“January 6 Was Practice”-- The GOP’s Plans to Subvert Democracy
Three Big Takeaways from the Most Comprehensive Reporting Yet
By Jim Miller
“January 6 was practice,” was the provocative lead in Barton Gellman’s seminal Atlantic piece “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun” that made the rounds last week across the media landscape and had the talking heads on MSNBC practically exploding.
And it IS a centrally important piece in that it documents how the pro-Trump GOP is succeeding in laying the groundwork for undermining elections by rigging the game in state after state across the country in the lead up to the next several election cycles.
While many progressives may have a “been there, done that” response to this latest news, there were several key things that stand out in Gellman’s work that will continue to drive our politics in the coming months if not years.
21-Million Trump Republicans Are Willing to Resort to Violence
Gellman outlines polling research that shows that rather than diminishing, Trump Republicans’ fervor over what they wrongly perceive to be a stolen election has only increased. As he reports:
In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.” (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)
Gellman goes on to note that this is an unprecedented phenomenon in American history. Those statistics are higher than the number of people who believed violence was justified at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland.
The key takeaway here is that many of our fellow Americans hate not just Biden but other Americans who they perceive as the enemy—and millions of them are well-armed. For every “Let’s Go Brandon!” hat and sticker there is an angry wingnut with a gun. This way peril lies.
Racism is a Central Driving Force in Radicalizing the Contemporary Right
Gellman carefully analyzes the data on this segment of American conservatives and comes upon a key fact:
[A]mong the 21 million committed insurrectionists: Almost two-thirds of them agreed that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.” Slicing the data another way: 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.
Thus, it is not overly “woke” Democrats that are pushing whites to the right, there is a significant pre-existing predilection toward racist fear of the loss of white privilege that informs contemporary Republican politics from the word go.
As Thomas Edsall pointed out in the New York Times last week, macroeconomic forces created the conditions where millions of American whites felt their situation was tenuous, and then, as Government professor Ryan Enos puts it in the piece, “when the Republican Party stumbled into a populist message of anti-elitism, protectionism, cultural chauvinism, and anti-immigration, it was almost inevitable that it would accelerate the pull of working-class voters toward Republicans.”
This move from economic populism to culturally based “backlash populism” has set the stage for authoritarianism.
The Shock Troops of the Radical Right Occupy a Post-Factual World and Are Immune to Reality-Based Arguments
Forget about arguing with your crazy uncle on Facebook, he’s hopeless. As Gellman dives into the world of the insurrectionists, he finds himself dismayed by the people he discovers there who are completely immune to facts that might undermine the “big lie.”
Gellman says of one of them, “he has wandered off from the empirical world, placing his faith in fantastic tales that lack any basis in fact or explicable logic.”
This is the landscape we are operating in at present so all those who think that messaging change or political triangulation will get the goods are deeply deluded. As I noted in a column back in June, the deeper roots of this lie in the information chaos created by the explosion of social media and the decline of what used to be shared sources of verifiable truth. No political argument is going to undo this. Hence the answer is to defeat rather than reason with those of our fellow countryfolk whose aim is to destroy inclusive democracy.
And that, in the end, is Gellman’s most compelling argument:
There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without . . . Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief.
That description of otherwise good people being “transfixed with disbelief” seems an apt characterization of the Biden White House which has infuriated civil rights advocates with its vanilla response to this threat. It also could be said a wide swath of national Democrats seem to be asleep at the switch. As Farhad Manjoo wrote in the New York Times:
If Democrats fail to uphold the integrity of our elections, what then? I fear total loss. Not for the party, but for the country. If Republicans prevail, America will become one of those faraway, seemingly lawless places where every election is in doubt and no part of our political culture remains above the partisan fray.
Perhaps it’s time to wake up.