Isabel Wilkerson writes in chapter 8, “Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims.”
Wilkerson continues, “By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.”
Does this sound at all familiar? As a person who has studied and taught history, this stark description of Hitler’s rise to power gives pause as we look at the current status of our democratic republic. I am truly concerned and afraid of what our republican leadership, in their methodical rise to control over all of the institutions of government, have loosed upon us. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a pragmatist. I think I have reason to be concerned with armed militias being told to go to the polls and “watch,” with plots against elected leadership, with a history over the past 20 years of one party consistently outvoting the other, but never prevailing.
Sabrina Siddiqui, writing for The Guardian, “The real concerns for Democrats, they said, could be found in a combination of gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics…”
“The rise of minority rule in America is now unmistakable,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University.
“Especially with a sitting president who won a majority in the electoral college [in 2016] while receiving roughly 3m fewer votes than his opponent, and a supreme court five of whose nine justices were nominated by Republican presidents who collectively received fewer popular votes than their Democratic opponents and were confirmed by Senates similarly skewed,” said Tribe.
But the latter was the result of partisan gerrymandering, which saw Republican-controlled state legislatures redraw congressional districts to favor the party in what conservative architects dubbed as Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. Read HERE.