In my post yesterday on the Maricopa County "grift disguised as an audit" (in the words of the Republican president of the Board of Supervisors), I suggested that the activities at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum served as a template for Republicans in other states. Yesterday, in an interview with Steve Bannon, Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano -- who led a field trip to Arizona -- confirmed the lesson out-of-state Republicans are taking from the grift Bannon characterizes as a "forensic audit":
“It’s really befuddling to me that anyone would have any concerns” with the audit, Mastriano said. “This is America and we should have free and fair elections, Arizona has nothing to hide…there’s chain of custody…there’s cameras everywhere. This is really the model in the future for any elections that might be in dispute.”
This morning Ronald Brownstein surveyed the "torrent of conservative legislation" -- apart from voter suppression and undermining election integrity -- that red states are putting in place. Texas featured prominently. Governor Greg Abbott has boasted -- accurately -- that 2021 featured "one of the most conservative sessions our state has ever seen." In Texas, legislation that was deemed too conservative two years ago got rammed through this year.
A piece in Tuesday's New York Times, with the headline, "‘Contested, Heated Culture Wars’ Mark Ultraconservative Texas Session," the subhead suggested a surprise, if not a paradox: This was the session that pushed Texas further to the right, at a time when it seemed least likely to do so — as the state becomes younger, less white and less Republican.
Brownstein attributes this pattern -- in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, Tennessee, and Montana among other states -- to both confidence and fear. Confidence, because after a rough 2018 election cycle, Republicans beat back Democratic attempts to flip state legislatures in 2020. Elections have consequences. One of the most consequential results of this Democratic failure: Republicans will control redistricting, shielding their majorities for the next decade. Further, with the most ideologically conservative Supreme Court in our lifetimes, Republican legislators believe that social policies that push the limits (such as anti-abortion statutes) will not be struck down.
Fear, because the Trump base can punish them in Republican primaries if they allow anyone to outflank them on the right. The further right the legislature pushes, the less chance there is of a challenge. Gerrymandering will protect them in general elections.
But, as Brownstein notes, it's not just fear: they're living in Trump's Republican Party and "his style of belligerent, culturally and racially confrontational politics is affirming its dominance in the GOP." As Donald Kettl of UT Austin put it, “All the forces of anger, part economic, part social, that were there to begin with are still alive, still building, and still in the process of trying to transform the Republican Party.”
Yes, Republicans are acting out, just as Donald Trump does. They're owning the libs to the nth degree. And the word 'trying' masks the fact that they've all but won at this stage. It's Trump's party now. Dissidents from Trump's world view are being purged, just as Republican liberals and moderates were purged from the party decades ago. (That John Kasich -- a Newt Gingrich lieutenant -- is called a 'moderate,' illustrates how far the GOP has moved in the past two decades.) Nowadays it is obeisance to Trump, and to the Trumpian politics of resentment and retribution, not fidelity to conservative ideology, that counts.
With a focus on the most contentious, divisive social issues, Republicans in states across the country are pushing back against a Democratic agenda in Washington and suppressing the policy choices of the diverse, Democratic-led cities within their borders.
Barack Obama sought to unify red America and blue America, to bring us together, to see us whole. Until 2016, Republican presidents professed to have the same aspiration.
No more. Donald Trump from the beginning has focused on his base, not on all of America. He has deliberately and masterfully sought to divide us. He has demeaned his opponents, attacking them as enemies. He has rejected as illegitimate political institutions and traditions (even the sanctity of elections and peaceful transitions of power) that stand in his way. He is at war with half the country and with the democratic values we once shared.
This version of authoritarianism is Trump's political brand. And it is the brand of the Republican Party circa 2021.