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Inflation Worries Push Americans Toward Authoritarianism to Their Economic Detriment
Watch the news each day, or each hour of the day in our cable news surveillance culture, and you’ll see constant reporting on two key stories that would seem to be at odds with one another, raising puzzling questions as to the state and content of American voters’ mentalities when it comes to assessing their interests and determining their priorities heading into the 2022 midterms this November.
One the one hand, each news day — again, even each news hour — seems to yield new revelations about the increasingly vast extent to which members of the GOP were involved in trying to overturn the results of 2020 election, both through political machinations that would have stymied the certification of the electoral votes and sown doubt about the election’s legitimacy and by consciously and strategically abetting the violence of January 6.
And we know these efforts haven’t stopped. A good portion of the GOP continues to peddle lies about the election being stolen, and we have seen states with Republican-led legislatures passing voter suppression laws and other election laws, such as we see in Georgia, that would actually enable state legislatures to dismiss the electorate’s popular vote and determine which candidates will take office.
