Wednesday Roundup

• On a personal note, the elevation of Juneteenth made me realize that this is the first new federal holiday of my adult life.
  
  A lot of the rhythms of modern everyday life seem set in stone. The 40-hour work week, minimum wage, weekends, federal holidays, systemic racism, constitutional amendments, the list goes on.
  
  But it’s important to not lose sight of the fact that this is because we live in a time that is simultaneously contentious and placid. The largest mass protest movement in history… barely budged policy an inch. There is no global war, but the West feels and acts like it’s in a fight for its life with the East.
  
  Millennials, who have lived their lives almost entirely within this age of contentious placidity, now make up the largest electoral demographic, and yet feel we’re nowhere near able to exercise the according power.
  
  This will not last forever. But we have to see it for what it is, not what its narratives would love us to think. As a White man, I have little personal context for Juneteenth, and no claim on its customs. And I won’t spout some smarmy platitude about how it makes me “hopeful for the future” and how I want to “make it my own”. I’m content to quietly support the holiday and give others the space to build something beautiful with it, which I hope we can all share in some day. But even this tiny lesson that I’ve been able to extract, a lesson which has more to do with my own idle ruminations than the incomplete struggle for freedom Juneteenth represents, well… at least it’s not nothing.

• Perhaps “unilateral disarmament” on gerrymandering isn’t so bad after all. But it does rely on a line of argument that we hate seeing from filibuster defenders: by disarming various blue states, we’re insulating those states from Republican malfeasance in the future. It’s the “be careful what you wish for” that so many morons arrogantly parrot at us like it’s a trump card.
  
  The standard - and I believe, correct - filibuster abolitionist retort, is that the filibuster should rightly have been abolished when Democrats had the chance, and doing so would have prevented its later abuse. But I think this same logic also wierdly dovetails with the case for unilateral disarmament: we can only prevent future gerrymandering by completely breaking its power, not by incrementally weakening it, only to be left in place for future abuse.
  
  It might also be helpful to reformulate this as “unilateral and permanent disarmament”. Putting future gerrymandering out of the reach of all but extreme GOP majorities, is the only way to make sure the strategy works.
  
  What’s most important here is for us to recognize the distinction between Democrats’ actual current balance of power, and what actually undergirds Republicans’ long-term power. Gerrymandering is the answer to the latter: Republicans are being radicalized by the lack of electoral competition and accountability. But the point of unilateral and permanent disarmament isn’t to prevent all the scary things we think today’s Republicans will do when next in power, it’s to ensure that tomorrow’s Republicans don’t radicalize the same way today’s ones have.

• We’ve seen one-party states throughout modern world history. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen one develop in slow motion like the US is threatening to - usually they happen in the turmoil of a revolution or civil war.
  
  It’s tempting to also be shocked that this is happening in “an advanced democracy like the US”, but… come on, guys. Nearly every other advanced democracy in the world uses something besides exclusively First-Past-The-Post and Single Member Districts, and the two exceptions are Canada - anchored against the two-party doom loop by Quebec - and the UK - currently on the brink of political implosion and contemplating abolishing either or both of FPTP and SMD.
  
  And US history itself has a direct comparison today: the South’s thirty-year post-Reconstruction slide into Jim Crow, which essentially established an authoritarian one-party sub-state within the US. This was a precursor to 20th-century authoritarianism, which perfected the mix by adding on a surveillance state, but it could be argued that White supremacy presaged later innovation by deputizing the White population into both informants and enforcers of the political apparatus.
  
  Anyways, what’s scary here is that the Republican Party is basically consciously opting¹ to recreate all this, but in even slower motion than before. The slow motion isn’t a bug, it’s a feature: it serves the primary purpose of masking what’s being recreated to the public who are being asked to vote for it, as well as the consciences of the politicians who support it. It’s also a result of Democrats’ accurate identification of and dogged resistance to the entire project - it’s been harder to enact. But it wasn’t too long ago that the GOP believed wholeheartedly in majoritarianism, and not just when it was convenient for them. The shift to minoritarian rhetoric is what betrays the truth that the Dixiecrats have remade the GOP in their own image.
  
  Here’s what separates today’s Republicans from Democrats. Both sincerely believe that their ideology is the only competent way to govern. Both sincerely believe that when they lose elections, it’s because the voters got it wrong, and that the American people will suffer dearly and needlessly for their mistake. But Democrats - accurately aware of their statistical disadvantages in every election² - recognize that they have to assemble even larger majorities to win back power. Republicans, on the other hand, have convinced themselves that this perfectly legitimate contestation by Democrats of the conventional avenues of majoritarian power - cultural hegemony, get-out-the-vote efforts, interest-group pandering, offering handouts - constitute a worthy excuse to draw up a full-court-press on abolishing majoritarianism, rather than go through the trouble of engaging in the same legitimate contestation.
  
  The only authoritarian slide that remotely mirrors this is that of Rome. Perhaps it’s the logical endpoint of the US’s founding on Roman republican principles. But then again, most advanced democracies were founded on similar principles. What’s inexcusable today is that the GOP has the benefit of ample history that shows Rome succumbed to an elite class who increasingly rigged the system to prop up their own power, until the system became so consolidated at the top that only an authoritarian could exercise that power - if only they’d bother to read such histories.

1. This is not to ignore what got them there in the first place. The GOP didn’t make this decision overnight; they arrived at this particular mile marker on the road to hell 50 years after making the Faustian bargain of bringing in the Dixiecrats.

One eerie parallel 19th-century parallel is the use of propaganda: Before the Civil War, Southern elites basically used John Brown’s rampage to convince the lower classes that abolitionists were about to wipe them out, not just free the slaves, most of whom were owned by the elites in the first place.

The rise of GOP propaganda follows most of the same tropes, if in ever-so-slightly-more-subtle forms, and it serves the same purpose of convincing the lower classes to go along with the elites’ program.

2. ~1.5% in the EC, ~2.3% in the House, and ~3% in the Senate, by an admittedly slightly-out-of-date estimate.