Detroit Today: How stable is American democracy?

Several facets of American democracy are currently being put to the test.

Recently, two African American Tennessee lawmakers were expelled from their positions for bringing “disorder” to that state’s House of Representatives. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was found to have accepted luxury vacations secretly paid for by a billionaire Republican donor. At the same time, former President Donald Trump was indicted on 34 separate counts of falsifying business records.

Before all of this chaos, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a firebrand, Republican congresswoman from Georgia, called for a national divorce — saying maybe we could just divide the country by red and blue states and shrink the federal government.

“What we are careening towards is some kind of constant escalation of hostilities between the two sides — the blue states and the red states.” — Shikha Dalmia, writer

Listen: Questioning the stability of America’s institutions.

Guest

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, where she has started a new program to study and resist the rise of right-wing populist authoritarianism around the world and in America. You can follow her work on her Substack, “The Unpopulist.”

Dalmia says America’s political culture is divided, causing different states to desire separation.

“There is movement toward this idea that red states and blue states are not getting along right now,” says Dalmia. “Their issues are too fundamental.”