Bart Gelman’s recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly, “January Was Practice,” should alarm every American. It lays out in clear and chilling detail what very nearly happened in the wake of the 2020 election (particularly on Jan. 6), but also who, exactly, the people are who would support the overturning of an election (and democracy itself) should Donald Trump be defeated again in 2024. There are at least 20 million of these people, according to Gelman, who cites a recent CPOST (Chicago Project on Security and Threats) poll. And the vast majority said that Biden was an illegitimate president, and that violence would be justified to restore Trump to the White House.
This is astonishing in itself. But one other statement “won overwhelming support” among the 20 million respondents, about two-thirds of whom agreed with this statement:
“African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”
This is a version of what has been called the “Great Replacement Theory”—an ethno-nationalist theory, popularized by French writer Renaud Camus, who warned that the white population in Europe was being replaced by non-European (i.e. black and brown) immigrants, in a process he called “reverse-colonizing.” A form of this Great Replacement Theory has taken hold in America; and what makes this belief even more alarming is not only that these are the very people willing to use violence to overturn an American election, but that these violence-prone crazies who assaulted the National Capitol on January 6 were NOT primarily from rural areas of the American South or Midwest as we might have thought. Rather, they were people with decent jobs in well-populated counties—but counties where “the white share of the population was in decline.” As Gelman writes, “for every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent.” In other words, the bulk of insurgents on Jan. 6 were white people who believed what they seemed to be seeing: that “their” country, like the 2020 election, was being “stolen” from them by “non-whites”—aided and abetted, of course, by the government actions of the hated Democrats who (they believe) specifically favor those non-white workers.
These ‘committed insurrectionists,’ as they have been called by Robert Pape, form a virtual army of shock troops ready to use violence to support the ex-president if he runs again, and to start a new Civil War, if necessary, to preserve their white privilege. If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to some of the Jan. 6 rioters Gelman interviewed. One guy (Phil is the only name he would give) said:
“Civil war is coming…and I would fight for my country….Oh Lord, I think we’re heading for it. I don’t think it’ll stop. I truly believe it. I believe the criminals—Nancy Pelosi and her criminal cabal up there—is forcing a civil war. They’re forcing the people who love the Constitution, who will give their lives to defend the Constitution—the Democrats are forcing them to take up arms against them, and God help us all.” (Gelman, ibid.)
Another Jan. 6 rioter, Gregory Dooner, told Gelman something similar: “Violent political conflict…was inevitable, he said, because Trump’s opponents ‘want actual war here in America. That’s what they want.’” (Gelman, ibid.) Notice that the pattern here is the usual one in the Trump era: total reversal of the truth. The hated Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are allegedly forcing a civil war (I assume by not recognizing Donald Trump’s Big Lie.) They are forcing those who are “defending the Constitution” to take up arms. As is obvious to anyone not blinded by right-wing propaganda, exactly the opposite is the case: the right wing insurrectionists are the ones taking up arms, and, they hope, forcing those who respect the Constitution and democracy to fight a new Civil War. Such a war would be based in the same determination with which the Confederacy tried to overturn the Constitution (and the Declaration) by insisting that NOT all men, particularly enslaved Africans, were created equal. And, importantly, that states had the right to institute their own laws keeping those Africans slaves, in defiance of the federal government.
Gelman goes on to show that this is precisely what Trump, his advisers, and now the entire Republican Party, is intent on doing in 2024. It was “the main event,” as he terms it, in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election: “a systematic effort to nullify the election results and then reverse them.” This plot—and it must be called a plot, in light of the revelations that have now surfaced about specific plans by Trump and his advisers (the scenario for this election overturn came from adviser John Eastman, an arch-conservative lawyer, who wrote a detailed 6-point memo outlining how it would work, with VP Pence playing the main role) on how to nullify Biden’s victory. Indeed, one of these plans is now known to have emerged on Nov. 4 before the results were known! (“Why can't [sic] the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS”)—a plot that would require “GOP legislatures in at least three states to repudiate the election results and substitute presidential electors for Trump.” That is, the pro-Trump plotters needed a mere 38 electors to reverse the election results, and they carefully selected six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—where they might get those electors. Why? once again, because the state legislatures in those states are controlled by Republicans. And this very plot was actively promoted by the conspirators we now know had gathered at the Willard Hotel in DC (Eastman, Giuliani, Bernard Kerik, Bannon, and others), and were in constant communication with Trump and his White House.
Fortunately, these efforts, including the appeal/command to VP Mike Pence to delay the counting of the votes, alleging that there was fraud in some state results, did NOT work. But it was not for lack of trying. Those attempts included an appeal to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to stop the count and throw the issue into the Supreme Court, as in Bush v Gore. But even Alito did not respond to this desperate attempt. Neither did Pence, who was threatened with lynching as he tried to fulfill his Constitutional duty to certify the electoral votes. And, as it became clear that neither Alito nor Pence would stop or even delay certification of Biden as the winner (and Trump as the loser—a position that is akin to death for him), Steve Bannon on his podcast played the only card left. On January 5, he summoned his troops:
“Tomorrow morning, look, what’s going to happen, we’re going to have at the Ellipse—President Trump speaks at 11.”
This last-ditch effort, advanced at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, would comprise an invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters to stop or delay, by violence if necessary, the dreaded count and certification of the electoral vote. This invasion was not just a tour of the Capitol as some have claimed. Its purpose has been clearly outlined a number of times, as for instance in the words of one of the rioters, Ali Alexander:
“I was the person who came up with the January 6 idea with Congressman Gosar” and two other Republican House members. “We four schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.”
We all know what happened on that certification day, Jan. 6. Except, that is, for the right-wing version, which has raised the issue of rioter Ashli Babbitt’s shooting death by an officer (as she attempted to enter the Capitol through a window she had broken) as evidence that yet another deep-state, left-wing plot was at work. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the violent Proud Boys militia, claimed that the shooter was a black man: “This black man was waiting to execute someone on January 6th. He chose Ashli Babbitt.” Another crazy has alleged that making the police officer who stopped Babbitt a hero was yet another example of the “only injustice in America today—anti-whiteism.” Though the accusation is totally false, it fits the narrative that the rioters feel comfortable with: that the white race is being sacrificed and replaced by people of color.
This is the situation we now face. Gelman makes the point that 2020 and the subsequent Capitol riot were attempts (that nearly succeeded) to stop the electoral count and declare Trump the winner—when he had clearly lost. Trump, his millions of supporters (all believers in his “fraud theory”) and the entire Republican Party do not intend to allow their scheme to fail again. They are, according to Gelman, “fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court.” Their scheme involves one they have been implementing for years—cementing Republican majorities in the legislatures of several key states (they now have legislative majorities in 30 states, and hope for more in 2022). With these majorities, they will promote the independent state legislature doctrine. This doctrine, very much like the one the Confederates used prior to the Civil War, “holds that statehouses have ‘plenary,’ or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors.” This differs from the current Constitutional system, in which each party chooses its electors; and whichever party candidate wins the popular vote gets ALL the electoral votes of that state. But if any state legislature can substitute its own slate of electors, discarding the popular vote for a bogus reason like fraud, “it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead.” Alarmingly, Gelman points out, there are already four justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas—who “have already signaled support for a doctrine that disallows any such deviation from the election rules passed by a state legislature.” In other words, the “independent state legislature” doctrine.
The end game, then, is that the stage is set for the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee happens to be, will not be allowed to lose. If the electoral college vote, determined by the popular vote, does not go his way, several state legislatures (already busy passing voting rules that disenfranchise millions of normally Democratic Party voters), can simply claim fraud, substitute their preferred slate of electors, and appeal to the Supreme Court to sanction their theft. And if, as often happens, Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 elections, and take control of the entire U.S. Congress, they will be in full control, at the national level as well, of the vote count and certification.
Gelman adds this statement by Nate Persily, an election law expert at Stanford:
“If a legislature can effectively overrule the popular vote, it turns democracy on its head.”
Indeed it does. So we must again wait, as during the Civil War, to see if, in these United States, a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ can long endure the assaults upon it—not, this time, by southern secessionists, but by the millions of loonies whom Robert Pape has called “insurrectionists,” and who have been unleashed and driven on to battle by their recently-found Messiah, Donald Trump.
And very much related to that is this critical question: do enough Americans care whether Democracy— that is, their electoral decision about who governs them—survives? Or are they more concerned, as some recent polls suggest, about the price of gasoline, or eggs, or where they can be “free” to go without a mask or a vaccination?
Lawrence DiStasi
