As others have noted, the real fix is the way Republican majority legislatures in swing states are granting themselves the power to arbitrarily overturn election results. When they exercise that power illegitimately, they will effectively put an end to our system of democracy, which is already creaky and under attack at multiple levels.
The GOP truly believes something it has never believed previously – that it can gain and hold power permanently even with the majority of the electorate opposed to it. I don’t think that’s possible but we’ve never really been here before.
This is what spooks me about Republicans. We’re asked to give them deference and empathy because “they sincerely believe that the election was stolen from them.” We’re supposed to give extra weight to “sincere beliefs” as if it’s sort of a condition of birth that can’t be helped.
The trouble with giving deference to “true beliefs” is that many people choose what to believe. Including and especially people of a fundamentalist religious background, which covers many Republicans. They don’t look at evidence and use it to sharpen the correctness of their beliefs; they first revere their beliefs and then go cherry-picking for evidence to bolster it.
Never let anyone get away with the excuse “but I/we/they really and truly belieeeeeeeeve it.” Belief isn’t a free pass to force one’s preferences on others, including (and especially) religious beliefs. The fact that they believe voter fraud is real is merely a tactical concern to help us better persuade them, and to help them resist persuasion.
That, in a nutshell, is the modern GOP’s interpretation of ‘democracy’ in America. They ultimately want to rig the system so that they have illegitimate control over 2/3 of the legislatures. That way they can call a constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution entirely.
Well, that’s a new one to me. To what end (beyond permanently outlawing abortion) would Republicans want to re-write the constitution if they can seize and maintain power by subverting the current one?
I’ve never had a constitutional do over debate with conservatives meaningfully involved. I take that back; I remember one at another board where abolishing universal suffrage was a popular idea. Maybe I’ve just answered my own question.
They’re certainly correct that the USA would be a much better place if people under the false and malign influence of QAnon, OANN, Faux, Trump, etc., had no desire or ability to vote.
One thing Republicans haven’t learned – or maybe just choose not to believe – is that disenfranchisement, regardless of reason, brings on another whole host of problems down the road. People with no say in their own governance will be less likely to value their own contributions to their society. Why should they cooperate with a system that makes them second class citizens? Force?
Considering the centuries long history of black mistreatment (and poor white mistreatment) at the hands of white local and state governments in the South, the Rs seem perfectly comfortable with using force to suppress the folks they disapprove of.
Power is often for the sake of power. It doesn’t have to have an end beyond that.
The ideals of democracy are that power is used to benefit the people, and only those who seek to use power to benefit the people attain office. Those are the ideals that they are rejecting.
The Republican party is going full-on, no-holds-barred illiberal. They support a republican or a democratic form of government, but their definition of democracy isn’t ours.
One thing that gets overlooked is that there were many, many people in the North who were sympathetic to Southern white supremacist views; they just weren’t into outright apartheid as the South was. But again, sports leagues, with sports teams mostly located outside the American South, were themselves exclusionary. Corporate America was equally exclusionary as well. The military was segregated until 1948. It wasn’t just the South; it was just the South that made racism look really ugly - so ugly that enough Northerners finally had a Eureka moment.
Since the fall of American apartheid in the 1960s, white supremacy has persisted in the North in much the same way it has in the South. This development has in many ways complicated efforts to make progress because instead of racism being a regional clash over apartheid policies, the guerilla warriors perpetuating the racist cause have been allowed to fade back into the bushes, where they can avoid dealing with the responsibility for resolving the more complicated issues of historical and institutional racism.
I think this is very accurate. The use of force has long been approved by the power structure to eliminate any threats to itself. But I’m saying that force might not be enough now when 55% (give or take) of the electorate opposes not only your policies but also your methods of maintaining power.
Very well said. The issue today isn’t the South; it’s everywhere.
The historical South I was speaking about simply points to a different and very overt way an RW authoritarian movement could choose to organize society along their favored Us/Them lines. Which lines will be racial, but not exclusively so.
There is a lot of state level legislation being pushed by places like ALEC that essentially make it impossible for counties or localities to have any say in governance. With things like mandatory jail time for city councilmen so much as introducing a motion to locally regulate something ALEC has decided the state should control. Once that profoundly anti-democratic stuff gets a toe-hold in written law, it’s easy that more educated or left-leaning places suddenly don’t get roads, don’t get hospitals, etc. That is overt state-sanctioned discrimination on the basis of politics, not race.
An article in the Atlantic (Republicans Are Making 4 Key Mistakes - The Atlantic) yesterday pointed out that the restrictions on voting may actually go against Republicans. It isn’t just Democratic voters who are using early balloting, drop boxes, permanent absentee, etc.
