The U.S. is in the midst of an ongoing coup, there is a real threat of fascist tendencies in the U.S. and elsewhere; these influence the possible outcomes of the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections as well as the 2024 U.S presidential elections. What are the potentially devastating consequences of legal action or rather inaction following from the January 6th committee? How fragile is American democracy today, and can changing perceptions of accountability lead to irreversible transformations in the political and legal structure, potentially even dismantling institutional checks and balances in the United States? What role does an increasingly partisan Supreme Court play in these processes? How can the historically unprecedented dilemma of the choice between the constitutionally guaranteed separation and independence of the judiciary, and the sovereign will of democratic popular majorities be resolved? What are the prospects of resistance to the threat of fascism, not just in the United States, but also globally, especially in the wake of Russia's continuing war of aggression against Ukraine?
Guests featured in this episode
Jason Stanley; Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and author of five monographs, including, most recently, the acclaimed How Propaganda Works and How Fascism Works. Jason is also a renowned public intellectual who has written extensively on fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, critical race theory, and mass incarceration for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, or The Chronicle of Higher Education. He appears regularly on CNN, NBC, CBS, or Democracy Now, and has been consulted by the January 6 Committee of the US Congress.
GLOSSARY
What is the January 6 Committee?
(00:1:10 or p.1 in the transcript)
The January 6 Committee was created by Congress to investigate the circumstances around the attack on the Capitol, to recommend “changes in law, policy, procedures, rules, or regulations” to prevent future acts of violence, and “to strengthen the security and resilience of the United States and American democratic institutions.” It was created with a near party-line vote in June 2021, with only the two Republicans who ended up on the committee, Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), voting for it. With its broad mandate, the committee has interviewed over 1,000 witnesses and focused intensively on the actions of Donald Trump in the weeks and months before the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on January 6. Since June, the committee has held eight public hearings geared at assembling a cohesive, comprehensive story of the organized, multi-pronged effort to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, with Trump at its center.The committee doesn’t have the authority to punish anyone. Source:
What is the Moore v. Harper case?
(00:6:51 or p.2 in the transcript)
The Supreme Court agreed to hear in October 2022 the case of Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina case that concerns gerrymandering, voting districts, and a little-known theory called the independent state legislature doctrine. Should the Court rule in North Carolina's favor, the ruling would reduce voter oversight on state legislatures and likely impact the outcome of various statewide political races — as well as the 2024 presidential election. Moore v. Harper centers around congressional maps drawn by Republican lawmakers in North Carolina following the 2020 census. The maps were challenged in court by Democratic voters and nonprofits who argued the districts were unfairly gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, which violated the state constitution. Earlier this year, the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked the state from using the maps in primary elections and required the districts be redrawn. Republican state lawmakers in February 2022 requested in an emergency appeal that the United States Supreme Court halt the state's order to redraw the maps, though the request was denied. The new maps, drawn by North Carolina Supreme Court-appointed experts, were used in the state's May 17 primary election. In another appeal to overturn the state Supreme Court's decision, Timothy K. Moore, the Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, filed a request that the United States Supreme Court review the case. The review was granted on June 30 with the case to be heard in the Supreme Court session this October. Source:
What is the “Don’t Say Gay law”?
(00:12:17 or p.4 in the transcript)
The bill passed by Florida’s Senate is giving parents greater power over what goes on in local schools and on classroom discussions about sexual orientation. The bill titled Parental Rights in Education, states that lessons about sexual orientation are banned outright in kindergarten through third grade. It also prohibits lessons in other grades unless they are "age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate." The measure, which would give parents the right to sue school districts, it is scheduled to go into effect on July 1, 2022. The bill's supporters say it strengthens parental rights by preventing teachers and school staffers from withholding information about gender issues from parents. Democrats and LGBTQIA supporters, who have derisively dubbed it the "Don't Say Gay" bill, say the law would stigmatize marginalized students and lead to bullying and attacks. Source:
What is the “Stop WOKE Act”?
(00:12:27 or p.4 in the transcript)
The legislation passed in Florida aims to regulate how schools and businesses address race and gender, the state’s latest effort to restrict education about those topics.The law, which has become known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” prohibits workplace training or school instruction that teaches that individuals are “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”; that people are privileged or oppressed based on race, gender, or national origin; or that a person “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” over actions committed in the past by members of the same race, gender, or national origin. The law says such trainings or lessons amount to discrimination. Source:
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S.R: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. It's a great pleasure to welcome back a friend and a former guest on the podcast, Jason Stanley. Jason is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and is the author of several monographs, including most recently two acclaimed books, "How Propaganda Works" and "How Fascism Works"
He's also a renowned public intellectual who has written extensively on authoritarianism, fascism, propaganda, free speech, critical race theory, and mass incarceration for "The New York Times," “Washington Post”, "The Guardian," and "The Chronicle of Higher Education," among other media. He appears regularly on CNN, NBC, and Democracy Now! He was consulted by the January 6 Committee of the U.S. Congress, which will be a focal point of our conversation today.
Jason has been tirelessly warning about the real threat of fascist tendencies in the U.S., and also elsewhere. As a rigorous philosopher of language, he can assure us that these warnings should not be taken lightly, let alone be dismissed as rhetorical flourishes. Picking up from the theme of our conversation last August, I'm going to begin by asking Jason to comment on the developments in American democracy since then, and to provide a realistic analysis of the upcoming 2022 midterm elections in the U.S., and, of course, with a view to looking at the 2024 presidential elections.
We will also address the potentially devastating consequences of legal action or rather inaction following from the January 6 Committee. How fragile is American democracy today, and can changing perceptions of accountability lead to irreversible transformations in the political and legal structure, potentially even dismantling institutional checks and balances in the United States? And what role does an increasingly partisan Supreme Court play in these processes? How can the historically unprecedented dilemma of the choice between the constitutionally guaranteed separation and independence of the judiciary, and the sovereign will of democratic popular majorities be resolved? What are the prospects of resistance to the threat of fascism, not just in the United States, but also globally, especially in the wake of Russia's continuing war of aggression against Ukraine?
Jason, welcome back to the podcast, and thanks so much for accepting this invitation to reflect anew on some of these grave issues during our recent visit to Vienna. It's wonderful to have you with me.
J.S: Thank you so much, Shalini, and thank you so much for all you do on behalf of democracy as a Rector of Central European University, which as much as any institution now, represents the fight for democratic institutions against the authoritarian force.
S.R: Thank you. So, Jason, it's wonderful, as I said, to have you back on the podcast after almost a year. And let me begin by reminding us of an intriguing analogy you made during our earlier conversation. You pointed to Roosevelt's New Deal as having successfully alleviated economic anxieties that could have been a fertile breeding ground for fascism, and you then drew a comparison with the Biden administration's policies. And your argument was that trying to reduce the potential supporters for a fascist social and political movement with something like a New Deal would be one of the achievements or could be one of the achievements of the Biden administration.
So, let's begin with you telling us about how successful this administration has been in reducing this real threat of fascist tendencies developing in the U.S. And, of course, it's had a hard time not only because of two years of COVID, and COVID exhaustion, the polarization of the Trump era, high inflation, recession, but all of these together has the threat of a fascist resurgence increased?
J.S: Absolutely, the threat of a fascist resurgence has increased. There's a hope by the left, by anti-fascists, by centrists, by conservatives who are for democracy, that material politics, returning a country to material politics will undercut fascist politics, which is always cultural politics. Central logic is Great Replacement theory. It says, "You're going to be replaced, you face this threat." And so, it's always cultural politics directed against scapegoats. And the hope is that people won't fall for this kind of cultural politics if they feel materially secure.
I don't myself know whether that's just the idealist optimism. In Errol Morris's movie with Steve Bannon, Steve Bannon laughs and says, "Democrats think people want health insurance. That's such a joke. People don't want to live longer. People want to see their enemies suffer. People want to win. They're perfectly fine to die earlier, as long as they can see their enemies suffer and win on the cultural battlefield."
And we don't know if Bannon is wrong. It's just material politics is the only game in town. It's not clear how to do an anti-fascist cultural politics, other than defend everyone they target, which is, of course, part of it. I mean, I think in the United States, it's no longer an issue of democracy, of overcoming the barriers to fascism by democratic rule, because we're in what I've called in my work the "Legal Phase of Fascism," where the courts have been taken over largely. Many laws are in place, so we're well beyond fascist rhetoric.
We have laws preventing the teaching of history in schools. We have laws against normalizing LGBT relationships. We have laws governing elections, and most frighteningly, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear next year Moore v. Harper, which is a case that says that state legislatures can overturn the votes of their own states and supply their own electors. So, this is Independent State Legislature theory that says that there's no democratic vote for the President. The President should be elected by state legislatures. One thing to understand about the United States is there's so much voter suppression and gerrymandering that Republican state legislatures have virtual locks on power.
So, in Wisconsin, when the Democrat won for governor, the legislature met beforehand and removed all his powers, as well as the powers of the attorney general who's also a Democrat. So, the Republican state legislatures in North Carolina and Wisconsin, when a Democrat wins statewide, they simply vote to make the Democrat powerless, and when a Republican comes back in, they just vote to give the governor powers again.
One thing to understand about the United States is that half our states have always been authoritarian. They've never really been democracies. So, what you have now is an aggressive attempt to take over the remaining states. The Supreme Court is not just tilting partisan. It's an extreme far-right legislative body that is simply claiming that everything on a far-right wish list, including Democratic votes for the presidency, is based in the constitution, which is, of course, complete fantasy.
So, we're beyond the situation where a simple Democratic vote could solve this problem. You have state legislatures gerrymandered in, you have a voter election laws from voter suppression to actually having the state legislature overturn the vote of the state. We know there are four justices in support of that. Probably they'll get a fifth. So that is the end of American democracy. And that's coming very quickly. And, you know, the fact that a majority of Americans, a clear majority of Americans are against overturning Roe v. Wade, for example, is just irrelevant now.
S.R: So, Jason, that's exactly what I wanted to ask you. You refer to the fascist politics of Great Replacement, the ideology that is being peddled by the far-right, not only in the U.S. but in many European countries as well about the whites becoming a dwindling race and being outnumbered in the U.S. The question here for me is when we talk about the Supreme Court in this context of the backdrop of this politics of reproduction, who belongs to the nation, who is ethnically pure enough to belong to the nation and to reproduce, etc., do you think ironically, Roe v. Wade will mobilize enough support to turn the tide for the Democrats, or is it going to be a Republican landslide, nevertheless?
J.S: If the Republicans win, it won't be as much a Republican landslide as it would have been. So first, the Supreme Court decisions will mobilize voters. They will bring independents to vote for Democrats. The second thing is that if the Republicans even have a slim majority, it's the full end of democracy because they will just simply pass legislation. They're targeting democracy now. Third, elections matter less and less because the Supreme Court runs the country, and the Supreme Court is a far-right extremist ideological body that is simply putting into law anything the most extreme Republicans, right-wingers want.
S.R: So then let me go to the other question of the justiciability of some of the things that Trump has done because if the courts are now in the center of politics, the question here would be, does the testimony of someone like Cassidy Hutchinson to the January 6 Committee to which you have been giving expert advice, does this kind of testimony finally provide robust and justice civil evidence of President Trump's direct involvement in the violent attack on the Capitol? And if that's the case, do you think there could be a legal remedy to the problem?
J.S: I don't think there'll be a legal remedy because there are more effective authoritarians waiting in the wings. Ron DeSantis is a better authoritarian than Trump. He is more relentlessly consistent, very effective. He just signed a bill into law requiring all students and faculty every year to be surveyed as to their political beliefs in Florida universities, saying that he's going to remove funding if there isn't viewpoint diversity in universities, meaning that universities must hire right-wingers now, you know, and they must make sure that enough of their students are right-wing. Because if enough students aren't right-wing, then they're going to defund the universities.
DeSantis passed the so-called “Don't Say Gay” law, which is modeled after Russia's 2013 gay propaganda law, which resulted in terrible, terrible crimes and violence against the LGBT community there. He passed the “Stop WOKE Act”, which banned all diversity, equality, equity initiatives in the state. I'm not sure if it ranges all the way to private companies. I don't think it can, but certainly, state institutions and schools. And he's been targeting companies like Disney. So, Disney lost a large amount of its stock price because Disney had been incorporating same-sex relationships into its movies and into its theme parks. So, he has targeted Disney. He removed their $1 billion per year tax rebate for being located in Florida. So, he just cost Disney $1 billion dollars per year. They're challenging it in court, but obviously, it's had a huge effect on their stock price. And the message is, unless you line up behind me, you're going to be punished severely as a company.
So, the January 6 Committee is important in that there's accountability for Trump, but is DeSantis the greater threat? Trump brings a kind of anarchy, disassociated, total incompetence. DeSantis is laser-focused, very smart, Yale grad, Harvard Law School, very smart, very capable, like any fascist leader in the past, laser-focused on using scapegoats for power, and knows how to do it. So, I think that, you know, what the January 6 Committee has shown is something well beyond Trump. It has shown the depth of the problem. When you look at the Republican Party, well, what they've shown is that every single person in D.C. close to Trump or not, knew that Trump was lying. Of course. Everyone.
So, therefore, all the Republicans who lined up behind him, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, the list goes on, knew they were trying to overthrow U.S. democracy. So, we have an anti-Democratic Party that aims to transform the United States into a one-party state and overthrow U.S. democracy. That's the problem. Will there be accountability for that? No, there will be no accountability, because even the Republicans on the January 6 committee, such as Liz Cheney, are for the ongoing coup. This is a rolling ongoing coup, and therefore, they just don't want Trump to lead it.
S.R: But, Jason, this is an alarming situation that you are pointing to. And the question is, under these dire circumstances, what expert advice on the language of fascism and authoritarianism have you been giving to the January 6 Committee?
J.S: The January 6 Committee consulted with a lot of people, and I'm just one of many, many people. They focused on substantiating the crimes that Donald Trump clearly engaged in, the attempt to overthrow the United States. They have not been focusing on the thing I'm focusing on, which is the rolling ongoing coup. That's because it's a bipartisan committee of Republicans and Democrats, and some of the Republicans, they might support changes in the law that transform the United States into a one-party state. I don't know what they think. But they haven't been focused on that. They have clearly shown us that Donald Trump tried to overthrow the United States and remain in power and was an agent in an attempt at a violent overthrow on January 6th.
They've shown that. They've shown that everyone in Washington knew that these were criminal activities from Attorney General Barr on down. So, they've shown that, and that was their remit, and they successfully delivered on that remit. But the future of American democracy, the January 6 Committee is not going to help with that. What needs to happen is you need to add to the Supreme Court, do something about the Supreme Court.
S.R: So, that's exactly what my question was going to be. One of the things which was under consideration and on the political agenda but seems to have disappeared a little bit was the idea that the Democrats could enlarge the Supreme Court and nominate another number of judges, which could at least balance the court, if not change its composition entirely, given that judges in the U.S. Supreme Court are lifetime appointments. So, would that be another route to go? And what has happened to those discussions?
J.S: Those discussions were squashed by essentially normalizers who said, "Oh, no, this is normal. Don't panic. This is just America, as it's always been. The Supreme Court always had too much power. Stop panicking”. So, that is probably not going to happen, unfortunately. Unfortunately, in the United States, the Democratic Party, too, is a gerontocracy run by people in their 80s, and so they can't see the alarming nature of the situation. So, if the Supreme Court rules next year, as I expect they will, that state legislatures can overturn the state's votes, then that's the end of American democracy and replacing the Supreme Court will never happen because, you know, there will only be Republican presidents from here on.
S.R: So, let me ask you about another decision of the Supreme Court that I've been following with some dismay, and that is its approval of the racially gerrymandered electoral map in the state of Louisiana, which strikes a further blow against the 1965 Voting Rights Act. So, could you say something about the new Voting Rights Act, which was at least on the Democratic Party agenda? What's happened to that?
J.S: Nothing. The Democrats can't do anything because of the filibuster, so nothing is going to happen. The Supreme Court, of course, they'll go for every racial gerrymander. Look at Mississippi, 38% of Mississippi are black Americans. Black Americans have no political power in the state of Mississippi. So, that's going to happen everywhere. You'll have all the black voters packed into one egregiously gerrymandered district, and they'll get one Congress person, Bennie Thompson in Mississippi. And the Supreme Court will ratify it all because the Supreme Court's only concern is to drive to a one-party state. The Supreme Court is hell-bent on destroying U.S. democracy. And they are the chief concern here, not Donald Trump.
S.R: But there is still a paradox here, Jason, because a lot of these, at least Roe v. Wade would be a good example of a Supreme Court ruling that is not supported by the majority of Americans. If the polls are right, people would actually want there to be a much more liberal abortion law. And the question here is, how do we fix this complete mismatch between partisan judges who can willfully ignore, of course, popular majorities and impose the tyranny of a small right-wing minority on a country in case after case where the popular will would actually have asked for something different?
J.S: Well, the United States is going to be an authoritarian one-party state, and most Americans are not going to vote. They'll be demobilized. They'll do what people do in any authoritarian country. They'll go to their job, make money, and go home. And unless there's some radical change that I can't see, but hopefully, there will be, I don't want to lose hope, but the United States will be an authoritarian country and the rest of the world will have to prepare for that.
S.R: So, let me ask you one question about this creeping fascism, also through electoral means, and through judicial means, as you have pointed out in great detail, is something which we don't quite know, as you say, how that can be stopped. However, there is another element, which is equally frightening in this mix, for me, and that is also a fundamental trait of fascism, violence, a racial regime of domination about which you have written a lot, which relies on the state's legitimate monopoly of violence, and that is also leading to mass incarceration. But in addition to that, there is something which is also peculiar to the United States among Western democracies, certainly, and that is the pervasive ownership and use of guns. Could you say something about that element, especially because, to come back to the Supreme Court, it has now given even greater juridical support for carrying weapons?
J.S: Justice Clarence Thomas essentially invented the idea of an individual right to bear arms. Considered earlier in my lifetime, not that long ago his views were considered just off the table. Now, the law. Recently, the [00:22:00] Supreme Court voted to repeal New York City's law that prevented people from, say, carrying their concealed guns on the subway. Now, everyone in New York can bring their gun onto the subway tucked into their waistband under their coat or whatever. So, what is this is going to do? It's going to lead to a wide resurgence of murders, of homicide. And what that will do, well, it will enable politicians to run for office again and again on fear of black crime.
Hannah Arendt discusses this in "Origins of Totalitarianism." You create the conditions that you warn about. So, they're creating the conditions for mass gun violence and violent crime rapidly expanding, which then creates a desire for law and order, which creates happiness with authoritarianism. So, it's a very well-thought-out structure. I think the plan is to make American cities and America just a place where there's immense violence. You can expand the carceral state even further. The United States has 25% of the world's prisoners. Almost 10% of the world's prison population are black American men. And the U.S. politics, you know, the desire for authoritarianism has always been marketed by American racial supremacists as, you know, a desire to protect yourself against black crime.
Now, the main victims of this, besides American democracy, are white men. As Jonathan Metzl shows in his brilliant book, "Dying of Whiteness", the number one victims of lax gun laws are white men who kill themselves by the tens of thousands every year, far more than homicide. So that's one of Jonathan Metzl's main cases for "Dying of Whiteness." You sell the gun policies by saying you need to protect yourself from black crime, and then the guns are used by white men to kill themselves.
S.R: So, let me take you outside of the U.S. for a bit as we draw to a close, and that is to ask you this extreme right-wing term that you describe in U.S. politics and the intentional, systematic dismantling of democracy that seems to be at the moment almost running its course towards the 2022 and 2024 elections. What risks does it have for the accommodation towards autocratic leaders in Turkey, in Poland, in Hungary? What does this entire set of developments in the U.S. mean for authoritarianism in the rest of the world?
J.S: It's deeply concerning, of course. The fascists, neo-fascists would be authoritarians in Europe, PiS in Poland, Fidesz and Orbán in Hungary, they're looking to the United States, and say, "See what happened in the United States? The authoritarians won. The red states undermined the democratic blue states and took over and imposed their values on everyone." And what Orbán is saying to the Hungarian people is, "That's what we're going to do. We're going to win. We will take over the EU. Look at what our colleagues in America did. They ended American democracy. The red states, the authoritarian states, the ethnos states, they won. They won by taking over everything from the inside."
And that's the fight the EU has. And I think that unless a miracle happens, the U.S. is lost to democracy. And I mean, I still have hope. But I think in the U.S., you have to have massive structural change, and the will for maximum structural change. I hope we get there, but I'm not sure we will. And so that will serve as an example to the EU. I think the EU needs to eject Poland and Hungary as soon as it can, or Hungary, certainly, from the EU. If it doesn't, then you'll see a similar game plan. And it's not like I'm making this up because they're all talking to each other. They're all visiting Hungary. CPAC, Conservative Political Action Committee took place in Budapest this year. They look at Orbán and they say, "That's how you do it."
And so, America will aid just as our evangelicals helped with things like Russia's gay propaganda law. You'll see our authoritarian party help Orbán and the anti-democratic forces in the EU try to take over the EU from the inside. The EU must stand as the world's bastion of democracy. India, the world's largest democracy is on its way towards becoming just an ethnos state. Brazil is another one of the world's great democracies. It's at tremendous risk. So, the EU must withstand the authoritarian forces inside the EU. If they don't, then this is the course the world will take.
S.R: Final question, Jason. The EU has, of course, internal problems and challenges to face as you point out, but it's also facing, at the moment, relatively unitedly, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. What do you think will be the repercussions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in American politics and globally?
J.S: So, happy thing is that many Republicans have supported Ukraine. Now, I think there are many powerful forces inside the Republican Party and Republican propagandists, such as Tucker Carlson, who would be clearly pro-Putin if they could, but it's not popular enough. So, Ukraine's struggle is clearly a struggle for democracy against the most explicit fascist leader of a great power since Adolf Hitler. Putin is a straightforward, you know, Russian Nazi, and so trying to impose Russian nationalism. I mean, there's differences. Putin doesn't want to control the world. He doesn't want to take over the world. He wants to restore the Russian Empire, dominate the ethnic groups within his purview. He does not seek what Hitler sought, total domination of the world. But that said, Putin wants ideological domination. He wants to be the leader of these ethnos states. So, standing up to Putin is essential. And we have a lot of Republicans who are seeing that Ukraine represents the sort of physical fight for democracy. So, hopefully, this can serve as a kind of a wake-up call for democracy in the United States and elsewhere because Putin, of course, was Trump's fan. The Republican Party is imitating Putin's strategy, as I said, DeSantis's “Don't Say Gay” bill, and Florida is a kind of watered-down version of Russia's 2013 gay propaganda law. The kind of attack on universities that Central European University suffered under Orbán, that's being brought to American universities. J.D. Vance, who's a Yale law graduate gave a talk at the National Conservatives Conference saying, "Our enemy is the universities."
So, if we can make these links, if we can point out, that look, the global fight against fascism, it's the most obvious manifestation is in Ukraine right now, is in fight against Putin. And then if we can show that what Putin is doing is Russian nationalism, rather than white nationalism in the United States or Hindu nationalism in India, that it was using attacks on universities, attacks at LGBT as its weapons, as its ideological weapons, maybe we can make those links elsewhere. But first and foremost, Ukraine has to win.
S.R: Thank you so much, Jason, for this incisive analysis of American politics, incisive and chilling, if I may say so. And I can only hope with you that we can turn the tide in the coming election. So, thank you very much for being with me today.
J.S: Thank you so much, and thanks to Central European University for carrying the flag of democracy.
S.R: So, let me wrap up by reminding you of some of Jason Stanley's chilling analysis and grave warnings. The U.S. is in the midst of an ongoing coup. It is unclear whether material security could prevent support for right-wing populist tendencies in the USA. And that for two reasons, any fascist thought and ideology involves a culture of politics of resentment that needs scapegoats. The myth of Great Replacement about whites being outnumbered and disadvantaged compared to the blacks provides just that.
More importantly, the United States seems to have entered into a legal phase of fascism. Courts are allowing changes to electoral laws that will guarantee a permanent majority to the Republican Party. The Republicans are targeting democracy itself. They are using legislative control in state legislatures and the courts to turn the country into a one-party state. Elections will matter less and less because it is an extreme right-wing Supreme Court that is running the country now. It makes decisions that do not have the support of most American citizens, for example, when it overturned Roe v. Wade, or when it loosened gun laws to permit carrying concealed weapons in New York. This will increase, for example, gun violence, and make American cities even more unsafe. That in, turn, will be used to fuel fear of violence by the blacks, and to imprison ever larger numbers of black men.
Right-wing Republican attacks on university funding and on academic freedom continue unabated. School textbooks are being burned or censored. All these trends end liberal democracy in any meaningful sense of the term in the United States. It will be up to the European Union to stem this authoritarian tide.
This was the second episode of Season 5. Thank you very much for listening. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed. And, of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.