Ballots and Bullets: GOP Bloodlust and State Nullification
Also: don't miss my interview on WNYC this Sunday!
Last weekend The New York Times published a front-page article on the growing acceptance among Republican voters of violence as a legitimate tool for resolving political disputes. Instead of repudiating the January 6 assault on the Capitol as beyond the pale, wide swaths of the party now only regret it did not succeed. From flashy videos put out by sitting representatives and congressional candidates to impromptu expressions of bloodlust at school board meetings and other public forums, the Republican Party from top to bottom is embracing the fantasy of some kind of purifying outbreak of violence. Threats against lawmakers are on the rise, and one organization that advises representatives has urged them not to hold public meetings until the flames of right-wing ardor have cooled.
That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. The Times piece opens with an anecdote about a man at a rally in Idaho who asked the right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, “When do we get to use the guns?” The article noted that Kirk, while formally disavowing the threat in the man’s question, “went on to discuss at what point political violence could be justified.”
The video of the incident was even more interesting than that. Kirk tries to redirect the questioner’s homicidal fantasies by observing that conservatives haven’t pursued non-violent means of redressing their grievances. If Idaho’s overwhelmingly conservative residents really wanted to challenge the “fascism” that Kirk says we live under, they could take concrete steps to undermine federal supremacy. The governor could sign an executive order abolishing the imposition of any federal vaccine mandates. He could—unilaterally, it seems—seize federal lands in the state from their current manager, the Bureau of Land Management. And the state legislature could, as Kirk puts it, “pick and choose...which one of the federal laws they think actually applied to the Idaho Constitution.” Any laws which the legislature deemed incompatible with the state constitution could be deemed null and void.
Understandably, it was the questioner’s lust for violence—and Kirk’s winking, half-assed objection to it—that drew most attention from the media. But I think there’s reason to believe that Kirk’s case for state nullification of federal laws says more about where American politics is going in the years to come. Before launching a new civil war, conservative discontents are likely to try to use the power they currently have at the state level—full control of no fewer than 30 state governments. “Idaho has not even started to exercise the peaceful means of state sovereignty against the federal government,” Kirk said. “Not even close.” While there might be spasms of violence here or there, I don’t expect a large-scale outbreak to occur before hard-right states take the kind of aggressive, dubiously constitutional stands against federal power that Kirk endorses here.
This, however, should be cold comfort, for even the path of “peaceful” state resistance would get messy fairly quickly. Consider, for instance, another video that has been making the rounds, this one of Ted Cruz speaking to students at Texas A&M University about the possibility of Texas’ secession from the United States. Once again, most commentary focused on the flashier points of Cruz’s remarks—that an independent Texas would “take NASA… take the oil,” that Austin transplant Joe Rogan could become president of the restored Lone Star Republic—while missing the more consequential implications. While he does not yet support secession, Cruz said, there are a few conditions that would have to be met if that loyalty were to continue. These conditions were remarkably specific. “If they pack the Supreme Court, if they make D.C. a state, if they federalize elections and massively expand voter fraud,” Cruz said of Democrats, “there may come a point where it's hopeless.”
Yet these very actions, which Cruz deems tantamount to “fundamentally destroy[ing] the country,” are precisely what I and many others on the left consider the absolute minimum required to keep the country a functioning democracy. Mitch McConnell’s theft of a Supreme Court seat—refusing to consider Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland eight months before a presidential election, then rushing Amy Coney Barrett through the confirmation process a week before the next one—amounts, as I’ve written before, to a coup d’etat. Likewise, DC’s twilight status as a de facto internal colony of the US is unjust and unsustainable, as is the woefully undemocratic apportionment of votes in the Senate that privileges more rural and conservative states. And elections, as Matt Ford observed in a New Republic piece responding to Cruz, have been federalized ever since the Reconstruction era and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Cruz’s depiction of what would need to happen for things to become so “hopeless” as to justify pulling the plug closely resembles pretty much the bare minimum for keeping us from getting to that point. As Ford writes, “Cruz’s argument is essentially that Texans should stay in the Union—but only as long as the flaws that give Republicans an unearned boost in political and electoral power remain unreformed.” In my chapter in Break It Up about the 1850s, I wrote about how both Northerners and Southerners in those years were questioning the value of the Union and wondering if it was really worth staying loyal to a government that—both sides feared—didn’t have their best interests at heart:
The idea, a guiding force from George Washington’s time onward, that compromise was always worth seeking no matter the cost had become a bankrupt, widely rejected irrelevancy. Northerners and Southerners alike now qualified their patriotism with reservations: the Union was worth saving only under certain conditions. The problem was that the do-or-die demands of each side were utterly incompatible with those of the other.
That’s where we are again today. It’ll take a few years for the dead-end nature of that logic to work itself out, but eventually, at some point, one or the other one side is going to bring things to a head. Given the increasingly extremist nature of the Trump-era Republican Party, the near-miss coup attempt of last January, and the fact that a Democratic president currently sits in the White House, it makes sense to assume, as most coverage does, that it’ll be the right that ultimately embraces the route of radical resistance to federal power. But a longer view suggests that will probably not be necessary. Whether we like it or not, and sooner than we might think, it could well be the Democrats who have to decide whether to take up the options outlined by Kirk and Cruz for how to resist tyrannical power without—or before—resorting to violence.
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Earlier this week, I taped an interview about Break It Up for an episode of my former Nation colleague Kai Wright’s always-excellent WNYC show, The United States of Anxiety. It will air this Sunday, Nov. 21, at 6pm. For NYC-era listeners, it’s 93.9 FM. Everyone else can listen live here, or later on Spotify and whatnot.