Twitter thread by Thomas Zimmer who teaches twentieth-century U.S. and International history at Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German and European Studies, with a focus on the Transatlantic history of democracy and its discontents.Prior to coming to Georgetown in 2021, he was Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg in Germany. His research on the history of global health politics after the Second Word War, the subject of his first book, won the German Historical Association’s Award for the Best Dissertation in the Field of International History in 2015-16.
Republicans could not be clearer about what their goal is: 1950s-style white Christian patriarchal dominance - that’s their animating vision for America. All the racial and social progress towards multiracial, pluralistic democracy since the 1950s needs to go.
Some thoughts:
Sen. John Cornyn just doubled down on grouping together Plessy v Ferguson, Roe, & Obergefell as examples of judicial activism under the guise of substantive due process. This isn’t just empty rhetoric. We are seeing a wave of red-state legislation intended to eviscerate the civil rights regime that has been established since the 1960s – and banish, outlaw, and censor anything that threatens white Christian dominance, past or present.
Last week: DeSantis signed bill easing book bans; GA leg passes a book ban bill; OK Gov signs transgender athlete ban; AZ Gov signs abortion & voting limits & transgender ban; Utah leg overrides gov veto of transgender ban. Red state erasure of post-60s rights revolution rolls on
Debating whether or not Republicans really want to abolish multiracial, pluralistic democracy is pointless. The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is the state level: Wherever they are in charge, Republicans are openly embracing an authoritarian vision of society.
The reactionary counter-mobilization against democracy is happening on so many fronts simultaneously that it’s easy to lose sight of how things are connected. But they absolutely are connected, and we need to focus on the big picture.
- Ban abortion and contraception;
- criminalize LGBTQ people.
- Install an authoritarian white nationalist education system,
- ban dissent.
- Restrict voting rights,
- purge election commissions.
These are not disparate actions - it’s one political project.
The overriding concern for conservatives is to maintain traditional political, social, cultural, and economic hierarchies. It’s a vision that serves, first and foremost, a wealthy white elite - and all those who cling to traditional white Christian patriarchal authority. It’s a political project that goes well beyond Congress and state legislatures: This is about restoring and entrenching white Christian patriarchal dominance and authority in the local community, in the public square, in the workplace, in the family.
The American Right is fully committed to this anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic vision – which they understand is a minoritarian project: Conservatives are acutely aware that they don’t have numerical majorities. But they don’t care about democratic legitimacy.
The Republican Party has a comprehensive strategy to put this vision into practice. In Washington, Republican lawmakers are mainly focused on obstructing efforts to safeguard democracy. It’s at the state level where the reactionary assault is accelerating the most. It all starts with not letting too many of the “wrong” people vote. That’s why Republican lawmakers are introducing bills - have introduced hundreds of bills! - intended to make voting more difficult, and have enacted such laws almost everywhere they are in charge.
All of these voter suppression laws are ostensibly race-neutral and non-partisan – as they always have been in American history. But look at who is targeted by these laws, and who is supposed to benefit: The political project behind them isn’t exactly hard to figure out.
If too many of the “wrong” people are still voting, you make their electoral choices count less. Gerrymandering is one way Republicans are trying to achieve that goal, and it has been accelerating and radicalizing basically wherever they are in charge.
As that might still not be enough to keep the “wrong” people from winning, Republicans are trying to put themselves in a position to nullify their win: We’re seeing election subversion efforts up and down the country – an all-out assault on state election systems. Republican-led state legislatures are re-writing the rules so that they will have more influence on future elections, election commissions are being purged, local officials are being harassed, people who are a threat to Republican rule are replaced by Trumpist loyalists.
Republicans understand that such blatant undermining of democracy might lead to a mobilization of civil society. That’s why they are criminalizing protests, by defining them as “riots,” and by legally sanctioning physical attacks on “rioters.”
The Right also encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to suppress these “leftwing” protests by celebrating and glorifying those who have engaged in such violent fascistic fantasies – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma.
Finally, Republicans are flanking all this by a broad-scale offensive against everything and everyone criticizing the legitimacy of white nationalist rule – past, present, and future. They clearly understand the importance of being in control of the national story. Ideally, the Supreme Court would step in and put a stop to the escalating attempts to undermine democracy and roll back civil rights. But the conservative majority on the Court is actually doing the opposite, providing robust cover for the reactionary counter-mobilization.
That’s the white nationalist vision, these are the authoritarian strategies. And this assault on democracy and the civil rights order is escalating. The long-standing anti-democratic tendencies notwithstanding, the Right has been radicalizing significantly.
Why now?
The more structural answer is that America has changed, and the conservative political project has come under enormous pressure as a result. The Republican hold on power has become tenuous, certainly on the federal level, and even in some previously “red” states. The Right is reacting to something real: Due to political, cultural, and most importantly demographic changes, the country has indeed become less white, less conservative, less Christian, more diverse, more multicultural, more liberal.
And recent political and societal events have dramatically heightened the sense of threat on the Right, of being under siege, that has resulted from these changes. The first one was the election – and re-election – of the first Black president to the White House.
Nothing symbolized the threat to white dominance like Barack Obama’s presidency - an outrageous subversion of what reactionaries understand as America’s natural order, made worse by the fact that he managed to get re-elected with less than 40 percent of the white vote.
It’s also impossible to understand the Right’s radicalization without conceptualizing it as a white reactionary counter-mobilization specifically to the anti-racist mobilization of civil society in the summer of 2020.
In the Black Lives Matter-led protests of 2020 that – at least temporarily – were supported by most white liberals, the Right saw irrefutable proof that radically “Un-American” forces of “woke,” leftist extremism were on the rise, hellbent on destroying “real” America.
Since then, by portraying the opponent as a fundamentally illegitimate faction that seeks to destroy the country, conservatives have been giving themselves permission to embrace whatever radical measures are deemed necessary to defeat this “Un-American” enemy.
The white reactionary counter-mobilization against multiracial, pluralistic democracy won’t stop because the people behind it have some sort of epiphany that they shouldn’t go that far. It will either be stopped or succeed in entrenching white Christian patriarchal rule. /end
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