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Must-Read: The Republican long march to overthrow democracy is nearing the end stage [1]

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Date: 2023-04-13  

Normally I find columns by Thomas B. Edsall at The NY Times to be about as useful as a Chat GPT composition that carefully assembles a bunch of information in a way that self-cancels itself out when you add up the internal balancing act of the AI moving words around.

But not this time.

The Republican Strategists Who Have Carefully Planned All of This is a long-overdue exposé of the deliberate campaign stretching back decades to make democracy in America a dead-issue. (The link should allow access to the full article.) Here’s how it starts:

Republican leaders are now adopting increasingly autocratic measures, using the police powers of government to impose moralized regulations, turning private citizens into enforcement officers and expelling defiant elected Democrats just as county Republican parties, particularly in Western states, are electing militia members, Christian nationalists and QAnon believers to key posts. Here’s one example. Last November, the Republican Party of Clackamas County in Oregon chose a new vice chairman, Daniel Tooze, a Proud Boy from Oregon City, and Rick Riley, the head of the county chapter of Take Back America, which denies the results of the 2020 presidential election, as chairman. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that in central Oregon’s Deschutes County, the local Republican Party chose Scott Stuart, “a member of the county chapter of People’s Rights, a nationwide network of militia groups and anti-government activists founded by conservative firebrand Ammon Bundy.” In June 2022, two of my Times colleagues, Patricia Mazzei and Alan Feuer, reported that “at least a half-dozen current and former Proud Boys” had secured seats on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee, including two facing criminal charges for participation in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol: The concerted effort by the Proud Boys to join the leadership of the party — and, in some cases, run for local office — has destabilized and dramatically reshaped the Miami-Dade Republican Party that former Gov. Jeb Bush and others built into a powerhouse nearly four decades ago, transforming it from an archetype of the strait-laced establishment to an organization roiled by internal conflict as it wrestles with forces pulling it to the hard right. “On the right, support for violence is no longer a fringe position,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a November 2022 Politico essay, “How Political Violence Went Mainstream on the Right.”

That’s disturbing enough — but the real meat of the column is this:

Cain cautioned, “My optimism about this [that voters can turn things around] assumes the Republicans do not give up on elections altogether, which is more in doubt than I ever anticipated a decade ago.” Other observers of American politics are more pessimistic. 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).

The illegitimate Supreme Court may be poised to strike a fatal blow at democracy, as the column concludes with this:

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.

There’s some reflex Left-bashing at one point, the claim that Liberals are partly responsible for this by making conservatives feel uncomfortable. (SMH) — but overall this is the kind of analysis that should alarm bells ringing everywhere.

(Some of us have been warning about this for years, and feel like we’ve been suffering from Cassandra’s curse.)

Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place has commented on Edsall’s column with Conservative Demockracy.

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.

Digby also weighed in, with Trump losing won’t solve the whole problem, and adds some historic background:

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.

To trace this back even further, this is the end stage of the Reagan Revolution — his war on government has turned into a war on democracy, working people, women, people of color, LGBTQ people, the middle class, the environment — all for the benefit of the Ownership Class. The unrestricted power of money is as dangerous as any other unrestricted power.

RELATED: Republicans are erasing democracy: Tressie McMillan Cottom places it in American history. Tom Sullivan referenced Cottom with this quote from her opinion piece.

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.

It has been a long time coming — the question is, is it too late to roll it back?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/13/2163663/-Must-Read-The-Republican-long-march-to-overthrow-democracy-is-nearing-the-end-stage

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