Whatever else one might say about David Frum’s political history, he called it in The Atlantic in January 2018. Never Trumper Bill Kristol tipped his fedora to Frum’s prescience a week after last month’s election:
Republicans in November lined up behind Donald Trump, the hair-sprayed loser of the presidential race, and behind the stolen election narrative he had constructed months earlier in case what happened happened. Whatever flag-waving patriotic pretensions the Republican base put on while singing with misty eyes Lee Greenwood’s anthem, it always felt synthetic. Frum knew it. Kristol too. So long as it secured Republicans in power and them their slots on “Meet The Press,” that was fine. Let the rabble dance. So what?
But for decades what bloggers once called the Mighty Wurlitzer of conservative media had addicted the base to daily hits of Two Minutes Hate. With Rush Limbaugh’s ascendance, the two minutes stretched to three hours. With the rise of imitators and Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid TV empire, stoking grievance became a 24-hour, profit-making enterprise. No longer the Republican Party’s media arm, conservative media made the Republican Party its legislative arm. So long as Republicans won, oligarchs got their legislation, and right-wing pundits and media barons got rich, so what?
Then in 2008 a charismatic Black Democrat won the presidency for eight years. The T-party revolution made it abundantly clear the flag-wavers’ allegiance was not to America as an ideal, but to a particular formulation that kept their tribe firmly in control, as God intended. Republicans in 2010 conspired to (and did) gain control of federal and state redistricting in enough states to keep Democrats at an electoral disadvantage for the next ten years.
Backlash to Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump and his disastrous non-management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The backlash to a quarter million Americans dead (and perhaps hundreds of thousands more to come) led to Trump’s reelection loss last month. But Trump ginned up a conspiracy theory that he could only lose if Democrats stole the election. His cultish followers and well over half the Republican Party still believe the liar. This, despite his lawyers’ allegations of massive fraud being laughed out of court over 50 times since Nov. 3.
Now the American republic has all gone sideways, as Frum warned. Conservatives played with fire. Now that fire like COVID-19 rages out of control. They have rejected democracy.
House Republicans — 106 of them — signed on to a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a Texas initiative to overturn election results in swing states Trump lost: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan. Eighteen states forming a kind of New Confederacy have joined the overturn effort spearheaded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, indicted in 2015 on securities charges. Paxton pleaded guilty and awaits trial. No doubt he expects a presidential pardon for his troubles.
No doubt many Republican officials believe there is no political downside to backing a case they think destined to fail anyway. David Graham writes in The Atlantic this morning, “The case seems to face very, very long odds, though it takes only five members of the Court to turn the preposterous into precedent. Even if the case fails, though, these Republicans have set a course of being willing to oppose the results of elections simply because they don’t like them. That is by definition antidemocratic.” That is the preposterous precedent being set. The courts are extras in this tragedy.
NBC News reports on the response from other states:
More than two dozen states filed motions with the Supreme Court on Thursday opposing Texas’ bid to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in four battleground states, a long-shot legal move that Pennsylvania blasted as a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”
Throughout Trump’s effort to thwart popular sovereignty, legal pundits have pooh-poohed the Trump team’s clownish legal efforts as doomed to fail. “Dangerous garbage, but garbage,” as Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen put it.
Anti-maskers dismiss COVID-19 in similar fashion. If they caught the virus, it would be mild, like the flu (superior genes?), but hardly life-threatening as skittish Democrats claim. The dead must have had underlying medical conditions.
And what of the country’s underlying conditions? With our people and economic foundations weakened by a deadly pandemic, and with the republic’s supporting norms knocked out from under it one by one over the last decade-plus, dismissing Trump’s public coup feels like whistling past the graveyard.
Winning the election or his legal cases is not Trump’s goal. Replacing the republic with autocracy is. Half the Republican House caucus just enlisted.
It is a fascist version of the camel’s nose and the tent. With each failed court case, they push it just an inch more, just another inch more, then another. Wise men snicker at the comedy of it and think there’s no way that camel is really getting inside the tent. Then, voila!
And so your German Shepherd sneaks onto the couch when you are watching TV.
What is left of the United States of America beside the 2nd Amend to which faux Real Americans™ of the New Confederacy “bear true faith and allegiance”?
Everything else these autocrats have repudiated.