Across the country Republicans looked at protests at excessive use of police authority and decided the solution was to criminalize protest
The easiest way to understand the trend toward the criminalization of protest is that the Republican Party has grown increasingly comfortable in using state power to tamp down dissent - in other words it has become more authoritarian. 2/ washingtonpost.com/business/2020/…
Apart from criminalizing protest, some other salient measures of current GOP authoritarianism:
*unwillingness to punish actual attacks on democracy
*seeking to overturn elections
*constraining voting rights
*state policing dissenting speech at universities and schools
Political scientists who focus on democracy in comparative terms have pointed out these trends of GOP authoritarianism for a while, but things have accelerated quickly in recent years.
Even before the current wave of legislation criminalizing protest, it was already happening in the criminal justice system, where the police and DAs (and the Trump DOJ) were targeting protestors for excessive punishment for non-violent actions (thread)
New bills often lowers the bar for turning protests into felonies: damaging a statue? Thats a felony. And you lose your right to vote in some states.
Such laws also protect police as an institution, frustrating local level efforts to address the root cause of the protests.
Not only are police powers protected under the new bill, violence against protesters becomes a protected right.
While protestors who damage statues face felonies, running protestors over is permitted. Hard to see the murderer of Heather Heyer be convicted under such laws.
Some new bills make simply using what the criminal justice system judges to be offensive speech toward one of their own to be a criminal act. We are well beyond violent behavior, or even property damage here. Actual speech is criminalized.
One interpretation of the current GOP rot is that they have quit governing to focus on culture war tropes like "Dr. Seuss is cancelled."
But it's also the case that they are still using state power in a patterned way: to minimize the political rights of those they disagree with.
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