AMERICAN COLLAPSE

Hartmann Report - As we look at the upcoming year this New Year’s Eve, the most urgent question facing us is whether the assault Putin, Orbán, Trump, Musk, and Vance have planned for our political system in 2025 will succeed.

In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
”Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
”What brought it on?”
“Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends.”

For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their “friends.”  They are not friends. 

With few exceptions, they are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.

Right now they’re moving gradually:

— Infiltrating police departments and the enlisted ranks of the military
— Taking over school boards and local boards of elections
— Firing principals and teachers who defend multiracial, multicultural democracy while banning books that contain such “dangerous” ideas
— Demonizing queer people and outlawing drag shows
— Working with Tucker Carlson and Fox “News” to completely rewrite the history of January 6th
— Gerrymandering states so regardless of how people vote, Republicans control the levers of power
— Changing election laws so they can both make it harder for city-dwellers to vote and to ignore and then change the outcomes of elections they don’t like  
— Building media structures that will support the authoritarian takeover when it happens
— Organizing armed paramilitary militias, with back-channel connections to local police
— Creating legal organizations to sanitize and rationalize ending messy democracy
— Radicalizing average Americans through social media and an ever-growing network of hard-right radio shows and podcasts 
— Spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about Democrats and Jews using the dog whistle of “George Soros”
— Firebombing Texas Democratic Party’s Austin headquarters and threatening them that if they don’t stop trying to get Democrats elected worse will come.