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Special Envoy and Head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), Jn Kubi described the signing as another breakthrough achievement by the 5+5 JMC.

I am honoured to witness this historic moment at this critical juncture in Libyas path towards peace and democracy, he said.

This latest political breakthrough concluded after a three-day meeting at the UN in Geneva, where military representatives from the Government and opposition military forces, known asthe5+5 Libyan Joint Military Commission (JMC), agreed on, and signed a comprehensive Action Plan.

It is designed as the cornerstone for the gradual, balanced, and sequenced process of the withdrawal of mercenaries, foreign fighters and foreign forces from Libyan territory.

Since the 2011fall of former ruler MuammarGadaffi,Libya has descended into crises on multiple fronts.

Until recently, thecountryhadessentiallybeendivided betweentheUN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) based in the capital Tripoli, and a rival administration, led by General Haftar, who commands the western-based self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA).

Mercenaries and other fighters from outside Libya have reportedly been operating inside the country for years, including some previously involved in the Syria conflict, and mercenaries allegedly contracted by the Russia-based Wagner group, according to a UN report released on Monday.

In line with last years Ceasefire Agreement, UN Security Council resolutions, and outcomes of the Berlin Conference , the Action Plan is a nationally owned and led instrument, said a statement released by the UN in Geneva.

The UN described it as being key to support the Libyans in regaining their sovereignty and integrity, maintain the peace, stability and security of their country.

Coupled with the action plan, the JMC is developing an implementation mechanism that calls for the gradual, balanced, and sequenced departure of all mercenaries, foreign fighters, and foreign forces.

The 5+5 intend to consult with the concerned international partners, including Libyas neighbours, and seek their support and cooperation on the plan.

The UN applauded the patriotism and commitment of the JMC members, and encouragedthem to seize this opportunity to advance the full implementation of the Ceasefire Agreement through this Action Plan.

This would include the prompt deployment of UN ceasefire monitors.

The Organization also calls on Member States to support the JMC and for the Libyan authorities to implement the Action Plan.

The UN stands ready to back Libyan efforts in implementing the agreed-upon Plan as well to unify military institution and initiate disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) and security sector reform (SSR) processes in the country.

Todays agreement responds to the overwhelming demand of the Libyan people and creates a positive momentum that should be built upon to move forward towards a stable and democratic stage, including through the holding of free, credible and transparent national elections on 24 December, with results accepted by all, Mr. Kubi said, commending the JMCs continuous efforts.

Read the rest here:
Libya: UN lauds mercenary withdrawal plan on 'path towards peace and democracy' - UN News

Another crucial Georgian run-off election is in the works, this time, not in the southern U.S. state, but the southern Caucasus country. Although the October 2 elections took place on the local level, they have had an outsized impact on the power struggle raging in Georgia between the ruling Georgian Dream Party and its political opponents.The leader of these opponents, former President Mikheil Saakashvili made a dramatic return from exile on the eve of the election. The country now awaits not only his trial but another round of heated run-off elections in four cities. How did an election of mayors and city council officials, who are among the least powerful in Europe, escalate into a referendum on the national government that experts warned could destabilize the entire country?

Last year, the 2020 parliamentary elections resulted in a Georgian Dream victory thatthe remaining eight opposition parties decriedas fraudulent. Their subsequent decision to boycott parliament until new elections were held left Georgia effectively without a government from October until April 2021. An EU-brokered compromise, the Charles Michel Agreement, brought both the ruling and opposition factions (with the notable exception of Saakashvilis United National Movement (UNM), the main opposition party) to the negotiating table and put a hold on, if not an end to, the political crisis. The agreement, among other things, required that Georgian Dream garner at least forty-three percent of the vote in the next round of local elections, which took place on October 2, 2021. Otherwise, the party would be required to hold snap parliamentary elections.

Georgian Dream has struggled to maintain its approval ratings amid a stagnating economy and a coronavirus outbreak five times worse than Indias. The party dropped out of the Charles Michel Agreement in July, (possibly from fears that it may not meet the forty-threepercent threshold) to the chagrin of Washington and Brussels.

But Georgian Dream apparently need not have worried. The votes are in, with Georgian Dream weighing in at a safe, if not comfortable, 46.7 percent, followed by UNM at 30.7 percent, and the other seven parties splitting the remainder. Not even Saakashviliwho flew back to Georgia from Ukraine in order to mobilize voters against Georgian Dreamcould kindle enough support to sway the results in his partys favor. He arrived with a rallying cry for his supporters to take to the streets. Instead, he was arrested shortly after his arrival and faces a six-year prison sentence after having been tried in absentia in 2018 for abuse of power.

But not everyone is content to see Saakashvili serve time. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has pledged to personally get Saakashvili back to Ukraine, where he was granted citizenship in 2015. In addition to the charges on which he was convicted, he awaits trial on several others related to the violent dispersal of a protest in 2007 and a raid on the television station of a political rival in 2008. For his part, Saakashvili claims the charges against him are politically motivated and has announced a hunger strike. White House spokesperson Ned Price has urged the Georgian authorities to ensure that Saakashvili receives fair treatment under the law, a remark that hints at the U.S. government's growing frustration with Georgia's democratic transition.

Critics of Georgian Dream, including those in the U.S. government, have accused the party of all manner of democratic backsliding, from covering up the death of slain journalist Lesko Lashkaravato vote-buying and intimidation in the lead-up to Saturdays elections. Georgian authorities have invoked the ire of both Washington and Brussels, who condemned the governments failures to uphold the rule of law and implement reforms, even going so far as to dangle the threat of sanctions. Adding to EU and U.S. exasperation was the leakage of Georgian Security Service files pointing to their surveillance of European and U.S. diplomatic missions in Tbilisi.

Despite its long-standing desire to join the EU and the fact thateighty-fivepercent of Georgians are in favor of a pro-Western foreign policy, the country now seems further from that goal than it has in decades. No amount of finger-wagging from Washington has made Georgian Dream change its course. Nor have financial incentives. Last month the Georgian government turned down a 75 million euro loan offered by the EU to help get Georgias raging coronavirus pandemic under control because it was unwilling to institute the judicial reforms upon which the loan was conditional. For now, it seems, all of the Wests entreaties to uphold are falling on deaf ears.

The true meaning of the October 2 elections is still unfolding.The country will now head into runoff elections to decide the mayors of the four biggest cities. Meanwhile, Saakashvili awaits his trial, the outcome of which will be a major test for Georgian institutions, particularly as the prospects for judicial reform are slim. Regardless, neither Saakashvilis UNM nor Ivanishvilis Georgian Dream have a clearly articulated vision for Georgias future. Rather than focus on the issues, the two parties have devoted their energies to undermining each other. If they continue, they will take Georgias once-lauded democratic institutions down with them.

Lillian Posner is the assistant managing editor at the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Continued here:
Is Georgia's Democracy Dying By 1,000 Cuts? - The National Interest

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We're going to something a little different and to try to explain what this country is fighting with itself about, what are the lines that divide us?

It's pretty obviously not the old partisan divide that the rest of us grew up with Republican versus Democrat. You figured that out now. You look over the Democratic side, you see Rashida Tlaib. You're pretty certain she's not on your side, obviously. But then the question is, is Mitch McConnell on your side? And the answer, as you well know, is, no, not really. So what divides us? What is the dividing line? And it's really simple.

The people in charge are intent on replacing our free democratic system with an authoritarian system where they don't convince you of anything. They simply make you do things and they benefit from that. There are people in this country who are opposed to that, they are anti-authoritarian. And if you look at who we book on this show, that may explain why we do it. You may have noticed we have a lot of former lefties on the show. Glenn Greenwald is the most obvious. Alex Berenson as well. And many others.

Now, we probably don't agree with these people on a lot of things. Are we on the same side on abortion? We've never asked. But one thing we know for certain is that they are totally opposed to authoritarianism. So that really is the divide. People are for an authoritarian America and those who are for a free America. It's that simple. And once you start to understand politics through that lens, you figure out what's really going on.

By the way, looking at polls, is an unusually bad way to understand what's happening in American politics? Polls are often wrong and when they are wrong, they're almost always wrong in the same directionthe last presidential election made that very clear. The polling outfit Quinnipiac, for example, which is attached to some kind of college in Connecticut, predicted that Joe Biden would win the popular vote by 11 points. It also predicted that Mitch McConnell was in tough shape in Kentucky. Pollsters even convinced a lot of Democratic Party donors that they had a real shot of winning the state of Texas. In retrospect, it's clear all of this was partisan fantasy and it had a purpose. It was all designed to make a mentally decaying senator from Delaware look like Teddy Roosevelt riding a massive wave of popular support. Of course, that was a lie.

So once you understand that once you recognize what these polls are actually designed to do. They're designed to put Democratic Party leaders in the best possible light. It is worth noting when the polls move in the opposite direction. When they start to reflect badly on the Democratic Party. That's been happening over the past several weeks. According again to Quinnipiac, a reliably Left-Wing pollster, Joe Biden's national approval rating is now 38 percent. 60 percent of independents disapprove of what Joe Biden is doing as president. A new AP poll noted that just 34 percent of Americans are pleased with the direction of the country. That's called the right track wrong track poll. And for the party in power, it is very bad news.

PSAKI GRILLED ON BIDEN'S REALLY TERRIBLE POLLS, BLAMES DELTA VARIANT, UNVACCINATED AMERICANS

This means that the very same people who just last year lied to you to your face about how popular Joe Biden was are now admitting that he is actually the least popular president in modern political history. Why are they telling you this all of a sudden? Why are these reliably Democratic pollsters telling Democratic voters that their president is unpopular? Maybe because they have no choice. Maybe there are other reasons, we're not sure. What is absolutely clear is that, according to a new poll from Pew, Democratic Party, voters understand what this means and what it means is in a free and fair democratic system, they can't win.

If we allocate power based on who's the most popular with the public and that's the basic premise of democracy, the Democratic Party is in very tough shape and they know that. And that may be why, according to polls, Democrats now overwhelmingly want the government to make their political opponents shut up. More than three-quarters of Democratic Party voters want the tech companies to "restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information." Think about that for a second. More than 60 percent of Democratic voters want the federal government to "control that flow of information over the internet."

So all of that contravenes the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which is the very core of our system of government and of our culture, it's what makes America great. And now the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters are against it.

So that's authoritarianism, there's no other word for it. And it's ironic considering for four years, prominent Democrats told us we were living through a fascist system. Donald Trump was a fascist. But of course, they were describing their own attitudes. So we're going to look at the rise of authoritarian impulses on the left and try to figure out where those came from and where they're going. Now, none of this is brand new. You'll recall that Democratic Party politicians have been pushing for censorship for a long time, certainly since Trump won in 2016. They blame that victory on Facebook. Here's Ed Markey in last October, for example, calling for more censorship.

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass: The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down. The issue is that theyre leaving too many dangerous posts up. In fact, amplifying harmful content so that it spreads like wildfire and torches our democracy.

Oh, they're not censoring enough because these posts, according to Ed Markey, who will literally say anything you should know, are, quote, dangerous. But Markey never explained what was dangerous about them. But you got the message they all did. A few weeks after Markey said that Big Tech effectively removed the elected president of the United States from the internet, they silenced him completely and virtually nobody said anything about it. So it didn't stop, it merely accelerated. Now, Democrats and their allies in the news media have decided to drop all pretense.

GREENWALD: FACEBOOK WHISTLEBLOWER IS BEING EMBRACED BY LIBERALS INTENT ON CONTROLLING POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Jonathan Chait writes for New York Magazine. He's considered smart on the left, one of the weirdest people practicing journalism today. He just published a deeply revealing piece in New York magazine. Here's the headline from it and we're quoting "Anybody fighting Joe Biden is helping Trump's next coup. All Republican politics is now functionally authoritarian." Right, because Republicans are calling for censorship. So that's how the Democratic Party is responding to the collapsing poll numbers of their president. They're accusing the other side of authoritarianism while practicing it themselves. Right.

So you'll recall that Joe Biden voters destroyed statues and destroyed our country's biggest cities for more than a year, and the police did nothing about it. And our media class applauded. And yet, because justice is no longer meted out equally if someone dares to dishonor the legacy of St. George Floyd, the New York Police Department Special Hate Crimes Division springs into action. Here's an actual quote, by the way, from this week on October 3rd, 2021 at approximately 10:15 a.m. in Union Square Park, a person on a skateboard threw gray paint on the face and base of a statue of George Floyd. That's the NYPD bulletin. Information, contact us!

So that's not really hypocrisy anymore, it's hierarchy. What they're telling you is that crimes against their ideas are the only crimes that matter. Well, that attitude has no popular support in this country, so you can only enforce it by force using surveillance to root out people who've got the wrong ideas. And that's exactly the basis on which the Biden administration is proceeding. That's why the administration has now given itself the authority to monitor everything that happens, for example, in your private bank account.

CNBCs Andrew Ross Sorkin: An effort that I know youre a proponent of for the IRS to collect more information and more tax dollars but more information about taxpayer bank accounts, including annual cash flows. I was curious whether you think the IRS has the wherewithal to actually do that.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen: Well of course they do. // And a simple way for the IRS to get sense of where that might be is just a few pieces of information about individuals bank accounts

Did you see that? The most interesting part of that exchange was not the Treasury secretary, she's embraced authoritarianism full-blown. It's the creepy little shill from CNBC. And the question is not does the IRS have the right to snoop into your bank account with no evidence you've done anything wrong? His question is, do they have the wherewithal, do they have the manpower? Can they actually pull it off? To what she says, of course, were the governmentwe can do anything.

WSJ EDITORIAL BOARD: THE IRS WANTS TO LOOK AT YOUR BANK ACCOUNT

So after January 6, this show reported that Bank of America "proactively" rooted through customers private financial information to find individuals who "met thresholds of interests." They spied on their own customers and then, like the good East Germans, they are, they passed those names to the FBI without telling anybody involved. The Democratic Party approves of this, and they want to make certain this kind of invasion of privacy is permanent. It's codified. And of course, they want to control your children to the center of your life. They'll destroy anyone who tries to stand in the way of this.

Bradley Keyes, for example, was a track and field coach at Pembroke Academy. He was fired because he didn't think it was good for his athletes to have to wear masks as they were playing tennis

Bradley Keyes, April 9: My goal is to get these mandates removed. And it's not just track and field. It's tennis. It is baseball. It's every outdoor sport. Masks will be worn at all times: practices and competitions. Tennis, wonderful example. Singles tennis. You go watch practices, everyone is wearing masks. Competitions, they will be wearing masks, even though they're 30 to 60 feet apart on the courts.

So we're going to tell you, we've told you a thousand times before, none of this is science. There's not a single study anywhere in the world that suggests kids benefit by wearing masks as they play sports outdoors. In fact, they are hurt by it. That's both common sense and the scientific consensus on the question. But the fact is it's happening anyway, and that's the point. They don't feel the need to justify their decisions with science, and in fact, they will punish actual scientists who object to these unnecessary medical mandates.

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Aaron Kheriaty, for example, as a physician at the University of California, he's the director of the medical ethics program at UC Irvine. Not a small job. He's just announced the university has "Put me on leave for challenging their vaccine mandates in court." Oh, so it's not a question of whether vaccine mandates help or hurt or good for public health, it's about power. And anyone who challenges it is crushed. The weak are hurt the most profoundly, as always.

Here's the story we'll be telling you a lot more about it in the coming weeks about a woman in Colorado who is facing death. She's got stage five renal failure. She's just been denied a kidney transplant. Now she has a donor, a willing donor, who has a kidney for her. Everything is ready to go. But according to the health system there, the woman and her donor have not taken the COVID shot. The donor explained that her vaccination status "does not affect any other patient on the transplant list... How can I sit here" the donor asked, "and allow them to murder my friend when I've got a perfectly good kidney and I can save her life?" That's a great question. No one the Biden administration has bothered to answer or even think about it. Instead, they're forcing anyone who raises these questions to be quiet. That's not a democratic system. That's an authoritarian system.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the October 8, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

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Tucker Carlson: The people in charge are intent on replacing democracy with authoritarianism - Fox News

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during a pen-and-pad news conference at the US Capitol on October 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

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Senator Bernie Sanders wants the public to know that the fight to pass Democrats $3.5 trillion social spending bill isnt just about meeting the needs of working-class families and combating the climate crisisits about the future of American democracy and whether oligarchs will be successful in defeating a popular agenda.

In a pen-and-pad briefing with reporters on Friday, Sanders focused on the wealthy and powerful special interests spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat the bill, urging the Capitol Hill press corps to reconsider horse-race coverage and instead think about whats really at stake.

Do you live in a democratic society? Sanders said. What kind of society are you living in, where you have three paid lobbyists for every member of the United States Congress? And you got lobbying firms led by former Democratic leaders, Republican leaders working overtime to try to defeat this legislation.

And then, he added, you have the fossil fuel industry, the health care industry, and the wealthiest people in the country spending millions to defeat it.

He continued to criticize Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona for obstructing legislation that the American people, the president, and an overwhelming majority of the Democratic caucus want. When asked if he needs to sit down in a room with Manchin and Sinema to negotiate a deal that makes everyone happy, Sanders replied, I dont know if youre a movie writerthis is not a movie.

Sanders also reiterated that he will not accept anything less than $3.5 trillion for the budget package.

President Joe Biden has floated a plan with a price tag as high as $2.3 trillion, while Manchin has said $1.5 trillion is his limita figure the Congressional Progressive Caucus has called a nonstarter. So Democratic leaders are in the process of deciding which of the countrys most vulnerable people will be thrown under the bus, as they weigh dropping or drastically cutting a range of climate and social safety net programs from their spending package to try to placate two senators. Current Issue

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To bring the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill downand that $3.5 trillion figure represents a combination of spending and tax cuts over the course of 10 yearsthe White House is trying to figure out what Democrats should slash first: billions to alleviate homelessness, universal pre-kindergarten, free community college, dental benefits for seniors, free school lunches, and so on. Some initiatives may be dropped entirely, and many of the social programs Democrats campaigned on are in danger of being means-tested into oblivion.

Manchin, a coal baron who represents one of the poorest states in the country, opposes his partys reconciliation on the pretext of avoiding an entitlement society. But his entitlement rhetoric comes as he fights to preserve tax giveaways to the oil and gas industry, an industry to which he owes much of his personal and professional wealth. The West Virginia senator is reportedly demanding that his colleagues pick just one of the top three priorities in the spending billan expanded child tax credit, paid family medical leave, or subsidies for child care. Sinema, on the other hand, has been much less transparent about the specific policies she does and does not support. But Sanders refuses to go down any further on the spending total. I think we do the programs that we have outlined and we fund them generously, he said. Thats not a choice.

Sanders, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, first proposed a plan to spend $6 trillion over a decadea package that included much of Bidens agenda. In late March, when the Biden administration was preparing to unveil its infrastructure plan, progressives and environmental groups were calling for $10 trillion in spending over the next decade for climate action alone.

Asked if hes worried that Democrats will ultimately walk away without passing anything at all, Sanders said he hopes thats not the case, but there is a chance. Is there a possibility, a horrible possibility, which would be so terrible for this country, that because two people refuse to do what 96 percent of the caucus wants, that nothing will happen? he said. There is that possibility, I think its a minimal possibility, but that possibility exists.

Excerpt from:
Bernie Sanders on the Corporate Threat to American Democracy - The Nation

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Editors note:This must-read essay from David Corn first appeared in his new newsletter,This Land.Given the ongoing efforts by Donald Trump and his followers to undermine American democracy and Davids spot-on analysis, we wanted to make sure as many readers as possible have a chance to see it. This Land is a newsletter written by David twice a week that provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, books, television, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a monthbut right now you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of This Land here.

President Joe Biden, I fear, may be screwing up. Not with the infrastructure bills. The current deliberations do look messy, but theres still plenty of time to concoct a compromise that expands education, health care, and other important social welfare programs and includes climate change action. Biden, though, might be miscalculating on another critical front: saving democracy.

As I and others havenoted, the nation is undergoing a crisis, with Donald Trump and his Republican comrades attempting to undermine democratic structures and norms to rig the system in their favor. For years, Republicans have tried to implement voter suppression schemes and have relied on gerrymandering (as Democrats often do) to gain a political advantage that would allow their minority party to exert majority control. Theyve been striving to create apolitical apartheid. And Trump and his devotees have supercharged this GOP effort with the Big Lie offensive and the seditious attack on the US Capitol, aiming to subvert democratic procedures to accommodate authoritarianism. Trumps never-ending assault on US electionsclaiming they are fraudulent unless they produce the results he seeksis poisoning the political culture. He wants his followers to believe democracy doesnt work, for then he (or others) can justify resorting to other means to grab and retain power.

And theres a Plan B: If you cant delegitimize the system, take it over. Trump loyalistsincluding QAnoners and other extremistsare signing upas precinct volunteers who can help pick poll workers and members of boards that oversee elections. That is, they are burrowing into the election system at the ground level. This is a scheme championed by Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser whomTrump pardoned. (Last week, Bannon, after speaking to a GOP social club about preparing for the next Republican administration,tolda reporter, If youre going to take over the administrative state anddeconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately.) A number of pro-Trump election denialists are nowattemptingto win secretary of state races; this will permit them to control the election apparatus in swing states. Meanwhile, Trumpsters promoting his election fraud disinformation are still pushing for sham audits inPennsylvania,Idaho, and elsewhere. And so far legislatures in 16 states have passed measures toshift election authoritiesfrom governors and secretaries of state to the legislatures, increasing the possibility of partisan wrangling over vote tallies.

Its a war on democracy. Trump has recruited the national Republican Party, local state officials, and a wide assortment of extremists for this battle.

After the election, Trump conspired with a handful of henchmen to try to overturn the election. He pressured officials at the Justice Department to declare the results corrupt. He leaned on state officials, especially in Georgia. He recruited a conservative constitutional lawyer, John Eastman, who drafted amemocontending that Vice President Mike Pence could nullify Bidens electoral vote victory. It was essentially a blueprint for a coup. (Pence didnt agree with Eastmans argument.) Trump incited a riot that had the potential to thwart Congress certification of Bidens win. He failed in these rearguardand largely behind-the-scenesactions, though he and his lieutenants came within inches of triggering an all-out constitutional crisis.

Now Trumps assault on the political system is out in the open. He denigrates the electoral system, and he has succeeded in convincing tens of millions of Americans that it cannot be trusted. A CNN poll last month found that78 percentof Republicans believe Biden did not win, and 54 percent said there is solid evidence of that. (There is not.) Moreover, Trumps continuing status as the leader of the Republican Partyand as its top contender for the 2024 presidential nominationsignals that the encouragement of violence to achieve a political end is widely excused, if not outright accepted, within GOP ranks. Only56 percentof Republicans say it is very important to find and prosecute 1/6 riotersa drop of 13 points since Marchand 57 percent note there has been too much attention paid to the attack.

This is a dangerous moment for the nation. As news coverage obsesses on the immediatethe tussle over the infrastructure bills on Capitol Hill, the rise in undocumented immigrants at the border, the debt ceiling dustup, the collapse of police reform negotiations, and so onthe media generally have failed to cover Trumps not-too-secret effort to break American democracy in a comprehensive fashion. The bogus audits draw attention, as do Trumps ceaseless and baseless claims of election fraud. But there is no overarching narrative focused on Trumps ongoing threat to democracy. This war in plain sight is not widely recognized.

Two weeks ago, Robert Kagan, a neoconservative who was a prominent cheerleader for the disastrous Iraq invasion, published a much-discussedpiecein theWashington Postdeclaring what some of us havepreviously pointed out: Our constitutional crisis is already here. Kagan opened by starkly observing, The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. Trump, he correctly noted, is driving this conflict. The former guy and his Republican allies, Kagan wrote, are actively preparing to ensure his victory [in 2024] by whatever means necessary. He warned that the stage is being set for chaos and [m]ost Americans and all but a handful of politicianshave refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it.

That may well include Biden. The president in July did deliver a passionate speech defending voting rights andderidedRepublican voter suppression and election subversion efforts. He asked the GOP, Have you no shame? And hecalledpassing legislation to protect and expand voting rights a national imperative. But that was months ago, and Biden has not yet wholly engaged in this fight to preserve democracy. He has not told the people the full story: Trump is imperiling the foundation of the American political system. He has not brought attention to the menace at hand.

Only Biden has the standingthe megaphoneto fully sound the alarm and convey this distressing narrative to a wide audience of Americans. He needs to connect the dots for the public, to clearly identify the various interlocking aspects of this struggle, and to call out Trump and the Republicans for more than their obvious voter suppression billsto name what they are doing as a treacherous assault upon the republic.

There are certainly reasons why Biden might not want to leap into all-out combat against Trump and the GOP at this moment. As a candidate, he vowed to pursue compromise with the other side and to attempt to repair the partisan wounds of the country. Blasting Republicans as a clear and present danger to the United States would not be in sync with that theme. And Biden is hoping to preserve some degree of Republican support for at least one of his infrastructure measures. Perhaps he figures there will be time to ring this bell after he pockets a few more legislative victories and before the next election.

Yet Trump and his cultists have already gained ground in this fight, as Kagan detailed. Should Biden wait much longer, it could become too late. The Republicans are further ahead in their campaign to rig the system than the Democrats are in blocking them. Texas Republicans, for instance, are well into their latestgerrymandering spreeto diminish the voting power of communities of color. Enacting measures that bring much-needed programs to the public is vital for Biden and the Democrats. Before the midterm elections next year, they must demonstrate to voters they can deliver. But there is nothing more in the self-interest of Democrats than to thwart the Republican crusade to manipulate electoral machinery for their benefit.

Without a functioning democracy, it will be impossible to do much about the pressing matters the nation faces: climate change, income inequality, racial justice, future pandemics, and much more. The top priority of the president referenced in the presidential oath of office is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. That is his chief obligation. Biden certainly takes this charge seriously. But the 46th president has yet to publicly reveal he realizes the scope of the all-out political warfare underway and that the fate of the United States depends upon the outcome.

The rest is here:
The Democracy Crisis: Could This Be Joe Biden's Big Mistake? Mother Jones - Mother Jones