Some Republicans have been defensive that the party has a strong anti-democratic bent. But the state GOP convention embraced it, writes columnist Danny Westneat.
This nation was built from settler-colonialists who thought themselves to become the new pure free proprietors of capitalism...
Besides, a social democracy a la Denmark would merely put bandages upon this as a solution...
Voter turnout peaks at around 150M participants in a country with 340M people, and only during a period in which postal voting was nationalized. Normal turnouts can dip into the single digits, particularly in municipal elections when races can be held with little notice and candidates operate with virtually no name recognition.
Partisan voting is overwhelmingly the method people use to pick their candidates, because so many of these people are invisible to the lay voter. Districts are enormous and heavily gerrymandered. Voting blocks are packed and cracked to minimize their influence. It is more difficult to cast a ballot than to buy a gun (particularly for people who are young, migrant, or poc). Significant portions of the population are explicitly disenfranchised by state and local law even in the face of popularly passed constitutional amendments that guarantee them voting rights.
What we have is a marginal group of enfranchised participants split between corporate liberalism and corporate fascism. And as the fascists lose ground, they are hoping to subject the remainder of their political opposition to the same draconian disenfranchisement tactics we have long since deployed against everyone else.