Now that the Supreme Court has ruled on the misbegotten, antidemocratic Texas suit to keep Mafia Mulligan in office, I'm still trying to figure out why so many Republicans seem to think the election in some states was fraudulent. Of course, I don't think the members of Congress who supported the suit or state Attorneys General who filed amicus briefs mostly think the election was fraudulent; rather, they are operating out of either fear of Trump or sheer will to power.
But rank-and-file militants on the street do believe it. When you see one of these folks yelling "Stop the Steal!" in front of your governor's mansion, you can tell they believe it's a steal. And the question is why?
Maybe it's just Fox or OAN or Newsmax or Rush Limbaugh or whatever, but what story are those media telling them?
I was looking through some of my old blog posts and I came across this one from 2018, which offers what I think is a good explanation. I'll quote it partially:
They believe 75% of Democratic votes are fraudulent.... This extraordinary claim gets zero pushback.... It’s an accepted axiom in their worldview to the extent that they think the only reason Democrats win urban areas is because voter fraud is easier there. They honestly think the majority of the U.S. is much more right-wing than it is, so every Democratic victory is then seen as *evidence* of fraud. A Democrat wins and that CONFIRMS their view that fraud must be widespread and blatant. The only way they will think an election wasn’t won by fraud is if the GOP win. The only way to break the ‘cycle’ is GOP winning forever.
If the Democrats win in a GOP-controlled state, despite all the odds against them, that doubly confirms in this mindset that the Democrats defrauded....
I don’t know if the high-ups in the GOP think the same way or just cynically exploit this as a way to justify cheating and voter suppression but the outcome is the same: the GOP will be supported by its base when the GOP cheats.
"It's an accepted axiom in their worldview...that...the only reason Democrats win urban areas is because voter fraud is easier there."
"Every Democratic victory is seen as *evidence* of fraud."
Doesn't that sound familiar from recent events?
All of which points us to thinking about the epistemic closure that afflicts this country, particularly on the Right, as discussed in this Why Is This Happening podcast from around that same time in 2018 (transcript here), and more recently on the You're Wrong About podcast. I highly recommend both, as depressing as they are.
1 comment:
There's a long history of hostility towards urban voters and urban politics, fed in part by actual instances of electoral manipulation (mostly in the 19th century) but especially and enduringly by the equation of American citizenship with whiteness (and for a long time, with Protestantism). At one point it was Irish and other Catholic immigrants whose votes were regarded as implicitly suspect -- after all, they were under the Pope's sway and therefore couldn't participate in a free democracy -- today it's African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. If America is defined as a Christian white person's country, then by logic any outcome that isn't preferred by a majority of white Christians has to be seen as invalid.
Of course, the fact that African-Americans were disenfranchised, openly for much of our history and through various subterfuges ever since, gets conveniently swept under the rug. "Fraud" of a very different kind was built into the system. It would be interesting to speculate on how our political history would have looked if we really had "one person, one vote" all along. Very differently, I suspect.
That, and the fact that many of the members of the Republican rank-and-file aren't really all that bright.
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