The Return of Anita Bryant

Most readers of this blog are old enough to remember Anita Bryant, and her campaign to “Save Our Children” from those wicked gay people.  Over the years, she’s become something of a punch line, at least in the gay community. To appropriate a line from the movie Jaws, however, “she’s back!” Not in the flesh, of course, but in the antics of state-level GOP political figures like Ron DeSantis.

The return of Republican focus on–and antipathy to–equal rights for LGBTQ+ Americans was highlighted in a recent roundtable discussion among New York Times  opinion writers.

That discussion included a number of penetrating observations, and I will be posting about a couple of them in future posts. But today, I want to share what I believe are well-founded concerns about what appears to be a foundational issue for Republican culture warriors.

One of the participants in the Roundtable, Jane Coaston, addressed that issue–return of  the GOP’s assault on LGBTQ rights.

 I went back to some old Times pieces talking about the Southern Baptist Convention’s boycott of Disney, because Disney started offering same-sex health care benefits in 1995. I think that for anyone who is L.G.B.T. and over the age of 30, this all seems very repetitive.

Ezra Klein, another Roundtable participant, identified a “challenge” to the strategists of the G.O.P.– he pointed out that the party has “this wave of people” who have begun screaming, “OK, groomer,” at literally any L.G.B.T. person on the internet. Despite the fact that traditional conservative outlets like National Review are warning politicians not to say things like that, “no one’s listening.”

He’s right. Bloomberg reports that Republican legislators have proposed at least 325 anti-gay bills this year, with about 130 targeting transgender rights. Twenty-seven became law in 2021;  so far this year, seven have passed.

As Coaston noted,

 These issues have to do, one, with a conceit of what L.G.B.T. people are and how L.G.B.T. people become L.G.B.T. I think we’ve seen over the last couple of days, some social conservatives who essentially argue that bills like in Florida, which keep being posited as being about sex ed — they aren’t about sex ed. There’s no mention of sex education or sexual activity in that bill. It mentions sexual orientation and gender identity. But the idea is that if you simply do not ever let people know that there is such thing as gay or trans people, then people will not be gay or trans.

Rod Dreher, the conservative writer said that, oh, no, no, when we’re talking about grooming, we’re not talking about pedophiles — which is ridiculous. But he essentially said that, oh, it means that an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them, which just reminds me of Anita Bryant in 1978, essentially arguing that homosexuals must recruit, and that all children are cisgender and heterosexual until something happens.

Coaston made another important point about this particular part of the GOP’s culture war: the attacks on trans children aren’t separate and distinct from attitudes about gay rights generally. These “warriors” are still mad about Bostock. They’re still mad about Obergefell. 

That’s something that we keep needing to relearn: that there is no part of the L.G.B.T. community that’s OK for some social conservatives. It’s not as if like, “Trans rights went too far, but we’re totally fine with gay couples. We’re totally fine with everything like that.” That might have been how it was parlayed, but that was never true.

In this blog, I frequently note the ways in which today’s GOP is dramatically different–and far, far more radical–than the party most of us once knew. An exchange between Coaston and Klein highlighted that difference…and was chilling. Coaston characterized today’s GOP as a “secular fundamentalist religion– “QAnon, but an areligious QAnon.”

Klein responded:

Well, it’s both, right? Because on the one hand, you have a Rod Dreher version of it, which is very, very Christian, “We’re trying to protect traditional gender roles.” It’s why he’s out there tweeting that Viktor Orban in Hungary is now the leader of the entire West. And on the other side you have this groomer thing, which is an attempt to take QAnon’s view — which is one reason it’s resonating on the far right — that all of politics is an effort by Democrats to protect pedophiles and then find some way to sort of wink, wink that you’re on board with that view of politics while saying it’s actually a little bit about something else…

As Klein also observed, countries live or fall on how well they police the fringes–the crazies– in their political parties.

Republicans not only haven’t done that policing, they’ve become their fringe. And LGBTQ people aren’t the only ones they endanger.

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Embracing The Lies

As the GOP has steadily radicalized, its ardent base has embraced an alternate reality– a place where, among other things, Donald Trump won the 2020 election, Democrats engage in pedophilia, Jews operate space lasers, and public schools are teaching Critical Race Theory.

The number of Americans who appear to actually believe these things–the number who have adopted some or all of what has been called the “QAnonification” of the GOP– is staggering. The danger this mass psychosis poses for democratic (small-d) government has been obvious for some time; we are now beginning to see how disinformation–lies–shade into something akin to treason.

The Guardian recently reported on the embrace of Putin’s propaganda by the American Right.The article focused on the conspiratorial narratives being  pushed by radical American politicians and media figures who have echoed Russian lies about its invasion of Ukraine, and have “bolstered and created synergies with the Kremlin’s legendary disinformation machine, experts on information manipulation say.”

Led by Tucker Carlson at Fox News, a few Republican rightwingers in Congress, and some key conservative activists, a spate of comments that have disparaged Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and echoed other Russian war disinformation have been recycled by Moscow, say experts.

A feedback loop between the Kremlin and parts of the American right has been palpable since the war’s start in February, which Moscow falsely labeled as a “special military operation” aimed at stopping “genocide” of Russians in Ukraine and “denazification” – two patently bogus charges that drew widespread international criticism.

The fact that multiple credible sources have debunked Russian claims hasn’t kept Rightwing influencers like Tucker Carlson from pushing these false narratives to millions of Fox News viewers. The Guardian reports that Fox segments echoing Russian propaganda have been “eagerly embraced and recycled by Moscow and by parts of the American right.

On a separate front, two Republican congressional conservatives, Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene, delighted Moscow last month by condemning Zelenskiy without evidence in conspiracy-ridden terms that sparked some bipartisan criticism. Cawthorn called Zelenskiy a “thug” and his government “incredibly corrupt”, while Greene similarly charged that Zelenskiy was “corrupt”.

Further, the former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, last month attempted to soften and spin Putin’s onerous crackdown on independent media in Russia, where reporters and other citizens now can face prison terms of 15 years for not toeing the Kremlin’s Orwellian war line and spreading what Moscow deems “fake” news about its Ukraine invasion. Gabbard made the wild claim that “what we’re seeing happening here [in America] is not so different from what we’re seeing happening in Russia”.

More recently, Russian state TV lauded Gabbard as “our friend Tulsi”, when it introduced a Carlson interview with her in which Gabbard accused Biden of “lying” about his true motives in Ukraine after Biden said in Warsaw that Putin “cannot remain in power”, which the White House quickly clarified was not a call for regime for change.

The Guardian article explores what it calls the “feedback loop” between Moscow and significant elements of the American right, and notes that when the same narratives are being repeated by influential political figures and pundits on news networks in Russia and the United States with large audiences, those narratives are reaching a lot of people. As one observer noted,

 “Given that many within those audiences have been primed to dismiss and distrust the ‘mainstream’ media and expertise writ large, there’s no amount of factchecking and objective reporting that is likely to change attitudes once certain falsehoods become adopted as facts.”

What is most mystifying–at least to me–is that this wholesale embrace of Russian propaganda is occurring primarily among the MAGA crowd, the “America First,” self-proclaimed patriots and believers in America’s Exceptionalism and historical purity. The threat Putin poses to the United States and the West is obvious; you would expect these particular figures to be first to rally around the flag, defend the myth of America’s glorious past, and agitate for an even stronger response.

Evidently, the allure of Putin’s strongman populism outweighs their asserted patriotism. Putin’s war on modernity–his defense of traditional (!) Christianity and efforts to stamp out “deviations” like homosexuality are presumably more appealing to the American Right than defense of that messy thing we call democracy and respect for other countries’ right to self-determination.

In another era, these weren’t the folks you’d expect to see giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies. But then, as I wrote in yesterday’s post, this isn’t your father’s GOP.

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The Sad Morphing Of The GOP

Last weekend, I ran into an old acquaintance from my days in Republican politics. When the conversation turned political, this former longtime Republican ward chair said he was now an Independent –and hadn’t voted for a Republican in several years.

Anecdotes, as we all know, aren’t data, but I’ve had numerous, similar discussions with friends I made during my 35 years in Republican politics, including several former Indiana office-holders. All of them echoed my own assertion that “I didn’t leave the party–the party left me.”

The bottom line is that–whatever you want to call today’s GOP–it is absolutely nothing like the party we all worked for those many years ago.

I don’t think “regular” people–those who haven’t followed partisan politics very closely or routinely taken note of the policy positions of candidates over the years–realize just how radically different  today’s GOP is from the party of Hoosier Republicans like Richard Lugar, Bill Hudnut, and Bill Ruckleshaus. (Occasionally, when I was teaching, a student would come across my first book–“What’s a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing at the ACLU?”–and express shock that I’d been a Republican. I’d assure them that the GOP they saw –the only GOP they’d experienced–was a dramatically different animal from the one I’d once worked for.)

Catherine Rampell recently remarked on that dramatic about-face in a column for the Washington Post.She noted that the GOP no longer argues that free markets, rather than government, should choose “winners and losers.” Instead, for today’s Republican politicians, the role of the state isn’t to get out of the way. It’s to reward friends and crush political enemies.

Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham expressed the new ethos in a recent monologue threatening companies that advocated for LGBTQ rights, ballot access, racial justice and sundry other political stances that are anathema in today’s GOP.

“When Republicans, they get back into power, Apple and Disney need to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table,” Ingraham warned. “Your copyright, trademark protection. Your special status within certain states. And even your corporate structure itself. The antitrust division at Justice needs to begin the process of considering which American companies need to be broken up once and for all for competition’s sake, and ultimately for the good of the consumers who pay the bills.”

As Rampell notes, this philosophy isn’t limited to Fox News pundits. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis–irate at Disney’s criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” bill–is threatening to cancel Disney’s status under a Florida law that has enabled the company to effectively govern itself within the bounds of its theme parks for some 50 years.

Similarly, last year, DeSantis signed a (likely unconstitutional) law to punish tech companies for privately determined content-moderation decisions, and another law that fines private companies that attempt to set vaccination requirements in their workplaces.

In other states, such as Georgia, GOP politicians have punished private companies for taking supposedly “woke” stands on issues such as gun violence. Republicans in Congress have likewise tried to use antitrust enforcement and other government levers to punish companies whose public stances on voting rights or internal policies on content moderation they dislike.

Trump, of course, understood the Presidency as a platform for rewarding his friends and punishing his (many) enemies. And the GOP–now the party of Trump– is “attempting to codify these responses into law, using the power and weapons of the state against those who disagree with them.”

Perhaps the most striking departure of today’s GOP from the party that used to bear that name is the nature of those disagreements. Today’s GOP has no discernible economic or social policy agenda–only culture war. What was once a political party is now a White Nationalist cult waging war on non-fundamentalist Christians, non-Whites, LGBTQ people and, of course, those despised “elites” (i.e., educated Americans of any race or religion.)

So–will the sad and pathetic remnants of a once “Grand Old Party” go the way of the Whigs? The Hill recently considered the possibility, giving several reasons for anticipating such an outcome.  One was that both pro-Trump and anti-Trump folks are departing, (the former finding the party insufficiently Trumpian). Another was the fact that corporate and major donors are fleeing the party.

And why would average Americans want to identify as Republicans? Soon, they must defend a party that acquitted their president after he incited a deadly insurrection to overturn a certified election based on his “Big Lie.” The Republican identity crisis is defined by its new “membership card slogan” reading, “We stand for shredding the Constitution’s impeachment clause and nullifying lost elections.”

It’s pretty clear that something has to give. The unanswered question is: will that something be America’s constitutional democracy– or today’s GOP?

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Gerrymandering Abroad

I’ve posted numerous times about the  equally numerous ways in which American gerrymandering distorts elections. Although it hadn’t previously occurred to me, it turns out that  American politicians aren’t the only ones who’ve figured out how to draw lines to do an end run around democracy and ensure continued control by a political minority.

I was commiserating with one of my sons over the results of the election in Hungary. I had hoped that the opposition to Viktor Orban would prevail–the pre-election reporting suggested that there was significant support for that opposition. My son directed me to an analysis in the Economist showing how the Hungarian version of gerrymandering had packed opposition votes into small districts, and–given the Hungarian system–how that tactic guaranteed a victory for Fidesz, Orban’s Neo-fascist, pro-Putin party.

In an upcoming election a populist conservative party is poised for victory. It leads polls by mid-single digits. It is also aided by gerrymandered districts, drawn after it won an election in 2010, which should secure its majority today even if its opponents get more votes. The party is not America’s Republicans, who lead polls by just two points and whose advantage in gerrymandering has dwindled. Instead, it is one that some Republicans cite as a model: Fidesz in Hungary, led by Viktor Orban, which faces voters on April 3rd.

Hungary has a mixed-member parliament. Just over half of mps represent geographic districts; the rest come from party lists allocated in proportion to the national vote. Academics often praise this method. But Hungary’s version is warped.

First, rather than having independent experts draw districts, Fidesz drew them itself. Legislators in many American states do this, too. But in America, constituencies must have nearly equal numbers of people. In Hungary, by contrast, their populations can vary by up to 35%. This lets the party in power pack opposition voters into a few heavily populated districts, and spread out its own among lots of less-populous ones.

Here in the good old U.S. of A, we’ve seen how much game-playing can be accomplished by partisans even when districts must be numerically equal. The key would seem to be the line-drawing role of those partisans–the American rules that allow parties in control of  state legislative bodies to draw that state’s districts, and the Hungarian rules that allow the Fidesz party to do so in Hungary.

In both countries, the goal is the same: to use the line-drawing power to pack opposition voters into as few districts as possible, and to spread out its own voters among a greater number of districts where they maintain a majority, albeit a thinner one. In Hungary, where districts can vary in population, it’s easier to do–but the approach is the same.

Fidesz has deployed this tactic deftly. When it took power in 2010, it fared similarly in the least- and most-populous districts. At the next election in 2014, after it re-drew the borders, its vote share was six percentage points higher in districts with fewer than 70,000 eligible voters than in those with at least 80,000. As a result, Fidesz won 91% of constituency seats and a two-thirds supermajority overall, despite getting just 45% of the vote. In 2018 it won 67% of seats again, with 49% of the vote.

The Economist calculated that– thanks to gerrymandering–Hungary’s opposition would need 54% of votes to control parliament.(Members of parliament vote for the President.) It also calculated that Fidesz could hold on to power with just 43%. “By contrast, at the peak of American Republicans’ gerrymandering in 2012, they needed 48% to win the House of Representatives.

Some political scientists argue that gerrymandering isn’t really a major contributor to  America’s less-than-democratic outcomes–that the urban/rural divide has produced the “packing and cracking” that gives us minority rule. But early results from states that have enacted  redistricting reforms suggest otherwise.

Academic researchers have found–somewhat to their surprise– that redistricting reform moderates the partisanship of Representatives. Studies have also confirmed that the use of neutral institutions such as commissions produces fairer and more competitive elections.

Gerrymandering has been shown to depress turnout– after all, why vote when redistricting has evidently neutered you? In a 2008 study, a researcher calculated that truly competitive House districts could generate up to eleven million additional votes, and that those votes would come disproportionately from states with particularly egregious gerrymandering practices, like Indiana.

The Economist analysis of Hungary’s system suggests that illiberal politicians everywhere will use gerrymandering to retain control and thwart majoritarian choices. (Of course, in Hungary, there’s the depressing reality that Orban remains popular, which makes it easier.)

Here in the U.S., absent solid Democratic control of Congress and/or passage of the election and voting reforms currently stymied by Joe Manchin, our system will continue to discount the clear desires of the American majority.

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