Republicans reject “that voters have the right to choose their leaders”
“A majority of Republican candidates on the ballot this fall for major state and federal elective offices,” Marc Fisher writes in the Washington Post, join the former president in rejecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and, by extension, elections they do not win this fall. This “epidemic of election denialism” historians and political scientists see as clear indication of the U.S. “drift toward authoritarian rule.”
Valorization of strongmen and tech giants as men (it’s always men, isn’t it?) “who get the job done” is growing around the world, observes Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College.
Rejection of popular sovereignty is a feature of this trend. The defense of basic rights takes a back seat to economic concerns, especially for Republicans:
A new Monmouth University poll asked people what issues were most important as they considered their votes this fall, and 54 percent cited concerns about the economy and cost of living, while 38 percent said they were most concerned about fundamental rights and democratic processes. Republicans overwhelmingly put the economy first — 71 percent of them — and Democrats largely put rights first, at 67 percent.
That the people elect their leaders is fundamental to the country’s origin story. Yet it is that story Republicans have undermined now for decades. The current rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. is an outgrowth of those efforts, not a recent development, Heather Cox Richardson recounts in her newsletter:
Republicans’ rejection of the idea that voters have the right to choose their leaders is not a new phenomenon. It is part and parcel of Republican governance since the 1980s, when it became clear to Republican leaders that their “supply-side economics,” a program designed to put more money into the hands of those at the top of the economy, was not actually popular with voters, who recognized that cutting taxes and services did not, in fact, result in more tax revenue and rising standards of living. They threatened to throw the Republicans out of office and put back in place the Democrats’ policies of using the government to build the economy from the bottom up.
So, to protect President Ronald Reagan’s second round of tax cuts in 1986, Republicans began to talk of cutting down Democratic voting through a “ballot integrity” initiative, estimating that their plans could “eliminate at least 60–80,000 folks from the rolls” in Louisiana. “If it’s a close race…, this could keep the Black vote down considerably,” a regional director of the Republican National Committee wrote.
When Democrats countered by expanding voting through the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, more commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, a New York Times writer said Republicans saw the law “as special efforts to enroll core Democratic constituencies in welfare and jobless-benefits offices.” While Democrats thought it was important to enfranchise “poor people…people who can’t afford cars, people who can’t afford nice houses,” Republicans, led by then–House minority whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia, predicted “a wave of fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants.”
From there it was a short step to insisting that Republicans lost elections not because their ideas were unpopular, but because Democrats cheated. In 1994, losing candidates charged, without evidence, that Democrats won elections with “voter fraud.” In California, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s opponent, who had spent $28 million of his own money on the race but lost by about 160,000 votes, said on “Larry King Live” that “frankly, the fraud is overwhelming” and that once he found evidence, he would share it to demand “a new election.” That evidence never materialized, but in February 1995 the losing candidate finally made a statement saying he would stop litigating despite “massive deficiencies in the California election system,” in the interest of “a thorough bipartisan investigation and solutions to those problems.”
Yeah, well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in conspiracy circles, circles that have widened dramatically on the right since the 1990s. Ask Republicans to produce evidence of alleged massive voter fraud and they’ll boldly assert the proposition that it exists but the press refuses to cover it. Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake did so on Sunday. This absolves them of having to produce any and subject it to evaluation. Because they cannot.
“A proposition is a picture of reality,” wrote Wittgenstein. Statements that cannot be evaluated true or false are not propositions, and are more akin to statements of faith.
Republicans have lost theirs in the system they put tremendous time and expense into controlling with no intention of governing.
It was not so very long ago that historians taught the Wilmington coup as a shocking anomaly in our democratic system, but now, 124 years after it happened, it is current again. Modern-day Republicans appear to reject not only the idea they could lose an election fairly, but also the fundamental principle, established in the Declaration of Independence, that all Americans have a right to consent to their government.
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