“Never a good sign for democracy when political parties start developing paramilitary wings,” tweets “Adam.”
That response came to Greg Sargent’s Friday column on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) staffing selections for the Jan. 6 select committee. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy faces a thorny decision about how Republicans might particpate. The violence was a serious matter. People died. Police officers suffered grievous injuries. Roll the tape.
McCarthy’s dilemma is that the investigation could implicate his caucus members in an attempt to “violently overthrow the U.S. constitutional order.” But appointing Republicans who might disrupt the hearings or attempt to shift their focus “toward some crackpot right-wing media obsession carries its own risks, precisely because the matter is so momentous.”
Sargent cites Rick Perlstein’s assessment of how Republicans brought themselves to this juncture:
Rick Perlstein suggests we’re witnessing “an insurgency against democracy with parliamentary and paramilitary wings.” The first consists of lawmakers who sided with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election through legal means that morphed into efforts at direct theft. The second consists of those who crossed into violence toward that same end, at Trump’s instigation.
Perhaps all this is best understood as a spectrum moving from “parliamentary” to “paramilitary.” Some Republicans fed the lies about Trump’s loss. Some supported sham lawsuits to overturn the results. Some voted to overturn Biden electors. Some state Republicans entertained sending rogue electors.
Some called on people to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally that produced the violence. Some now minimize and distort the attack, giving cover to a movement that actually did attempt to overturn the constitutional order through mob violence.
“Build your party’s power by actively seeking out thugs, and of course things eventually get out of hand,” Perlstein writes.
Combined with the Supreme Court’s fileting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act this week, what we are reliving is “the Reconstruction years after the Civil War,” writes Heather Cox Richardson:
That war had changed the idea of who should have a say in American society. Before the war, the ideal citizen was a white man, usually a property owner. But those were the very people who tried to destroy the country, while during the war, Black Americans and women, people previously excluded from politics, gave their lives and their livelihoods to support the government.
After the war, when white southerners tried to reinstate laws that returned the Black population to a position that looked much like enslavement, Congress in 1867 gave Black men the right to vote for delegates to new state constitutions. Those new constitutions, in turn, gave Black men the right to vote.
In order to stop voters from ratifying the new constitutions, white southerners who had no intention of permitting Black Americans to gain rights organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize voters. While they failed to prevent states from ratifying the new constitutions, the KKK continued to beat, rape, and murder Black voters in the South.
The KKK formed the paramilitary wing of white Southern Democrats calling for “Redemption” – “the return of white supremacy and the removal of rights for blacks – instead of Reconstruction.” Donald Trump’s Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and MAGA footsoldiers seek to redeem a political system that a century and a half later could elect a Black man president of the United States and permit the browning of America.
The parallels with the current Republican flood of anti-democracy sentiment and anti-voting legislation in the states do not require boldface. What has changed since the 1960s is the posture of the two major parties towards participation in the political process by non-white, would-be voters. Republicans stand now where Democrats stood in 1870.
So, in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to defend Black rights in the South. It also passed a series of laws that made it a federal crime to interfere with voting and with the official duties of an elected officer. And it passed, and the states ratified, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, declaring that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Immediately, white Americans determined to stop Black participation in government turned to a new argument. During the Civil War, the Republican Party had not only expanded Black rights, but had also invented the nation’s first national taxation. For the first time, how people voted directly affected other people’s pocketbooks.
In 1871, white southerners began to say that they did not object on racial grounds to Black voting, but rather on the grounds that formerly enslaved men were impoverished and were electing to office men who promised to give them things—roads, for example, and schools and hospitals—to be paid for with tax dollars. Because white men were the only ones with property in the postwar South, such legislation would redistribute wealth from white men to Black people. It was, they charged, “socialism.”
In 1876, white southerners reclaimed control of the last remaining states they had not yet won by insisting they were “redeeming” their states from the corruption created when Black voters elected leaders who would use tax dollars for public programs.
In 1890, a new constitution in Mississippi, which at the time was about 58% Black, restricted voting not on racial grounds but through a poll tax and a “literacy” test applied against Black voters alone. Mississippi led the way for new restrictions across the country. Although Black and Brown Americans continually challenged the new Jim and Juan Crow laws that silenced them, voting registration for people of color fell into single digits.
Trump’s new Klan and its parliamentary wing aspire to that again.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes and sounds like “Dixie.”