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OROn Wednesday, the transition of Republicans to the party of Confederacy will be complete. One day after the second round of the Georgia elections, at least a dozen legislators in the Senate and more than half of the party’s House members will seek to overturn the results of the 2020 elections and disenfranchise them. the majority of American voters. An attempted coup in everything but name, this is how democracy dies.
Sadly, a statement issued Saturday by seven sitting senators and four elected senators dispelled any doubt about the nexus between the end of the American civil war, more than 150 years ago, and Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to cling to power. Unsurprisingly, America’s racial divide is once again front and center.
After regurgitating for the umpteenth time unsubstantiated and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, the senators invoked the 1876 election. At the time, Democrats contested the result, conceding after Republicans agreed to stop Reconstruction.
As framed by Ted Cruz and his gang, “the most direct precedent” for their actions “emerged in 1877, after serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race.” In his account, “the elections in three states” were “allegedly held illegally.” What is not said is that after the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the toxic legacy of “separate but equal” continued.
To quote William Faulkner of Mississippi, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. “Senators from states that were once part of the Confederacy, or territories where slavery was legal, provide the ballast for Cruz’s lawsuits. At least one senator from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas is on board. .
Apparently Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, the former vice president of the first black man in the White House, and Kamala Harris, a black woman, is too much for many. In other words, for these Republicans the right to vote is only for some people, sometimes those people are the supporters of this president.
Trump’s equivocation about Charlottesville, his debate shout out to the Proud Boys, and his adoration of dead Confederate generals are all of the same piece. The vestiges of a more ancient and cruel social order must be preserved, at all costs.
Similarly, the reluctance of Trump appointees to the federal judiciary to assert the validity of Brown against the Board of Education, the supreme court ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional, is a characteristic, not a mistake.
As for the declaration of the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal”, and the constitutional guarantee of equal protection before the law, these are inconveniences that must be discarded when faced with a dislocating demographic.
“Go back and wait”, in fact.
Since the civil war, there has always been a southern party, often echoing the tensions of the old slave-owning south. In practice, that has meant hostility toward civil rights along with caution toward modernity.
Surely the south did not automatically equate to neo-Confederate, but the distinction could easily be lost. And, without a doubt, the Democrats were initially the southern party. During the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans gave Lyndon Johnson the votes he needed. No longer.
Cruz and Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who started the attempt to deny the electoral college result, are products of places like Harvard, Stanford and Yale. John C Calhoun, the seventh vice president, argued in favor of slavery and the right of states to secede. He also went to Yale. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate from Heidelberg. An elite title does not automatically confer wisdom.
For the record, Cruz was also a secretary to a chief justice, William Rehnquist. Hawley did it for John Roberts.
On Sunday, as the new Congress was sworn in, a recording surfaced of Trump unsuccessfully intimidating the Georgia secretary of state into finding “11,780 votes, which is one more than us.” By the sound of things, Trump’s fear of prosecutors and the creditors, who expect him to leave the White House, take precedence over electoral integrity.
In May, after Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, predicted 240,000 deaths from Covid, and as armed protests against public health measures mounted, an administration source relayed that the United States Trump was becoming a “bit” like the “late” Weimar. Republic. Eight months later, the death toll exceeds 350,000 and is steadily increasing.
As night falls on January 6, the Abraham Lincoln party will no longer exist. Instead, the specters of Jim Crow and the autocracy will blink. Messrs. Trump, Cruz, and Hawley may take a collective bow.
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