GOP wages an asymmetrical war on democracy because it can’t get the votes

It was the highlight reel of what should have been a banner week for American democracy — scores of down vest-wearing, smartphone-gazing students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in a line that snaked around every corner of a campus building as they waited to cast a ballot for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

When the votes were tallied at the end of the night, some 883 people had cast ballots at the campus polling place — more than any other precinct in Eau Claire, and nearly six times as many as voted there in a similar election four years earlier. And 87% of the students had voted for Democrat Janet Protasiewicz — perhaps a rejection of her Republican opponent Dan Kelly’s lifelong opposition to abortion and his work trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

The surge in young-voter turnout was a key reason why Protasiewicz won a landslide, 11-point victory in a key swing state that Biden had only won by just over 20,000 votes three years earlier. Overall, the turnout for a race to decide the balance of power on the Badger State’s highest court set a record for a nonpresidential year, but the GOP’s Kelly wasn’t hearing the chimes of freedom. He all but called the Democrat’s victory illegitimate.

“I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” Kelly told his supporters on election night. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.” He claimed without evidence that Protasiewicz is “a serial liar” and that the Democrat who defeated him doesn’t believe in the rule of law but “the rule of Janet.”

It would be easy to dismiss Kelly’s election denial as unusually sour grapes, except that some lawmakers in the GOP majority in the Wisconsin legislature are — and this is hard to believe — already talking about impeaching Protasiewicz even before she takes the oath of office. A new state senator who won a special election to give Republicans a supermajority in Madison said he’d “seriously consider” impeaching the new justice, citing the flimsy pretext of her record as a circuit judge in “failing” Milwaukee.

It should have been a banner week for democracy. But it wasn’t.

Anyone doubting Republicans’ impeachment bluster in Wisconsin could take a look around to Nashville, Tenn., where white GOP lawmakers stunned the nation by expelling two Black colleagues and disenfranchising their roughly 140,000 predominantly African American constituents because the men had, from the floor of the Capitol, joined a thousand or so young people protesting gun violence. (A white female Democrat who also protested kept her seat by one vote.)

The Tennessee expulsions, tinged with a racism that echoed from 1960s civil rights protests with deep roots in Nashville’s once-segregated lunch counters, showed America just how far Republicans are willing to go to hold power — by nullifying the votes of Black and brown voters and drowning out the voices of young people who thoroughly reject Republican dogma around AR-15 assault rifles, transgender athletes, or banning abortion.

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That movement has in 2023 already brought a flurry of moves including state takeovers of Democratic school boards in large red-state cities like Houston and legislation in states from Georgia to Missouri aiming to sharply curtail power and potentially remove progressive district attorneys elected by urban voters, such as the impeachment of Philadelphia’s twice-elected prosecutor Larry Krasner. Even Congress got in on the act with legislation to nullify a sweeping criminal justice overhaul that Washington, D.C.’s majority-Black city council had approved 12-1.

What’s more, this political counterrevolution in legislative corridors is taking place right as the conservative movement’s grand project of the last half-century — a ruthless, multimillion-dollar crusade to install unaccountable, lifetime right-wing judges across the federal bench — is coming to full fruition. Good Friday’s decision by Amarillo, Texas-based federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee rooted in ultraconservative networks, seeking to undo approval of the abortion drug mifepristone after 23 years on the market is a huge end run around democracy in a nation where a majority of voters support abortion rights. Conservatives routinely file lawsuits in Amarillo because Kacsmaryk is that district’s lone judge.

Now his ruling — another huge blow to reproductive rights in a nation still reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for red-state abortion bans — heads to that same high court, which is reeking from the stench of billionaire corruption. Last week’s blockbuster report from ProPublica that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted and not reported hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of luxury travel from a Texas billionaire with a right-wing agenda shows the moral depths of an unaccountable Supreme Court — lacking an ethics code and apparently for sale — that is thwarting the popular will on issues ranging from abortion to climate change.

The tumultuous events of the last week call to mind Vladimir Lenin’s famous observation that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Decades, indeed. Over these seven days in April, we watched the right-wing dead-enders of the 1980s “Reagan Revolution” mount legislative and judicial coups against the rising youth of the 2020s in a battle waged with all the moral intensity of the 1960s. But we should also see it as a moment of clarity for a chaotic America — revealing exactly what we are fighting for, and the massive stakes.

Democrats are waging conventional warfare on the political front lines — at the ballot box, trying to get votes with the power of their ideas — and in much of America, they appear to be winning. It happened on Tuesday, with the coalition that produced the Protasiewicz landslide in Wisconsin, and with Chicago voters rejecting the reactionary, cop union conservatism of Paul Vallas to elect progressive upstart Brandon Johnson as their new mayor. But then, it’s happened on the bigger stage since 1992, as Democrats have won the national popular vote in seven of eight presidential elections, as the United States grows more diverse and less in thrall to the conservative hierarchies around race, gender, sexuality, and intolerance.

Republicans are responding with an asymmetrical civil war against democracy, constantly looking for the weak points to deploy their IEDs of autocracy, determined to blow up the American Experiment if that’s what it takes to retain power by any means necessary. Their tactics are working well, unfortunately. Darth Vader’s Death Star had just one opening to exploit, but U.S. democracy has many — gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Electoral College, the undemocratic makeup of the U.S. Senate, statehouse power plays against home rule for Black or brown or progressive-minded communities, a take-no-prisoners hijacking of the judiciary. The only shock of Thursday’s next-level expulsion of two duly elected Black lawmakers in Nashville was the proof that — as Republican ideas become more unpopular — there is no bottom to how low this movement will go.

And the targeting of these two young Black activists — Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis — should have removed any lingering doubts around what the GOP’s war on democracy is ultimately all about: white power. Increasingly, state legislatures are using the pandemic-era uptick in urban crime as their shallow justification for antidemocratic assaults on the will of big-city voters who believe in criminal justice reform, not the GOP’s preferred method of warrior cops with roots going back to the 1800s slave patrols. In Tennessee, the white Republican majority is triggered over who can own assault rifles, the ultimate social control.

The conservative movement doesn’t really believe in the liberties laid out in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It believes in the divine right of its preordained hierarchies — white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. — and will stop at nothing to maintain them. The story of America has been the fight for democracy against slavery, Jim Crow, pervasive sexism, mass incarceration, and more. Today, the forces of repression are running out of room, so they would rather win by fascism than lose elections.

It’s fitting that the dramas from Nashville to Amarillo played out against the week’s other huge story — the arraignment of Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom. Rather than depart the stage after his own election defeat in 2020, Trump has survived to become the Great Orange Whale of American neofascism. The fact that the 45th president has so far managed to evade any accountability for mounting an attempted coup against the peaceful transfer of power to Biden, and is running for a second term to pardon the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, cannot be overstated here. His survival is the symbol that has emboldened the expellers, the impeachers, the judicial dictators — the guerilla fighters against our freely cast votes.

The Nashville travesty made clear that the next 19 months, between now and the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump remains the front-runner for the GOP nomination, are likely to be the most fraught time for America since 1860-1861, and perhaps even more perilous than that prelude to our Civil War.

It’s not impossible to see an immediate future in which more and more democratically elected officials like Jones and Pearson are impeached or expelled, with a Supreme Court that serves an oligarchy and not the 99% of U.S. citizens continuing to strip our basic freedoms — perhaps even ruling that the same state legislatures now disenfranchising Black voters can also award presidential electors to the candidate with fewer votes in 2024. The citizens who cling to “it can’t happen here” need to look at what is happening right now.

And yet there is also reason for great hope. America’s young people — the ones who left their classrooms last week and overran the state capitol in Nashville to plead for real action against gun violence, the ones fighting book bans in their schools and speaking out for radical action on climate — are the bravest and boldest generation this nation has seen in some time. Their moral authority, and their rising power at the ballot box from Eau Claire to Memphis, is why a decrepit GOP is lashing out. History will surely remember what happened in Tennessee as an affront to democracy — and the last throes of a dying movement.

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