8 November 2022

It may be one of the most significant days in American history.

I feel like the resident of a planet, let's just say Earth for example, who has been worrying every day about a life-destroying asteroid that astronomers discovered a year ago. The threat is far out in space and its trajectory couldn't be determined until it got closer. The astronomers said, "November 8, that's the day. It will be close enough to finally make an absolute determination whether Earth will be destroyed or the asteroid will pass us by."

That's today, folks, and the Earth I'm talking about is the country of the United States. If the Republicans take control of Congress with wins in both House and Senate, it will likely mark the end of the USA as we have known it for the past 233 years. 

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist wrote yesterday:

If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention.

...

Ten or 20 years ago, those of us who warned that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extremist and anti-democracy were often dismissed as alarmists. But the alarmists have been vindicated every step of the way, from the selling of the Iraq war on false pretenses to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. 

....

America as we know it is not yet lost, but it’s on the edge.

I have been paying attention, and I do feel a huge sense of dread, as I have for many years.