It’s taken two and a half weeks, but things have finally reached the totally alarming phase of our post-election madness. With just a couple of exceptions, all Republicans in our federal government seem to be aiding and abetting the corruption of our election and ending our democratic government as we’ve known it.
The good news is that Trump and the Republican Party’s tacit acceptance of his tactics stand little chance of achieving the goal of somehow reversing who will be our next president. The bad news is that if we harbored any illusions that Republicans were not a wholly corrupt party, it’s been blown away by recent events.
Today, Trump has members of the Michigan Republican legislature at the White House to persuade them to somehow give Michigan’s electoral votes to him instead of Joe Biden, who won a majority of them. In reality there’s not much Michigan Republicans can do. The same is true in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, all key states whose votes would need to somehow swing into Trump’s column to pull off this electoral coup. To do what he wants done would have required mendacity and a lot of preplanning. Trump has plenty of mendacity, but almost no ability to plan anything.
The same can’t be said about Republicans in general and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in particular. For more than thirty years they’ve executed an arguably brilliantly devious and mendacious plan to give Republicans disproportionate electoral impact. It’s been done through gerrymandering to the extreme, wholesale voter disenfranchisement strategies, and abetted by a conservative Supreme Court that said those predominantly southern states didn’t need preapproval by the federal government anymore before changing their voting laws and apportioning legislative districts. The Supreme Court said it was a relic of the past. What Trump is doing today in the White House is proof of how catastrophically wrong this decision was. Our courts have gotten so conservative principally because the Senate has been largely controlled by Republicans and Mitch McConnell, and they won’t approve any but the most conservative jurists.
Democracy is the direct rule of the government by the people. You can still find it here in New England, where major decisions are made by whoever attends periodic town meetings. Republican government means allowing the people to vote for representatives, who hopefully reflect their will in local, state and federal legislatures.
Gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement have been extremely effective in muting the powers of certain voters. It takes extraordinary civic engagement, like we saw in the recent election, to overcome its effects. The Electoral College offers an additional hurdle by giving rural states disproportionate power to select our president.
As Trump’s actions today prove, even that high hurdle is not a bar too far for our president and Republicans in our government to corrupt. Trump’s efforts though are very last minute. A more mendacious future Republican president or presidential candidate won’t make these same mistakes.
I had hoped that this election would bring the end of the Republican Party. I’m likely to be proven wrong on this. Instead, the election is demonstrating just how deeply polarized our country is and how for most Republicans there is no bridge too far for them to cross to achieve their goals. The so-called Law and Order party has no respect for the law, and the only order they will allow is order they declare.
All of this points to how fragile our system of government actually is at the moment. It also shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Republicans don’t want a republican form of government. They want total control. They don’t want to brook or allow any dissent. They are completely happy with an autocracy, as long as the autocrat is one of their own. Apparently, Trump will do fine.
All this points to a nation that is likely to become increasingly ungovernable as there will be virtually nothing both parties can agree on. The job of one party will be to wholly obstruct the other. And at least for Republicans, rules and the law be damned. It’s all completely fair as long as it works to achieve their aims.
So, I expect we will be marching in the streets. It’s just going to happen later instead of sooner. We’re going through a slow-motion national train wreck. And we’re doing it as the worst possible time, with one party wholly corrupt, with a court system holding but teetering, with a pandemic rapidly worsening, and a president who will obstruct any action that would allow for a peaceful and planned transition of government to Joe Biden.
God help us.
Occam's Razor 