'..Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, an early 2020 candidate for president, had cited Benjamin Franklin’s renowned (and probably actually uttered) words: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Barely an hour later, chaos had the floor.''The United States on Wednesday seemed at risk of becoming the very kind of country it has so often insisted it was helping: a fragile democracy.
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But is this truly an inflection point, or simply another escalation — one in a series that has unfolded so gradually in recent years that the unimaginable of 2015 has become the merely repetitive in 2021? Is this the final gasp of something linked to the current administration, or the emergence of something that will become a dominant strand in the national DNA for decades?
“It seems like a different country, in one of those places where coups happen,” said Bev Jackson, chair of the Democratic Party’s Cobb County African American caucus in Georgia, where two Democrats won U.S. Senate seats in runoff elections Tuesday.
“I think people have feared a moment like this might be coming,” Jackson said. “It’s really sad and it’s really tragic but I think people have been bracing themselves for this.”
All over American television and on social networks were different permutations of the same statement: This isn’t what America is. But what if it is? Indeed, many Americans who watched it all had similar how-could-this-happen-here reactions, echoed by newscasters and interviewees who used phrases like “banana republic” and the more unfortunate “like a third-world nation.”
It raises the question: What on Earth does this look like abroad, where the United States has long positioned itself as a fixer of such things?
“I feel like I’m watching an American film,” said Laurie Pezeron, the founder of a Black literature book club who lives in the suburbs of Paris. “I just hope it doesn’t end up with a civil war.”
Which brings us back to the Senate, shortly before it was infiltrated by intruders. Debating the objection to Arizona’s balloting, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, an early 2020 candidate for president, had cited Benjamin Franklin’s renowned (and probably actually uttered) words: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Barely an hour later, chaos had the floor.'
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A moment in America, unimaginable but perhaps inevitable, January 7, 2021
Context'It's insurrection.' - Biden