2022 Wasn't About Defending Democracy

 A lot of people tried to argue that 2022 was going to be about defending democracy. Well, we've now seen how that turned out. But the truth is that 2022 was almost never going to be about defending democracy. At best, it was going to be a holding action against white supremacist patriarchy. And worse, it now appears that white supremacist patriarchy is about to outright win the US House of Representatives and might win the Senate.

This brings me to the real point I wanted to make here - your chance to defend democracy was in 2016, when so many of you hated a woman for the lies told about her that you let yourself be led to not vote for her. When freedom lost that election to an outright fascist, when control of the court was handed on a silver platter to Christian Nationalists, that was the end of democracy.

All the rest of this is the death and subsequent rotting of an already dead corpse of what used to be the hope that the US represented (but never really implemented). Until 2016, I think a large swath of Americans held onto a hope that things could get better, for people of color, for women, for LGBT people, for all minorities.

But after the election of a black president, the evil that is white supremacy felt threatened. And every election since then has been white supremacy reasserting itself. In the next 12 months, we will watch as a hyperconservative Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action. Don't be surprised if, in the following 2-3 years that same court allows segregation to be legalized again. Don't be surprised when LGBT people see marriage equality stripped away. Don't be surprised when women become less and less human beings and more and more just brood mares to the ruling conservatives.

And don't be surprised when the US becomes like Hungary or Russia, controlled by one hyperconservative theocratic fascist party (the GOP) while providing the illusion of democracy. Because Republicans have literally said that is their goal. The Republican governor candidate in Wisconsin, Tim Michels, promised that if he were elected, "Republicans will never lose another race in Wisconsin again". Just what did you think that meant?

Republican state legislatures across the nation have already passed laws allowing GOP controlled legislatures to overturn election results if they don't like the results of those elections. Those will get used in 2024. Be sure of it. Those laws were passed precisely because they didn't have the legal authority to do what Trump wanted in 2020 - overturn Biden's victory in GOP controlled states.

So let's stop pretending 2022 was about saving democracy. White people killed democracy in 2016 when they chose an openly racist, fascist thief and sexual predator over the most qualified person to run for the presidency in over a hundred years. If you thought defeating Clinton wouldn't hurt that bad, look around you, because I assure you, it's only going to get worse from here on out.