Plenty of other signs should have been telling us already for a while that with Donald Trump and his fascist, phobic oligarchy our democracy is seriously and realistically at risk. But if those weren’t clear enough, then the startling admission from GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski, “We are all afraid”, should really raise the alarm.
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Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the moderate Alaska Republican who has routinely broken with her party to criticize President Donald Trump, has made a startling admission about the reality of serving in public office at a time when an unbound leader in the Oval Office is bent on retribution against his political foes.
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, speaking at a conference in Anchorage on Monday. After pausing for about five seconds, she acknowledged: “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
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[The Seattle Times article; The New York Times article]
Retribution against political foes, retaliation, and being anxious about using one’s own voice are not things that happen in a democracy: these are signs of an authoritarian regime. We’ve seen this happen elsewhere and we’ve seen this happen even in places that are considered the birthplace of democracy: just think of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, fascism, the Nazis, other dictatorships, and the two World Wars they caused.
People have fought (& died) for the democratic rights and liberties we have (had): we cannot take them for granted. The threat is real and we have to do something actively to stop the risk from becoming a hellish reality.
The Little Prince and the Fox 