The Republicans Are Making a Mockery of Democracy

Why Authoritarians Love the Gaslighting Method of Destroying Democracy, And Why it Works

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By now, you don’t have to look very hard to see it: the Republicans are making a mockery of democracy. And yet while they are, and we all know it, it’s not being discussed enough, nor nearly with the gravity it deserves. Looking for a decent discussion of this latest fiasco, I could scarcely find one that even gave it the proper context: far-right Trumpists, lunatics, violent thugs, bigots, supremacists…being given plum Committee assignments in Congress. So let’s begin there.

Marjorie Taylor Greene? Who recently said that if she had led the Jan. 6 attack, “we would have won” and that people would have been “armed”? Who’s made a point of appearing in public and smiling alongside Holocaust deniers and literal supremacists? She’s going to be on the Homeland Security Committee. Think about how crazy that is for a second, as in “literally bananas”: someone who still vehemently champions Jan 6th and thinks of literal fascists as good guys…is now one of the people in charge of America’s Homeland Security.

Crazy town, and we’ve barely even begun.

Then there’s Paul Gosar. He’s also appeared with Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, which of course is an open signal to the base, barely even with a wink and a nod. He’s also known for sending a violent death threat to a fellow member of Congress, where: “[Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s] face is superimposed over the monster’s, before the three anime characters/members of Congress deliver a fatal strike to the back of the monster’s head. Blood is seen gushing from the attack.”

That guy? He’s now on the House’s…LOL…Oversight Committee. Totally normal, right, to put someone on in charge of oversight who’s celebrated killing his fellow members of a Congress in a wink, nod, joke-but-not-really.

Ah, friends. How deep this abyss of lunacy goes.

Then there’s everyone’s favorite con artist, George Santos. He’s the guy that’s reportedly lied about his entire background, from his grandparents being Holocaust survivors to his mother dying on 9/11 to scamming a veteran out of money he’d raised for his dying dog. Guess what his punishment — I mean reward — is. He’s on…wait for it…deep breath…the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. (Quite rightly, this was mocked online as welcoming an “astronaut” and a “Nobel Prize Winner” to the Committee.)

What exactly is going on here? It’s funny, but it’s not just fun and games. There is a point to this sordid spectacle. Making a mockery of democracy is a tactic that authoritarians and fascists love. Not just because it gives them a kind of perverse entertainment, but because it serves the purpose of undermining democracy from within, reducing to a coarse, cheapened thing, thereby weakening confidence and trust in it, not to mention its ability to do its job. I’ll come to all that, which can be put more simply: authoritarians make a mockery of democracy in order to hollow it out from within, even as they purport to be undertaking its hard work.

Now, none of the above was a fait accompli. This is basically what the new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, let happen, in exchange for support from these lunatics and fanatics in the first place. A lurid deal — a power-seeking autocrat, allied with lunatics and bigots and liars, all of whom are taking a wrecking ball to democracy, gleefully.

OK. Now that you have a bit of actual info, which there’s still not enough of, let’s discuss all the above.

What’s really going on here? Well, think for a moment about proper banana republics. What happens in them? Aspiring authoritarians have learned to treat Orwell’s warnings as a kind of manual for how to destroy democracy. Remember 1984? In it, each Ministry did precisely the opposite of its intended job. The Ministry of Truth spread Big Lies, the Ministry of Love was responsible for the daily “two minutes hate,” where people united and screamed, raged, sneered at scapegoats. Sound familiar? It should.