Surrendering Without a Fight

By GENE NICHOL

Rep. Madison Cawthorn – North Carolina’s most recent and visible national humiliation – famously told a Macon county gathering Aug. 29 “we all know” Donald Trump and, apparently, North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Forest’s elections “were stolen.” If our “election systems continue to be rigged,” he continued, “it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed.” Noting his alleged humanity, Cawthorn concluded — “as much as I’m willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing I would dread more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American.” He has “plans” to call folks to Washington again he “can’t make public right now.” Cawthorn was sanctioned neither by his caucus nor his party. He’s proud and they’re apparently proud of him.

Cawthorn’s minority leader in the Congress, Kevin McCarthy, followed up the sedition threat with one of his own. If any of 35 technology companies comply with the lawful demands sent by the Jan. 6 congressional committee to preserve phone and social media records of 11 members of Congress who pushed to overturn the election, including Cawthorn, Mr. McCarthy announced Republicans will “not forget” and the corporations will be “held accountable.” Warming to totalitarianism, he threatened they would “lose their ability to operate in the US.” The now-thuggish spokesman for what has become the most dangerous anti-democracy party in the world announced he’s ready to use the might of the central government to punish those who comply with the orders of his own institution. McCarthy would shield urgings to violence through a corresponding commitment to lawlessness and anti-constitutionalism. This is the landscape we now occupy.

I’ve long found it stunning to contemplate what has become of the party of Lincoln. But it is what it is. The GOP has abandoned the American experiment. They now wage war against it. They seek to do what the Confederates couldn’t. No wonder they’re attached to the Stars and Bars.

But I find the Democrats perplexing as well.

It’s serious business for elected leaders to talk of deploying violence against their countrymen and using the tools of government to punish and oppress their political opponents. Just because Trump got us used to anything doesn’t make Cawthorn and McCarthy any less vile, or dangerous, or un-American. And the wages of failing to confront burgeoning tyranny, history teaches, can be earth-shatteringly acute.

It won’t do to assume demagogues are just stupid or buffoonish. Especially as their colleagues employ similarly dishonest and debilitating schemes across the country to deny voting rights and dignity to Americans they mean to exclude from full membership. Yet, Democrats behave as if this is all the give and take of normal, even if somewhat extreme, politics. They take Republican claims and postures as if they are offered in good faith. As if we’re having a somewhat ill-tempered political dispute, instead of a fight for our national character.  So, Democrats won’t blow up the filibuster, or the Supreme Court, or codify abortion rights, or the franchise, or throw folks like Cawthorn out of the Congress. It would be bad form. They bring a powder puff to the gunfight.

The Republican Party has become home to moral, political, scientific, racial, democratic and constitutional nihilism. It giddily embraces the destruction of our foundational norms and institutions. It cowers before our darkest forces, assuming it’s safe to ride the back of the tiger. Democrats have to stop worrying they might insult Republicans by naming what they do. It just gives them more room to accomplish the destruction of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021

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