A common joke about high school boys is that those who talk about having sex the most are having it the least. Among people of faith, many zealously declaring theirs from street corners or in front of cameras understand faith the least. And flag-draped, self-described patriots who assaulted the Capitol Jan. 6 seeking to overturn an election? Well.
They do not love the actual ideals and democratic institutions of this republic so much as the land they were born into because they were born into it. They are nationalists more than believers in democratic principles, in “created equal,” in e pluribus unum, or in one person, one vote. Their faith in those is a mile wide and an inch deep. They believe in power for their tribe, not in principle.
Proof of that is on display in Republican-controlled legislature after Republican-controlled legislature where model legislation drafted by the Heritage Foundation is advancing for the purpose of thwarting democracy and securing minority rule in violation of the principle of popular sovereignty. It is on display in how histrionics have replaced any Republican effort to advance policy for improving Americans’ lives.
A candidate for U.S. Senate in North Carolina describes recent debate over updating the state’s social studies curriculum:
Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate, “The fact that all of the current Republican grievance can be distilled into some version of wailing about “woke cancel something something” certainly says something about the difference between actual governance and performance of governance.”
The effort to “frame their opposition to protecting fair and universal suffrage in free speech terms gives away the game,” Lithwick says of vote suppression legislation:
Maybe the abiding lesson in the case of Voting v. Speech, the 2021 edition, isn’t that the speech claims are trivial but that those trying to protect the right to vote are doing so on behalf of all Americans, across party, ideology, and race, whereas those making claims about who is being “canceled” are really only ever concerned about powerful Republicans and, in fact, only about powerful Republicans who are not named “Liz Cheney.” In other words, before we tumble too deeply into the false choice of privileging speech over voting, or succumb to the temptation to frame absolutely everything as a choice between being woke and being canceled, let’s recall that the party whining about being “canceled” (again, whatever that means) is also attempting to cancel the results of the 2020 election and therefore the actual votes of millions of people who voted in that election; to cancel political speech about the 2020 election results; to cancel the votes of millions of people who will vote in upcoming elections, by way of new vote suppression legislation; and to cancel speech and protest by ordinary citizens around the country by way of a raft of new anti-protest legislation. And all of this is being done by pushing provably false claims about a stolen election and illegal voting.
Republicans decry Democrats as socialists or as communists (when more bluntly red-baiting as though the Cold War never ended). Yet, they are “only interested in free speech for some, and in quashing speech for most,” Lithwick observes. “All animals are equal, but …” as Orwell wrote in his allegory about communist rule.
“Actions taken to protect against cancel culture (whatever that is) are symbolic and self-serving,” she writes, while the fight against voter suppression is fundamentally democratic. “Not every provision of the current voting reform bills is perfect, but to cast voting itself as anti-democratic is not just the stuff of Trump’s Big Lie, and of Jan. 6 itself, but the stuff of authoritarianism.”
Nationalism masquerading as patriotism.