Who Needs Voter Suppression?
For years, the GOP has been aggressively suppressing the vote. But it may not need to, if Americans voluntarily sign up for fascism.
“Pure democracies are not the way to run a country,” former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Penna.) told Newsmax last November after voters in his home state and elsewhere protected abortion rights via ballot measures that made the rulers of a would-be Gilead hoppin’ ass mad.
File under: Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud.
But for once, the vile Mr. Santorum—last seen in a hissy fit after LGBTQ+ activist Dan Savage co-opted his surname for biological purposes—isn’t entirely wrong. When we leave governance to the will of the people, we open ourselves up to some bad decisions as well as good ones.
Case in point:
There have been polls of late showing Biden and Trump in a dead heat, and some showing Trump actually winning. One in particular—a credible one from NBC, just this week—is especially worrying, as it has Trump widening his lead slightly since the last NBC poll, taken in November.
Needless to say, it is absolute insanity that the American people would seriously consider putting this human shitstain on the underwear of mankind back in power. (Speaking of santorum.) But here we are.
And these polls are not a matter of the archaic and anti-democratic Electoral College either: they show Trump winning the popular vote in a head-to-head rematch. To be fair, there are also polls—like a recent one by Quinnipiac—showing Biden in the lead. But that it’s close at all is mind-boggling.
Of course, the polls can be wrong. Famously, they were dead wrong in 2016, but not in sanity’s favor. And to hang our hopes on that slim thread would be foolhardy to say the least.
Some of Trump’s support can be attributed to the calcification of American politics along tribal lines, not to mention a right wing propaganda machine that would make a certain Herr Goebbels doff his cap. But you can’t con a man who doesn’t want to be conned. The fact of the matter is that a disturbing percentage of our fellow Americans are cool with Trump’s return to power.
Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the Republican effort to suppress the Democratic vote, and to seize control of the electoral process to ensure that the GOP wins even when it loses. But none of that really matters when sufficient numbers of our fellow Americans are perfectly happy to put Donald J. Trump back in office, the cost to democracy, to the United States’ standing in the world, to human lives, and to AAWOKI be damned.*
(*America As We Once Knew It.)
Who needs voter suppression when you can get people to vote for a tyrant of their own free will?
DEFYING GRAVITY
So WTF is wrong with America that we’re at this pretty pass?
The great Tom Nichols, who is both a columnist for The Atlantic and a professor emeritus at the US Naval War College, addressed this question just this week, in a piece called “The Weirdest Presidential Election in History.” It might as easily have been titled “The Scariest.”
Nichols wrote of “an unserious nation” facing “dire choices,” and marveled at "a reversal of the laws of political gravity, mostly because so many American voters are now ruled by vibes and feelings rather than facts.”
By any standard, Biden’s first term is perhaps as consequential and successful as Ronald Reagan’s first four years. With achievements including holding together a NATO coalition in the face of genocidal Russian aggression and an economic soft landing almost no one thought possible, Biden should be running far ahead of any Republican challenger—and light years beyond Trump.
But he ain’t.
The economy is booming, yet Americans stubbornly continue to believe it’s terrible, and that Trump would handle it better, even though when he was in charge he basically gave the store away to the rich on the backs of working and middle class people.
The economy, Nichols writes, “continues to torment (Americans) with its low inflation, low unemployment, declining mortgage rates, and high growth”—what the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last calls a “mass economic delusion,” that seems beyond the powers of Democratic messengers to correct. Nichols adds that he also suspects “many Americans have not yet internalized the dangers of a second Trump term.” What worries me is that they never will.
It's true that there is often a lag before good economic news translates into voter approval for a sitting president, and that may yet happen. But something more is in play here. Biden is not getting the benefit of the accomplishments of a normal POTUS because America has become so irrationally hyperpartisan and tribal—and so bludgeoned night and day and day and night by the right wing propaganda machine—that it overwhelms reality. Forget alternative facts—half of America is living in a permanent alternative reality, or what we not so affectionately know as Earth 2.
Trump has openly declared that he wants the economy to crash in order to help his fortunes. (Hey GOP voters: that really sounds like a guy who has your best interests at heart, right?) But he may not need that, because the truth doesn’t matter anymore.
And Joe has other problems too. Nichols:
(A) lot of Democrats, especially younger people, have turned on Biden because of the war in Gaza, This “President Superman” problem afflicts both parties, but if angry Arab and Muslim Americans put Michigan in play—another challenge for the fractious prodemocracy coalition the Democrats hope to create—then Biden’s loss to an anti-Muslim bigot would be among the greatest face-spiting nose removals in political history.
The Republicans, however, have completely departed Earth’s orbit and are now plunging headlong into the destructive black hole of Trump’s personal needs. In the past week, the GOP has moved along toward a Trump coronation, and they have been trying to help Trump’s later general-election chances by hamstringing solutions to the border crisis and holding up important foreign-aid packages—all while the military situation in Ukraine worsens and US and allied forces carry out strikes in Yemen.
House Republicans were even willing to tank an immigration bill that had been agreed upon by both parties and gave them just about all the hardline, heartless xenophobic BS they wanted, just because Trump told them to.
So after years of complaining that Democrats wouldn’t do anything about what Republicans claimed was an existential crisis at the southern border, the GOP itself prevented Congress from doing anything about it, just because they hope it will help Donald win back the White House. Wow.
Nichols again:
The House GOP’s obstruction, however, is beyond partisanship. Republicans are threatening to harm the country and endanger our allies merely to help Trump’s reelection chances, obeying a man under multiple indictments and whose track record as a party leader has been one of unbroken losses and humiliation.
Trump, of course, cares nothing for national policy. He has also clearly abandoned any pretenses about democracy, a position that might seem less than ideal heading into a general election, which is likely why Trump’s campaign has tried to ridicule concerns about its candidate’s commitment to the Constitution. But the former president’s footmen can’t help themselves, and they continue to trumpet their hopes for a dictatorship.
Luckily for the GOP, for a lot of their voters that’s a feature not a bug. On the Sunday morning talk shows recently, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ninth Circle of Hell)—auditioning for the VP spot on the Trump ticket—told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Trump ought to just defy the Supreme Court if it issues decisions he dislikes. And he did it in snide, condescending terms—including repeatedly saying “George,” like he meant “Vermin”—until “George” cut him off in mid-sentence and went to commercial.
Scuzzy as it is, Vance’s calculation that this sort of thing is exactly what the MAGA base wants may not be wrong. Because hardcore Trump loyalists don’t really want a democracy anyway, and their “mainstream” GOP enablers are happy to go along, while Low Information America apparently doesn’t care.
ROBIN HOOD IN REVERSE
Joe Biden is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” But when it comes to that alternative, plenty of our countrymen don’t seem to think a lifelong con man and pathological liar who has been found guilty of sexual assault and is under indictment on 91 separate criminal charges sounds too bad. So my faith in the judgment of our fellow Americans is not super high.
MAGA hardliners are one thing; they are impervious to reason. Republican cynics like Vance and Tim Scott of South Carolina and accommodationists like Rep. Nancy Mace of SC (to name but a few) are also beyond help. But what I am most worried about are ordinary Americans who are not otherwise predisposed to sign on for fascism, and who should be alarmed by the prospect of Trump’s return, but are not.
By way of saying he would be fine with a second Trump administration, the odious Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, went on CNBC and made a series of assertions that were howlingly wrong on a purely empirical basis. (Trump was right on immigration? On NATO? On tax reform? I guess it depends on your definition of “right,” and on whether or not you’re Stephen Miller, Vladimir Putin, or Ebeneezer Scrooge.) And the CNBC anchors went along with and even happily nodded in agreement.
But the fact that many of the ultra-rich support Trump should come as no surprise. the idea that anyone else thinks he ought to be president, or would be good for their pocketbook, is nucking futs.
The main achievement of Trump 1.0—not counting kidnapping and caging children and killing people by the hundreds of thousands in the pandemic—was a massive tax cut for the wealthy that added about $1.7 trillion to the deficit that conservatives claim to care so much about. (That’s trillion with a “t” that rhymes with “p” and that stands for “plutocracy.”)
The economic plan for Trump 2.0 is the same, financed with a tariff, which as Matthew Yglesias explains in his Slow Boring newsletter, would mean “raising taxes on the poor and the middle class in order to finance a tax cut for rich people. It’s cartoonishly evil.”
(“Cartoonishly Evil,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer points out, would make a hell of an accurate campaign slogan for Trump, should “Make America Great Again” wear out its welcome.)
Yet that fact, too, is getting precious little airplay in the media, and seems to have no effect on the Republican voters it would hurt most. As Ygleisas writes in another recent piece, "Donald Trump is running on a gigantic regressive tax increase and nobody seems to care."
SOUNDS LIKE A WHISPER
This past Sunday, Tracy Chapman made a rare live appearance on the Grammys, singing her iconic hit “Fast Car”—which won a Grammy in 1988—alongside country star Luke Combs, whose cover of it hit the top of the C&W charts (well, #2) last summer. Yeah, it was weird, but also poignant. I wrote a whole blog about that phenomenon last July, in which I mused whether one day we would turn on country radio and hear another of Tracy’s hits, from that same monster debut LP, “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution”:
Poor people gonna rise up and get their share
Poor people gonna rise up and take what’s theirs
Finally the tables are starting to turn…..
The irony is, Trump’s supporters see themselves as those aggrieved and victimized people, and thrill to the idea of rising up and taking “what’s theirs.”
Some of them are indeed poor—which is a bitter irony in itself, seeing as they support the worst plutocrat of them all—but many others are middle class and even more are wealthy, like the grotesque Mr. Dimon. And the people they intend to “take what’s theirs” back from are, you know, the coloreds and the women’s libbers and the fags and the snowflakes and all the others they hate and believe have usurped the birthright of “real Americans.” They want to “take what’s theirs” the same way our forefathers took this country from its original inhabitants and wiped them out in a genocide, so that now American conservatives can keep a straight face while they screech about “securing the border” to keep out “illegal immigrants” trying to come here “the wrong way.”
So as I wrote last summer, “if ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’ were to crack the country charts, I fear the ‘revolution’ in question would be the Capitol insurrection kind, with Confederate flags and AR-15s.”
As I wrote in the wake of Bob Kagan’s “sky is falling” piece of last November, a wakeup call is in order as regards the prospect of a second Trump administration, but self-defeating fatalism is not. The sky IS falling, but we can stop it, if we try…..or we can embrace the “Don’t Look Up” ethos and let the most openly criminal, overtly despotic president in American history come back to power after once trying to overthrow the government, not only with impunity but with reward.
The whole point of the Chicken Little story, after all, is that C.L. was right.
Yes, there is a lot of time left before this next November, but it will go by in a flash. And an October surprise in Trump’s favor—engineered, like Reagan/Tehran in ’80 or Nixon/Saigon in ‘68—is at least as likely as a turnaround that benefits Biden.
Many Republicans who currently support Trump have told pollsters that they would abandon him if he were to be convicted in one or more of his many trials. That surprises me: nothing thus far has dented their obeisance, so why should that? Do they really put that much stock in the wisdom of the justice system? Why not just disregard it, like every other institution and metric over which Trump has run roughshod? But whatever the reason, it offers some glimmer of hope for sanity in these United States.
Then again, the other way of looking at it, as NPR reported the story, is that “Most Republicans Would Vote For Trump Even If He's Convicted Of A Crime.” Which is appalling. That poll found 70% of Republican voters in the “who cares?” category, against 27% who would be swayed. But in a tight race, losing that 27% could be fatal to the fascist cause.
That conviction scenario, of course, presumes that Trump will not succeed in running out the clock on his various legal troubles, which he has been pretty adept at doing thus far, with some assistance from the justice system itself. Today’s very welcome decision by a federal appeals court affirming that Donald is not a king is a step in the right direction toward stopping that, at least insofar as the January 6th case being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith. Let’s hope SCOTUS declines to take the case—the easiest way for it to stay above the fray and salvage what’s left of its credibility—and the trial can proceed forthwith. One hopes that the spectacle of a presidential candidate on trial for some of the worst crimes imaginable by a public servant, even if not yet convicted of them, will change the electoral calculus.
No matter which poll you believe, the 2024 presidential election is going to be a close one—far too close for comfort. And tens of millions of Americans are, in various degrees, thrilled, comfortable, not particularly bothered, or ostrich-like in their unawareness that it may spell the end of participatory democracy in the US of A.
It’s become trite to quote Ben Franklin’s quip, as he left the 1789 Constitutional Convention, about America being a democracy only if we can keep it, but he wasn’t wrong. And increasingly, I’m not sure we can.
And if we put Trump back in office, we won’t deserve one.
********
Illustration: Lemmings.