Fighting the future

“I am struck,” historian Heather Cox Richardson has written, “by how completely the Republican Party, which began in the 1850s as a noble endeavor to keep the United States government intact and to rebuild it to work for ordinary people, has devolved into a group of chaos agents feeding voters a fantasy world.”

Unfortunately, a once great political party has created a fantasy world dripping in resentment, all in service to an agenda to turn back the clock to the 50s.

The 1850s.

The current war against modern America has historical antecedents. Powerful interests supporting chattel slavery led to the Civil War. Southern Redeemer governments of the 1880s and 1890s undermined the gains of our second founding and Reconstruction, ushering in the dark period of Jim Crow. Various forces supporting the rise of the KKK or opposing women’s suffrage fought women, people of color, and immigrants in their attempt to turn back the clock. Much of corporate America began opposing the New Deal reforms in the 1930s. They haven’t stopped in their attempt to avoid regulation and diminish the power of labor as they seek to return to the great inequalities of the Gilded Age.

Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the independent news magazine The American Prospect, summarizes the current methods used by those politicians and groups pushing issues such as restricting reproductive rights that are at odds with the views of most voters. To keep power they use voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and rigged courts, while red-state legislators and governors countermand the preferences of citizens in blue cities.

Yet history also shows that Americans fight back when you take away their rights and their democracy.

FIRST, THEY COME FOR THE BOOKS

Kuttner described one battle over unpopular issues: the right’s all-out war on libraries to limit what people can read and discuss.

Houston is a city with a diverse, progressive electorate and an African American mayor, Sylvester Turner. So it was bizarre when the new superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, Mike Miles, recently announced plans to fire librarians at dozens of schools, while converting libraries into discipline rooms for misbehaving students.

How could such a thing happen in diverse, progressive Houston?

If you made a wild guess that the state administration of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott used a ploy to take over the local school system, you guessed right.

This move is a “state pre-emption to override local city governments.” As they lose support, the party that built its brand on local control is now overruling local government.

(R)ight-wing state governments are becoming more flagrant and cynical in their use of state pre-emption to block progressives from using home rule, in areas as far-flung as minimum wage ordinances, paid sick leave, gun control, climate initiatives, and rent control.

ATTACKS ON DIRECT DEMOCRACY

Using radical gerrymandering to attain a near-lock on governance, Ohio Republicans have enacted extreme policies that don’t align with the wishes of today’s voters. To avoid accountability, the Ohio GOP rushed to stop a popular drive to protect abortion access in the state by scheduling an election last Tuesday to limit voters’ best remaining option to challenge their unfettered power: direct democracy.

And did I mention that the GOP-controlled legislature passed a law last December to eliminate August elections because of the difficulty in holding them?

Yes, to keep people from having a say in their government, the legislature set an election in a month they’d just decided to eliminate from the voting calendar.

Why? “Anti-abortion groups lobbied GOP lawmakers to support a constitutional amendment to make it harder for any future amendments to pass.” When liberals pointed out the obvious contradiction, the Republican-majority on the state’s Supreme Court ruled the Legislature could simply break the law it passed less than a year ago.

Their strategy may have just reached its limits when the people of Ohio had their say last Tuesday.

By overwhelming numbers they knocked down the anti-democratic proposal to raise the threshold for ballot initiatives to amend the state constitution.

The move backfired. Spectacularly. Ohio has voted Republican by at least 55-45 in recent elections. The measure, however, went down in flames 57% to 43%.

Washington Post, columnist E.J. Dionne suggested: “When you do everything you can to rig an election and still lose, you have a problem.” Voters told the Republican Party that it has a big problem when a majority simply refused to accept the Republicans’ invitation to throw away its own power.

AUTHORITARIANS WILL TELL YOU THEY ARE THE VICTIMS

Pat Byrnes @thePatByrnes pic.twitter.com/GK7HBKpsbi
— Editorial & Political Cartoons (@EandPCartoons) August 8, 2023

Simon Rosenberg believes “that the current radicalization of the GOP is intimately linked to its repeated failure to handle the challenges of the post-Cold War era.” Their rigid ideological approach leaves them “unable to govern in a time of rapid change; and those repeated failures have left many Republicans angry, reactionary and willing to do the unthinkable to stay in or regain power.”

Fantasy resentments are the fuel for this fight. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism, has written about how strongmen will make moves to dominate others while claiming to be victims.

(A)ll authoritarians are victims. They have victimhood cults. It’s extremely important because their aggression must always be presented as self-defense, and any prosecution of their corruption must be presented as persecution.

At some point the strongman has to bring in others. Donald Trump has started saying:

“I’m the victim, but the real target is you” … “They’re really going after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” … We also know from the history of fascism that if you want people to engage in violence on your behalf, you have to get them to feel personally threatened.