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“Republicans” used to describe adherents of one of America’s two major political parties; but more recently, the term has come to denote a broad cultural movement with specific aims, characteristics, and implications — with quite a few tribal traits. For that reason, some people have taken to calling current American politics “tribal” and referring to “Republicans” as a “tribe.” This is not wrong, as the unthinking loyalty of many diehard followers often seems to defy reason and logic, and they are easily swayed by false propaganda.

Democrats are human and imperfect, and make mistakes, but this article isn’t about them, except tangentially in the sense that they’re the only real alternative to Republicans in U.S. elections, so Democrats for better or worse is what you get if you won’t vote for Republicans, and at this point in history I strongly recommend against voting for Republicans. The reason for that is today’s Republicans are out to destroy U.S. democracy and impose one-party authoritarian rule on us.

Until now, most of the focus has been on the GOP’s gaming of elections, voter suppression tactics, dirty tricks, false propaganda, and other below-the-belt political tactics. But the Jan. 6 insurrection opened a new chapter in their playbook: Political violence, and violent overthrow of our law-based system. Actually, this was merely a culmination; for quite some time before that Republicans had been arming themselves for civil disorder, openly talking about “civil war” and killing liberals, forming private militias, issuing death threats, and in some cases brandishing guns in public buildings.

At this point, the threats and violence are mostly coming from individuals or small groups, and don’t appear to be an organized effort of the Republican Party, or elected and/or party officials, although there are signs that could change. To date the GOP’s organized efforts have focused on “winning” elections by going outside the normal and accepted boundaries of doing so. Republicans are “putting in place the pieces to steal future elections by systematically taking over every aspect of the voting process,” an article in left-leaning Mother Jones magazine asserts (read it here). Here’s how they plan to do it:

Making it harder to vote

Last year,19 GOP-controlled states passed laws making it harder to vote.

Aggressive redistricting

Now that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court has greenlighted gerrymandering by removing the federal judicial restraints on it, GOP-controlled legislature are drawing state and congressional districts in a more blatantly partisan fashion than ever before. This is to give them minority control. Redistricting is done every 10 years, after a census, and the 2022 midterm elections will be held under those redrawn maps. This is a major factor in predictions the Democrats will lose House control in the 2022 midterms.

Republicans are seizing control of elections

“The newest—and potentially most dangerous—anti-democratic threat are new laws designed to give Trump-backed election deniers unprecedented control over how elections are run and how votes are counted,” Mother Jones says. For example, “in at least eight Georgia counties, Republicans have already changed the composition of local election boards—which not only certify elections but determine things like the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes, as well as voting hours—by ousting Democratic members and replacing them with Republicans … who claim the [202] election was stolen.”

And that’s not just because they don’t trust Democratic election officials to run fair elections (although there’s no evidence they don’t). “In Lincoln County, [Georgia], the recently reconfigured election board recently proposed closing six of the county’s seven polling sites.” This, of course, is to keep the 33% of the county’s population who are non-white from voting. And you can expect them to use this power over elections to refuse to certify election results favoring Democratic candidates. Mother Jones explains how this would work:

“During the January 2021 Senate runoffs, the right-wing group True the Vote challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters who it claimed had moved. Only a few dozen votes were ultimately thrown out, but now Georgia’s new law explicitly allows an unlimited number of voters to be challenged and requires local election boards to hear these challenges within 10 days or face sanctions from the state election board. Based on these challenges, local boards could then decline to certify election results or disqualify enough voters to swing a close election—exactly the gambit Trump tried to pull off in 2020.”

Beyond that, Republicans are running candidates — in some cases challenging GOP incumbents who didn’t cooperate with Trump’s Big Lie — who are pledging to refuse to certify election results if their candidate loses.

Overturn elections in legislatures

“If hijacking election administration fails,” Mother Jones says, “extreme gerrymandering makes it more likely that Republican legislators in increasingly safe districts, insulated from public accountability, will decide to overturn the will of their states’ voters in presidential contests.” They would do this by hijacking the electors, installing their own slates after rejecting the electors chosen by the voters.

Reject election results in the House or Senate

In January 2021, two-thirds of House Republicans refused to certify the 2020 election. It was certified anyway because Democrats held a House majority (albeit a slim one). Extreme gerrymandering, aggressive redistricting, more intense vote suppression, and other Republican tactics can be expected to result in more extremists, not fewer, in Congress. “The people who don’t want to certify free and fair elections,” predicts Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), “will regain control of the federal government [and] make it harder for representative government to ever exist moving forward.”

Intimidation

There have been waterfalls of bullying, intimidation, and threats against election workers (and often their families, too, including their kids) since the 2020 election — all of it coming from Republicans. While this appears, in virtually all cases, to be the action of disgruntled individuals rather than an organized effort by the party, the GOP and its elected officials are turning a blind eye to it, and making little or no effort to discourage it.

Law enforcement hasn’t been helpful, either; oftentimes the victims of these attacks brush them off or ignore them, but when they’ve reported explicitly violent threats to police, in almost no cases have police followed up, made arrests, or brought charges. Their lame excuse is these cases are hard to prosecute because this behavior often falls under “free speech.” What??? Stalking, threatening, and harassing are not protected by the First Amendment. They are crimes. There’s a pretty strong suspicion that police condone this behavior because many cops are rightwing themselves. In effect, they’re protecting these people.

The effect of the harassment and death threats is to drive professional, impartial, nonpartisan election workers out of their jobs. Of course, when election workers quit because of harassment or fear for their safety, that creates vacancies that can be filled by partisans who may be willing to subvert the election process. I certainly wouldn’t trust Republican “stop the steal” partisans to run elections honestly.

Violence

The Republican Party, as a formal organization, and most of its elected officials didn’t exactly endorse the Jan. 6 insurrection. Initially, a few prominent Republican leaders made speeches condemning it, but those same leaders haven’t cooperated with investigations and more recently have participated in the party’s concerted efforts to sweep it under the rug. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) went even farther and called the rioters “tourists,” which obviously implies they — in his eyes — did nothing wrong.

The situation in the Trump White House, in its final days, was even more concerning. People close to Trump urged him to declare martial law and use the military to seize power. He didn’t, but not necessarily because he didn’t want to; it was pretty clear at the time that Pentagon chiefs wouldn’t cooperate with any such scheme. Since then, Michael Flynn, a retired 4-star Army general who became a close Trump adviser, has been barnstorming the country and whipping up Republican crowds by proselytizing for the violent overthrow of constitutional government and democratic elections by means of a military coup.

Many people, especially among Democrats, see violent uprising as the greatest threat to our democracy. Newsweek magazine explores the subject in an article here, and what they found isn’t comforting. Their conclusion: There’s no guarantee a violent rightwing takeover of our government won’t succeed. Right now, our best protection against it is the fact there’s no large-scale organized effort, but that could change. In the short-term, whether federal prosecutors can make charges stick against Proud Boys and Oathkeepers leadership may be the finger in the dike. We’d better hope they do, because there may be no stopping the militias if they’re not held accountable for their organized violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Lurking in the background of the “civil war” and “coup” talk is a dark shadow that no one talks about, but is implicit in the very notion of political violence: That people who seize power by force might not stop there. Researchers have made much of the fact that most of the people who carried out the Holocaust — they weren’t just Germans, but people of many nationalities — were ordinary folks. History is strewn with politically, tribally, racially, and religiously-motivated genocides and indiscriminate mass killings. Anyone who thinks it couldn’t happen here, under conditions allowing it, is deluding themselves. Human nature is the same everywhere, and what happened in other places could equally happen here, if those conditions occurred.

The fact today’s preeminent Republican leader, Trump, is powerfully motivated and driven by vengeance and vindictiveness is especially concerning; and the cult-like nature of his following in the Republican rank-and-file, which is based on personal loyalty to him, rather than loyalty to party or ideology, makes this potential even more dangerous.

What’s next?

Democrats have been slow to respond; and two Democrats in particular, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kristen Sinema (D-AZ), are effectively blocking federal voting rights legislation that would erect safeguards against some of these abuses. That’s a big problem, because

“For months, voting rights advocates and scholars of democracy have issued hair-on-fire warnings about the danger that the GOP’s … strategy poses to the very foundation of representative democracy. … This is not hyperbole. And by 2024 the damage may have already been done. The members of Congress, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, state legislators, and local officials elected this November will determine to a large extent whether there will be fair elections for years to come.”

With voting rights stalled in Congress, there’s really only one thing that can be done: Do not vote for Republicans. This has nothing to do with ideology or policies, we’re beyond that, it’s about saving democracy in our country. At this point in our nation’s history, it’s crucial to turn out and vote, including in local elections for offices like city council and school board, and to make sure you vote for candidates who are for, not against, democracy. That requires reading candidate biographies and checking their affiliations and endorsements. Be aware that Republican candidates may try to hide their party identity. And, the way things are right now, I wouldn’t trust any candidate who doesn’t have a (D) after his or her name.

Related article: Trump officials made extraordinary efforts, over the resistance of career civil servants, to manipulate the 2020 census for partisan purposes. Read the details here.

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