There aren’t really any people in power seeking to end democracy, that is very hyperbolic. Trump is anti-democratic, and if he had had the power, he absolutely would have ended democracy. That’s why it was a very bad idea for the GOP to nominate Trump, and was a terrible idea for suburban whites to gamble that Trump was “less bad” than Hillary. It’s why no one should consider voting for Trump in 2024. But Trump didn’t have the power to end democracy in 2020, and he likely wouldn’t have that power in 2025 either were he reelected.
There are people in power who are backing Trump’s claims. That’s not hyperbolic at all.
True.
But what is to be done about it? We can point it out, and repeatedly scream that it’s not OK for politicians to support the lie. We can hope that a large-enough majority agrees with that claim that Trump is unelectable in 2024, and that lie-supporting candidates will lose in 2022.
But I can’t think of any tangible action that can be taken now to short-circuit the process. Perhaps the Jan 6 commission will find some evidence that makes prosecution viable for those that attempted the coup. Or perhaps they will find that it really was just a rabble of rednecks and gawkers making a ruckus.
It still seems that the only way out is to name and shame those that supported the coup and win elections against them. Dividing up the country because you’re scared of something that might happen in the future seems rather insane.
Because what is the absolute worst-case here? Let’s say the GOP wins the House and the Senate in 2022 (not impossible at all). And let’s say Trump gets nominated (likely) and wins the EV even though he loses the popular vote by huge margins (possible). Or alternatively he actually loses the EV but somehow convinces a few states with GOP laws to overturn their results or persuades the Congress to not accept those results.
For the first scenario (Trump wins the EV “fairly”) well that will suck, and it will definitely provoke some more significant analysis of how broken the American democracy is. Because it will have proven that refusing to accept your political loss is actually a viable strategy going forward.
The second is a bit more dangerous, and I think is what many Democrats fear. But remember that taking it to the Congress like Trump tried on Jan 6 won’t work because a Democratic VP will preside. They will just not allow the challenges. Taking it to the states might work, and that is where the true test of the guard-rails will be. Will a state be willing to overturn its local election officials tabulations and appoint electors that are not backed up by the tally of the votes in that state? How would a Democratic DOJ respond to that? How would the Congress react to competing slates of electors? How would a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS rule on that?
That is a pretty terrifying set of circumstances, but I think I want to see how the midterms go before I get too worked up about it.
And what are they doing to “end democracy”? Saying you agree with Trump that the “election was stolen” isn’t the same thing as promoting specific policies that might erode or end democracy. Lots of Democrats said the 2000 election was stolen for years.
Maybe for Irving, TX, but demographic changes nationwide will take quite a bit longer.
The problem with that point of view is that it assumes that Trump supporters are stupid. Some of them certainly are, and most are just mindlessly repeating statements they’ve heard Trump or other supporters say, but that is the essence of political rhetoric regardless of the color of your flag, which is what we remember most from history are slogans and quotations. There are certainly Trump supporters who are quite articulate in their own way, and they understand how to attract more people to their movement, by appeal to uncertainty and fear which are far more compelling than “logic and reason”, notwithstanding that the latter methods of analysis are learned behaviors while the former are instinctive affect.
- Massive efforts by Republican-dominated state legislatures to gerrymander redistricting efforts to the point that they will never be challenged in future elections.
- Challenging the validity of elections based upon no evidence whatsoever and forcing time-consuming complete recounts even though there indication from sampling that there is any significant fraud or error.
- Passing more restrictive voter registration and voting access laws in 18 states and counting including trying to eliminate vote-by-mail and drive up voting during a pandemic.
- Threatening election officials—even those who are registered Republicans—for certifying valid electoral results, often with threats of physical harm to the officials and their families.
- Insisting that factual information is “fake news”, and that non-factual claims of election fraud are “alternative facts”.
- Purging moderating influences from the Republican party to create a unified position that the end of electing Republican candidates justifies whatever means are deemed necessary, including the pressuring of election officials, threatening elected representatives, refusing to acknowledge an insurrection with the sole purpose of preventing certification of a valid election and trying to prevent inquiry into the same.
That is just a few points to which more could be added; in fact, it isn’t even in question on the Trump side that they are quite intentionally trying to remove the Constitutional strictures and essential conventions of democratic governance. Trump himself boasted about just remaining in office after the end of his hypothetical second term and to my knowledge not one Republican leader stepped forward and corrected that misapprehension.
Trump, of course, is a symptom of a larger problem, and the overall “Weimarization” of the United States through wealth inequality and economic destabilization is the responsibility of both political parties. But only one has taken clear and unambiguous steps toward limitation of the voting franchise, undermining of public confidence in the electoral apparatus, eliminating moderate elements in favor of unrestrained radicalism, and refusing to acknowledge the threat presented by insurrectionists acting under the then-president’s explicit direction.
Stranger
Gerrymandering has been going on since 1789 [actually since even earlier in the colonies, 1789 being the year our constitution went into effect], if that is the basis for saying we’re becoming fascist, we’ve always been fascist. Note that since all the drama around the 2010 Congressional maps, several states have instituted redistrict commissions, and several others have had State Supreme Court rulings that limit egregious gerrymanders. Some bad actor states like Texas, Ohio etc will continue to heavily gerrymander, but that’s a status quo not anything new. There is nothing special they are doing that makes it any more “permanent” than previous gerrymanders. If anything the fact the GOP has given up its fairly reliable hold on the suburbs to appeal more to rural voters has made gerrymandering difficult, in a number of states the GOP itself has acknowledge this, noting that if they can’t fix their suburban problem many of their 2020 gerrymanders actually are in peril of flipping around on them by the second half of the decade.
They challenged the validity in court, which is legal and part of our democratic system of government. They also challenged it in the media, which is part of our government allowing free expression.
We got along for ages without drive-thru or vote-by-mail, both could go away completely and it wouldn’t matter. The “suppression” effects of tighter voter registration requirements (like Voter ID) have consistently been shown to be pretty minimal, it’s a common thing Democrats cry about but it hasn’t affected much on the ground. Voting is definitely easier and less restrictive now than it was 50 years ago, so the idea the current situation is a slide into fascism is not accurate.
Anyone threatening public officials is a criminal and that’s terrible, but there is actually less political violence today than in previous eras.
Politicians disputing factual information is as old as politics.
Parties shifting around their political ideology is also as old as politics. I could point to the Democrats purging “moderating influences” as well, I remember a time when pro-life Democrats had a significant say in the party and a significant number of House and Senate seats, but now being a pro-life Democrat is all but disqualifying for participation in the party.
It’s not an assumption; it’s an observation. People who do and say stupid things may not be intrinsically stupid, but what’s the real-world difference? (Cue Forrest Gump clip.) If a kid is highly intelligent but never studies, gets Bs and Cs and writes a application letter full of platitudes and grammatical errors, you’re not going to admit him to MIT.
But yes, I know it’s a problem to label all MAGATs as stupid because it forecloses any opportunity to engage with them. As has been discussed in innumerable threads here, productively engaging with them is theoretically possible but practically useless.
Excellent summation!
I took a look at the numbers, and in 2020 in my home state of South Carolina 1.3 million people voted for Trump. In California 6 million people voted for Trump. So which state is redder?
Somewhat related (though the basic idea is nothing new): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/us/politics/maryland-counties-west-virginia-request.html
Partisan gerrymandering is certainly a long tradition that both parties have engaged in whenever they were in power, and is one of those things that is easy to “know it when you see it” but hard to quantify, but it is widely if not universally agreed among electoral analysts that we are seeing extreme degrees of gerrymandering by the GOP to an extent not seen since the Jim Crow era. Gerrymandering in and of itself is not specifically “fascist” but it is definitely intended to undermine the effective participation of political outgroups.
Just because an action is legal in court, and can be voiced under freedom of political expression does not mean it is not also intended to undermine basic democratic principles. “Free expression” includes expressions of racism, prejudice, and hostility as long as they are not directed at specific persons or deliberately intended to incite violent actions, but nobody confuses them as benign expressions of socially acceptable opinions.
We “got along” without seatbelts, airbags, and antilock brakes on cars for ages as well, which doesn’t mean that they are manifest safety improvements for the driver and passengers. That voter suppression efforts don’t significantly affect the traditional voting public overlooks the fact that they are very specifically intended to limit voting by specific groups for whom traditional voting access is restrictive (e.g. people who are homebound, have to work on election days during voting times, don’t have a car or ready access to voting locations, et cetera), and of course the concerns about being forced to voting in a public location during the still-ongoing pandemic. There is really no reason to not move to mail-only voting, which is actually logistically easier for election officials and has been shown to have negligible occurrence of fraud and error, so the idea that laws opposing mail-in ballots and restricting voting access are not an indicator of an effort to undermine democratic norms is “not accurate”, and more to the point, echoing the very arguments of the people trying to justify their actions in this regard.
This is true if you are extending “previous eras” to include the post-Reconstruction era, but the extent and acceptance of political violence and threats specifically at election officials is at levels unseen in the past century, and certainly in post-WWII politics.
It is one thing for politicians to lie, and sometimes even lie about things that are easily fact-checked. But the pervasive extent of lying specifically about the validity of the electoral process with the specific intent of undermining public confidence is, again, at levels unseen in living memory. Even when parties have been bitterly divided on issues there is the tacit agreement that it is best for democratic norms overall to maintain a continuity of government even if it means conceding a contested election. That is why it was controversial, even among many Democrats, when Gore retracted his concession and pushed for court adjudication.
Of course, in the case of Trump, he repeatedly made claims undermining the validity of the 2016 election that it was almost universally agreed that he had won (by Electoral College votes), claiming that there were “3 to 5 million illegal voters” that denied him a win of the popular vote, a claim not strongly contested by the Republican leadership overall. So, essentially from the beginning and without any practical reason whatsoever, Trump was reflexively undermining confidence in the vote and was being enabled by ‘his’ party in doing so. That this has lead to a wide denial of legitimacy of the 2020 presidential vote by a majority of Republican voters is not coincidental; it is an artifact of conditioning people to not accept results they don’t agree with.
Parties changing political positions in the mean, or even changing fundamental ideology (in the case of departure of the Dixiecrats) is a natural part of political evolution; deliberately purging elements of a party by censure and public attack because they do not conform to extremist strictures is a hallmark of fascist and authoritarian political movements. That the GOP leadership would attempt to purge Liz Cheney—not even for being politically moderate, but simply for expressing concern about not supporting democratic norms—and censuring John McCain’s widow for essentially no reason whatsoever is perhaps the strongest evidence of just how extremist that Republican leadership has become. Other acts like partisan gerrymandering could be understood as just rational (if ethically questionable) self-interest but the vitriolic attacks even on those who agree with the party positions in general but not with the means to achieve them are harbingers of a total rejection of democratic norms.
That this kind of action has come to center around the cult of personality about Trump—who is not even a ‘real’ Republican in any policy position sense of the term—accentuates just how far that the GOP has slipped down the slide of authoritarianism; winning is no longer just a means of enacting their agenda, but is an end in and of itself, and openly embracing an avowed would-be demagogue as their ‘leader’ (really just a figurehead, but of the ‘useful idiot’ kind, or at least so Gingrich, et al believe) is definitely fascist-like behavior regardless of the label you put upon it.
Stranger
In terms relative to overall population (South Carolina: 5.3 million; California, 39.5 million), South Carolina is definitely “redder”. But there are certainly large areas of California that are hard red, with Trump signs in plain evidence. But that just illustrates the point that there really aren’t “red” and “blue” states; there are (mostly rural) conservative populations and (mostly urban and suburban) mixed-to-progressive populations, so unless we want to create a dual state that has mainly ‘red’ areas surrounding enclaves of ‘blue’ cities (which sounds disturbingly apocalyptic) notions of cleaving the country by ideology just isn’t practical from a geographical standpoint, much less dividing all of the obligations, responsibilities, and powers. It is about as practical as colonizing Mars or giving the country over to an advanced computer to manage as a technoperfect utopia.
Stranger
It is. But when I see the people who rant about it, it still often makes the idea of “replacement” seem more attractive.
Demographic change is a constant. The only reason to fear it is if one knows that they have an advantage based on belonging to a particular group that they are worried of losing.
What actually happened is the President of the United States, supported by his political party including several members of both Houses of Congress and the right-wing media, spent literally months inciting his supporters into a frenzy of violent unrest involving nationwide death threats and actual violence against members and supporters of the opposing party and electoral officials. He and his cohort literally planned and funded the events of the day, potentially including the invasion of the Capitol. That “lack of security” you mention? Thank Christopher Miller for that.
Despite your handwaving away of the assaults on police (hey, it was just one guy who had a heart attack, right?), 140 police ended up being injured (some quite seriously), and an angry mob attempted to chase down and potentially murder multiple members of Congress and the Vice President (again, with the encouragement of the President). Is that what you consider a “nothingburger”?
And after the event, with a few notable exceptions the (now-former) President, virtually every Republican in Congress, the right-wing media - and now you - are pushing the narrative that what happened was no big deal. The same Republicans who will conjure up any excuse to investigate a Democrat are actively blocking the investigation of a violent attempt to overturn a legitimate election and any related crimes. In the last week, 200 House Republicans voted to exonerate Steve Bannon for refusing to comply with a subpoena.
It has become patently clear that the American right will excuse any corruption, criminality or act of sedition committed by one of their tribe. I had thought more of you Martin, but after your “nothingburger” statement and your carefully-phrased minimizations of the rise of proto-fascism in the US I have been forced to reconsider.
On the rise of fascism, let me borrow something I wrote elsewhere on the board. The modern American right-wing, led by Trump:
To which we can now nominally add the whole Texas thing about promoting pro-Holocaust narratives in schools, although I continue to hope that turns out to be a misunderstanding.
And it’s not just me - the rise of right-wing anti-democratic authoritarianism has been on the rise globally for years, as noted by quite a lot of scholars including Holocaust scholars. Despite the “You guys call everything fascism” brigade’s assertions, it’s not hyperbole at all.
But over and over again, your arguments here are basically designed to minimze and decontextualize the severity of what has happened and what is continuing to happen. They are essentially the equivalent of “Look, the knife-wielding stalker only got as far as your front lawn this time. Lots of people walk on other people’s lawns. Why do you need a restraining order for a minor trespassing incident?”. One is forced to wonder whether you simply don’t want to believe what is going on, or whether you are fine with it.
To quote the mouseover text from this xkcd,
Even in the most convoluted scenarios, there really is no way to carve up the country along political lines without either leaving vast numbers of people in ‘hostile’ territory or requiring a mass migration that would make the Partition of India look like a game of Red Rover.
Back in the 1990s Rush Limbaugh was averaging an estimated 13 million listeners a week. Some sources say closer to 20 million but the point is he had a mammoth sized audience for three hours a day everyday. Before there was any such thing as podcasting or digital playback. For context he had a bigger audience back then with far less tools to get platformed than Joe Rogan does today.
The reason why I am posting this is the fact during those years Limbaugh completely shifted the way Republican Party politics work. He didn’t so much change the electorate in a big way. Bill Clinton got re-elected fairly easily and maintained very high approval ratings right to the last day in office after getting impeached. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. There have been more long standing red states that have subsequently gone blue during Limbaugh’s era than blue states going red. However he changed the Republican electorate massively. And that by extension has changed the country in a way that cannot be examined electorally but by what happens between elections. It is not anymore a case of differing on margins of tax policy or issues of defense. Limbaugh set the ball in motion of culture wars and conspiracies dominating the right-wing ecosystem which led to a fear among their own politicians to fall in line or get retired. The Tea Party did that and Donald Trump was the man who put on the mainstream everything Limbaugh was putting out for twenty five years. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle now.
Yeah, yeah, Dr. Forbin, we’ve heard it all before. Give it a rest, will ya?
If it becomes a reality (it won’t) it will increase the income and IQ averages of both states.
To repeat–check out political violence in the 1960s, it was more pervasive and more violent than it is now. There is a risk of not having concerns about Republican activities, there is also a risk about saying things that are not true or crying wolf when there is no wolf present. I have often remarked that the overuse of the term “racist” for “conservatives we dislike” had an effect of basically watering down any power the term “racist” had, and ultimately causing lots of people to reject even the label of racist as a valid application to basically anything short of Hitler or the Klan.
Systemic racism is real, but the way people synthesize information is that a word with a strong historical shared understanding of what it means, if you suddenly broaden the concepts that word covers, it’s going to cause problems. Maybe that’s worth it, maybe it isn’t. But I strongly believe the way we watered down the word “racism” is why when an actual very obvious racist in Donald Trump ran for the Presidency, his racism did little to derail his candidacy. Note that it wasn’t that long ago racist missteps by figures like Trent Lott and George Allen ended their political careers in the Senate.
There’s a serious danger here of watering down “fascism” the same way. If you simply call anything you dislike “fascism”, you remove from that word any meaningful power.
You can’t call Voter ID laws and gerrymandering fascism, because they aren’t, and most people know they aren’t, and when you do, they just tune you out. You also shouldn’t try to conflate a few thousand idiots and a poor Capitol Police response with “our government almost become a dictatorship”, no such thing came close to happening.
If you oppose Republican voting policies you should oppose them and explain very specifically why. You should not assume you can just call them fascism and wave your hands and suddenly win the argument.
It looks like at least with the evidence we do have, most voters actually don’t like the claims that Trump “really won” the election, and have punished candidates in general elections who have continued to make those claims. That’s good, and that should be emphasized. But if you keep grandstanding and calling mostly procedural tweaks to the election system “fascist backsliding” you are inviting large scale irrelevance–and it will weaken us in protecting against actual fascist backsliding.
Ignoring and minimizing again. While it is true that political violence in general was worse in the 1960s, you are making an apples-and-oranges comparison in order to distract from the fact that the political violence now is part of a concerted, organized campaign directed by the top of one party and the powers behind it and supported not only by virtually the entire party but its followers, and disseminated by hyperpartisan media outlets, with the goal not merely to gain power but to permanently retain it by undermining the fundamental structure of America’s democratic processes and institutions. When one considers the details of political violence now versus political violence then, the two are materially different in quite a lot of important ways, the primary one being that this time the violence could actually succeed in its goals.
If you choose to ignore the wolf as it gnaws your intestines, that’s down to you, but it doesn’t make the wolf stop existing.
I repeat what I said above:
What there is a serious risk of is ignoring or minimizing the very real (and considerably well-documented) rise of a new American fascism, much in the same way that by ignoring or minimizing what happened on January 6 - as you did - it increases the risk of it happening and decreases the ability to stop it before it becomes too embedded,
It’s a good thing I didn’t do any of those things, then.
I note that you’re ignoring the list of actual ways in which the American right maps to the historical rise of fascism. I could also elaborate on the ways in which Eco’s 14 common features of fascism are visible in the American right, but at this point I have no reason to expect that it wouldn’t also be ignored or minimized.
And if you continue to deflect from the actual signs of fascism, play down the violence on the right and pretend that what is happening now is nothing out of the norm, you are actively inviting the actual fascist backsliding to happen, and for us to conclude that you are fine with it.
You seem to be very committed to calling it “minimizing and downplaying” simply because I’m stating facts and not speaking in hyperbole. Note I’ve never said Trump doesn’t have anti-democratic beliefs or that Republicans don’t. What I’ve said is no specific actions have been taken thus far that have directly sought to end democracy or bring about fascist government.