That sound you hear, which sounds suspiciously like jackboots, is the Republican Party marching out of the closet and proclaiming its opposition to democracy.
After decades of promoting minority rule—but dressing up their intentions with a fig leaf of respect for America’s history, values, and tradition—the GOP has now dropped any pretense of caring about our Constitution or the principles upon which the United States was founded.
Although the embrace of Nazi rhetoric, techniques, and tactics by the party’s standard bearer should chill any American who cares about the country’s future to the bone—in recent days it has become absolutely clear that the leadership of the Republican Party has decided to publicly own their authoritarian aspirations.
They just do not care any more about appearances.
Thanks in part to the fact that the most popular politician in their party openly mimics the language of Hitler, promises to throw his opponents in jail, pacl the federal government with legions of loyal toadies, and fill camps with immigrants he wants to expel from the country, at the federal and state level, GOP officials are starting to favor the words and deeds of in your face fascism as their party’s main message and deliverables.
Take the resounding Ohio vote to guarantee a right to abortion in the state constitution. The fact that the people of Ohio spoke, and the vote was not even close, did not matter a bit to that state’s Republican legislators. They immediately responded by saying the legislature will “consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative.”
In other words, they would make it impossible to enforce the new constitutional amendment, the will of the people be damned.
That move was not an outlier. It is part of a pattern at the state level to give Republican legislators and governors the power to overrule the people who apparently, in their eyes, cannot be trusted to do the right thing at the ballot box. The stories occur so frequently that, at this point, we fail to be as outraged by them as we should be.
Janet Protasiewicz, 60, speaks during her swearing in ceremony State Supreme Court Justice at the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda in Madison, Wis. on Aug. 1, 2023.
Take the effort (since stalled) in Wisconsin to impeach a Democratic Supreme Court justice for no reason other than the fact that she was a Democrat. The effort may have “lost steam,” as The Washington Post put it. But the impulse on the part of Wisconsin legislators was absolutely clear and unhesitating. If we don’t win the vote, we’ll find another way to get our way. (Sounds familiarly Trumpian right? Call it trickle down fascism.)
A pioneer for the modern GOP in this work has been Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He’s been comporting himself as a Lil’ Mussolini since he took office in 2019.
He removed elected officials from office simply because they did not share his beliefs. He has banned the press from public events and then sought to dilute First Amendment rights further still. He has sought to impose his own agenda on the people of the state, their rights and views be damned. (DeSantis has been emulated elsewhere. Georgia, for example, passed a law allowing a commission to remove elected district attorneys if they are viewed not to be “adequately” enforcing the law.)
At the federal level, the GOP once put up House Speakers who at least claimed to see themselves as part of the country’s democratic traditions. Then came Kevin McCarthy, who swallowed his momentary outrage at Donald Trump’s coup attempt and sought to actively defend Trump for his actions. His brief run in leadership is already over, and now the boss is Speaker Mike Johnson, who says, democracy is “two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner.” He has also explicitly said, “we don’t live in a democracy.”
Republican presidential candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks to the press following a campaign event at the Machine Shed restaurant on Nov. 7, 2023 in Davenport, Iowa.
He’s not alone in that view of course. Many Republicans have said it. That includes Utah Sen. Mike Lee and, more recently, former GOP Sen. Rick Santorum, who complained on Newsmax that “pure democracies are not the way to run a country.” He explained further, saying, “You put sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot and a lot of young people come out to vote.”
See? That’s the problem. Voters. And issues that matter to them.
At the most recent Republican “presidential candidates” debate, candidates advocated for some of Trump’s pro-authoritarian agenda—from massive forced deportations, to firing civil servants en masse, to getting rid of those who might place loyalty to the Constitution above loyalty to a Republican president.
We have gone from voter suppression measures to a party whose advocates often articulate the (idiotic) phrase: “We’re a Republic, not a democracy.” Given the fact that this point is ludicrous—the U.S. is both a republic and a democracy, they’re not mutually exclusive—you have to ask, why is it so popular?
The answer is clear. It’s a pseudo-rationale for stripping away the rights of voters who might hold views contrary to those of the GOP’s leaders and their benefactors. It’s as much the rallying cry of their movement for minority rule in America as “Don’t Tread on Me” was that of American patriots during the revolutionary war. (A motto which has also been co-opted by the far right as a way of complaining about the power of the government that revolution was fought to establish—and, by extension, the power of the people who ultimately are supposed to be the highest power in that government.)
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally in Claremont, New Hampshire on Nov. 11, 2023.
More evidence that the GOP just doesn’t care anymore about pretending to uphold our system of government ranges from members of Congress ignoring subpoenas of the institution in which they serve, to members of the Supreme Court responding to calls that they should follow the same ethics guidelines as lower courts by presenting a sham code of ethics with no enforcement mechanisms and big loopholes.
We have had legislative initiatives proposed by the Department of Justice to “defund” their political opponents—including the entire Department of Justice, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Vice President of the United States. We’re used to lunacy on Capitol Hill.
But this is not just lunacy. This is attacking how our democracy works and the rule of law in America, as part of what is clearly a coordinated, nationwide effort to align the entire Republican Party with the authoritarian impulses of their leader, Donald Trump.
Experts like Professor Brian Klass have warned that we are “sleepwalking toward authoritarianism.”
I would argue that although Klass’ rationale is sound and his intentions are good, he is understating the problem. Democracy has been under siege from the GOP for years. (See the Citizens United or Shelby County Supreme Court decisions. Heck, see Bush v. Gore.) But now it is directly, openly, and thanks to the positions of GOP leaders, unambiguously on the ballot.
The GOP is now unmistakably on the record as an active anti-democracy party.
We are one year away from a vote that could end democracy as we know it in America. It is not inconceivable that my one year-old grandson might never remember what life in a democratic America was like. That is not hyperbole. Not only do Trump and the GOP leadership display open contempt for democracy, not only have they actively sought to undermine it, but recent polling suggests that a fairly substantial number of Americans actually support those views.
They don’t make up quite a majority of the electorate, but they do represent nearly half of all Republicans and they could—in tight races, in gerrymandered states, or those where voter suppression laws are in place—produce an outcome that should make your blood run cold.
We could, by electing representatives of a political party that has become openly hostile to the system of government that has defined America for nearly two and a half centuries, in the blinking of an eye, just 12 months from now, see the end of much of what was good and great about this country.
Your freedoms could be pared away. A president who aspires to running a police state could take office. A party that was to permanently enshrine minority rule in the United States could take office and, like their president in 2020, never intend to leave office again.
We’re not sleepwalking toward that tragic outcome. We’re hurtling towards it. It is just a few ticks of the clock away. And there is a massive, well-funded, highly empowered movement in this country seeking to make it happen.
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