So right now, as the fallout from Georgia’s recent legislative attack on voting rights continues apace, we’re in the midst of a pretty startlingly aggressive effort by Republicans to find almost any conceivable alternative to making their party appealing to larger numbers of voters. There are at least two prongs to this effort — the first is the unprecedented onslaught of legislation enacted by Republican-controlled legislatures in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and many other states to impose voter suppression measures that would severely constrain the likelihood of participation by Democratic constituencies, as well as other measures that would simply pluck the whole question of electoral decisions out of the hands of properly administered certification boards and/or Secretaries of State, and put it in the hands of Republican-controlled legislatures.
But there is a second prong to this effort as well, and it involves persuasion of the electorate: to be very precise, it involves persuading the Republican half of the electorate that the other half shouldn’t really get to vote. Given the opportunity to reach out to a broader electorate, Republicans are doubling down with further “inreach” to their own stubbornly Trumpist base. And the arguments they’re making are getting a bit “out there,” as these things go.
First of these, and my personal favorite, is the boneheaded assertion that you all have likely encountered all over your social media feeds — the “it’s not a democracy, it’s a republic!” gambit. The implication here, I suppose, is that we all need to return to the days when the franchise was restricted to property-holding men, or a small covenant of village elders or something. I’m not going to say too much about this one, because the inevitable semantic debate that would emerge here between armchair constitutional scholars about “what the definition of republic is reaaaaly” would be enough to make even my eyes glaze over. And I’m an academic!
All I will say about this first one is that looking at the word “republic” in the founding documents and immediately deciding that that necessarily excludes democratic governance as a possibility is the kind of simpleminded and petulantly literalist approach to governance that makes me despise conservative sensibilities so very, very much.
Another approach taken by unctuous Republic chin-scratchers is the attempt to persuade Republican voters that voting in elections is fine, but that what we really need right now is a better quality of voter, drawn from, y’know, the better sorts of folk. Elections are apparently too important to be entrusted to those who don’t look and think like me don’t prioritize the good governance of this great nation. Keven Williamson, in a recent article in the National Review, waxes eloquent about how a country of fewer voters would be a good thing, how the voting age would be raised to 30, if he could help it, and how making it easier for people to vote is no different than [checks notes] eliminating qualifications for medical practitioners(!):
Much of the discussion about proposed changes to voting laws backed by many Republicans and generally opposed by Democrats begs the question and simply asserts that having more people vote is, ceteris paribus, a good thing.
Why should we believe that?
Why shouldn’t we believe the opposite? That the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters?
[snip]
There would be more voters if we made it easier to vote, and there would be more doctors if we didn’t require a license to practice medicine. The fact that we believe unqualified doctors to be a public menace but act as though unqualified voters were just stars in the splendid constellation of democracy indicates how little real esteem we actually have for the vote, in spite of our public pieties.
But I’m afraid we can proceed no further in this grim parade of Republican ideas without addressing the recent intellectual vomit of Tucker Carlson, who I liked a lot more — or rather, hated a lot less — when he was just a snippy “voice from the right” on Crossfire, oxygen to his brain cut off by a bowtie that was tied a little too tightly.
Carlson’s latest brainwave is a piece of truly disturbing reactionary drivel, one which — and I cannot put too fine a point on this — is basically one degree of separation away from neo-Nazi claims of “white genocide.” Tucker Carlson’s outlining of “the great replacement” puts across the alternately unhinged and inane argument, promulgated by white supremacists, that the white electorate in this country is slowly being “replaced” by immigrants and people of color, and that white voters are being “disenfranchised” with the addition of each new voter to the roles. His formulation of the whole thing is jaw-droopingly stupid, so I suggest that you watch the video, to the degree that you can stomach it:
CARLSON: Now I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,' if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it: That's true!
OTHER DUDE, THROUGHOUT: [worriedly] Mmmhmm; Mmmhmm.
[snip]
CARLSON: This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they're importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote, and they're diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do that. Why are we putting up with this?
All right, so, apart from the terrifying proximity of this stuff to truly pointy-hatted white-robed conceptual territory, it’s just mind-numbingly stupid. I mean, like…. some math issues, for starters. If Tucker Carlson is standing there with his one vote, and then you add another person, also with one vote, to the first d__chebag voter…. did Tucker Carlson somehow lose his vote? Is his vote now only worth, I dunno, 3/5ths of its original value?
The moral bankruptcy and flagrant, foghorn racism of Carlson’s argument gives us a sense of where we are at presently with the strategic posture of the contemporary Republican party. This was once a part of [very bad] ideas: supply-side economics, something something family values, and all the rest of it. For a time, the party was able to articulate those ideas, and build enough of a coalition around itself that it could secure electoral victories for the party without too much overt, outrageously noticeable voter suppression. Cripes, some of these ideas were so popular, for a little while, that Democrats felt the need to parrot them, or at least sidle up alongside and flirt with those ideas a bit. The “Third Way,” “triangulation,” the “Era of Big Government” being “over,” and so on and so forth — conservative ideas put a certain kind of Democrat on the defensive, and so in the 1990s many Dems felt the need to play the same game.
So Republicans had some popular ideas, but these became less so as time went on. A country increasingly disgusted with income inequality began to wonder about whether the Reverse Robin Hood approach to wealth redistribution was such a hot idea. The ridiculous ease with which Tough On Crime, Law n’ Order sensibilities could translate into votes (and into a scale of incarceration unprecedented in human history) became just the slightest bit harder to sell to an electorate that had watched as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Eric Garner, and countless others had lost their lives to police use of excessive force. The “Overton window” on LGBTQ rights has been steadily shifting to the left since the early 2000s, to the point where we would barely recognize some of the positions held by our highest-profile Democratic politicians.
The further we got into the 21st century, the more likely it was that various sorts of structural distortion in the US electoral system — whether it is gerrymandering in the House, wildly divergent representation by population in the Senate, or the Electoral College for the Presidency — would be the thing that helped Republicans to secure majorities in Congress or Presidential victories. And this can get you a certain part of the way, but there was worry in some quarters that it wouldn’t get you all the way to any kind of consistent Republican victory.
A key artifact of this worry, and of the shifting sands under Republican feet, was the white paper that was released by the RNC in the wake of Mitt Romney’s electoral defeat in the 2012 presidential election. Mitt Romney’s xenophobia in that campaign reads as pretty f__king mild by today’s standards — people looked askance when he held forth about the possible “self-deportation” of undocumented immigrants, which sounds almost polite in comparison with what Trump later had in mind.
But all this was enough of a concern that the Party issued a recommendation after Romney’s defeat that Republicans begin to cultivate a broader and more diverse electoral coalition. The recommendations of this “Growth and Opportunity Project” report read to me like they’re from a parallel universe, where party strategy could have gone in an entirely different direction:
The GOP today is a tale of two parties. One of them, the gubernatorial wing, is growing and successful. The other, the federal wing, is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.
[snip]
Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.
[snip]
It is time for Republicans on the federal level to learn from successful Republicans on the state level. It is time to smartly change course, modernize the Party, and learn once again how to appeal to more people, including those who share some but not all of our conservative principles.
[snip]
If we believe our policies are the best ones to improve the lives of the American people, all the American people, our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms and we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case. We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities.
There is a sense that Republicans, in that brief window of time before the Trump juggernaut overtook the 2016 Republican primary, may have been on the cusp of attempting to implement those ideas. Marco Rubio is kind of a waste of space, but there is little question that his entry in the 2016 election was designed to capitalize on a certain “modernized” vision of the Republican party, one that could be open to the idea (if certainly not the reality) of a charismatic young Cuban-American President in the same way that the 2008 election had opened American minds about electing an actually charismatic young President of color. For a hot minute, Bobby Jindal’s 2016 campaign raised the possibility (one that ultimately no one took very seriously) that Republicans might be open to electing a Presidential candidate of South Asian descent.
It’s worth meditating on this moment, to think about what it means. This window of time between the frank, honest GOP self-appraisal of the 2012 election postmortem on the one hand, and the meteoric ascent of Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2015 on the other, was the last time that the GOP even so much as flirted with the idea that winning federal elections in the future might actually mean reaching out to new constituencies of voters.
Now, you can argue that these efforts were as superficial as they were cynical, that the commitment to diversifying the face of the Republican leadership means nothing if the party was still committed to policies that demonized immigrants, incarcerated young men of color, and reduced LGBTQ people to second-class citizens. All of which is undoubtedly true, but the point remains that it was a moment where one could almost imagine that Republicans, faced with political irrelevance at the federal level, might eventually move past optics and communications to change up their policy positions as well, to begin to align their legislative priorities with some kind of fresh-faced, dynamic, and diverse electoral coalition they might hypothetically pursue.
Well, we all know what happened. No point in dragging us all through the xenophobic, racist, misogynistic dumpster fire of the past four years, a period that remains unnervingly fresh in our memories.
But the main point I’m driving at here is this one: the American electoral system, which really seems to favor a two-party balance (for reasons that political scientists could explain better than I ever could), can really only be functional when there is a degree of ideological and social overlap between the two parties. Increasingly, one of these two parties is drifting to the extreme margins of the electorate, and seems utterly uninterested in reevaluating the terms of its engagement with that electorate: it has located a constituency driven by white revanchist grievance politics, and having succeeded in getting its candidate elected President once by this coalition (based upon the narrowest of Electoral College victories), it has decided to double-down on this coalition in perpetuity. The GOP would sooner axe large swaths of the Democratic electorate from voting eligibility than do what all successful major parties have done at some point in their histories — to change up and modernize their image, and maybe even their policies, to expand the “big tent” of their electoral coalitions.
Right now, obviously, the main thing to worry about is whether the GOP’s strategy of structural sabotage will destroy democracy in the same moment that it destroys (or undermines) the Democratic party. But in the medium term, one can imagine what it might look like to have more than one political party that “looks like America” (to use that current truism), that represents the dynamism and futurity of American society in all of its diversity. Given the situation at present, where we vacillate between polarized gridlock and terrifying proto-fascism, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if the GOP took a gander at its 2012 recommendations to itself, and found a few choice takeaway lessons from that healthy exercise.