The Senate voted, 49 to 43, strictly on party lines, to uphold the ruling that Warren violated rules of debate. Warren is now forbidden from speaking during the remainder of the debate on the nomination of Sessions.
“I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate,” Warren said after McConnell’s motion.
Read David Frum’s cover story from the March 2017 issue. In a cautionary report, Frum lays out how the preconditions already exist in the U.S. for a leader like Donald Trump to lead the country down a path toward illiberalism.
Swedish university finds ‘dramatic shift’ in GOP under Trump, shunning democratic norms and encouraging violence
The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.
In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.
The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
The first and decisive attribute of the autocrat is his power over life and death. No-one may come near him; a messenger, or anyone who has to approach him, is searched for weapons. Death is systematically kept away from him, but he himself may and must decree it. He may decree it as and when he wills and his sentence will always be executed; it is the seal of his power, and his power is only absolute so long as his right to decree death remains uncontested….
For, from every execution for which he is responsible, some strength accrues to him. It is the strength of *survival* which he gains from it. His victims need not actually have challenged him, but they might have, and his fear transforms them — perhaps only retrospectively — into enemies who have fought against him. He condemns them; they are struck down and he survives them….
Anyone who works his way to the top too quickly, or, by any other means, suddenly seizes control of such a system, will acquire an abnormal measure of the anxiety of command and will inevitably try to get rid of it. The threat which he uses continually, and which constitutes the real essence of the system of commands, finally turns against himself. Whether or not he is actually in danger from enemies, he always feels himself menaced. The most dangerous threat comes from his own people, those to whom he habitually gives orders, who are close to him and know him well. The ultimate means of deliverance, which he never wholly renounces (though he may hesitate to use it), is the sudden command for mass death. He starts a war and sends his people where they are supposed to kill, but if large numbers of them die there he will not regret them. However much he may dissemble, he is never free of a deep and hidden need to see the ranks of his own people thinned. To free him from the anxiety of command what is really necessary is that not only his enemies should die, but also many of those who fight for him. The forest of his fears has grown so dense that he cannot breathe and he longs for it to be thinned. If he waits too long his vision becomes blurred and he may do something which will seriously weaken his position. The anxiety of command increases in him until it results in catastrophe. But before catastrophe overtakes him it will have engulfed innumerable others.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960), translated from the German by Carol Stewart (1962)
