The anti-democracy party

The GOP in Congress instigated, supported — actively or tacitly — and now is trying to cover up the origins, funding, and accomplices of the failed January 6 coup. The Republicans speak, vote, and govern like an anti-democracy party because it is an anti-democracy party.

On May 29, the lead headline in the New York Times read:

REPUBLICANS STOP INQUIRY ON CAUSES OF CAPITOL ATTACKS

G.O.P. Senators Use Filibuster in a Show of Undiminished Fealty to Trump

This is the latest bit of evidence the Republican Party is not a democratic party. It is an anti-democracy party. Indeed, the refusal of Senate Republicans last week to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters hellbent on reversing the results of an honest and democratic election belies any GOP claim to be a legitimate party in a constitutional republic.

This is almost as serious as it gets. More serious still is the delusional universe that Trump’s Republicans swim in, and that the actions of Republicans in Congress and all over the country reflect and reinforce. Up is down and down is up. This topsy turvy world is the habitat of from 30 to 40 percent of the American people. In the black hole almost all Republicans and a sizable proportion of all white Americans inhabit, Donald Trump won the election, the Democrats, who are all communists, or devil worshippers, or child cannibals, stole it. Science is bunk, and bunk is truth. Covid is a hoax. The Covid death toll is made up or wildly exaggerated. Masks, social distancing, and lockdowns don’t work. Fauci is a fool and Trump is a genius. Conspiracies, not complex and contradictory processes, control what happens in the world.

Race and racism are at the core of the hard-line Trump Republican worldview. Racism is a thing of the past, and it is not systemic but only the actions of a few bad apples. The phrase “all men are created equal” is 18th century political correctness that even the man who wrote it did not believe in or practice. The Great Race is the white race, especially the whitest whites of northern European origin.

The danger is that today and for decades the Great Whitest Race is being outbred and overwhelmed by immigration of people of various shades of brown and black who are unassimilable and lack the civic and work ethic of the real Americans. Making America great again is turning the clock back to around 1960 when whites were the vast majority, there were few new immigrants, blacks and browns were barred from immigrating altogether, and African Americans knew their place or else Southern trees still could bear strange fruit, as Billie Holiday sang.

To give a bit of historical context to what is happening today with voter suppression laws, there has always been a strong anti-democracy faction in this country. It has been mainly about race and secondarily about class. South Carolina, home of the Kama Sutra of politics, Lindsey Graham who has been in every position in the book, was the epicenter where two versions of anti-democracy did verbal battle. One group fought for a government run exclusively by “well-born” whites, an aristocratic hierarchy that excluded not only Blacks but also the “white trash” that “gentlemen” used to wring profits from enslaved Blacks on the plantation while keeping their hands clean. The other faction worked for a white man’s democracy, regardless of pedigree.

South Carolina was also the center of the “nullification” thesis which held that state laws supersede federal laws. It was a bulwark against any federal encroachment on the power of the slaveholders and was popular in several southern states beyond South Carolina. Nullification was an early warning of the kind of Southern assertion of special status that eventually led to disunion and the Civil War.

Today whites, who lean heavily Republican, are attempting a twenty-first century version of nullification by using state voter suppression laws to supersede federal voting laws and regulations. That Texas and Georgia, two states in the old Confederacy, are out in front of this crusade is a reminder of how much the enduring South, as the sociologist John Shelton Reed called it thirty years ago, endures still as a counterweight to democracy.

The Big Lie and the insurrection in fact were attempts to nullify the democratic election of 2020. As William Faulkner, the Nobel winning Mississippi novelist wrote, “The past is not dead, it’s not even past.”

The South has risen again and again in American history. It has been enduring but it is not unsinkable. Its last stand is coming. The zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the post George Floyd, post-Trump, post pandemic era, has shown that walls and nationalistic rhetoric do not faze the deadliest threats. Viruses do not respect borders or immigration rules and they are not intimidated by xenophobia. Racism does not deter Covid, Ebola, AIDS.

White America:

Much as you try, you can’t legislate away the new multiracial, multilingual, polysexual nation that has emerged no matter how many anti-democracy laws and policies you enact.

Game over. Les jeux sont faits; Game, set, match. Checkmate.

Die with dignity, not dragged howling all the way to the grave.

Or, better yet, absorb and live deeply the new, more inclusive, version of what Jefferson wrote at the outset: All humans are created equal.

On that basis, and only on that basis, can we link arms to forge an America really, and for the first time, authentically great.