Why Republicans Play Dirty

Donald Trump is not the only person dedicated to sabotaging democracy in the United States. Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in The New York Times:

The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.

Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.

This has happened once before -- but the party doing the damage was the Democrats -- in the wake of the Civil War:

In the United States, Southern Democrats reacted in a similar manner to the Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of African-Americans. Mandated by the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, black suffrage not only imperiled Southern Democrats’ political dominance but also challenged longstanding patterns of white supremacy. Since African-Americans represented a majority or near majority in many of the post-Confederate states, Southern Democrats viewed their enfranchisement as an existential threat. So they, too, played dirty.

Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 post-Confederate states passed laws establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements and other measures aimed at stripping African-Americans of their voting rights — and locking in Democratic Party dominance. In Tennessee, where the 1889 Dortch Law would disenfranchise illiterate black voters, one newspaper editorialized, “Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” These measures, building on a monstrous campaign of anti-black violence, did precisely what they were intended to do: Black turnout in the South fell to 2 percent in 1912 from 61 percent in 1880. Unwilling to lose, Southern Democrats stripped the right to vote from millions of people, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in the South.

Democracy is not just about winning. It's also about knowing how to lose. Levitsky and Ziblatt believe that Republicans are afraid of losing. They know they're going to lose. But they refuse to accept the reasons for their loss. So they do whatever they can to rig the system in their favour.

I confess I have a soft spot for the sixth movie in the Star Trek franchise, The Undiscovered Country. I enjoyed watching two old Stratford alumni -- William Shatner and Christopher Plummer  -- as the two protaganists. The script also gave Plummer ample opportunity to quote Shakespeare. But, more importantly, there is a scene in the film when Spock turns to Kirk and asks, "Are we two -- you and I -- so old and so inflexible that we both have outlived our usefulness?"

I suggest that Republicans know that they are old and inflexible; and they're scared as hell. But they refuse to change. The Democrats understood the problem. It took time, but they changed. After all, they elected the first black American president.

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