General Discussion

This is class warfare at its most fundamental, and in order to collapse democracy you need to destroy the party that can be used to rally everyone else. The communist party in Germany in the days leading up to the Third Reich were what we would probably recognize today as social democrats. One of the first things that Hitler did, before he even came to power as Chancellor, was to use his Brown Shirts to attack, harrass, and in many cases kill outright the Communists, even before he began his pogrom against the Jews, and if you look at the rise of most authoritarian governments, eliminating the primary opposition party (especially if they've been in power before) is pretty much standard practice. Remember that a lot of this started with the Southern Strategy, led primarily by the investment class at the time that saw the Democrats as turning against them. They invested HEAVILY in barely surviving seminaries and televangelists then shifted their strategy to controlling the rural airwaves. Johnson was hated by this group almost as much as FDR had been a generation earlier.