God help me, I’m living in a Cohen Brothers film slowly working its way to the inevitable denouement.
I’ve said forever that Republicans’ conspicuous patriotism is so much Potemkinish facade. The base might believe it, but the elected Barnums behind the sideshows perform patriotism just to sucker the rubes out of their loose change.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern this morning outline the nihilism driving the GOP to drop all pretenses of believing in democracy and to reconfigure the United States as rapidly as possible as a one-party state immune to it. The Republican Party has become antimatter to popular sovereignty.
Yes, Texas’ S.B. 8 bounty-hunter scheme for eliminating abortion services there is unpopular. Republicans know that and they don’t care. They don’t have to care. State legislatures, the pair explain, “are beginning to govern as though majorities of the electorate either cannot vote or won’t even bother.” And if majorities do vote against them, it won’t matter. They’ll see to it.
Election suppression laws are old news. The GOP has moved on to election subversion:
In the months since Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, the voting rights fight has moved—as our colleague Rick Hasen has been trying to explain—from voter suppression to election subversion. This problem can’t be resolved by simple get-out-the-vote efforts, Hasen argues. Republicans envision a future in which they can steal entire presidential elections, an idea gaining traction in some state legislatures right now. Welcome to the new GOP—the post-voting party.
Laughable election audits exist just to sucker the rubes. Republicans already don’t believe in elections they do not win. “Fraudits” in Arizona and in states Donald Trump won in 2020 exist to reinforce that belief for 2022 and beyond. Rumors of fraud provide the pretext for new laws allowing Republican-controlled legislatures to overturn election results themselves. Add to election suppression, manipulation of census date, partisan gerrymandering, and court-packing the ability to overturn elections, and it becomes impossible ever for a majority of non-Republicans to turn minority Republicans out of office.
The people who are churning out wildly unpopular laws are doing it because they believe they are immune from electoral consequences. One reason the Texas Legislature simply doesn’t care about backlash against its radical 2021 measures is because the Texas Legislature has no intention of honoring the outcome of elections going forward. That includes presidential elections, which decide judicial appointments.
So, yes, it’s important to organize around abortion and state legislatures passing wildly unpopular laws like S.B. 8 that are wholly out of line with public sentiment. But the problem is that they know people will be upset about abortion, and they are already taking the steps to ensure that does not affect their hold on power. Which is why absolutely nothing else we do will be as imperative as ensuring that we have free and fair elections whose results are honored. Hasen built a road map last week to achieve some of that. The path to restoring reproductive rights in Texas, and around the country, begins, as it always has, with forcing ourselves to care about local canvassing board members and secretaries of state. Otherwise, the GOP will continue to run the table, merely because it can.
Progressives and their donors need to get their heads out of their asses when it comes to where the real action is in elections. Republicans have long targeted school boards for a reason, several reasons. They want to undermine public schools and divert public funds to private religious schools, but they also see election to school boards as springboards to higher office. First local, then state, then national.
Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! F*** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
Progressives who pour all their political investment into federal elections are forfeiting local and state platforms to opponents more than happy to exploit the undefended, open field to run up the score for their side. Control of state legislatures means control of redistricting, influence in appointment (or election) of judges, the ability to hamstring governance in Democratic-led cities, the ability to cut taxes and services, making government seem more dysfunctional and cities that much more fertile for right-wing populism and nihilism.
Granted, much of the election-rigging underway in red-state capitols now is driven by a desire to return Donald Trump to the White House in 2024. But the long-term goal goes far beyond that to remaking the United States a mockery of its beacon-of-democracy branding.
Say what you like about the former Republican Party, Dude, at least it had an ethos.
Update: Fixed some formatting of Slate paragraphs.