance (around two thirds). There are certainly local cases of gerrymandering democrat, but the systematic recourse to the process is republican.
We are witnessing the logical outcome of the policy according to which the end justifies the means (from Machiavelli… even if the formula itself is not his). Without any other justification than to say: “We do it because we are able to do it with impunity. »
Expulsion of legislators for ideological reasons, electoral rigging, Russian roulette on the federal debt, delirium on the presidential defeat of 2020: everything converges towards a coherent, shared and programmatic refusal of democratic procedures by one of the two major parties in what was “the largest democracy in the world”.