Their plans come together
“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”
“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from”, said the Queen.
— Alice in Wonderland, chapter 9
The conservative base may be driven by what it “knows” in its gut, as Stephen Colbert’s alter ego once observed, but conservatism’s real movers are far more strategic. The left, not so much, despite pretensions to the contrary.
Thomas B. Edsall asked several authors and academicians how strategists of the right pursue their ends and by what means.
Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of political science and sociology, tell him what we see today in the states is the result of careful, long-term planning and organizing by the right’s strategists, particularly the Federalist Society, to produce “minority authoritarianism” inside a nominally democratic government.
Their base may dream of establishing a Christian nationalist theocracy, but for the right’s brain trust, turning the U.S. into a right-wing demockracy will do:
Skocpol outlined her thinking in an email:
The first-movers who figured out how to configure this new ‘laboratory of democratic constriction’ were legal eagles in the Federalist Society and beyond, because the key structural dynamic in the current G.O.P. gallop toward minority authoritarianism is the mutual interlock between post-2010 Republican control, often supermajority control, of dozens of state legislatures and the Scotus decision in 2019 to allow even the most extreme and bizarre forms of partisan gerrymandering.
These organized, richly resourced actors, she wrote,
have figured out how to rig the current U.S. system of federalism and divided branches, given generational and geographic realities on the ground, and the in many ways fluky 2016 presidential election gave them what they needed to put the interlock in place. They are stoking and using the fears and resentments of about half or so of the G.O.P. popular base to undo American democracy and enhance their own power and privileges. They are doing it because they can, and they believe in what they are doing. They are America’s G.O.P. Leninists.
That harkens back to the infamous 1983 Cato paper, Achieving a “Leninist” Strategy. The authors argued for a long-term, divide-and-conquer strategy for undermining support for Social Security using incremental changes to move the public toward private accounts. It might take years, but if that’s what it takes….
Similarly, Skocpol argues, incremental law changes mean that “behind a bare facade of ‘constitutionalism,’ [Republicans] can render majority-elected officials, including the President and many governors, officials in name only.”
Decades of conservative tweaks to election laws have worked to threaten the franchise of millions of Americans. That they have become more brazen about it over the last decades is a sign both of the those incremental changes bringing American democracy to the brink of demockracy and desperate recognition on the right that they are losing the culture war.
Tressie McMillan Cottom urges readers to keep an eye on the South where the right’s state-by-state strategy is coming to a head:
I also keep my eyes on the South because the Republican strategy of disenfranchisement is a state-by-state strategy. It looks like judicial rule where they cannot win. Where they cannot win by judicial rule, they will rule by procedural theft. Where they cannot persuade voters to vote for them, they will persuade the candidate they voted for to become one of them. This Republican strategy of winning by losing can work in any state, but it is most brutally efficient in states where we consider nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — inherently illegitimate.
The right won’t stop with Black voters.