Across the country, Republicans are pushing local, state, and national regulations to curtail democracy and lock in minority rule. Most of these efforts aim to ensure white, male, conservative control of government by flouting the will of the majority of citizens.
Making it harder for young people, poor people, and people of color to vote is a key element of this plan. But so are a raft of smaller, mean-spirited measures so petty that they boggle the mind.
This fall, we will likely face a partial federal government shutdown because Republican members of Congress are insisting on attaching bans on drag queen story hours, inclusive hiring policies, and other unrelated riders to what should be straightforward government funding bills.
In Indiana, a new law just passed the legislature that blocks the Indianapolis City-County Council from putting up no-turn-on-red signs downtown. Local officials, responding to record-high pedestrian fatalities, were on the brink of passing the commonsense traffic safety measure when a Republican legislator jumped in front of them. State Senator Aaron Freeman called the downtown proposal “stupid” and part of a Democratic “war on cars.”
Now the city is stuck with dangerous intersections it can’t regulate.
This follows a 2016 law, signed by then Governor Mike Pence, that prohibits city and county officials in Indiana from taxing or restricting the use of disposable plastic bags by grocery stores and other retailers.
In Texas, the amount of solar energy fueling the electric grid has doubled since early last year and is on track to double again by the end of next year, The New York Times reports. Yet the state legislature is contemplating a crackdown on renewable energy with proposed fees, heavy regulation, and other barriers to growth that will protect the fossil fuel industry from competition.
The party of small government and local control is hoping to tie up renewable energy innovators in red tape in Texas, even as consumers confront deadly power outages and climate change drives ever more extreme weather.
Destructive policies like the disastrous mismanagement of the power grid in Texas are attributable to simple greed and politicians who carry water for industry. But other anti-democratic measures are so capricious that they seem to arise purely from a desire to score political points by making life miserable for most people.
Take the array of conditions the Wisconsin legislature imposed on Milwaukee as part of a deal that will allow the city to avoid bankruptcy by releasing shared revenue from the state.
When Republican legislative leaders—none of whom represent the Milwaukee area—announced the deal, they crowed that they had forced local officials and Democratic Governor Tony Evers to accept their terms. These include forcing cops back into schools where students and communities had ejected them, banning local funds from flowing to Milwaukee’s popular streetcar, and making it illegal for voters to make their voices heard through advisory ballot measures on matters like legalizing marijuana. Diversity programs that seek to increase sensitivity and boost the hiring of people of color in the state’s most diverse city were also banned.
The sour-faced white Republicans who presented this plan had plenty of condescending words for the Black local officials they claimed “mismanaged” their city. In truth, the state legislature has deliberately starved Milwaukee of funds for years. Republicans made a big point of saying, as they forced police officers back into the schools, that the state won’t send money to cities that “defund the police.” But as Wisconsin blogger Dan Shafer points out, Republican legislators are the ones who have been defunding police departments across the state for years, forcing hundreds of municipalities in Wisconsin to cut police budgets because of declining state aid to local governments.
The truth is, Republicans want local governments in Milwaukee and other Democratic-leaning cities to fail, along with all of the democratic institutions they have been undermining and depriving of resources: schools, libraries, universities, polling places, mass transit, the U.S. Post Office, union contracts that protect livable wages and working conditions, environmental protections that make the world habitable, emergency safety net programs, and health care access. All of the basic goods and services that make a functional society are under attack from the people who want the super-wealthy to hold all the power over a desperate, disempowered workforce.
Politicians who wrap themselves in the flag and call themselves patriots want to bring back serfdom, forced labor, and a rigid class system where there’s no opportunity for those without inherited wealth.
Republican anti-democratic measures are so capricious they seem to arise purely from a desire to score political points by making life miserable for most people.
Of course, many of the voters they’re appealing to with their attacks on Black people, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people are not rich themselves. They are disaffected, white, working-class people. Stoking racism, sexism, and homophobia is classic rightwing populist misdirection. By punching down, rightwing populists keep working people from looking up and seeing the real problem. Railing about trans kids in the locker room and drag queen story hours distracts people from the way massive tax avoidance by the mega-rich, coupled with austerity and shrinking opportunity for everyone else, hurts most people. Union-busting, wage inequality, exploding college debt, and environmental deregulation are killing us. Drag queen story hours are not.
Democrats need to call out this hoax and remind voters of their real interests. But also, all of us need to recommit to civil society. We need to remain civically engaged. After the pandemic hit, isolation and alienation got worse. With the rise of rightwing populism and the growth of violent American fascism, we face an existential threat to democracy.
Fortunately, among a raft of damaging decisions, including rollbacks of affirmative action in college admissions and the Biden Administration’s student debt relief plan, the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed Republicans’ all-out assault on democracy in June with a ruling in Moore v. Harper that upheld the ability of state courts to review and rectify election rules and voting maps created by state legislators. Had the court’s 6-3 majority decision gone the other way, state legislatures would have been empowered to gerrymander with impunity and send electoral ballots for losing presidential candidates to Congress (as Republicans in ten states did when, contrary to the will of their states’ voters, they cast fake ballots for Donald Trump in 2020). But this time, Congress would actually have had to accept the rogue electors’ votes. Fortunately, the court agreed with the North Carolina Supreme Court that such a result “would produce absurd and dangerous consequences.”
So the fight for democracy continues.
We need to remind each other what a functional society looks like—not the stripped-down hellscape that Republicans are trying to impose on us.
They’ve been claiming for decades that public schools have “failed” in order to justify siphoning taxpayer money into private schools. They pretend universal, affordable health care is unachievable. They attack poor people in the richest nation on Earth, and they try to roll back unemployment benefits by saying it discourages people from working, even as unemployment remains at a record low. They are destroying voting rights in the name of protecting against nonexistent “voter fraud.”
We have to keep calling out the lies. But most of all, we have to remember what we treasure, enjoy, and love about our public institutions and society. Hanging onto that is going to be the most important task we face.