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The hoods are off

Consent is contingent on who gets a say

Capitol Breach 2. Photo by Brett Davis via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

This paragraph from Heather Cox Richardson’s substack is as succinct an explanation as any of the division in this country, of why a MAGA mob stormed and breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and why people in high places plotted to overthrow an election if not the government:

We have reached a place where Republican leaders no longer believe in the principle the nation’s Founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The idea that a government’s legitimacy comes from the fact its people choose it was the huge leap the Founders made to create a nation based not on monarchy but on democracy, and it is one of the two foundational principles of our government. Republicans appear to have rejected this principle and moved to the position that the election of Democrats is illegitimate and stopping such a victory—even if it is fairly won—is important enough to break long-standing laws in order to do it. 

The second foundational principle (as our 18th-century male founders understood it) is “all men are created equal.” The Civil War, Reconstruction, and 100 years of Jim Crow proved how much those flowery words were, for half the country, mere marketing.

I might take issue with Richardson’s assessment that Republican leaders no longer believe in either principle. One could argue that many conservatives never believed them, either when Democrats represented the ruling class on these shores or, since the latter half of the last century, now that Republicans do:

At the end of the Revolutionary War, there were an estimated half million Tories in this country. Royalists by temperament, loyal to the King and England, predisposed to government by hereditary royalty and landed nobility, men dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal.

After the Treaty of Paris, you know where they went? Nowhere. A few moved back to England, or to Florida or to Canada. But most stayed right here.

Take a look around. Their progeny are still with us among the one percent and their vassals. Spouting adolescent tripe from Ayn Rand, kissing up, kicking down, chasing their masters’ carriages or haughtily looking down their noses at people they consider inferiors.

Pretending to hold the two principles dear was the price colonial plutocrats paid to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves so they might plunder the New World unhindered by the British. They kept their own royalist leanings barely in check in polite company for over two centuries. Until Trump. The masks (and the hoods) have come off.

The royalists’ program today, as it was a century ago, is to reject the results of any election they don’t win and to prevent as many of their inferiors from casting ballots as possible. The goal is to render government of the people, by the people, for the people mere Model Congress role-play.

Paul Krugman wrote in 2014:

And now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.

The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy. And it’s by no means clear which side will win.

Stay tuned.

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