Heather Cox Richardson provides the analysis. There have been cycles in our history as power has shifted back and forth between the wealthy and the common people.
It has been hard for me to see the historical outlines of the present-day attack
on American democracy clearly. But this morning, as I was reading a piece in
Vox by foreign affairs specialist Zack Beauchamp, describing Florida
governor Ron DeSantis’s path in Florida as an attempt to follow in the
footsteps of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the penny dropped.
Capital moved
upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an
economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that
favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.
When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had
concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their
opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as
“makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and
voter suppression was well underway. But the Republican Party still valued
the rule of law. It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level
playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash, when it
became clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were
determined not by the market but by cronyism.
Trump’s election brought a new right-wing ideology onto the political stage to
challenge the rule of law. He was an autocrat, interested not in making money
for a specific class of people, but rather in obtaining wealth and power for
himself, his family, and a few insiders. The established Republican Party was
willing to back him so long as he could deliver the voters that would enable
them to stay in power and continue with tax cuts and deregulation.
strong base that it is virtually a cult following, and politicians quickly
discovered that crossing his followers brought down their wrath. Lawmakers’
determination to hold Trump’s base meant they acquitted him in both
impeachment trials. Meanwhile, Trump packed state Republican machinery
with his own loyalists, and they have helped make the Big Lie that Trump won
the 2020 election an article of faith.
That Confederate impulse has been a growing part of the South’s mindset
since at least 1948, when President Harry S. Truman announced the federal
government would desegregate the armed forces, and white southerners who
recognized that desegregation was coming briefly formed their own political
party to stop it.
Abbott and the Texas legislature have tapped into this traditional white
southern ideology in their quest to commandeer the right wing. Texas S.B. 8,
which uses a sly workaround to permit a state to undermine the 1973 Roe v.
Wade decision declaring abortion a constitutional right, has become a model
for other Republican states. In June 2021, along with Arizona governor Doug
Ducey, Abbott asked other state governors to send state national guard
troops or law enforcement officers to the Mexican border because, he said,
“the Biden administration has proven unwilling or unable to do the job.”
Abbott’s recent stunt at the border, shutting down trade between Mexico and
the U.S., was expensive and backfired, but it was also a significant escalation
of his claim of state power: he essentially took the federal government’s
power to conduct foreign affairs directly into his own hands.
DeSantis is following this model right down to the fact that observers believe
that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was modeled on a similar Hungarian law.
DeSantis’s attack on Disney mirrors Orbán’s use of regulatory laws to punish
political opponents (although the new law was so hasty and flawed it
threatens to do DeSantis more harm than good). DeSantis is not alone in his
support for Orban’s tactics: Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson
openly admires Orbán, and next month the Conservative Political Action
Committee will hold its conference in Hungary, with Orbán as a keynote
speaker.
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