In 1820 the Missouri Compromise was enacted by the US Congress as an effort to preserve the balance of political power between slaveholder and free states. Missouri was admitted as a slave state; Maine was admitted as a free state. Perhaps more significantly, slavery was also prohibited in the former Louisiana territory north of latitude 36° 30’, which was part of the boundary between Missouri and Arkansas.
“The Republican Party is an authoritarian outlier,” wrote Vox’s Zach Beauchamp in September 2020. Beauchamp was writing in the context of the rush to confirm Federalist Society darling Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice following the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite several Republicans having refused to consider a nominee to the court “in an election year” during the Obama administration. Citing experts on comparative politics including Harvard’s Steven Zilitsky, who with Daniel Ziblatt authored New York Times bestselling How Democracies Die, Beauchamp writes that the GOP should no longer be considered in the same category with traditional conservative political parties such as Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU), but rather as an extremist party like Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, or Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey, which “actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.”
In this series of articles we’ll trace the evolution of today’s white nationalist authoritarian Republican party from its origins in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, through the party’s nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and his “Southern Strategy” appealing to racial fears of southern white voters, to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” to the Tea Party, and Donald Trump. In conclusion we’ll look at predictions by Zilitsky and Ziblatt and others, and their prognoses for the Republican Party and American democracy.
To read the ABC News headline you'd think the nation was awash in vast protests decrying the stay-at-home orders implemented in many states. From a survey of protests over the weekend, however, Forbes found relatively few participants. For example, in Austin TX, a city of approximately one million people, only a few dozen showed up to protest. In Franklin, KY, Raleigh, NC, and Columbus, OH, about 100 protesters each appeared. And in New York City only about 30 protesters could be found. Protests such as that in Lansing, MI, which attracted several thousand cars and around 100 people on the state Capitol lawn, were apparently the exception....
Democratic Party action page. Volunteer opportunities relating to a range of issues and communities.
Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions
Democracy 2025 | The united legal frontline in the fight for our democracy
Vaccine Information Statements (VISs) Overview
Health-data analyst Charles Gaba has posted links to copies of CDC data archived most recently prior to the Trump admin at his site acasignups.net
American Medical Association (AMA) YouTube page.
Some of the information previously available from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Find a Mutual Aid Group.
Lamda Legal's Helpdesk: information and resources relating to discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.
Indivisible.org is coordinating action with several unions and other community groups.
See also:
Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles (hope and optimism)
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
American Civil Liberties Union
People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch
Anti-Defamation League - You may also wish to read the Forward's recent article on the ADL and its critics.
Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller's Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election was released on the Internet, April 18, 2019. The report identified "sweeping and systemic" Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, including a social media "information warfare" campaign favoring the Trump campaign, hacking of databases and release of stolen materials. Russia also targeted election-related databases in several states, and gained access to millions of voter registration records.
The report produced more than three dozen indictments and seven guilty pleas or convictions. Fourteen other criminal matters were referred to elements of the Justice Department....
"It has never existed," the New York Times' Maggie Haberman wrote in June about the hope being expressed in Washington for an imaginary person who could keep Trump in line. "... [P]eople keep cycling through, looking for ways, in the campaign and now." In June some were hoping the kindergarten-teacher-in-chief would be the First Lady; this month the talk was of retired Marine general John F. Kelly, Trump's new chief of staff. John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline on White House, the New York Times proclaimed on August 3, only to be answered barely two week later by the Washington Post headline Trump's lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed.
In the aftermath of the violent Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, VA, Trump's noncommittal statement has come under criticism from across the political spectrum, with the exception, of course, of white supremacists. As noted on our home page, the Weekly Standard's Kelly Jane Torrance, appearing on Fox News, condemned Trump's refusal to identify white nationalists as the perpetrators of the Charlottesville violence, or label it domestic terrorism. Also on Fox News, former George W. Bush adviser, Karl Rove, derided Trump's statement as defensive and inadequate.
The neo-Nazi web site the Daily Stormer praised Trump's comments on Charlottesville. "No condemnation at all," the Stormer wrote.
Last week's news was dominated by Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, which Trump admitted to NBC News was related to what he called "this Russia thing with Trump." Pushed somewhat into the background, but with as much or greater potential to affect national politics was the executive order establishing the so-called "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity." Heading the commission with Vice President Mike Pence will be Kansas Secretary of State Kurt Kobach, who gained national attention for his hysterical allegations of widespread voter fraud, despite there having been only four documented cases in the entire 2016 election.
