How minority rule became the American Way | Will Bunch Newsletter

I’m old enough to remember when the violent derailment of an Amtrak train packed with tourists, resulting in three deaths and scores of traumatic injuries, would dominate the national news. In a tumultuous June of 2022, that Missouri tragedy is struggling to even dent our consciousness. As you’ll see in the items below, there is almost too much news to process right now.

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Now that a weekend of boisterous but utterly peaceful protests — except when baton-swinging police or right-wing hit-and-run drivers enter the fray — has calmed down and the new reality of life in America where the Supreme Court has robbed women of a fundamental civil right is sinking in, here’s one question that still looms large.

Why was Roe vs. Wade struck down now, in 2022 — more than 40 long years after the resurgent right wing began to mobilize against legalized abortion?

After all, ever since the presidency of Richard Nixon, in office at the time of the Roe decision in 1973, Republican presidents with anti-abortion viewpoints have managed — mostly through luck but occasionally through the art of the steal — to name the vast majority of new justices. What is in the atmosphere today that wasn’t present in the 1980s and ‘90s, when the nation took a right turn in what’s known as the Reagan Revolution?

The answer to that question is a frightening one. And it suggests an American future that will get a lot darker before the dawn.

When the Republican Party — initially through the so-called “Southern Strategy” fomented by Nixon and perfected by his successors — embraced the cultural mantle of white supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia, it was a short-term winning hand in a game the GOP seemed destined to lose, as America became more diverse and better educated and, thus, open minded.

A half-century later, the Republican Party is a minority party in every sense of the word. The latest Gallup Poll in May found more independents (39%) and Democrats (31%) than GOPers (29%), despite President Biden’s recent unpopularity. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and the last time GOP senators represented a majority of the American people was in 1996.

Rather than change its core values to try to appeal to the most voters — a.k.a., “how it’s supposed to work in a democracy” — the Republican Party has sought to rule as a minority party. It turns out that it’s not impossible. It did take some trial and error but the uniquely American system of federalism and “checks and balances” offered many opportunities.

A short list:

State governments suppressing votes or doubling down on mass incarceration to ensure a consistent majority in what became known as “red states.” Those legislatures using gerrymandering to both stay in office and draw congressional maps that give Republicans a shot at controlling the House even when Democrats get the most votes. Making the most of the baked-in advantage the GOP holds in the smaller, rural states in the Senate and in winning the presidency. Using that duopoly to pack the courts with as many young, mostly male, and almost all white conservative lifetime judges — the party’s No. 1 priority on Capitol Hill. Invoke the filibuster to thwart any ambitious social welfare measure that liberals might want to enact. And if everyday folk want to take to the streets and protest, the militarized cops are on the minority’s side, too.

Last Friday’s decision in the Dobbs case to overturn Roe, and send the abortion issue back to the states — many of which have already or are poised to ban the practice — was a high watermark of just how powerful a force the anti-democratic movement within the GOP has become. Success as a minority party means that the five justices who upended the abortion precedent feared no consequences for ending a status quo supported by a healthy majority of voters — even at a moment when public trust in the Supreme Court is at an all-time low.

And it meant that one of those votes can come from Justice Clarence Thomas — who did not recuse himself on cases tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection of which his wife was a major supporter — because there are no ethics rules for the nation’s highest court and no chance that enough Republican senators would ever vote to remove him from office.

“The majority of Americans opposes the reactionary vision — but the Right is fully content to install authoritarian minority rule,” Thomas Zimmer, a visiting professor of history at Georgetown, wrote on Twitter this past weekend. “They don’t care about democratic legitimacy — only about what they believe is the natural / divinely ordained order, what is ‘real America.’”

The ruling in the Dobbs case is horrific in its own right — an enormous retreat for the rights of women that will limit their life options and certainly even cause some to die — but in the bigger picture it also shows how this antidemocratic political movement on the right feels its momentum can no longer be stopped, that the old political rules of getting 51% no longer apply to them.

As the tainted yet unchecked Justice Thomas wrote Friday in his concurring opinion, the conservative faction on the court is already eying other edicts that would overturn the widely accepted civil rights gains of the last 60 years, on issues such as same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights and relations, and contraception. In imposing these and a more theocratic agenda — including prayer on a public football field and taxpayer dollars for religious schools — on the majority of Americans who feel otherwise, the court’s majority is willing not only to toss precedent but also to use legal pretzel logic in order to take the United States back into the 19th century.

The willingness of a widely distrusted court to make bad law that pays need no heed to public opinion is awful enough, but the reversal of Roe will also surely embolden Republican politicians who want to cement their antidemocratic strategy by making it easier for their candidates to win elections with fewer votes. Thus, the push in 2022 for secretaries of state or governors who believe the Big Lie around election fraud and will work with lawmakers for a new regime that would make a Jan. 6-style coup easier to pull off in 2024. This as authoritarian governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis push the limits of repressive, reactionary government, using their growing powers to punish political enemies from Disney to the Tampa Bay Rays and the Special Olympics.

Why is it so hard for an increasingly not-silent majority to stop this? One big undercurrent we’ve seen in the tumultuous weekend of protest and outcry over abortion rights is, to steal the popular cliché, Dems in disarray, as the political opposition that ranges from the fire of a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the obstinance of a Sen. Joe Manchin argues amongst itself about strategy and tactics against a unified, lockstep far right.

To me, the biggest problem for the center-left coalition comprising the Democrats is the insanity of doing the same thing — begging for just a few more votes in an electoral system that the other side is successfully suppressing (and now gaming), and promising to pass new laws in a legislative system that’s broken beyond repair — and expecting a different result.

In very short order, the majority coalition that opposes the extreme right’s agenda needs bold leadership that we frankly are not seeing right now, a daring plan of finding whatever administrative and legislative tools can be leveraged, and then using them aggressively, and without fear of how the other side will react. I believe that voters will respond to courage and that — yes — winning in November would make it a lot easier for Democrats to make the radical changes needed to save American democracy.

The alternative used to be unthinkable but now we are watching it play out in real time.

Question: Please advise where a modest donation (for 2022 midterm candidates) may help the best. I’m thinking I’ll chose five critical campaigns and give them each $100 — Ellen Irwin, via email

Answer: Ellen, I really think this question speaks to the political moment but I’m also always a little squeamish about appearing to endorse specific candidates. I think the human tendency is to look at the highest profile elections, and for a Democrat such as yourself, there are some remarkably important ones — including stopping the threat of extremist Doug Mastriano becoming governor here in Pennsylvania, and close-call elections such as Stacey Abrams for governor of Georgia. But the elections that are so crucial in 2022, and where small dollars could matter most, are for state legislature. In the Philadelphia suburbs, there are a number of GOP lawmakers who aid the reactionary majority in Harrisburg yet represent districts where President Biden won in 2020. Investigating these races in our backyard is where I would start.

America awoke Tuesday morning to the unbearable news of yet another mass-casualty event, this time linked to our struggles in coping with immigration at the southern border. During a brutal and extended heat wave of 100-degree days across the American Southwest in a summer of climate change, authorities in a San Antonio neighborhood found at least 46 dead migrants inside a packed tractor-trailer in a botched effort to smuggle them into the United States. About a dozen more were rushed to hospitals for heat stroke. As the news broke late Monday night, the political reactions started flying before the bodies even reached the morgue. Some on the far right showed no empathy for asylum seekers who gambled everything on a better life in the United States, while Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was the first to try to score cheap political points off a tragedy. “These deaths are on Biden,” Abbott tweeted. “They are a result of his deadly open border policies.”

Here’s the thing: Biden’s immigration policies deserve criticism, but for the opposite reasons of those stated by Abbott. In continuing Donald Trump’s Title 42 policy that allows U.S. border officials to use COVID-19 as an excuse to turn away those hoping to claim asylum, even as the pandemic has waned, Biden’s cruel border regime still means migrants pushed to the limit by poverty and climate change will continue to seek these desperate measures. A similar incident in which at least 10 migrants died in San Antonio in a hot tractor-trailer occurred in 2017, in the earlier days of Trump’s repressive measures. It’s shameful that Biden hasn’t worked harder to undo these policies, but what’s worse is opportunistic politicians like Abbott who’ve spent millions on unneeded extra patrols to make the border even more dangerous. “Lord have mercy on them,” Gustavo García-Siller, the archbishop of San Antonio, wrote. “They hoped for a better life. The lack of courage to deal with immigration reform is killing and destroying lives.”