Thanks to the Federalist Society and over 70 years of concerted effort by the oligarchs to take control of the Supreme Court we are watching in real time how democracy ends.
The RW activist justices took away female privacy and self-determination and state a clump of nonviable cells are humans with rights but the woman carrying those cells is not worthy of the same consideration and rights. Then they gut the federal government’s ability to enforce regulations through agencies established under the executive branch.
Now they seek to take away federal oversight over the electoral college and even state’s courts to consider state constitutions when ruling in voting cases which would allow legislatures to ignore the popular votes in their state and select a slate of electoral college electors regardless of the vote. This is the same playbook used to attempt the coup of Jan 6 in tandem with the violent insurrection (meant to indicate the traitors mean business while also delaying the process for select states to produce and present the alternate slates of electors to steal the election from Biden. If the SCOTUS rules as we know they were appointed to rule they will make this totally legal and remove the guard-rail of state supreme courts protecting the majorities in states from having their votes disregarded by state legislators as they certify their preferred slate of electors to the electoral college.
This process has been in play since the 1960’s and accelerated in the past 40 some years since Raygun’s term.
Good reads on this subject:
"Dark Money" (2016),
"Democracy in Chains" (2017);
"Evil Geniuses" (2020)
These tomes expose a stealth plan, overseen by radical right-wing billionaires determined to "liberate" themselves from all effective government limitations on their actions and accumulation of wealth.
Our system of government was never meant to be a popular democracy.
It was designed from the beginning to be run by elites.
At first, only free, white male property owners could vote, for example.
I think the FFs knew that the general population wasn't smart enough or educated enough to understand what an entire country needed.
And while their original ideas sound sexist, racist, classist, etc., etc., maybe they were
sensible considering the people of that time. (And given today's population, they might have been even more restrictive in deciding who could vote in a new form of government , but I don't know how they'd "qualify" voters.)
They also understood that the "unwashed masses" were more likely to be influenced by appeals to their basic needs or even promises of free money.
We are now at the stage where people can literally vote themselves money and that was seen by some as a likely cause of our downfall.
Just remember that we did not have "direct election" of our Senators until the
17th amendment was ratified in 1913.
The idea before then was that "knowledgeable" people were best equipped to
elect people to the more powerful branch.
Of course, that had its issues, but when you look at how things are now, I'm not
sure it was worse than what the rabble has put into office.
When you consider that India is supposedly the "world's largest democracy", then
democracy isn't looking so great.
Especially when you compare the results to places like Singapore and, perhaps,
even China. Singapore, for example, has been nothing but amazing since WWII. Mostly due to the efforts of one leader, Lee Kuan Yew, a "benevolent dictator" of sorts.
Immediately after WWII, Singapore was at about the same level of poverty and development as Mexico. Today, there is no comparison.
Lee Kuan Yew was a very interesting leader. There were interviews with him during the 1960s and 70s which show how much smarter and wiser he was than probably ANY politician the US has had. In the US, he wouldn't have had more than 8 years to do his thing, and would have been replaced by the next popular hack who came along.
Similarly, China has done more in the last 40 years to raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty than any other country. And they do this not only in China but in places like Africa where they have been on the ground doing work for decades.
I've lived in China and visited China many times since 1997. It has been amazing to watch their progress. Lately, they've reined in a bit of their "freedoms", especially the
more socially destructive ones, but in general it is a MUCH SAFER place than the US on a daily basis.
One big difference in China is that they actually execute high officials who are corrupt.
This makes a difference.
BTW, Benjamin Franklin is often given credit for the saying:
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.“
And that certainly rings true today, but I think a more likely source of this is this fellow - or someone similar - who was around at the same time:
He has some interesting ideas which seem to be true about democracy.
This graphic is interesting. We seem to be somewhere around 9pm on this "clock"...