The Tribune

Lights, camera and an admixture of antebellum and Jim Crow action as Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law sweeping voting restrictions designed to suppress minority voters in the state after it voted last November for Joe Biden as President and both a black and a Jewish man as federal senators.

The tableau was revealing: the white governor surrounded by six white men in front of a painting of Callaway plantation in Wilkes County, Georgia. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noted the plantation “thrived because of the back-breaking labour of more than 100 slaves who were held in cruel human bondage”.

The new 98-page legislation, known as the Election Integrity Act of 2021, mixes subterfuge and an open assault on mostly black voters who are pivotal, especially in federal elections and who constitute one of the most loyal bases of the Democratic Party.

This is Orwellian-speak by autocrats: mislabelling one’s blatantly undemocratic actions as a means of promoting democracy.

Recall that the military junta in Myanmar recently staged a coup because it claimed recent democratic elections were fraudulent and that the generals cum corporate overlords are the true guardians of democracy even as they bloodily suppress millions.

After a number of business groups suggested they may boycott or take corporate action in response to the Georgia legislation - which now makes it a criminal offence for “many volunteers to hand out water or food within 150 feet of polling precincts” - a rattled Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, usually enthralled to big business, issued a laughable, empty broadside against Big Business.

In a tantrum, McConnell fumed and fretted: “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signalling.

“Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”

Translation: “If corporations want favours from Republicans they must do our bidding and keep the Jim Crow structures of white privilege and entitlement firmly in place. Please keep helping us to rig America for our political and economic benefit.”

Exemplar

Notice that those who are promoting democracy are a “mob”. For the exemplar of an undemocratic, radical mob McConnell should look again at the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol this past January 6.

As reported in Politico: “The broadside from the Senate minority leader, who has aligned himself with the business community for decades, is just the latest sign of a fraying alliance between big companies and the Republican Party.

Poor Mitch McConnell. His white entitlement, privilege and power are under assault from a Democratic President and House, black activists and his erstwhile corporate buddies who, from both a business and ethical standpoint, recognise the old supremacist playbook may be a problem for their bottom line.

For centuries, white supremacists have openly structured and manipulated American democracy to build and to retain economic power. The constitutional compromise which still gives a clutch of small states considerable power in the US Senate was a compromise over slavery.

Centuries of laws and various Supreme Court decisions have bolstered white supremacy and the suppression of equality in areas ranging from voting rights to blatant gerrymandering and redistricting.

Many state legislatures have gerrymandered seats for the federal House of Representative that are obscenely racial in character, with some districts geographically contorted so that black voters are bunched into “black seats”, while ensuring many more safe “white seats”.

Some districts resemble an elephant with two snouts, two tails, three heads and other anatomical anomalies, unrecognizable as a feature of nature, but Frankenstein-like in absurdity and designed for a nefarious purpose.

Today, the Republican Party, which is the white supremacist party in America, has a number of structural and demographic problems which constitute an existential threat to their hold on federal power, including the presidency.

A slew of states, including California and Virginia, which Ronald Reagan safely carried twice, are now safely Democratic in presidential contests. An increasing minority and youth vote will continue to grow in states like Arizona, Texas, North Carolina and others.

Republicans are pressing the panic button in the form of voter suppression throughout the United States of America. Many of them are paying lip service to the ideals of democracy while promoting autocratic and anti-democratic measures.

Huckster

The great huckster entertainer Donald Trump was a temporary, one of a kind figure who was able to increase the Republican vote among white voters, including male and non-college educated voters enthralled to his message and worried about their supposed social and economic decline.

Trump, with his genius for marketing and rage, is in many ways a singular figure in his marketing prowess. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and the other Trump wannabes do not possess his combination of traits or the biography of the celebrity who starred in The Apprentice.

Still, in his reelection bid, despite increasing his number of voters, Trump was stopped by Joe Biden who assembled a coalition to defeat him. Albeit, Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic aided Biden’s victory.

Biden demonstrated a path to victory for Democrats, including policies and messaging aimed at former Trump voters, independents and a number of Republicans, including suburban voters turned off by the direction and racism of their party.

The other demographic wall the Republican’s cannot surmount is a fact well-known to Republican consultants. Once the black vote reaches approximately 25 percent in various states with sizeable black populations in federal elections, this vote combined with others makes it exceedingly difficult for Republicans to win.

The recent Georgia election results proved a nightmare for Republicans, who worry that this might prove a bellwether.

As an aside, a good percentage of older black men in the US have voted Republican for various reasons, including those who were drawn by the bellicose machismo of Trump. There will be less of such voters in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have yet another problem as described by Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

“Biden and many Democrats appear to have given up on Republicans entirely, or at least Republicans on Capitol Hill, and to have made a significant bet on the current short but urgent window to get things done despite, rather than with, the GOP.

“On Thursday morning, after Biden’s speech in Pittsburgh, I spoke with Doug Sosnik, who served as Bill Clinton’s White House political director and is well aware of the historical ebbs and flows to which Presidential reputations are subject. Sosnik made two historical arguments that I found provocative.

“The first is that Biden & Co have decided to go big because they have concluded that Republicans have in recent years outplayed them in political-hardball tactics – on everything from refusing to vote on Obama’s final Supreme Court choice to rolling over for Trump, even after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. Democrats, he said, are ‘radicalized’ by this, convinced that Republicans are ‘not on the level’; they are determined to be ‘much more aggressive’ as a result.

“‘The DNA of Republicans,’ he argued, is that they have tended ‘to overuse power; the DNA of Democrats is that they have tended to underuse power, and I think that’s changing’.”

Glasser continued: “That explains why Biden is willing to go big even without Republican votes, especially given the urgency of the interlocking crises that America faces. Biden and his team also appear to be acting on a well-known Washington fact, which long predates the current political dysfunction: it’s a lot easier to achieve major legislative action in the early months of a President’s term than at any point thereafter.

“But it was Sosnik’s second point – that something even bigger is going on – which struck me as the real historical gamble by Biden’s team. They are now, in effect, advancing the proposition that the politics of the Reagan era – of endless tax cuts embraced by Republicans and of Democrats trying and failing to escape the label of big-government liberals – is finally over.

“In that sense, Sosnik argued, Biden’s sweeping legislative agenda really is the heir to LBJ and FDR, and a worthy successor to the great middle-class social programs of the past century. It is also, he argued, very, very popular in this ‘supercharged populist’ moment.”

The greatest threats to Republican power at the federal level are certain demographic trends and a shifting mindset among voters, including moderate white voters battered by a global pandemic and eager for more progressive policies to lift their boats.

The other threat is a triumvirate who recognise, “the fierce urgency of now”, the historic moment and the possibility of dramatic progressive change.

The triumvirate is constituted by a 78-year-old President Joe Biden, an 81-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a 70-year-old Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer who appear to possess the tenacity, the experience and the passion to enact landmark change.

No wonder McConnell and his colleagues are fretting about the filibuster, the corporate reaction to suppression laws and federal court appointments. They are deathly afraid of any change that upends their entitlement and privilege.