A piece by Greg Sargent about news coverage of far-right Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Doug Mastriano absolutely nails a broader media failure that’s at the heart of our democracy crisis. Noting the numerous references to Mastriano as a 2020 “election denier,” Sargent digs into how this phrase serves to obscure the true dimensions of the candidate’s radical anti-democratic stance. The phrase “election denier” is “meant to convey the idea that Mastriano won’t accept Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential reelection loss,” but Sargent correctly points out that Mastriano has been quite explicit about using the powers of the governor’s office to throw out future presidential votes in favor of a Democratic candidate should he deem those votes suspect. Thus, Sargent suggests, a more accurate term for describing Mastriano would be “full-blown insurrectionist.” (Sargent’s point is strengthened by a point I think he underplays a bit, which is that Mastriano was an active participant in Donald Trump’s insurrectionary attempt to stay in office — these past activities alone would earn him the “insurrectionist” description.)
The point Sargent is making, which boils down to an argument for reporters and editors to use language that accurately conveys reality to their readers, is one that applies not just to Mastriano, but to hundreds upon hundreds of GOP candidates and current officials who have not only been explicit about their goals of overturning the popular vote in future state and national elections, but have actually already embarked on making this anti-democratic vision a reality. In states controlled by the GOP, the party has been implementing a range of voter suppression measures, even as far-right candidates who believe in placing the thumb on the scales in favor of Republican votes seek and are elected to, or placed in, important election oversight roles.
Naming such activities as “insurrectionary” accurately conveys the truth of the matter — that such people are seeking to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States, whether at the federal or individual state level. Use of the phrase “election denier” is, as Sargent correctly describes, a deeply misleading canard that suggests that such politicos are merely deluded and unable to accept the reality of Donald Trump’s 2020 loss. The media’s mass glomming-on to the phrase is both symbol and substance of a general failure to accurately report the right-wing uprising that we are all currently living through. This failure is absolutely to the benefit of the far-right movement that seeks to replace our democratic order with something authoritarian and illegitimate.
It’s pretty clear to me that a major reason the media has thus far avoided the terms “insurrectionist” and “insurrection” to describe the GOP’s open conspiracy to subvert future elections is that these words carry connotations of violence. But the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “insurrection” as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” A revolt against “an established government” is most certainly what we have on our hands. It may be slow-rolling, and couched in legalisms and feigned interest in “the integrity of the vote,” but a revolt against our democracy it most certainly is. From extreme gerrymandering aimed at suppressing the representation of Democratic-leaning urban dwellers and minorities, to byzantine voter registration rules that hearken back to the Kafkaesque absurdities of Jim Crow, to election officials running on explicit platforms of ensuring the victory of GOP candidates, and to the propagation of a “great replacement” theory that seeks to convince white Americans that any means are justified to win future elections, the insurrection is real, and it is growing. This insurrection will continue even if the media, or Democrats, refuse to call it by its name; and refusing to call it by its name will help ensure that it continues, by serving to obscure an urgent reality from the American people.