United States: The dying democracy | Opinion

Joe Biden’s presidency is hanging by a thread. The institutional blockade and internal divisions among Democrats erode any possibility of a favorable balance for 2022, when the dangerous midterm elections will be held in which the majority of the ruling party is usually broken. The sinking of Kabul, the incipient cold war with China and the tension with the European allies add drama to a presidential drift with excessive continuities with Trumpism. Trump’s shadow looms over Washington again. If at the beginning of the mandate his return to the White House in 2024 seemed implausible, now he is becoming a threat. The more details are known about his attempts to subvert the electoral results before Biden’s inauguration, the more fears grow regarding the next presidential elections, in which Trump could attempt the assault on power with direct coup methods. And even more so in view of the difficulties in investigating and punishing his presidential excesses, which culminated in the assault on Congress on January 6.

Those who have pulled the alarm with the greatest energy are Republicans and even intellectuals neocons, increasingly distant from their old party, now taken over by the Trumpists. George W. Bush did it in the celebration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11: “Our political life has become a stark appeal to hatred, fear and resentment, to the point that we are concerned about our nation and our future. together”. But no one has been as precise about coup fears as Robert Kagan, promoter of the Second Iraq War and inventor of the identification of the United States with Mars and Europe with Venus.

Kagan supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 against Trump, whom he already described as a fascist, but in his last article, entitled Our constitutional crisis is here (The Washington Post), argues that the United States is on the brink of the greatest political and institutional crisis since the civil war, “with reasonable probabilities of incidents of mass violence in the next three or four years, a breakdown of federal authority and the division of the country. between red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) combatant enclaves ”. He also believes that “the destruction of democracy may not come until November 2024 (date of the presidential election), but decisive steps in this direction are already being taken now.”

There is no domestic politics in our global world, much less in the case of the still first superpower that is also the oldest of democracies.