Hand it to our conservative neighbors. They are many things, but what counts is that their leaders are strategic and relentless. Against a left organized around its own ideological certainty, but fickle, it’s no contest.
Conservatives want to rule. They see their grip on power eroding to relentless demographic change. Like Iraqi Sunnis after De-Ba’athification, they are angling to lock in any control for themselves while they still can. They are working it in plain view just as the plotters behind the Jan. 6 insurrection did. And there’s nothing they like so much as a twofer.
Ron Brownstein explains at The Atlantic that Republican machinations to restrict voting and efforts to censor what’s taught in schools are two fronts of the same war:
The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as many areas grow significantly more racially and culturally diverse. Voting laws are intended to reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate; the teaching bans aim to shape the attitudes of tomorrow’s.
“This is the next wave of voters, so the indoctrination that we see occurring right now is planting the seeds for the control of that electorate as they become voters,” Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me recently. “They are trying to manipulate power and exert their influence at both ends of the spectrum by limiting those who can cast ballots now, and by indoctrinating those who can cast ballots later.”
The schools putsch, Brownstein explains, is perhaps “the last battlefield” between the GOP’s “coalition of restoration,” made up of people most unsettled by rapid societal change, and Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” assembled from people most adaptable to the changes.
Chris Hayes Friday night noted the sophistication of the coup plot for presenting Vice President Mike Pence with seven alternate slates of Trump electors on Jan. 6. These guys are not fooling around with street protests and handmade signs. Like the phony electors plot, these efforts are coordinated and happening in multiple states at once.
In 2021, nine Republican-controlled states approved laws limiting the discussion of racism (and in many cases gender inequity), and four others imposed restrictions through the state’s board of education. This year, the pace “has clearly accelerated,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, told me. Of the 122 state bills that Sachs has tracked for PEN America, a free-speech organization, since January 2021, more than half have been introduced just in the past three weeks as state legislatures have reconvened for this year’s session. So many proposals are surfacing so fast that Sachs said his “gut instinct” is that all 23 states where Republicans control both the governorship and the state legislature eventually “will see a [censorship] bill passed.”
These school measures, like voting restrictions are introduced “exclusively” by Republicans, says Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia. They are being passed through state after state on party-line votes backed “by influential conservative groups such as Heritage Action for America.”
Where the courts fail to support conservative causes, they do not quit. The decades-old fight over women’s reproductive autonomy is proof of that. They keep at it. They appoint conservative judges and change the courts.
And rewrite the rules to “reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate.” Ari Berman has news on that from Georgia:
“States are not engaging in trying to suppress voters whatsoever,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared last year.
Facts on the ground in Georgia tell a different story. A new data analysis by Mother Jones shows that the number of voters disenfranchised by rejected mail ballot applications skyrocketed after the GOP-controlled legislature passed sweeping new restrictions on mail voting last year. The law enacted in March 2021 shortened the time people have to request and return mail ballots, prohibited election officials from sending such applications to all voters, added new ID requirements, and dramatically curtailed the use of ballot drop boxes, among other changes.
During municipal elections in November, Georgia voters were 45 times more likely to have their mail ballot applications rejected—and ultimately not vote as a result—than in 2020. If that same rejection rate were extrapolated to the 2020 race, more than 38,000 votes would not have been cast in a presidential contest decided by just over 11,000 votes.
Municipal election voters tend to be more engaged than general election voters. So, the impact could be worse in 2022 and 2024.
Bottom line, these players think long-term. They are patient. They are relentless. They are determined and well-funded. Good vibes and purity of intent won’t beat them. It will take years of hard work in the face of setbacks.