The Atlantic has published an in-depth story by Barton Gellman about Donald Trump’s coup attempt and ongoing efforts by the Republican Party to ensure that the next such effort succeeds. This is probably the best single piece I’ve read about the authoritarian crisis this country is experiencing. Gellman conveys both the foulness of Trump’s scheme to throw out the November 2020 elections results, the horrors of the January 6 insurrection, and the ongoing abomination of Republican legislators working to subvert election mechanisms and rules so that a future Republican presidential candidate can fully escape the intent of American voters. He also captures the mix of racism, resentment, and delusion at the heart of the most extreme Trump supporters, and their frightening openness to violence as a means to secure undemocratic future power for the Republican Party. To give you a flavor and some enticement to read more, here’s an excerpt from the opening:
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
The piece is dense with information and insights, but I want to draw out a few points that relate to posts I’ve written over the past year. First, Gellman’s examination of the participants in the January 6 storming of the Capitol provides yet more evidence that a combination of white supremacism and white fear of demographic change is the motor behind much of the ongoing right-wing rebellion. Discussing the search to find common threads among the participants, he writes:
“Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.”
[. . .] Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president.”
In other words, the same basic white resentment that’s now at the core of the Republican Party’s appeal is also driving some of the Republican base to violent extremes. Among other things, this helps us understand that rather than being an attack by organized groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the violence of January 6 was indicative of a much larger group of Republican-aligned Americans who see violence as necessary to preserve political power. As one expert told Gellman, “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement. This is collective political violence,” rather than the work of isolated individuals.
Gellman also makes a strong case that GOP efforts across the nation to subvert the nation’s election machinery are probably even more of a threat to American democracy than the attempts to gerrymander and disenfranchise voters. State legislatures are going so far as to enshrine their ability to reject election results that they don’t like, a direct attack not just on majority rule but democracy itself. But Gellman’s interviews with right-wing Republicans who’ve fully embraced the lies about a stolen election and the need to take the country back by any means necessary may be the most arresting aspect of the article. More than anything, I was struck by the off-the-chart levels of delusion, resentment, and narcissism of these predominantly white, male Americans who have essentially decided that to save this country, they will need to destroy it. At bottom, the idea that they have everything to lose if all Americans, regardless of skin color, race, gender, or national origin, are recognized as fully equal members of the nation, is white supremacism in all its crapitude, and cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. Likewise, the paranoid belief that it is the left, and minorities, who are the ones threatening the nation with violence is a classic case of projection and self-serving propaganda. The rush to justify violent resistance, to open the door to killing their purported enemies, speaks to a soul sickness that endangers us all.
In the face of this continuing radicalization of millions of right-wing voters in favor of overturning American democracy — by violence, if they think necessary — Gellman indirectly shines an even brighter light on the Democrats’ failure to protect democracy — a failure that hardly ends with their refusal so far to attempt the obvious strengthening of our election mechanisms, like eliminating gerrymandering. By refusing to act like we face a crisis, Democratic leaders are effectively demobilizing their base even as the GOP is radicalizing its own voters. The Democrats are also failing to perform the basic task of alerting the public to vitally important political developments that pose catastrophic dangers to our collective good. This disparity in attitudes goes beyond maddening, into the realm of self-sabotage and fantasy levels of denial. For instance, just this week, Greg Sargent reports at The Plum Line blog, President Biden’s team is hosting the Summit for Democracy, but appears unwilling to actually concede the depth of the U.S.’s own democracy problem and the need for actual action, rather than overoptimistic words about bringing Americans together. If Democrats don’t understand that what they face is an inevitable and necessary confrontation with democracy’s internal enemies, they’ll never bring to bear the urgency and focus that this moment requires.