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10 Sep, 15 tweets, 5 min read
“So is this really how it’s going to be?“ @ThePlumLineGS asks in this crucial piece, as GOP candidates are openly casting any potential election losses as illegitimate. The answer, sadly, has to be yes – because this is what the Republican Party has become. Some thoughts: 1/
It is tempting to describe the Republican candidates in @ThePlumLineGS’s piece as fringe outliers: as either deranged Trumpists or as cynical opportunists who simply want to emulate Trump’s approach in an attempt to charm the Trumpian base. But there is more going on here. 2/
Remember that undermining the legitimacy of democratic elections in such blatant fashion does not get these people in trouble within the Republican Party. Why is that? Because many Republican officials and at least half of Republican voters share the underlying ideology. 3/
It has become a core tenet of the Republican worldview that Democratic governance is fundamentally illegitimate, to define the Democratic Party as not simply a political opponent, but a fundamentally “Un-American” enemy who must not be allowed to destroy “real America.” 4/
Many Republicans might be uncomfortable with the idea of undermining elections in such blatant fashion, and they may not subscribe to the outlandish claims of voter fraud propagated by the Trumpists. But fundamentally, they agree that Democratic governance is illegitimate. 5/
To Republicans, the specifics of the, as Larry Elder calls them, “shenanigans” – fake ballots? Lost ballots? “Illegals” voting? – matter less than the higher truth: That only the GOP stands for “real America,” and that the other side seizing power simply can’t be right. 6/
The diffuse ideas of fraud are a result and a manifestation of this underlying belief – they gain plausibility among conservatives not because of empirical evidence, but because they adhere to the higher truth of who is and who is not legitimately representing “real” America. 7/
The belief that Democratic governance is fundamentally illegitimate rests on two ideas: 1) the Democratic political project is radically Un-American, because Democrats are trying to turn what is supposed to be a white Christian nation into a land of multiracial pluralism. 8/
And 2) the Democratic political project is fueled by a coalition of people who don’t deserve their place in the body politic – if it weren’t for the support of these “illegal” / “undeserving” Un-American forces, Democrats would stand no chance against “real Americans.” 9/
This is what Republicans really mean when they speak of themselves as the only representatives of “real America,” as @johnastoehr has outlined in this great piece here: 10/
None of this is new, exactly. The reason Trump’s #BigLie can flourish and have such a massive effect is because it can a) build on longstanding anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the American Right and among conservatives… 11/
…and b) latch onto the decades-long attempts by Republicans to present themselves as the only legitimate representatives of “real” America, and to denounce Democrats as an “Un-American” threat. 12/
It’s also not just Republican politicians pushing such ideas. Among conservative intellectuals, there is a distinctly Trumpian wing openly disregarding anyone who voted for Biden, declaring over half of the population not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. 13/
What we are seeing now both is and it is not the legacy of Trump – as always, Trumpism represents a radicalization of long-standing tendencies and impulses, but mostly not an aberration. 14/
It is crucial to recognize the underlying ideological basis for the ludicrous election lies that are now emanating from the Right. This is indeed how it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. Better to acknowledge it and figure out how to act accordingly. /end

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More from @tzimmer_history

Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
11 Sep
The conservative reaction to the soft vaccine mandate boils down to: “So what if I might be spreading a highly contagious virus that’s killed hundreds of thousands and is devastating everybody’s lives - leave me alone!” The idea that we should all just accept that is bizarre.
We as a society accepted it for far too long, and paid far too high a price for it. It’s been obvious for many months that will have to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic, that we won’t get from a pandemic to an endemic situation unless people get vaccinated. Let’s do it!
America has prioritized the anxieties of an increasingly radicalized minority for far too long - in that way, our public health crisis and our democracy crisis have been closely intertwined, and we need to tackle both.

A more detailed version of that argument in this thread:
Read 4 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
9 Sep
The thing about these “the cancel mob is coming” pieces is that they simply don’t hold up as empirical analysis. They are extremely interesting, however, as evidence of a pervasive reluctance among elites to accept changing standards of what is / is not acceptable behavior.
I wish someone with a big platform would be honest and self-critical enough to say: “Look, I really benefited from the traditional culture of elite impunity, and I liked the fact that I could say and do pretty much whatever I wanted without facing legal or cultural sanction.”
We could potentially have a more productive discussion about individual perceptions of political and cultural change and what to make of these elite anxieties considering that the power structures that have traditionally defined American life have unfortunately held up fine.
Read 6 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
6 Sep
It’s American.

This is such a crucial point - and the same reason why I remain skeptical about the way the term “fascism” is sometimes used to describe Trumpism. It often comes with certain aberrationist implications, separating Trump from the continuum of American history.
There are many good reasons to see Trumpism as a specifically American, twenty-first-century version of fascism. But the term should be used to emphasize fascist traditions and tendencies on the American Right, not to whitewash whatever came before Trump’s rise.
The comparison to Europe’s interwar period can be enlightening if it generates questions about the history of the Far Right in America - but not if it is invoked to mark Trumpism as an aberration, something Un-American, something foreign for which there is no U.S. comparison.
Read 5 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
6 Sep
The claim that there was no “self-censorship” in academia until the “illiberal left” came and destroyed “free speech” is not worthy of serious discussion. Speech has always been (self-) regulated, everywhere, and the debate has always been over who gets to define the regulations.
Speech is never completely unrestricted, and shouldn’t be - there are always agreed upon limits. Who gets to make the restrictions and who needs to comply, who has to pay a price for violating the norms and who gets to be immune from critique by pleading “free speech.”
These are conflicts over who gets to determine what is and what is not acceptable in a society or in sub-systems of society, like academia. What irks people like Friedersdorf is that those who traditionally got to define those limits face more scrutiny today than they used to.
Read 5 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
30 Aug
And let’s remember: The Jim Crow South always held elections. Stable one-party rule by an authoritarian faction determined to uphold white reactionary dominance, all within a system that retained many democratic features, was Southern reality until fairly recently.
Never forget what “democracy” meant in the U.S. before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s: A system that was fairly democratic if you happened to be a white Christian man – and something entirely different if you were not.
What animates large parts of the American Right is not the idea of turning the country into 1930s Germany (although a sizable fringe certainly displays fascist sensibilities) but of returning to an equilibrium in which democracy didn’t interfere with white Christian elite rule.
Read 7 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
27 Aug
Sadly, the rule followed by many political journalists is: If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, you make no effort to inform the public who’s right and who’s wrong, because you need to be seen as neutral, and so you describe it as partisan bickering.
And if you really want to score points with most of the mainstream media establishment and moderate elites, you present this as yet another indication of how “polarized” everything is and lament the unwillingness to compromise: Why can’t these politicians meet in the middle?!
A lot of issues won’t be as cut and dried as the question of whether or not it’s raining. But many - including some of the defining political conflicts of our era - really are. And as @RottenInDenmark points out, news media will still choose “neutrality” over adequate analysis.
Read 7 tweets

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