Nancy Pelosi: the Linchpin to American Democracy

The Speaker is the last thread by which our democracy hangs.

For the most part, we have overcome fascism. Sort of. The issue at play within American democracy and the reason Trump became President, or even was the Republican candidate is because we as a country never properly dealt with the failures in our system laid bare after the Civil War. Rather than trying the rebels for treason they were not only issued a blanket pardon (another issue we’ll have to discuss at a later date) but many of them were given important society and academic positions and enshrined as heroes in the American mythos. As Isabel Wilkerson points out in her book Caste, Germany imprisoned and executed its fascist traitors and erected memorials to their victims while in the United States we — counterintuitively— did the exact opposite.

I know to a lot of white people that sounds like a massive tangent, but it’s why our democracy is imperilled. If you want a representative democracy everyone has to have equal access to and regard within the institutions. Stratification inevitably leads to fascism.

Trump was able to secure the Presidency in 2016 because of people’s refusal to vote for a woman, particularly a woman who upheld the ideals of equality and was well regarded among people of colour. Despite…