The Republican campaign to manipulate elections expands on the Jim Crow playbook and has been in operation for some time. The Republicans, under Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” rushed in to appeal to racist whites and have built on it ever since. The Democratic Party was once the principal perpetrator and beneficiary of Jim Crow laws, but the party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s made it a champion (if an imperfect one) of voters of color. In the Jim Crow era, the South’s advantage in those two institutions helped deny full citizenship to Blacks for a century after the Civil War. The Electoral College and the Senate, two massively undemocratic institutions, were partly a response to demands from slaveholding states that gave them disproportionate power. Manipulating the vote to partisan advantage is nothing new in the United States but rather goes back to the Constitutional Convention. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the desired effect. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. One of the earlier and most comprehensive forecasts came in a December article by Barton Gellman for the Atlantic, who wrote: … The next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. While some see Biden’s eventual taking of office as evidence that the system worked despite the effort to undermine it, analysts not on the payroll of Fox News or the One America Network look at the machinations of Trump and his allies before and after the election and see how they might have worked - and might work next time to undercut and corrupt an election in his favor. ultimately failed in 2020, they began writing a playbook that they can repeat and expand on in the future. The irony of the Trumpists’ slogan “Stop the Steal” was that in reality it was Trump and his cronies trying to steal the 2020 election, while Democrats - and a few Republicans - were trying to deliver an honest count of the results. This has implications not only for the Democratic Party, and not only for the survival of constitutional government, but for the broader left/progressive agenda as well. If they can win fairly, fine for them if not, they plan to use manipulation, voter suppression, threats - and, if necessary, violence. By now it’s commonly accepted in even the most mainstream of media that the Republicans are planning a ruthless campaign to win back the House and Senate in 2022 and the White House in 2024.
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