{"id":144342,"date":"2020-12-30T21:19:46","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T18:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/a-party-gone-mad-macleans-ca\/"},"modified":"2020-12-30T21:19:46","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T18:19:46","slug":"a-party-gone-mad-macleans-ca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/a-party-gone-mad-macleans-ca\/","title":{"rendered":"#A party gone mad – Macleans.ca"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#A party gone mad – Macleans.ca<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Adnan R. Khan: Federal politics app<\/a>ears to be rebalancing after Trump’s loss. But at the ground level, things look much bleaker for American democracy.\n <\/div>\n
\n For Alicia Abbott, Joe Biden\u2019s victory in the Nov. 3 presidential election was bittersweet. The 36-year old Idaho native and Democratic organizer had devoted herself to ensuring a one-term presidency almost immedia<\/a>tely after Donald Trump was named America\u2019s 45th president in January 2017. It was mostly the \u201crapey thing\u201d at first, she tells me, referring to the long list of sexual assault allegations that dogged Trump during his 2016 election campaign, but eventually came to run the entire gamut of his odiferous personality. Like millions of women across America, the battle to dislodge a serial liar, misogynist and racist from the White House began the day after he was inaugurated. Nearly four years later, they succeeded.<\/p>\n

But the win has come at a steep cost. Abbott, who normally resides in the picturesque ski resort town of Sandpoint, Idaho, about an hour\u2019s drive from the Canadian border, hasn\u2019t been home in more than two months. She left Sandpoint in the lead up to the election after a fellow Democratic organizer had an arrow shot at her front door.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d been receiving death threats from Trump supporters for a while,\u201d she tells me by telephone, \u201cbut that arrow really made the danger real for me. So I decided to leave\u2014mostly so my parents wouldn\u2019t worry\u2014at least until the election was over.\u201d<\/p>\n

The election passed, Trump lost, but the atmosphere didn\u2019t improve. Indeed, it only worsened as Trump prodded his supporters into a frenzy with baseless allegations of voter fraud.<\/p>\n

In northern Idaho, these were not merely those rural Republicans who voted for him because they didn\u2019t know any better; they were the true believers, the religious fanatics, conspiracy theorists and anti-government ideologues who are genuinely convinced that the Democratic Party is engaged in a communist plot to destroy America, or have gone so far down the rabbit hole that they believe the Qanon conspiracy that the country is run by secret group of Satanic pedophiles.<\/p>\n

With those kinds of people sending her threatening messages, Abbott decided to stay put in Oregon. From a safe distance, she has watched her home state veer off into an alternate universe where the political spectrum has swung so far right that the centre\u2014the space she occupies\u2014barely exists.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump losing was great,\u201d she says. \u201cBut if you look further down the ballot at the state level results, the radical right did really well in Idaho. I can now name four Republican state legislators who support Qanon conspiracy theories or have connections with the John Birch Society, or both.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the federal level, the political landscape looks like it is rebalancing itself: Trump and the Republican party are failing spectacularly in their attempts to overturn the election results. Many senior Republicans are now admitting openly that Joe Biden will be the president come Jan. 20. The judicial system, insofar as it relates to the basic tenets of democracy\u2014things like protecting voting rights and requiring evidentiary proof to back up allegations of voter fraud\u2014is holding its own. On the national stage, American politics does seem to be clawing itself back from the depths of the Trumpian abyss.<\/p>\n

But from the ground level, things look decidedly bleaker, both for American democracy and for the Democratic party.<\/p>\n

Idaho is one cautionary tale\u2014a state where deep conservatism and distrust of government have been weaponized by Republicans for a cynical electoral agenda. In other states, particularly the battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania, Republicans have used gerrymandering, a process by which voting districts are redrawn to favour one party, to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win elections at the state and local levels.<\/p>\n

The result, whether in solidly Republican states or gerrymandered battlegrounds, is that the outcome of an election is now such a far-gone conclusion that Republicans don\u2019t need to worry about a centrist Democratic challenger who might appeal to centrist Republican voters. \u201cWhat they do need to worry about is someone on the right taking them out,\u201d Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of American history at Boston College, said in a recent Facebook livestream. \u201cSo they have moved very, very far to the right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Georgia\u2019s gerrymandered 14th congressional district, for instance, spat out Marjorie Taylor Greene in the November election. During her campaign, Greene said that the Republicans have been handed \u201ca once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.\u201d Greene now claims she no longer supports Qanon, but she remains convinced that the Chinese Communist Party is somehow angling to take over America. And she\u2019s also a racist.<\/p>\n

The crazies pile up the lower down the political totem pole you go. In Idaho, Republican state legislator Vito Barbieri, an anti-abortion fanatic, asked during a February 2020 town hall why Planned Parenthood had not been \u201cnuked off State Street\u201d. \u201cJudgment is coming,\u201d he proclaimed. \u201cThat\u2019s not my job; you know whose job that is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another Idaho Republican legislator, Heather Scott, was reported by fellow Republicans in 2015 to have mistaken a fire suppression system hanging from the ceiling in her new office at the Idaho Capitol building for a listening device. They described how she climbed up on her desk and cut it down \u201cwith a knife she had on her person.\u201d Since then, Scott has been photographed unfurling Confederate flags and headlining John Birch Society meetings where the coronavirus pandemic has been labeled a hoax.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not surprising that the conspiracy theorists in Trump\u2019s orbit exhibit unsettling paranoid streaks and a penchant for painting their political rivals as existential threats. Whether it\u2019s a political tactic to gain Trumpian voters, who themselves occupy a universe of YouTube conspiracies and right wing media fever dreams, or genuine belief remains unclear. But either way, the result is a Republican party sliding inexorably toward far right radicalism.<\/p>\n

Abbott says her mission now is to hold these radicals to account. She plans on returning to Idaho in the new year, once the state legislature is back in session. \u201cThere are a whole host of issues on their agenda,\u201d she says, \u201cincluding reversing LGBTQ and abortion rights. My parents are nervous about me going back but this is where the fight is, and I have to be there. If change is going come to the U.S., it will be at the grassroots. It will be from the ground up.\u201d
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#A party gone mad – Macleans.ca” Adnan R. Khan: Federal politics appears to be rebalancing after Trump’s loss. But at the ground level, things look much bleaker for American democracy. For Alicia Abbott, Joe Biden\u2019s victory in the Nov. 3 presidential election was bittersweet. The 36-year old Idaho native and Democratic organizer had devoted herself…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":144343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/GettyImages-1280376521-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4941,67806,67844],"class_list":["post-144342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-donald-trump","tag-editors-picks","tag-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}