"Election Denial" Does Not Capture the GOP's Corruption and Violence. Let's Find a Better Term
The GOP's aim is to debase the whole idea of elections, so the fundamental democratic idea of relying on elections to choose leaders is compromised.
This week’s essay comes out of the wonderful Q&As I host each week. We sometimes touch on the issue of not having the proper terms to name what is happening in American politics due to the GOP’s authoritarian turn. In our last gathering, an attendee member reflected that “election denial” was not a strong enough term to convey the democratic emergency we face. I thought about that comment and this essay is the result. And another member of the Lucid community sent me the twitter post with the photo of Biden depicted as a hostage on a pickup truck. So thank you to all who contribute to the dialogue - I appreciate you!
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"The media appears unable to use the right words to describe this," observed David Pepper of the Ohio GOP's intention to use districts in the state's upcoming general election that the state’s Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional. "It's not 'bizarre.' It's not a 'fight.' It's not a 'showdown.' There's no 'both sides.' The GOP legislature & statewide leaders intentionally broke the law for a year to impose illegal maps on the state."
When a political order is in transition, and phenomena that have no name in the previous political culture start to take hold, a crisis of language can manifest. This is what happened in America under the illiberal presidency of Donald Trump, when the public and the media had initially hesitated to use the adjective authoritarian to describe him and his actions. The hope that Trump would "pivot" to being a "normal" president was also a desire to remain within a familiar world, where political events could be recounted with a familiar vocabulary.
All of that has been shattered as the GOP remakes itself into a party bent on using autocratic methods to gain power. Frames of reference based on democratic norms and bipartisanship no longer work. Those of us who study autocracy have a ready store of language and concepts that describe what is shaping up day by day in our country, but that lexicon is still unfamiliar to many.
Specifically, the US could develop into an electoral autocracy (also known as autocratic legalism), which is a form of illiberal rule currently dominant in Hungary, Russia, Turkey and elsewhere. Twentieth-century despots shut down elections other than the occasional sham referendum. Benito Mussolini staged one in 1934 to have voters “approve” his purge of Parliament (Putin’s referendum on annexing Ukrainian territories recalls Fascist methods).
Today's autocrats tend to keep elections going but game the electoral system to produce the outcomes they require to stay in power. American politicians have a long history of such practices at the state level: gerrymandering, redistricting, and racially motivated voter suppression. That is why Pepper, a former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, calls U.S. states laboratories of autocracy --using a term many Americans still associate more with foreign than national experiences.
Trump scaled up these state-run efforts, but also added something new that the terms "election denier" and "Big Lie" don't convey.
Trump and the GOP don't just aim to invalidate the 2020 election that brought Joe Biden into the White House: they aim to delegitimize elections in the absolute. The goal is to associate voting with corruption to the point where the idea of relying on elections as a way to choose leaders is compromised in the public mind. The debasement of elections encourages acceptance of other ways to approach transfers of power --say, a violent coup attempt.
The hostile takeover of our electoral system by hundreds of GOP politicians who engage in the ritual of "running a campaign" and yet have no intention of conceding defeat (following Trump's lead) takes us out of a democratic system and into something else.
“Election denial” is an insufficient term because rejecting certified electoral results is not really a belief (other than the belief that respecting election results is for the weak) but a practice that, as we saw on Jan. 6, has real-world outcomes. An entire political party decided to subvert the will of the people and seize power illegally on Jan. 6, even if Capitol Police officers had to die for that to happen.
Autocratic (or fascist) takeover may be a better term than election denial to convey the corrupt intent and violent consequences of the collective conspiracy among GOP politicians and operatives to refute the results of the 2020 election and all future elections that don’t go their way.
These are actions that have already led to violence and which spawn scenarios such as this: a Trump supporter's criminal fantasy of Biden “brought to justice,” displayed to the world on the back of his truck.
The Texas GOP’s 2022 resolution that Biden is an illegitimate and “acting” president, someone who will soon be removed and brought to justice, gives this fantasy real-world traction.
What would you call the attempt to strip elections of any meaning in order to prepare Americans for anti-democratic governance and legitimize other means of bringing leaders into office?
Absolutely agree. We have been in an attempted fascist takeover since 2016. In reality, the foundation of such a takeover has existed long before. Jeff Sharlet wrote of a religious entity in "The Family". Today, Dominionism and Evangelicalism has taken over where the "Family" has retreated to some degree. Fascism NEEDS Religion. Religion is the fuel that makes fascism burn bright. Most local church goers have no idea of the politics behind their organizations. We are watching the total destruction of separation of Church and State. The lie used, that we are a Christian Nation, and those who point towards "In God We Trust", only perpetuate the fascist takeover. "In God We Trust", was never a part of our Democracy until 1956. Before I get any religious flack, let it be known, I am not against anyones religion. I am against that religion being imposed on me, a State religion and, that religion being used by autocrats to engage in a Fascist takeover of our Democracy. WHICH IS HAPPENING.......... These Fascists use a very primitive defense, known as projection. They project their position onto others. Sarah Kendzior makes this very clear in, "Hiding in Plain Sight." We have less than a month to see if our reprieve will continue. Buckle up folks.
I'm struggling a lot lately with the language gaps. But the big concept I haven't even seen addressed is: If you enter a contest (pie-eating, arm-wrestling, chess, elections), the baseline presumption is that the rules for the contest have been established and agreed on. Cheating in a normal case means using advantages or ignoring the rules. But the thing now spreading from 45 is something else: It isn't "cheating" within the rules of a contest. It's a THREAT, a PLAN, an INTENTION to ignore the agreed-on rules if the outcome isn't to their liking. This is tantamount to saying "I win no matter what happens", and in the case of elections it says "I win no matter how many people vote against me". Why don't we DISQUALIFY each candidate who takes as a starting premise that they won't honor democratic election outcomes? Big Lie proponents have essentially already started down that road; they already are insistent that they can choose their own reality in spite of actual election stats. They DISQUALIFY themselves when they don't agree to abide by the rules, the results, the frame of the contest. Why is that not our response to election deniers?