Our Last Free Election
Trump’s Big Lie is about to payoff in a big way
It’s difficult to believe that a mere ten years ago voter apathy was one of the biggest social challenges in the country.
Stranger, and more unnerving, to think that though we are collectively apathetic no more, we now stand on the brink of what may very well be the last free elections in the United States of America — or, more accurately, the American States since “United” no longer seems applicable.
The signs are all around us: brazen acts of voter intimidation, an increase in political violence such as the recent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the forced resignations of election workers fearing for their lives, the flooding of media channels with lies big and small.
These are patently authoritarian tactics being used expertly to help one party regain and maintain power indefinitely to, among other things, provide a more perfect form of economic liberty for the very rich. And it is all unfolding at the expense of those who do not presently conform to the party’s notion of a “good American,” which is terrifyingly similar to Mussolini’s “good Italian,” “Hitler’s good German,” and Franco’s “good Spaniard.”
A fascist, in other words, as Umberto Eco defines the term.
Compounding the concern for those who still, perhaps naively, believe in the promise and hope of a more perfect representative democracy is the number of ultra-conservative candidates refusing to say if they will accept the election results of the midterms,in addition to the amount of election deniers who are on ballots across the country.
This isn’t just any old election day: It’s doomsday, folks.
Never mind the fact that the candidates on the radical right, who have no faith in the electoral process, are not bothering to drop out of their races. They have enough confidence in a system that they despise to effectively put themselves in pole position to destroy what remains of civil society in America. And rub out a government of, by, and for all people in a single death blow.
It will be the crowning achievement of a grand strategy to design a new regime where a privileged and wealthy minority is protected from the will of the majority, something that is outlined with chilling precision by Nancy MacLean in her award-winning Democracy in Chains.
Those who vote red in the midterms will do so unquestioningly simply because their party (which really isn’t “Republican” as any of our American ancestors would recognize it but a Libertarian mutation of a predominantly white Cristo-Nationalism) promises to relieve the super rich of any and all tax burdens, and deliver not-so-wealthy supporters from those whom they hate: the woke, or wokerati if you prefer.
All Republican ticket voters need do is rush to the polls one last time, and they’ll never, ever need to vote again.
None of us will.
Once in power, ultra-conservatives will finish what they started on January 6 in Washington D.C., at the behest of their supreme leader, only this time under the pretense of legitimacy. Voters have been promised as much and in no uncertain terms, although what most conservatives still don’t, won’t, or simply can’t understand is unless they are independently wealthy, and a member of the 1%, they’re on the GOP’s hit list, too, and will be marginalized or worse after the legitimate coup of the midterms.
In other words, the GOP has declared war on everyone and anyone who can’t afford life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without the government’s help. Those are commodities now, and come with hefty price tags. The great American social and political experience is being privatized before our eyes because capitalism has triumphed over democracy, not only in Eastern Europe and Russia, as Fran Leibowitz famously remarked, but in the U.S as well.
Somewhere, Vladimir Putin, who has done more than even Trump or Charles Koch himself to unify the “Western right,” is grinning a smug grin — on his word, Russia has successfully exploited the flaws of democracy to the point where our country is caving in on itself, and done so without firing a shot on our soil as Kruschev predicted.
Working indefatigably to undermine faith in representative democracy with members of what Liz Cheney calls the Putin Party, and even the Federal Exchange Commission, the Russian leader has helped to guarantee that the United States as we know it now will disappear as soon as the party formerly known as Republican comes to power across the land after the midterms. And America will be made “great,” but only as wealthy Cristo-Nationalists define greatness.
A foolproof plan
In 2020, the Supreme Court flat out rejected a move to revisit a trial court ruling that would have given Wisconsin an extended deadline for absentee ballots. And, more importantly, allowed state courts, not state legislators, to have the final say in state-level legal kerfuffles over voting rules and regulations.
In a footnote to the Supreme Court’s decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh went on to say that there is a role for federal courts when it comes to settling disputes related to state laws:
“As Chief Justice Rehnquist persuasively explained in Bush v. Gore,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the text of the Constitution requires federal courts to ensure that state courts do not rewrite state election laws.”
While that seems reasonable enough at face value, Nathaniel Persily, a rather prescient law professor and political scientist at Stanford, saw at the time a much darker implication: “What [Kavanaugh’s remark] presages for post-election litigation…is that in the event there is conflict with state courts and state legislatures, there are several justices on the Supreme Court who are leaning toward the legislatures,” reported The New York Times.
This means in the event of any disputes of election results, lawmakers at the state level, not the state supreme courts, will decide which votes count and which ones don’t — tantamount to deciding who wins and who loses.
It was a masterstroke, setting up a final takedown of American Democracy.
Look at the key battleground states, and one will see that every state legislature has a majority of those who identify as Republican in both chambers. All GOP candidates have to do is scream “fraud!” wherever they lose on November 8, toss the election to the state lawmakers, and allow them to decide.
And, given their political stripes, it’s easy to see how it’s a foregone conclusion that it will be heads the GOP wins, tails Democrats lose. Further proof of just how successful — and damaging — Trump’s efforts have been to prop up the Big Lie in the weeks and months beyond the 2020 presidential election.
What happens next?
The party formerly known as Republican takes control of the House and Senate; impeaches President Biden for anything from his alleged failure to enforce immigration laws to the “botched” Afghanistan withdrawal to the extension of the moratorium on residential evictions or some yet-to-be-manufactured charge. Then, in an “emergency” session, members rewrite the Constitution, which gives birth to the Second American Republic. And why not? France is already on its fifth.
If he is still at large on his hay-ride and rally circuit, the next logical move would be to install Trump as president for life. Or it’s on to the next white hope, Ron Desantis.
This will mark the end of free elections in America. And it’s the last we’ll see of representative democracy. Maybe for a lifetime. Maybe for two.
To be sure, condemning the ultra-conservatives and calling them out for unabashedly fascist intentions — which they are acting out on a regular basis as if they are using William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich not as cautionary lesson but as a lesson plan — is not a wholesale endorsement of the Democrats: Mine eyes have the seen the hypocrisy, the corruption, the double standards in that party, too. And I have had a bellyful of more than a few “shoulds” and “should nots” over the years. Further, I have been “canceled” by those on the ultra-left, as well as the right, who fear that I love humanity more than I do the norms of any one political party.
But — and it’s an important “but” — I, like the Democrats, believe in using not destroying the system to reduce the corruption, the influence of special interests, the opportunities for grift, the grave human errors in our democracy, which requires us to become better, more humane citizens in the existing framework that, though imperfect, is not yet unsalvageable.
Another failed dictatorship
I fear these words may be too late.
We live in a time now where opinion is Truth; and in such a world, nobody believes they are capable of lying.
Our democracy has withstood and still can withstand many different ideas about a single truth: what it can’t take is many different ideas about many different truths streaming from every possible digital orifice.
Your “what is” not your neighbor’s “what is.”
All who value their own skins can agree that none of us want to learn the hard way that fascism is worse than inflation, worse than paying a nickel more at the gas pump, worse than tax hikes for the super rich. It’s worse, much, much worse, than allowing kids to read The Bluest Eye, worse than universal health care, worse than background checks and waiting periods for gun buyers.
(For those who don’t hold that fascism is worse than socialism in America, let us not kid ourselves: we already have socialism in America — for corporations that routinely privatize their gains and “socialize” their losses. It is rugged capitalism for the rest of us, those with the least amount of capital to begin with and who only have our labor to peddle in a global marketplace.)
But none of this amounts to anything if all those who wish to vote red, given the choices on the ballot, refuse to see for themselves how they have been used and abused by their masters and the news entertainment media; and realize that, unless they’re among those who could have afforded a trip to Epstein’s Island, they are just as despised as those on the left. And once they’ve helped usher in a new Cristo-Nationalistic order, they, too will be broken.
It’s a Thelma & Louise ending for American Democracy, only it’s the 99% — Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Green Partiers et al — in the same car, while the pathologically apolitical 1% watch at a safe remove…and the Dems fight like mad to yank the emergency break.
If the ultra-conservative plan for the midterms comes off without a hitch, we will all be forced to learn a painful and destructive lesson: that fascism, in any of its forms, but particularly the version that comes “wrapped in the flag and holding a cross” as Sinclair Lewis described it, is not and never will be the answer for any society.
It means something else, too: posterity will one day have a new entry for the growing list of bloody and ultimately doomed dictatorships. After Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy will be written “Trump’s America.”
