The Texas energy failure highlights a deeper systemic threat to US democracy
Don’t let the Jan. 6 riot distract from the even more dangerous (and perfectly legal) state-level Republican effort to buttress the electoral infrastructure of apartheid rule in America
Anyone remember the batshit bizarre spectacle, in 2015, of Texas governor Rick Perry — citing fears of invasion by the federal government — mobilizing the Texas National Guard against a U.S. military exercise in his state? Last week served up a reminder that this secessionist mindset extends to the state’s electrical power grid, which was constructed separately from the rest of the nation’s – you know, like General Franco built fascist Spain’s railways on a different gauge to the rest of Europe’s – thereby freeing the hustlers and vulture capitalists of the state’s energy markets (remember Enron?) from federal oversight, and also preventing the Lone Star State from borrowing power from neighboring states.
But this edition is not about Texas’s energy collapse — for that, I’d recommend Texan economist Jamie Galbraith’s excellent piece on why those suffering through a man-made catastrophe can blame capitalism. What should concern us more is the obvious peril to the national wellbeing posed of which it reminds us: a dysfunctional system of government that allows states to make their own laws and rules on nationwide existential challenges like climate change — and Covid-19.
The headline takeaway in the British medical journal Lancet’s assessment of the governmental failures that accounted for some 40% of American pandemic deaths was the Trump Administration’s incompetent and ideological response to the virus, but the researchers also noted the profound vulnerability created by a system that allowed and even encourages states to make their own rules and conduct autonomous public-health policies in response to what was clearly a national crisis. Partly, this was a product of a longstanding GOP philosophy of shrinking the federal government — like the berserker Abbot last week proclaiming that Texans (rich white ones with a Cancun option, anyway, I guess) would rather go without power than see the federal government get involved. It also reflects a system of governance that allowed states to push back against measures adopted in most of the country to contain a national peril.
And that system is as perilous to the project of democratizing America as it is to sparing us the worst of climate change and pandemics. And it’s a key front of the apartheid backlash to the ongoing struggle led by Black Americans to democratize the settler polity that brought their ancestors to these shores in chains.
We know the 18th century constitution created by and for rich white settlers bequeathed an electoral system that reinforced minority rule by creating vetos on democracy through such obvious mechanisms as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate (by giving two seats to each state regardless of population size). But there’s more: The system that allows states to respond autonomously to climate change and Covid also allows them to make their own laws about who gets to vote in U.S. national elections, how voting is conducted, how much those votes will count.
If by democracy we mean, first and foremost, a system where every citizen has the right and ability to cast a vote of equal value, then it’s plain to see that the US falls well short of that standard — that the Republican Party is dedicated to preventing democracy in America. And one of the key levers in the hands of the American party of Apartheid (white minority rule) is control of state governments.
Georgia’s state Republican government used the antidemocratic machinery allowed by their control of state government to cheat Stacy Abrahams out of the governorship in 2018. And if we thought Abrahams had the last laugh by mobilizing the state’s Black voters to win the election for Joe Biden, the state’s Republicans have other ideas. They’re already hard at work with legislation brazenly designed to prevent Black citizens from voting. And Georgia’s not an outlier; the Republicans’ core strategy is grounded in regaining and holding onto power by preventing Black, Latino and Indigenous people from voting. Another bizarre anti-democratic feature of the US system is that it is left to state governments to draw electoral districts – so, a new season of gerrymandering is upon us, with the white supremacist Republican Party once again using the mechanism to reinforce its power.
As the Brennan Center politely put it,
Under the best of circumstances, the redrawing of legislative and congressional districts every 10 years is a fraught and abuse-prone process. But the next round of redistricting in 2021 and 2022 will be the most challenging in recent history. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, intense fights over representation and fair maps were all but certain in many states due to rapid demographic change and a weakening of the legal framework governing redistricting. Invariably, communities of color would bear much of the brunt, facing outright discrimination in some places and being used as a convenient tool for achieving unfair partisan advantage in others.
Bertolt Brecht was being sarcastic when he responded to East Germany’s authoritarian regime declaring it was losing confidence in the electorate with the quip “wouldn’t it easier to dissolve the people and elect another?” But that’s exactly what the Republicans do at state level, and it’s perfectly legal under the anachronistic US Constitution — helped, of course, by the fact that the minority-ruled Senate and Electoral College have combined to create an extremely unrepresentative, partisan Supreme Court bench.
Are the Democrats paying attention to what the GOP is doing right now at state-level? Ronald Brownstein warns:
The magnitude and speed of the GOP’s efforts since its 2020 losses to impose new state-level voter-suppression laws, even as it gears up for aggressive gerrymanders, have exceeded even the most alarmist predictions from Democrats and voting-rights advocates. If nothing else, the sudden and sweeping Republican efforts to tilt the rules of the game should leave Democrats with no illusions about the fate they can expect if they allow the filibuster to block new federal standards for redistricting, election reform, and voting rights. H.R. 1 and a new VRA represent the Democrats’ best, and perhaps only, chance to preempt the multipronged offensive Republicans are mounting to tilt the balance of national power back in their direction—and potentially keep it there for years.
Don’t get sidetracked by the illusion that there’s any value in restoring comity between Democrats and the party of apartheid in Congress, or by nostalgic platitudes about America needing a strong Republican Party
As Chris Hayes warns, we’re in a fight to “democratize political power” in the United States – i.e. an anti-apartheid struggle (my formulation, not his) and it’s through that lens that we need to approach national politics. “Any progress toward that goal, any effort to push back against minoritarian control, will lead to bitter conflict. But there is no way to avoid that fight if we’re to defeat the growing faction that seeks to destroy majority rule. No substantive victories can endure unless democracy is refortified against its foes. That task comes first.”
And I highly recommend reading this moving, personal and very powerful analysis by Vann R. Newkirk III on how the struggle of the formerly enslaved people to democratize America faces a continuity of white supremacist reordering of the political space, from the white terror, lynching and Jim Crow that ran from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era, to the voter suppression efforts by today’s Republicans. If we’re going to keep our eyes on the prize of ending apartheid in America and replacing it with democratic equality, we’re going to need radical change. Constitutional change, which recognizes the toxicity of the current system — and, importantly, which recognizes the judicial branch of government is an extremist partisan body whose orientation has been set by a president and Senate that do not reflect the will of the electorate, and which is a central weapon in the Party of Apartheid’s effort to disenfranchise Black, Latino and indigenous voters. Newkirk writes:
Black Americans deserve better. Their struggle over the centuries helped create essentially all of the measures that we now associate with suffrage—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; the Twenty-Fourth Amendment; the Voting Rights Act; the “one person, one vote” principle; and the Nineteenth Amendment, which Black women fought to secure. Black Americans should be counted above the Athenians as progenitors of democracy. Widespread political participation was simply not anticipated in the Constitution—least of all for Black Americans—and Americans have done well to retrofit its chassis into something resembling universal suffrage and representative democracy. But what Charles Hamilton and the people who marched with him always knew is that the vehicle is still flawed.
Despite the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, which prevented states from denying the ballot on account of race or gender, and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which eliminated poll taxes in federal elections, the Constitution doesn’t guarantee the right to vote in all cases, and only provides a tenuous framework—dependent on the interpretation of the three branches—for understanding what counts as discrimination or unlawful levels of voter dilution. Moreover, the way we currently fight unlawful practices often requires that people experience disenfranchisement, dilution, or undue burden first; in the worst cases, entire governments can be, and are, elected under illegitimate circumstances. There is no universally accepted way to penalize bad actors. States so inclined can experiment with the most extreme and shocking antidemocratic measures, knowing that court decisions will eventually lead them to find out exactly how much tyranny is permissible. And, as the events of January showed, white backlash against Black voting is still too powerful to leave the franchise in the hands of states.
Read his analysis of what it would take to create a genuinely democratic constitution in the United States. That’s what it’s ultimately going to take. A good moment to remember the old maxim that all revolutions are impossible until they become inevitable.
The immediate struggle, says Newkirk and others, is to secure and reassert the Voting Rights Act — something that Democrats in Congress can achieve if they stop hemming and hawing over the dangerous fantasy of bipartisanship. And it’s a struggle that’s going to be waged on multiple levels, crucially — as Stacy Abrahams and her organization showed — with grassroots organizing at state level. Abrahams, writing with Lauren Groh-Wargo, recently offered a valuable guideline on how to fight for democracy at the state level. It’s key mantra: Organize for the long game!
To be sure, the movement to democratize America by enfranchising and empowering Black working class people is not necessarily going to be waged and certainly not going to be won by the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Lots more on that to come, here on Rootless Cosmopolitan, and on the struggle against apartheid in America more broadly. Lot’s to learn from South Africa!
Meantime, and because we still need to eat…
The crowd-pleaser I’d like to feed to shivering Texans and voting rights activists everywhere:
I have my lovely mother-in-law, the great South African food-writer Phillippa Cheifitz, to thank for the inspiration to roast chicken atop polenta – I’ve taken her recipe and added a few spices touches over the years to create my household’s favorite Friday night dinner. The magic lies in what the spice-rubbed chicken fat and juices running off the bird do to the polenta underneath. This isn’t hard, and the returns are delicious
So, cook two cupfuls of polenta on the stove top, till firm. Butterfly a whole chicken (though you can also do this with leg-and-thigh pieces if you prefer, though I’d recommend the whole bird). Salt, pepper and a dry rub of, like, two or three teaspoons of smoky paprika, a teaspoon each of cumin and coriander, a teaspoon or so of Aleppo peppers or similar chili flakes and assorted herbs (you can play with ingredients for the rub per your tastes), rubbed on and drizzled with a bit of oil, mixed in (get your fingers dirty, you’ll be okay). Oil a baking dish, slice an onion and scatter on the bottom, put in the oven to soften slightly (just enough so that it doesn’t stick, it’s going to cook under the polenta). In a separate skillet (sorry about the mess) put the underside/inside of the butterflied chicken under the broiler for about ten minutes to create a seal that will stop marrow and unsightly juices running straight into the polenta. Remove, pour the polenta into the baking dish to cover the bottom, then put your chicken on top, skin side facing up (hopefully your polenta is not too creamy, it’s okay if it sinks a little, but it needs to be on top with the skin exposed). Roast at 400 for an hour. That’s it.