(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Republicans are erasing democracy: Tressie McMillan Cottom places it in American history [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-11 Rep. Justin Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones, expelled by the Republican majority in the Tennessee legislature for daring to speak up while being black, among other things. Tressie McMillan Cottam has a thoughtful opinion piece in The NY Times. (The web page url has a somewhat different message than the headline: “To See Where America is Headed, Look to Tennessee”) Cottom has a way of discussing what’s happening that brings a terrible clarity to what’s happening in America with a brutal poetry. ...We like to look to the horizon instead of to the soil because we bury the people we do not care about in the South. It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people. It is where we put the social problems we are willing to accept in exchange for the promise of individual opportunity in places that sound more sophisticated. But the South is still a laboratory for the political disenfranchisement that works just as well in Wisconsin as it does in Florida. Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope. After discussing what’s happening in Tennessee and North Carolina, she ties it to the history of America: I keep my eyes on the South for a lot of reasons. This is my home. It is the region of this nation’s original sin. Nothing about the future of this country can be resolved unless it is first resolved here: not the climate crisis or the border or life expectancy or anything else of national importance, unless you solve it in the South and with the people of the South. What is happening is not an accident. It’s a deliberate strategy. 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. And here’s the kicker: The South is not exceptionally racist. The South is quintessentially American in its racism. The distinction is clear in how, of the three representatives in question, Tennessee expelled the two Black men but the third, a white woman, held on to her seat. The strategies of disenfranchisement are clearest where the racial animus is strongest. emphasis added She expects Trump can deal with his legal troubles, and keep his grip on the GOP — the only thing that can derail Trump is Trump himself. It’s the larger historical forces she’s watching. The next season of America does look brutal, if you are interested. It looks like more Trumps with better hair and less orange spray tans. They don’t sound as confused as Ron DeSantis, who has never been as brutal as his handlers need him to be to make a real play for the national scene. The kind of brutality you need to really summon the South’s ghosts needs more than a televangelist like Trump. It needs a true believer. That’s a Southern specialty. I keep my eyes on the South. Cottom sees with clear eyes what is happening in plain sight. It is something the media in general and too many Democrats seem unable to take in. Tom Sullivan observes: I am alarmed, frankly, by events in Nashville. Republican authoritarians mean business. Yet, Democrats in the states and in D.C. seem not to believe what their eyes are seeing. Nor are they mobilized to fight Trumpism with more than politics as usual. The “Tennessee Three” get it. But how many of the rest of us? Benjamin Franklin remarked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that we had formed a republic if we could keep it. If we are not prepared today — mentally and in our guts — for the fight MAGA Republicans are already waging against that representative democracy, future historians may ask Democrats hiding in caves how we lost it. As Hemingway wrote, “Gradually, then suddenly.” Digby is also appalled, but sees some possible hope: She [Kellyanne Conway] and her accomplices built a political party based upon bigotry and hate. They approve of torture and celebrate death. They addicted their followers to conspiracy theories and rank tribalism. Old people like me watched it happen over time and it was just slow enough that we didn’t see the full scope of how ignorant and nihilistic their movement had become until Trump came along. Young people see them for what they are — and they are appalled. They and their friends don’t want to live in a country where people like this are in charge. They have large numbers and they are engaged and active. As for the issues of abortion, guns and climate change, young people know hypocrites when they see them and they won’t be fooled by insincere outreach efforts. And they will be insincere because Republicans have trained their own voters over many years to believe that abortion is murder, unfettered gun rights are inalienable and climate change is a hoax. Nobody will be able to thread that needle. All that’s on top of the fact that they are racist, homophobic and transphobic, misogynist monsters. If there’s an obsession with Trump in the press and among the chattering classes, a lot of it seems to be based on the delusional hope that if Trump can somehow be pried loose from the Republican Party, they can all go back to pretending Trump was an aberration, and the GOP is still a legitimate participant in American democracy — instead of the existential threat it has become with or without Trump. Sullivan and Digby see the reality. Robert Reich at Substack is explicit: I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which — notwithstanding a few glaring counter-examples such as what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie in 2016 — is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. Okay, fascism. Still, Cottom’s words really take it to the next level. Keep an eye on her. Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. 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