No country, not even the first superpower, can withstand a presidency like Donald Trump’s without its democracy suffering as a result. Just as a congressional commission is gathering the testimony and evidence of the former president’s direct responsibility in the violent attack on the Capitol to prevent confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory, the constitutional arbiter, the Supreme Court, has just ruled imposing the three most reactionary judgments in the history of this court in the last 100 years.
The first recognizes the individual’s right to bear arms in public places without the need for governmental approval, while repealing contrary laws in the federated states. In contrast, the second repeals 50 years of jurisprudence in favor of abortion as a constitutional right and restores legislative power to states. The third rejects the responsibility of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate pollutant emissions.
In the three votes, an unusual supermajority of six conservative judges prevailed against three progressives, which is precisely what Trump’s three nominations are the true legacy of his presidency. The conservative bloc has used its first year with a majority of such caliber to correct the legislative and jurisprudential course of the last century, despite knowing that its opinions are largely rejected by public opinion, and without caring that Republican institutional hegemony is not the result of societal majorities expressed in the ballot box, but of a dysfunctional electoral system and the partisan and abusive remodeling of many electoral districts. The counter-majoritarian institutions of American democracy, aimed at maintaining the balance of power and respect for minorities, have enabled the establishment of a biased court and established a minority Republican dictatorship with the ability to block government and impede legislative activity .
With these rulings, the United States recognizes the use of offensive weapons as a constitutional right, curtails women’s liberty and reproductive rights, and restricts the actions of state regulators, a return to the worst of the past. The troubling combination of reactionary individualism, sexist fundamentalism, and far-right anarchism expressed in these phrases opens up troubling avenues for more rights to be lost and new deregulations to emerge.
With a society in permanent cultural civil war and deeply divided, even geographically, and a deadlocked political system, the United States is losing the battle for prestige and exemplary status as a country that has claimed to lead the free world in this last century. Perhaps it is not Putin and Xi Jinping who are defeating democracy, but the republican right.
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