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Electoral McCarthyism

To extend the theme from my earlier post, let’s review something Jamelle Bouie wrote on Friday. As I’ve written repeatedly (perhaps ad nauseum), the extremist right and its Trump-infected political party will have its way with this republic or murder it so its enemies cannot.

Rejection of objective reality is just one tactic in that struggle. Rejection of democracy is another expression of what Ned Foley now calls “Electoral McCarthyism.” Any embrace of small-d democratic trappings is merely a matter of convenience or, like Trump’s flag-hugging, showmanship.

Bouie writes:

“Voter fraud” is not a factual claim subject to testing and objective analysis as much as it’s a statement of ideology, a belief about the way the world works. In practice, to accuse Democrats of voter fraud is to say that Democratic voters are not legitimate political actors, that their votes do not count the same as those of “the people” (that is, the Republican electorate) and that Democratic officials, elected with those illegitimate votes, have no rightful claim to power.

In a sense, one should take accusations of voter fraud seriously but not literally, as apologists for Donald Trump once said of the former president. These accusations, the more florid the better, tell the audience that the speaker is aligned with Trump and that he or she supported his attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. They also tell the audience that the speaker will do anything necessary to “stop the steal,” which is to say anything to stop a Republican from losing an election and, barring that, anything to delegitimize the Democrat who won.

Electoral McCarthyism “cannot be reasoned with, only defeated.” The question is how. So long as Trump remains at the center of a cult of personality, Bouie writes, Republican politicians who retain some sense of “Earth One” reality, “if they even exist, won’t say in public what they almost certainly say behind closed doors.”

Lauren Windsor has caught a few on camera saying in private what they won’t say in public. But it is not clear that other than titillating the left, such cotton candy promoted on lefty Twitter or on MSNBC has any effect on de-Trumping the Republican Party. There are true believers and there are operatives who blather bad-faith lies they know are lies and don’t care so long as they “work” for a news cycle or two. They spread falsehoods knowingly. Everyone is in on the scam. There is no sting to the sting. That McCarthy could not produce his list of 205 card-carrying communists in the State Department was beside the point. Proof was irrelevant, as it is today with voter fraud. Only the harm the accusations could cause mattered.

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