On the toppling of democracy

The mid-term elections are already lost. Democrats will watch the gerrymandered districts secure Republican victories in 2022, which will tip the scales even further to a new anti-democratic system.

It is a system in which the people's vote is subject to their state legislature's discretion. It is a system of rewritten laws devised by Donald Trump and his refreshed team of lawyers — its ranks now bolstered by the Federalist Society and firms such as BakerHostetler. The teams on that front are steering and coaching states such as Arizona, Georgia and 15 others to reassign election authority so that electors are no longer shielded from partisan replacement during a national election.

The midterms are lost because of maps. The funhouse-mirror distortions wrought upon congressional districts emerged this year, and there appears to be no turning back. The Republican party has achieved its goal; it will win in a sufficient number of House districts based on its redrawing of the voting topography in such a way that it breaks all modern records for contortionism. Nobody has seen maps like these since the Voting Rights Act passed nearly 60 years ago. 

Then, we've never lived in a version of the United States like this one, and that's counting the Civil War when the Confederates conceded to Lincoln's election. They may have seceded, but they didn't build a system to destroy democracy for those who disagreed with their twisted worldview. The Republican party and its goblin armies of QAnon adherents and Proud Boys are not satisfied with the old ways of disagreeing about the Republic; they want to tear it all down and remake it. They are succeeding apace while the Democrats, and whatever sane members of the GOP’s tattered ideological spectrum remain, stand transfixed by what they would not prefer to believe.

So, that leaves us with action. What is left, short of the equally appalling option of donning the anti-fa uniform — no less threatening to the United States of America in its way when it comes to the concept of a free people electing their best bets for a future absent of otherism, violence and proscription? 

There may be two paths forward. Neither of them looks likely. 

First, filibuster reform. What's directly obstructing our nation's legislators from stopping the stripping away of election authority at the state level is the fact that, with the Senate controlled by the very people enacting that obscenity, the filibuster is preventing new laws — the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and others — from making it to a vote. However, to kill the filibuster, by any of the ways currently proposed (i.e., reducing how many senators are needed to open debate, rules around who's in the room and speaking to sustain a filibuster, and giving voting measures the same kind of up-or-down majority mechanisms that some of our fiscal measures enjoy) requires a bipartisan effort in Congress. There is little question that this path is already cut off.

The last possible path, then, would be one of inarguable spectacle. The United States must not only hold Donald Trump and his co-conspirators accountable for the plotting of a post-election coup in 2020 and 2021, but the country must bring the full legal ramifications to bear. As Barton Gellman puts it in his landmark exploration of the very topics this short essay covers (and his work is an inspiration, here), "An unpunished plot is practice for the next." 

What we know is that this is not happening. The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have made virtually zero headway in doing much more than gather internet wannabes and weapons collectors — indeed contributors but nothing like the conspirators who set them in motion. 

The impending loss of the mid-term elections is the high-octane injection that will shift into overdrive the subversion and removal of national election outcomes from the people — a process already underway. As early as 2024, the future of national elections stands to fall into the hands of legislators beholden to masters who want nothing less than to rewrite the United States in their image. Their image is one of fantastical theories about satanic forces at work in the land, global cabals of, yes, our old friends the Jews and their remote control of all the money, and all of it rooted in age-old nationalist and fascist stories of the white race being replaced and some vaguely defined tradition being overthrown by shifty enemies in the shadow of an undefinable deep state. 

So, that leaves us with … other actions. For the sane and the able, that action may be an abdication of the board because the game is no longer being played on the squares or by anything like the rules to which people living with each other in good faith have always agreed. 

One wonders what the search and page-view numbers tell us about U.S. citizens investigating terms for foreign citizenship and leave-to-remain laws around the world in 2022.