GOP chucks that “liberty and justice for all” stuff
Election integrity is like that old saying about teen boys who brag about their sexual “conquests”: Those who talk about it the most do it the least.
And, brother, do Republicans talk a lot. Like patriotism and freedom that way.
We’ve written plenty here over the years about the GOP’s obsession with election integrity and alleged rampant voter fraud believers can never seem to document. Trump’s Big Lie is just the most successful. Nurturing the impression that there are “so many problems” in elections is the point: to create public demand for solutions to an all-but-nonexistent problem. Barriers to voting operate like a one-way ratchet. Each new restriction passed means to shrink small-D democratic participation incrementally.
Greg Sargent summarizes the lie powering the Republican fervor for election integrity:
Here’s what’s really ugly about this saga: These Republicans aren’t just urging rule-breaking at the polls. They’re also justifying it by claiming in advance that Democrats are the real cheaters, per CNN, thus prefabricating a phony rationale for their own chicanery.
This self-justifying ruse — Democrats will inevitably cheat, so pretty much anything goes to set things right — is absolutely foundational to right-wing efforts to corrupt democracy across the board, including laying the groundwork to steal future elections.
After decades of Republicans promoting the narrative, “Democrats cheat” has become one of those “everyone knows” bits of mental flotsam conservatives take as given. No proof needed. Like “the Earth is flat.”
Sargent recounts efforts by the GOP in Michgan to undermine election rules, all justified by the “reverse-justification” that Democrats cheat, so their cheating is just tit-for-tat:
The 2020 results were confirmed by dozens of court cases and numerous audits. But no matter: The myth of a fraud-riddled 2020 will forever continue justifying whatever means Republicans decide are necessary at any given point.
Republicans are just trying to restore the integrity of our elections, you see.
[…]
For instance, Politico reported that the Republican National Committee recruited prominent Trumpist election deniers— including lawyer Cleta Mitchell — to train poll workers battleground states. This, too, is being done in the name of “election integrity.”
Multiple GOP state-level candidates promise in the name of election integrity to overturn 2022 election results that do not fall Republicans’ way. The very opposite of integrity. Then again, those who talk about it the most….
There is a corollary in right-wing media and in education policy, Sargent notes:
As Nick Catoggio writes at the Dispatch, the presumption of corrupt mainstream media bias runs so deep that it has morphed into an automatic justifier of deceit by right-wing media, no matter how debased. Writer Jennifer Berkshire has located a similar dynamic in right-wing assaults on public education.
Conservatives are forever victims in a diverse world hostile to recognizing their God-given right to minority rule. If they lose, someone must have cheated. Must have. No proof needed. (See post below.)
When that happens, Sargent writes, “anything goes, and it’s all just a power struggle all the way down.”
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