A political scientist is sounding the alarm about how much the American republic is in danger of devolving into an authoritarian state.
In an interview with Vox, Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris warns that Democrats have already grown too complacent about the fight to preserve voting rights, which he says are under relentless assault from a Republican Party that has radicalized against democracy.
Faris recently wrote on Twitter that he's "not sure people appreciate how much danger we're in" of becoming an authoritarian state, and he went even further in his Vox interview by saying he's considering fleeing the country if things don't improve.
"The most destructive thing that Trump did on his way out the door was he took the Republicans' waning commitment to democracy and he weaponized it, and he made it much worse to the point where I think that a good deal of rank-and-file Republican voters simply don't believe that Democrats can win a legitimate election," he said. "And if Democrats do win an election, it has to be fraudulent."
He then said that having President Joe Biden in the White House should not lull people into believing that the danger has passed, as the GOP now has a blueprint for flat-out stealing elections it doesn't win legitimately.
"It was a test run for a way to overturn an election with the veneer of legality," he argues. "You have to give Trump and Republicans some kind of dark credit for figuring out that this is really conceivable. I think they now know that, even though it would cause a court battle and possibly a civil war, that if they can't win by suppressing the vote and the election is close enough, they can do this if they control enough state legislatures and the Congress."
The bottom line, says Faris, is that "if Democrats don't make some changes to our election laws and if they lose some races that they really need to win in 2022 and 2024, then we're in real trouble."
