Point and laugh at hapless clown Roy Moore’s latest step in his refusal to acknowledge reality. He filed a lawsuit in federal court, the one he was twice kicked off of, alleging voter fraud in the election that saw him repudiated by a margin of more than 20,000 Alabama voters. Take a careful look, because this is the playbook the national GOP was going to follow if, as had been expected, Hillary Clinton won the Electoral College.
Here’s what people who long for centrism don’t get: You can’t achieve it unless both sides want it, and one side obviously doesn’t want it. Too many Democrats, including all of Delaware’s Congressional delegation, refuse to see this. Republicans are not interested in sharing power, unless the alternative is having no power at all, and they will not hesitate to destroy the country’s institutions in order to gain and hold onto that power.
It’s been clear for a generation that the Republican Party is in a death spiral. Only once in the past six presidential elections has it won a majority of the popular vote, and given the unpopularity of the party’s positions that’s unlikely to change. It has therefore concentrated its efforts not on appealing to voters but in gaming a system that was set up to reflect the will of the majority. It’s been doing so, on every front available to it, for a generation.
The 2016 elections marked a new low point, in which the GOP, incapable of rigging elections on its own even with the voting machine manufacturer in the fold, turned to Russia for help in putting a minority government in place, taking oligarchs’ laundered money and technological aid to capture the presidency for a megalomaniacal dotard.
From the available evidence, it appears the plan worked better than expected, so we never got to see the chaos Republicans had prepared to unleash after a Clinton victory. All the signs are plain, though; Trump spent the last month before election day claiming the election was rigged, and the days after his unexpected triumph he still maintained that he won the popular vote as well. These claims have been written off as part of Trump’s mental infirmity, but Moore’s turn toward the same tactics shows that the strategy is widely shared among Republicans.
The future is clear: Republicans intend to take over the governments of the United States by whatever means necessary, popular sovereignty be damned. For now they are doing so under the guise of democratic elections, but if that proves untenable, I am convinced they will go farther towards autocratic rule, as they respect the nation’s institutions only so far as they prove useful to that takeover.
Think you’re living in a democratic republic? As the peasant Dennis in “Monty Python’s Holy Grail” says, “You’re foolin’ yourself. We’re living in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy.” And there’s some lovely filth down here.