Threats to democracy and its institutions aren't new.

The right has been bent on their destruction for more than a century.

As Rick Perlstein says, the point of taking note of this isn't to minimize the danger, rather, it's to contextualize it.

️The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions, ️
so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats.

The project of the right is grounded in a belief in #Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is "that which leads to elite status."

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a #hereditary #meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God's favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty.

Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.

So we should be alarmed by the right's agenda. We should be alarmed at how much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory.

️The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.️

The right wing coalition needs to pander to
forced-birth extremists,
racist extremist, Christian Dominionist extremists (of several types),
frothing anti-Communist cranks,
vicious homophobes and transphobes, etc, etc.

Pandering to all these groups isn't easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things
– the post-Roe forced birth policies that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly #unpopular among conservatives (with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition.)

Even more unpopular are policies banning birth control, like the ones laid out in #Project2025.
Less popular still: the proposed ban on no-fault divorce.
Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular,
but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage's "Husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office"
@pluralistic
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/