ANÁLISE
2022, um ano decisivo para a democracia nos EUA
Nas colunas dos mais importantes jornais norte-americanos
fala-se abertamente sobre os riscos de uma guerra civil nos Estados Unidos. Em
2022, esses avisos vão ser postos à prova por uma série de decisões do Supremo
Tribunal e pelas eleições intercalares de Novembro.
Alexandre Martins
27 de Dezembro de
2021, 0:09
https://www.publico.pt/2021/12/27/mundo/analise/2022-ano-decisivo-democracia-eua-1989327
Um ano depois da
invasão da sede do Congresso norte-americano por apoiantes de um Presidente dos
Estados Unidos em exercício de funções, a corrosão acelerada da democracia
americana é hoje uma realidade sobre a qual trabalham vários observadores e
estudiosos independentes.
Em Janeiro de
2021, nos dias que se seguiram à invasão do Capitólio por cidadãos
norte-americanos — um episódio sem precedentes na História dos EUA —, os
discursos de condenação do ataque, por parte dos líderes do Partido
Republicano, criaram a esperança de que o processo de deterioração da
democracia podia ser revertido.
“Cidadãos
americanos atacaram o seu próprio Governo”, disse o líder dos republicanos no
Senado, Mitch McConnell, na votação final do segundo processo de destituição de
Donald Trump, a 13 de Fevereiro de 2021. “Agiram dessa forma, porque foram
alimentados com falsidades delirantes pelo homem mais poderoso na Terra — que
estava zangado por ter perdido uma eleição.”
No mesmo dia,
McConnell votaria contra a condenação de Trump, permitindo que o responsável
moral pelo ataque ao Capitólio (segundo as suas próprias palavras) pudesse
voltar a candidatar-se à Casa Branca em 2024. Mas havia a esperança de que o
discurso do líder republicano fosse suficiente para trazer de volta à realidade
os eleitores que acreditaram nas “falsidades delirantes” de Trump (também
segundo as suas palavras de McConnell).
De acordo com as
leituras mais optimistas da altura, as queixas de fraude eleitoral (nunca
provadas em dezenas de processos nos tribunais e desmentidas por todas as
recontagens e auditorias, incluindo por apoiantes de Trump) iam acabar por
desaparecer com o passar do tempo, como tantas outras crises políticas e constitucionais
no passado — à excepção dos anos que antecederam a guerra civil
norte-americana, de 1861-1865.
“Sobrevivência do
país”
Se o ano de 2021
marcou o fim da ilusão de que Joe Biden — ou, para esse efeito, Barack Obama,
Oprah Winfrey ou Lincoln ressuscitado — seria capaz de salvar os EUA de uma
corrida acelerada em direcção a um futuro potencialmente explosivo, o ano de
2022 será decisivo para se perceber até que ponto ainda é possível salvar a
democracia americana de uma divisão tão profunda como a que originou a guerra
civil de 1861-1865.
Numa sondagem da
Universidade de Harvard, publicada no início de Dezembro, só 7% dos jovens
norte-americanos dos 18 aos 29 anos consideram que o estado da democracia no
país é “saudável”. A maioria, 52%, diz que a democracia está “em apuros”, ou é
mesmo já uma “democracia falhada”.
E a percentagem é
muito mais elevada entre os jovens republicanos do que entre democratas e
independentes — o que reforça a ideia de que as queixas infundadas de fraude
eleitoral lançadas por Trump passaram a fazer parte das crenças mais profundas
no Partido Republicano. Segundo a sondagem, 70% dos jovens republicanos dizem
que a democracia norte-americana está em risco, e 50% pensam que há pelo menos
50% de hipóteses de virem a assistir a uma guerra civil no seu tempo de vida.
Numa outra
sondagem, da Universidade da Virgínia, publicada em Outubro, mais de 80% dos
inquiridos em cada um dos partidos dizem que os representantes eleitos do
partido adversário representam “um perigo iminente para a democracia
americana”.
“Não é nenhum
exagero dizer que é a sobrevivência do país que está em jogo”, diz Dana
Milbank, um colunista do The Washington Post que foi correspondente na Casa
Branca durante a Administração de George W. Bush.
“Se conhecem
pessoas que ainda estão em negação sobre a crise da democracia americana”,
continua Milbank no seu artigo, publicado a 17 de Dezembro, “tenham a gentileza
de lhes tirar a cabeça da areia durante o tempo suficiente para que ouçam esta
mensagem: uma nova descoberta surpreendente, feita por uma das principais
autoridades do país em guerras civis no estrangeiro, diz que nós estamos à
beira da nossa própria guerra civil.”
A descoberta a
que o colunista do Post se refere faz parte de um livro com publicação agendada
para Janeiro de 2022, escrito por Barbara F. Walter, uma professora de Ciência
Política na Universidade da Califórnia que integra um painel de aconselhamento
da CIA sobre a instabilidade nos vários países do mundo — a Political
Instability Task Force.
“Ninguém quer
acreditar que a sua amada democracia está em declínio, nem que esteja a
caminhar para uma guerra”, diz Walter. “Mas se você fosse um analista de um
país estrangeiro atento aos acontecimentos na América — como se estivesse a
olhar para a Ucrânia, a Costa do Marfim ou a Venezuela —, iria usar uma lista
predefinida para avaliar as condições que tornam provável o início de uma
guerra civil. E iria descobrir que os Estados Unidos, uma democracia fundada há
mais de dois séculos, entrou num terreno muito perigoso.”
Segundo a análise
de Walter, os EUA já passaram pelas fases de “pré-insurgência” e de “conflito
incipiente” — duas das três categorias que o seu painel usa para avaliar os
riscos de uma guerra civil em qualquer outro país no mundo. “Só o tempo dirá”,
acrescenta Milbank, “se a fase final, a da ‘insurgência aberta’, começou com a
invasão do Capitólio.”
Supremo e
eleições
Em 2022, há pelo
menos dois acontecimentos que devem ser acompanhados com atenção para se
perceber se os avisos catastrofistas sobre o futuro da democracia americana vão
ficar mais perto de se tornarem realidade: a decisão final do Supremo Tribunal
dos EUA sobre o direito ao aborto no país, que vai ser conhecida em Junho ou
Julho; e as eleições intercalares de Novembro.
Numa audiência
preliminar, no início de Dezembro, a maioria conservadora no Supremo adiantou
que pode vir a devolver às assembleias legislativas dos 50 estados
norte-americanos a autoridade para decidirem, cada uma por si, em que
circunstâncias podem as mulheres ter direito a um aborto em condições de
segurança.
Na prática, essa
decisão iria pôr fim à consagração da interrupção da gravidez, em determinadas
circunstâncias, como um direito constitucional — que existe nos EUA desde 1973.
Ao mesmo tempo, aprofundaria ainda mais as divisões no país, no auge das
campanhas eleitorais.
E as eleições de
Novembro de 2022 são vistas, a esta distância, como muito importantes para o
futuro da democracia dos EUA, apenas dois anos antes da eleição presidencial de
2024.
É provável que o
Partido Republicano recupere a maioria nas duas câmaras do Congresso, o que lhe
dará ainda mais margem de manobra para continuar a aprovar, nos estados mais
conservadores, leis eleitorais que tornam legais muitas das pressões feitas por
Trump, em 2020, no sentido de impedir a vitória de Biden.
“Na eleição
presidencial de 2024, não haverá uma repetição dos acontecimentos de 6 de
Janeiro de 2021”, diz Lawrence Douglas, professor de Direito na Universidade de
Amherst, num artigo publicado no jornal Guardian, a 17 de Dezembro. “Quando o
Congresso abrir os votos do Colégio Eleitoral, a 6 de Janeiro de 2025, o golpe
estará consumado. Se isso acontecer, é porque o golpe foi preparado
antecipadamente nos gabinetes dos responsáveis eleitorais nos estados mais
disputados. E isso está a ser escrito neste preciso momento.”
Em Junho de 2020,
o mesmo Lawrence Douglas dizia, em entrevista ao PÚBLICO, que era “impossível
imaginar Trump a aceitar uma derrota nas eleições” — o que poucos se atreviam a
dar como certo na altura, e que viria a acontecer cinco meses mais tarde.
Opinion: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of
us would like to believe,’ new study says
By Dana
Milbank
Columnist
December
17, 2021 at 2:38 p.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/how-civil-wars-start-barbara-walter-research/
If you know
people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove
their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new
finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we
are on the cusp of our own.
Barbara F.
Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San
Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task
Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are
most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t
assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter, a longtime friend
who has spent her career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern
Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere,
applied the predictive techniques herself to this country.
Her bottom
line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She
lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,”
out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in
decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a
foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at
events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a
checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And
what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two
centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the
United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two
phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases —
and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with
the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
Things
deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no
longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic
Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most
helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United
States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic
state.
U.S.
democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for
much of its history. But in the five years of the Trump era, it tumbled
precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S.
score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first
time since 1800. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,”
Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand,
and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica,
and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping
five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war (six points
in three years would qualify as “high risk” of civil war). “A partial democracy
is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter
writes. “A country standing on this threshold — as America is now, at +5 — can
easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and
increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”
Others have
reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of
“backsliding democracies” in a report last month. “The United States, the
bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies
itself," the report said. And a new survey by the academic consortium
Bright Line Watch found that 17 percent of those who identify strongly as
Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39
percent favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing
effectively.
The
question now is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans
have led us to. There is no more important issue; democracy is the foundation
of everything else in America. Democrats, in a nod to this reality, are talking
about abandoning President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in favor of
pro-democracy voting rights legislation. Republicans will fight it tooth and
nail.
The enemies
of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the
“open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once
countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as
increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and
guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”
It is no
exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake.
Republicans are plotting to destroy democracy
from within
Lawrence
Douglas
Opportunism and cowardice has more than sufficed to
make Republicans espouse a noxious falsehood as an axiomatic truth
Fri 17 Dec
2021 08.47 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/17/republicans-plotting-destroy-democracy
At hand is
a plot to destroy American democracy from within. Its organizers have
infiltrated the highest echelons of state and federal government, and have
instigated and condoned acts of violence directed against our elected
officials. This might sound far-fetched. But the threat is real and the
seditious group is none other than the Republican party. Its target is the 2024
presidential election.
Less than a
year ago, Donald Trump limped from the White House a badly discredited figure,
roundly condemned for having instigated a shocking attack against a coordinate
branch of government. The 6 January insurrection seemed like a wake-up call to
Republican lawmakers. No longer could they indulge the self-serving story that
Trump was simply an uncouth, untraditional president. The reality was stark and
undeniable. The president was at heart a petty autocrat, willing to torch
democracy to cling to power.
The wake-up
call went unheeded. The critical inflection point came during the second
impeachment trial, when Republican senators had the opportunity to join
Democrats in condemning Trump. And while seven Republican senators voted along
with all 50 Democrats to convict, this still left the Senate 10 votes short of
the 67 needed to hold Trump to account.
Emblematic
of the Republican refusal to reckon was the stance adopted by Mitch McConnell,
who only weeks before had lost his position as Senate majority leader. On the
floor of the Senate, McConnell delivered a powerful condemnation of Trump –
only then to vote to acquit. Insisting that an ex-president was
“constitutionally not eligible for conviction”, McConnell cynically overlooked
the fact that the purpose of the trial was not to remove Trump from office but
to bar him from ever running again. And while McConnell presumably was hoping
to mollify the Republican base while keeping Trump himself sidelined, that
strategy backfired grandly.
The
acquittal served as the first step to Trump’s rapid rehabilitation and the
further radicalization of the Republican party. Ten months ago, McConnell
castigated Trump for spinning “increasingly wild myths about a reverse
landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup”. Now these same
myths have been elevated to first principles of the Republican party, as the
party has come to effectively close its doors to those unwilling to lie about
the 2020 election. In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith had to be tortured
into declaring that 2+2=5. In the case of today’s Republicans, no torture has
been necessary. Opportunism and cowardice has more than sufficed to make
Republicans across the land espouse a noxious falsehood as an axiomatic truth.
No less
ominous has been the whitewashing of the insurrection itself. Ten months ago,
McConnell declared the “mob … assault[ed] the Capitol in [Trump’s] name. These
criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their
loyalty to him.” Hardly a day passes without fresh revelations from the House
select committee, documenting the shocking steps Trump contemplated in his
effort to remain in the White House. Yet despite the intrepid work of Liz
Cheney, the larger Republican response has been to distort and suppress the
committee’s findings. Paul Gosar, the Arizona congressman who recently posted
an animated video that depicted him slashing to death his House colleague
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has recast the insurrectionists as patriots. Others,
including Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, have insisted the attack was a
false-flag operation, a conspiracy theory given traction by Tucker Carlson’s
three-party series.
Republican
state lawmakers have in turn weaponized the lies about the 2020 election and
the 6 January insurrection to gain control over the local administration of
elections. Bad enough are the 33 laws that have been passed in 19 states
designed to make it harder for persons of color to vote. But more disturbing
still are the Republican party’s radical efforts to purge officials who
resisted Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 results and replace them with
loyalists who have bought into the big lie. Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin
are seeking to eliminate the state’s bipartisan elections commission altogether
and to install themselves as the sole arbiter of state election results. And
more than a dozen other red states have similarly enacted laws to transform the
counting and review of ballots cast into a carefully monitored partisan
exercise.
By the time
insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on 6 January, the 2020 election was a fait
accompli. True, Trump tried desperately to forestall Congress from counting and
accepting the duly certified state electoral certificates attesting to Biden’s
victory. What ultimately frustrated Trump’s putsch attempt was the fact that
election officials in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania
had already accurately and honestly reported the results. Many of these
officials were Republicans. They acted in simple defense of democracy and were
rewarded with death threats, ostracism and now ouster.
Come 2024
these quiet custodians of democracy will have been replaced with loyalists and
hacks ready to muddy the waters or supply the votes to secure a Trump win. The
2024 election will not witness a repeat of the events of 6 January. By the time
Congress tallies the electoral votes on 6 January 2025, the putsch could be
complete. And if it is, it will have been staged in the small offices of the
election officials in the key swing states. And it’s all being scripted now.
Lawrence
Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming
Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian
US and teaches at Amherst College
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