Do you think that a more successful version of 1/6/2021 (either via more violence or successfully pressuring the Vice President not to certify votes) would not be a threat to democracy? To me that seems like the most likely way for Trump's general antagonism to liberal democracy to manifest itself.
A fair question.
So first of all, I would say January 6th was the biggest embarrassment to MAGA people, and to Republicans in general, of the last seven years or so. You can see this just by listening to the political discourse surrounding Trump. Democrats love to bring it up as much as possible, while Republicans find every possible way to be on the defensive ("Yeah, it was bad, but its badness is exaggerated -- it doesn't technically fit the definition of coup or even insurrection -- nobody brought guns or was actually killing people -- you just want to make everything about January 6th -- what about the BLM riots around the country the previous summer?"). I once was confronting a previously staunchly liberal friend who started voting Republican and seeming to abandon most of her left-wing stances on a variety of issues following being pissed off at how Democrats in California dealt with school closures during the pandemic, and asking her whether her new convictions really outweighed the horrors of another Trump term; when I brought up January 6th, the best response she had was, "That was terrible and the truth is I think most Republicans feel terrible about January 6th."
My point being that January 6th, 2021 was a disaster for MAGAism and the Republican party in general (if Harris winds up winning narrowly in November, I'm going to say that if January 6th hadn't happened, she would have lost, and that is truly a silver lining), and most Republicans know it. Unfortunately, Trump himself and his most impassioned cult followers are among the only ones not wise enough to know it. So yes, I expect a worse version of January 6th could occur, which would be an even bigger disaster for the Republican party and likely spell the death of MAGAism altogether (as opposed to, say, turning us into a one-party state under Trump and the MAGAists) but be a very, very horrible event in and of itself. I guess my point is, what effects would this have beyond the immediate? I guess the worst-case scenario -- which is admittedly historically bad for our country -- would be that that the VP is willing not to certify votes this time, that a constitutional crisis is triggered which has to be decided by various courts now stacked explicitly in Trump's favor, and a Trumpist president (which could only be Trump himself if he managed to ram through an end to term limits and if his health is holding up at 82) and/or members of Congress wrongly get elected.
This would be a highly, highly undemocratic event in the history of our country, but not much more undemocratic than, say, Bush's election in 2000 was; meanwhile, I predict that Trump himself will be not much longer for this world, that a very solid majority of Americans will be awake to the dangers of MAGA and fight against it like nothing we've seen before, that an actual focused policy agenda would fail to come to fruition, and that the political backlash would be decisive (the basic form of our government and mechanisms for elections would still be in place, and could those in power really fix the results if they were losing by a true landslide rather than marginally? I tend to think not.)
Would this worst-case scenario be an absolutely appalling sequence of events? Yes, and plenty of reason to fear Trump's return to power (even though it still relies on a lot of "if"s). Would it unravel the structure of our government to turn it into something more like a dictatorship, or in other words, "destroy democracy"? It's hard for me to concretely imagine a way that it would.
I suppose I'd prefer that phrases like "insult to democracy", "degrade/undermine democracy", and "antidemocratic" be used over phrases like "destroy democracy" and "make himself a dictator". But, I don't know, if the latter are doing a better job of turning swing voters against Trump than they are at giving Trump supporters more ammunition for diagnosing half the country has having Trump Derangement Syndrome, then I guess I'm in favor of that rhetoric for the short term of the next three months.
