The Fate and Future of American Democracy Hangs On the Minimum Wage

If Biden & Harris don’t act now, the window will close

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

It looks like President Joe Biden is going to cave on the $15 an hour minimum wage. And it looks like Chuck Schumer is going to cave on ending the filibuster.

While these are disappointing failures to progressives because of the harm they’ll do to working people, they’re also extraordinarily dangerous to the future of American democracy.

These failures will add to the skepticism of the American people that government, as we have it today, can never work on their behalf, and thus increase their willingness to accept replacing democracy with a Trump-style strongman oligarchy.

The simple fact is that the Republican Party no longer believes in democracy. They haven’t for some time, which is why they’ve spent the last 20 years working so hard to make it more difficult for Americans to vote. It’s why they’re willing to promote monstrous Big Lies to achieve their political goals. It’s why they refuse to use the correct name of the Democratic Party (the oldest political party in the world) and instead will only call it “the Democrat Party” (something that doesn’t even exist).

Republicans now only believe in billionaire money and power, and that kind of a singular focus by a country’s politicians usually leads to the replacement of democracy with oligarchy and, soon thereafter, tyranny.

We saw this movie once before in the 1930s in Europe, and are watching it play out today in Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, the Philippines, and Brazil, among others. Democratic governments in each of these countries have been or are being replaced by modern-day fascist governments with strongman leaders.

Tragically, because of Trump’s rhetoric and four decades of unwillingness by the GOP to pass any legislation that benefits average people, tens of millions of frustrated Americans are on-board with the Republican’s move toward fascism and the end of the American democratic republican experiment.

They believe in a zero-sum racial theory that says the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s, which they want to re-capture, was based on keeping women and minorities down, and that…