Republicans believe they don’t have to accept difference and compromise, regarding it as their prerogative to shape the nation in their image, to define the boundaries of “real America.”
If they don’t get to rule, they might as well ruin what they no longer regard as “America.”
@tzimmer_history The way I started putting it some years ago was “Our country to rule, or no country to rule.”
It all goes back to the fundamentalist evangelicals’ mass rejection of the idea of a “loyal opposition” in the late 1990s. They explicitly decided that there was no such thing as neutrality and that all opponents were in active league with Satan, with the leadership spending years and years on Revelations 3:15-16 to sell it.
@tzimmer_history Yep. And it's not them that decides how it is shaped in their eyes but him, one man (Trump), who's word might as well be the word of God in their eyes. The Republicans are the cult of Trump & only his word counts.
Sometimes, the Right’s violent secessionist fantasies are being sanitized for a more mainstream audience. Nikki Haley, for instance, has tried to justify Greg Abbott’s actions as an expression of a genuinely (small-d) democratic concern over what “the people” want. 2/
Another sanitized version of the civil war and secession fantasies is the idea of a “national divorce.” If the two sides can’t stand each other anymore, shouldn’t they go their separate ways? Compared to the specter of a fascistic uprising, isn’t this the much better scenario? 3/
But the “divorce” analogy is not only nonsense in practical terms, it is also grotesquely misleading in that it suggests a defensive posture on the Right, as if they just wanted to do their own thing, unbothered by an encroaching government or totalitarian progressive elites. 4/
Granted, there is a tradition among rightwing intellectuals to flee an increasingly liberal America they were no longer willing to endure. L. Brent Bozell Jr., for instance, who ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative,” moved to Franco-Spain in the 1960s. 5/
More recently, Rod Dreher fled the “collapsing imperium,” as he once put it, to seek refuge in Victor Orbán’s Hungary, which he imagines as a kind of white Christian patriarchal wonderland, where the “woke” hordes and “globalist” enemies are still being kept in check. 6/
The defining impulse on the Right, however, is not to pull back, but to dominate and subjugate. The current rightwing mobilization against egalitarian democracy is defined by its willingness to do whatever is necessary to impose a reactionary vision on the majority of the country. 7/
Their project stands in a long tradition of defining “freedom” as the ability to curtail the freedom of others. The slave states sought not merely to defend, but to expand the empire of slavery; and Orbán’s Hungary today is seen as not just a safe haven, but a role model to be emulated. 8/
This is not a defensive political project. Even within the borders of their “red” states, Republicans have been on the offensive against blue communities, stripping power away from blue cities and metros – even threatening, as Donald Trump has, to send in troops. 9/
And as much as Republicans like to talk about “states’ rights” and “letting the states decide,” their vision of what America should look like is not confined to just the “conservative” parts of the country. 10/
There is no question that Republicans will institute a nation-wide abortion ban the minute they get the chance. And the idea that they would restrict their crusade against trans people, who they have demonized as an acute threat to the “natural” order, to just red states is preposterous.