The political leadership of Florida is today gripped by a new “lost cause.” Despite the fact that Donald Trump triumphed in the Sunshine State in 2020, in an election that Governor Ron DeSantis called “the smoothest, most successful election in the country,” the Republican-controlled legislature imposed a series of new voting restrictions in the aftermath of the election. The impetus for these restrictions was the falsehood that Trump had won reelection but had been deprived of victory by “voter fraud.”
Trump, along with his allies in the right-wing media, has inundated conservative voters with ludicrous claims that the election was “rigged.” These claims cannot be proved, because they are false; in fact, the Trump camp has always known that they were false, and that their supporters would believe them nonetheless. The allegations, though, need not be substantiated in any factual sense, because they are fundamentally an expression of the conviction that Trump should have won, not because he actually won the most votes but because the other side’s votes simply should not count. This belief justifies not merely restrictions on the right to vote but the right to simply overturn elections, as Trump supporters attempted to do when they ransacked the Capitol on January 6.
The novel restrictions cannot be a solution to endemic voter fraud, a problem that DeSantis’s boasts implicitly acknowledge does not exist. They are a solution to a different problem: the fact that the other side gets to vote at all.
None of these attempts to restrict the franchise has been as overtly racist or close to as successful as the efforts of the Redeemers. But as long as the risk of competitive elections exists, a party driven by the belief that its rivals are illegitimate will seek to eliminate them. That this effort is today led by the Republican Party, during Reconstruction the defender of Black rights in the South, is one of history’s great and tragic ironies.
Florida’s rule limiting the teaching of this history is not the worst of the state-level efforts at censorship—it states that teachers “may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction” but also bars them from teaching that “racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” It is obvious that the former cannot be taught without recognizing the history of the latter, and that under the ambiguous wording of the rule, teachers will fear that doing so will risk professional consequences.
But to acknowledge this history would be to raise uncomfortable questions about its legacy in the present. Rather than doing so, this movement has settled on the belief that its fundamental political rights are threatened when those its members fear exercise their own. In the name of “free speech,” Florida censors its educators; in the name of “democracy,” it disenfranchises its citizens. This is because, as Florida’s so-called Redeemers understood, power does not need to resolve its contradictions when it can simply silence them.
Where we are headed as a nation and as a people is "Democrats don't count".
That is, Democratic votes don't count, Democratic Congresses and Presidents don't count, Democrat-appointed judges don't count, and Democratic voters' rights and civil rights don't count, because Democrats aren't American, aren't human, aren't permissible.
"Our elections won't be free and fair as long as Democrats are involved!" they scream, and so Democrats will soon no longer be involved.
Just silence them, just cancel them, just punish them enough and they'll get with the winning side, the only side, the MAGA side, the Republican Christian Evangelical Dominionism Patriarchy side. Whatever happens to Democrats, the Enemy, well, they deserved it.
If there's anything the last 150 years of American history has shown, it's that racists assholes sure do love getting creative with their ways to keep white supremacy the de facto law of the land despite all the efforts to change that.
All of it is tied together, the efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, the efforts to limit executive regulatory power in favor of a gerrymandered House and GOP-centric Senate, the efforts to completely destroy trust in elections so that people won't mind authoritarian measures, all of it is designed to create a permanent white supremacist Christofascist state.
They are exceedingly close to winning what they've wanted for generations: the end of civil rights, voting rights, and of democracy.
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