What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia
If you’re interested, here’s a livestream on Twitch from a popular channel that appears to be pretty close to the front of the crowd.
What Happens When A Political Party Can’t Accept Loss?
McConnell just gave what I think will be described as a powerful rebuke of Trump’s and other GOP senators’ efforts to delegitimize the election results. There will be calls that McConnell should have done this sooner. Why did he wait, for instance, until mid-December to admit that Biiden had won the election? So while we debate the semantics of a politician who himself is “an extraordinarily effective partisan,” as Chad said earlier, I think it is worth thinking back to a FiveThirtyEight article from Maggie Koerth and Shom Mazumder on authoritarianism and the role it played in the protests in Portland.
They found that partisan animosity had more than doubled from 1994 to 2016, with the percentage of people who rate the opposing party as “very unfavorable” climbing from about 20 percent to more than 50 percent in that time. “In fact, as of 2016, more than 40 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said they saw the other side as a threat to the nation.”
That, as Koerth and Mazumder wrote, is a real threat to our democracy.
As Jennifer McCoy, a professor of political science at Georgia State University, told them at the time, “If we view that if one party gets into power they’ll be a threat to my way of life or the nation as a whole, we’ll do whatever we can to keep them out or keep ourselves in.”
That seems to be what McConnell and others are pushing back against today — the very real threat to our democracy when our political leaders will no longer be able to tolerate loss.
Hearing Cruz call for another investigation of the election makes me feel compelled to say, for the umpteenth time, that Trump and Republicans brought a slew of alleged fraud claims into the courts and basically all of them were rejected. It’s pretty extraordinary (and, of course, highly inaccurate) to say at this point that those allegations haven’t been reviewed by neutral fact-finders.