One year after pro-Trump protesters ransacked the United States Capitol on January 6, the legacy of the deadliest attack on Congress since the War of 1812 is not the jail sentences of the few dozen protesters convicted for participating in the failed coup attempt. Rather, Americans should be thoroughly alarmed by the Republican Party’s continued amplification of the Big Lie that fueled the insurrection, and the failure of our institutions to meet the urgency of the moment.
The linchpin of democracy: Local election workers
One month after the January 6 insurrection, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called on his podcast listeners to take over precinct officer positions within their local Republican Party organizations. Because these are typically low-level bureaucratic roles devoid of partisanship, precinct officers are often tapped by their local political parties to help oversee elections.
A ProPublica investigation of 65 populous counties in key swing states like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that roughly two-thirds saw an abnormally high number of people sign up to be precinct officers in their respective Republican Party organizations after Bannon’s podcast episode. There has so far been no similar flare-up of interest in Democratic Party organizations.
More than 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, giving him the largest vote count and popular vote margin of any presidential candidate in American history, but Biden’s victory in the electoral college was actually much closer.
On paper, the data shows Biden routed Trump by a margin of 306 to 232, easily surpassing the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. But three states that pivoted from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 – Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin – were all decided by approximately 37,000 votes combined. This means that the allocation of 37 electoral votes (and effectively the margin of victory for the presidency itself) was based on the votes of a group of people smaller than the population of Concord, New Hampshire.
Such a small number of voters in a handful of swing states deciding the presidency means that local election officials in the most populous counties of those states – Maricopa and Pima Counties in Arizona; Cobb, DeKalb, and Fulton Counties in the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area; Dane and Milwaukee Counties in Wisconsin – have outsized power.
If 2020 election overseers in key swing state counties were rabid GOP partisans, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a few thousand ballots disappeared, or that results deemed unfavorable by Republicans failed to be certified, allowing the Republican-controlled legislatures of those three states to potentially send alternate slates of electors that would refuse to cast their electoral college ballots for the candidate that won a majority. This would effectively spell the death of democracy. If Bannon’s call to arms inspires enough Republicans, this scenario could play out in 2024.
The Republican base is primed for war
In 2019, approximately 2,000 political experts from around the world were surveyed on the ideology of mainstream political parties. Respondents measured parties based on how committed they were to democracy, and how they favored protection for the human rights of ethnic minorities.
There was widespread agreement among participants that the Republican Party in the United States had more in common with fascist-adjacent parties like the AKP in Turkey (one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), the PiS party in Poland (which is hostile to press freedom and democratic checks and balances) and the Fidesz party in Hungary (which wants to revise textbooks for political advantage) than conservative parties in Group of Seven countries like Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The aftermath of January 6 shows the Republican Party has become even more extreme since that survey.
A recent poll by the University of Maryland and The Washington Post found that Republicans stand alone in their opposition to democracy and a peaceful transition of power. 40% of Republicans said violence against the government was sometimes justified, 62% said there was evidence of widespread election fraud in 2020 (despite Trump’s own attorney general confirming there was none). 58% of Republican respondents thought President Biden was not legitimately elected, and 36% said the January 6 insurrectionists were mostly peaceful, despite five deaths – including that of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick – and 140 police officers injured. A separate poll from ABC News and Ipsos found that 71% of Republicans believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and that 58% of Republicans believe the January 6 insurrectionists were “protecting democracy.”
All of this data suggests that the racist, conspiratorial bluster of Republicans like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) is reflective of mainstream Republican ideology, not of a marginalized, extremist wing of the party. In a column for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon – a renowned scholar of social breakdown and political violence – warned that Republicans’ embrace of zero-sum politics would significantly endanger democracy should they retake Congress in the 2022 midterm elections:
Willingness to publicly endorse the Big Lie has become a litmus test of Republican loyalty to Mr. Trump. This isn’t just an ideological move to promote Republican solidarity against Democrats. It puts adherents one step away from the psychological dynamic of extreme dehumanization that has led to some of the worst violence in human history. And it has refashioned – into a moral crusade against evil – Republican efforts to gerrymander Congressional districts into pretzel-like shapes, to restrict voting rights, and to take control of state-level electoral apparatuses.
When the situation is framed in such a Manichean way, righteous ends justify any means. One of the two American parties is now devoted to victory at any cost.
Many of those with guns are waiting for a signal to use them. Polls show that between 20 and 30 million American adults believe both that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that violence is justified to return him to the presidency.
…Mr. Trump’s electoral loss has energized the Republican base and further radicalized young party members. Even without their concerted efforts to torque the machinery of the electoral system, Republicans will probably take control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate this coming November, because the incumbent party generally fares poorly in mid-term elections. Republicans could easily score a massive victory, with voters ground down by the pandemic, angry about inflation, and tired of President Joe Biden bumbling from one crisis to another. Voters who identify as Independent are already migrating toward Republican candidates.
Once Republicans control Congress, Democrats will lose control of the national political agenda, giving Mr. Trump a clear shot at recapturing the presidency in 2024. And once in office, he will have only two objectives: vindication and vengeance.
It isn’t hyperbole to say that 2022 will be the year where Americans decide whether we want democracy or authoritarianism. Historian Michael Beschloss, who has authored nine books on the US presidency, recently called on Congress to pass legislation safeguarding voting rights amid a wave of Republican-led efforts to disenfranchise voters.
“If we lose our democracy this year, we are unlikely to get it back during our lifetimes,” Beechloss told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart. “I can’t think of anything more important than that.”
(Stay tuned for part 3 of this series. Read part 1 here.)
