Thomas Edsall has a long piece on the radicalization of the GOP. This is the point most people don;t want to admit:
Theda Skocpol, a professor of political science and sociology at Harvard, contended that many of the developments in states controlled by Republicans are a result of careful, long-term planning by conservative strategists, particularly those in the Federalist Society, who are developing tools to build what she called “minority authoritarianism” within the context of a nominally democratic system of government.
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.
Skocpol did not pull her punches:
This situation, locked in place by a corruptly installed Supreme Court majority and by many rotten-borough judicial districts like the one in Amarillo, means that minority authoritarians, behind a bare facade of “constitutionalism,” can render majority-elected officials, including the president and many governors, officials in name only. The great thing from the minority authoritarian point of view is that those visible chief executives (and urban mayors and district attorneys) can still be blamed for government nonfunction and societal problems, but they cannot address them with even broadly supported measures (such as simple background checks for having military assault weapons).
There are a number of factors that confirm Skocpol’s analysis.
First and foremost, the Republican Party’s commitment to democratic values and procedures has been steadily eroding over the past two decades — and the momentum has accelerated. The brakes on extremism are failing, with Donald Trump gaining strength in his bid for renomination and the continuing shift to the right in states like Tennessee and Ohio.
Second, in bright-red states, the embrace of far-right positions on such issues as abortion, guns, immigration and election denial is now a requirement rather than a choice for candidates seeking office. At the same time, in purple states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, a hard-right posture may be a liability in the general election, even as it is often mandatory in a primary contest.
The 2024 presidential election, if it is close, will test the viability of a mainstay of Republicans’ current antidemocratic strategy: a drive to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. In August 2021, ABC News reported that eight states (Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and Kentucky) have enacted legislation shifting power over determining election results to legislatures or partisan boards.
The ability of state legislatures to determine the winners and losers of elections now hangs on the outcome of a pending Supreme Court case, Moore v. Harper, which will determine the constitutionality of a fringe legal theory promulgated by the right, the so-called independent state legislature doctrine.
What’s at stake?
In a 2021 essay, “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time,” Richard Hasen, an election expert who is a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote:
A state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply meet and declare that local administrators or courts have deviated from the legislature’s own rules, and therefore the legislature will take matters into its own hands and choose its own slate of electors.
Put another way, according to Hasen:
The Jan. 6 insurrection, and Trump’s actions trying to change the Electoral College votes in five states, was an attempted coup built on the Big Lie of voter fraud. But the potential coup next time will come in neatly filed legal briefs and arguments quoting Thomas Jefferson and wrapped in ancient precedents and purported constitutional textualism. It will be no less pernicious.
Great, just great.
By the way, this is from 1997:
Norquist had to wait the better part of a decade for the Republicans to retake Congress. He spent the interim years in a constant state of readiness. Norquist assumed a revolutionary persona, eschewing bourgeois conventions like a wife and family, table manners, even personal relationships. When I asked Norquist which of his friends could tell me what he is like as a person, he suggested I speak to “anyone in leadership, House or Senate.” No, I said, I mean the names of people with whom he talks about something other than Movement politics. “I don’t have any friends like that,” he replied. This is true, it seems. “There might be a couple of family members Norquist keeps in touch with in spite of ideology,” says a former employee. Otherwise, “his relationships are exclusively based on philosophy.” “Grover’s a Leninist,” says one longtime acquaintance.
Norquist’s great philosophical relationship, forged during his years in the wilderness, is with another Leninist of the New Right, Newt Gingrich. Norquist says he sensed in their first meeting that Gingrich possessed the revolutionary spirit. “It was pretty obvious to me that this was a guy who wanted to change this town,” he says. Since then, the two have kept in close, usually weekly, contact—a fact that is instantly clear to anyone who picks up Norquist’s résumé, which begins with a footnoted quote from Gingrich hailing Norquist as a man who has “truly changed American history.”
That was written by Tucker Carlson. It’s been a long time coming.