You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.
Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.
I’d say there definitely was a threat to defend against, because shortly after the end of Reconstruction, the Klan effectively suppressed the vote of black people in the South and they couldn’t vote for a hundred more years.
That seems outside the scope of the conversation. Remember that we were talking about defensive democracy; the Klan thing was straight up terrorism and not an issue of anti-democracy positions being allowed in politics.
PS: I just learned about this today while looking things up for this convo so I might be overlooking something or straight up wrong.