David Atkins: What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins?

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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.

Transcript

David Atkins 0:00

Modern fascism does not necessarily look like what it looked like in the 1930;s. They have to create systems whereby it’s impossible for them to lose. Even when they lose elections, they have a semblance of democracy. But in reality, what they’ve done is make it in such a way that the popular will cannot win. You can stay in power regardless of the actual votes that count. There’s only a few ways to do that. And they all look like authoritarianism and they all look like a modern 21st century fascism.

Sam Goldman 0:47

Welcome to Episode 67 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of this show. On this episode, we’re bringing you a conversation I had a few weeks ago with David Atkins on what happens when Republicans simply refuse to certify Democratic wins an article he wrote this may for Washington Monthly.

But first I want to take a moment to share some developments given that this was CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference — ed) weekend, and very importantly, share the new mission statement from Refuse Fascism. Today, six months after his violent January 6 coup attempt, Donald Trump spoke at CPAC, a glorified Nazi rally in Dallas, Texas. He culminated an event showcasing and solidifying the growing fascist movement in the United States.

Meanwhile, in Austin, the Texas Legislature has been brought together for a unique “special session” to plow through that very same program. The legislation being taken up this session reads like a Fox News nightly rundown using the big lie to ram through voter suppression; militarizing the border; decrying social media restrictions; banning transgender students from athletics; attacking critical race theory or the teaching of any high truths about American history; and going all out to criminalize abortion. What we have here is an object lesson on how fascist rhetoric and propaganda connects with the growing power of their movement in and out of government, and how all this is geared towards the violent and total seizure of power. It’s never just rhetoric or red meat for their base. It’s not merely crazed or dumb. This is the future they are fighting for. And for the sections of the ruling class who are backing this, the extremeness is a feature not a bug. This lesson needs to be urgently learned by all who have a heart for humanity.

Jeff Sharlet ran down this fallacy very pointedly earlier today when addressing folks who are attacking Lauren Boebert for being uneducated given her CPAC speech where she railed about government benefits. He wrote “The problem with Lauren Boebert isn’t her lack of formal education, it’s the fascism, and no, they don’t go hand in hand. Just ask Yalie JD Vance or Princeton Cruz, or Dartmouth D’Souza, or Harvard Pompeo, or Columbia Gorsuch, or the Trumps of Penn.” The violence of January 6 was both lionized and sanitized at CPAC, openly welcoming the Oathkeepers and with Trump himself raging about the imprisonment of those engaged in the Capitol siege.

We are seeing history being rewritten before our eyes. Not only is this coup attempt being defended, but throughout the whole weekend and in Trump’s remarks at CPAC and in his Fox interview earlier today, he’s telling people that their fight has only begun. In his Fox News interview, he was hard at work continuing to turn Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, and putting a target on the backs of top Democrats who he falsely blames for her death. Trump’s keynote speech was a tribute to false grievances and feigned victimhood. He began his speech with his best hits of cruelty and his big lie of a stolen election, and ended with a long diatribe on the lie of America’s historic greatness and the need to indoctrinate young people in that American mythology; banning The 1619 Project critical race theory and the teaching of any of America’s foundation in genocide and slavery. He rattled off lists of his enemies, often wondering aloud why they hadn’t been persecuted or worse, while building up those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and making clear that fight was far from over, but it’s well within reach. While COVID is still killing thousands, the Republi-fascists have not let up in demonizing masks or the vaccine, and the CPAC crowd viciously cheered for the US failing to meet COVID vaccine goals as the Delta variant imperils lives, and the pandemic still rages across the globe.

In the face of all of this and everything that we lay out every week on this podcast, it’s vital that we see clearly what the situation we face is, and what needs to be done. And that’s why we’re sharing with you Refuse Fascism’s new mission statement.

In today’s episode of Refuse Fascism, I’m chatting with David Atkins. David is a writer, activist and research professional based in California. He is a contributor to The Washington Monthly is political animal and is president of a qualitative research firm. Earlier last month, David wrote for Washington Monthly, an article titled ‘What happens when Republicans simply refuse to certify Democratic wins?’ It caught several folks on our team’s attention because this is an alarm bell that very few are ringing at the level it needs to be. And I’ve been wanting to dig into it more as part of a larger conversation about the fascist offensive afoot. The Democratic Party leadership is telling you largely to ignore in the effort to seek unity. So David, welcome. I’m so glad to have you on.

David Atkins 9:30

Great to be here.

Sam Goldman 9:32

I’m wondering, perhaps we could start with the question that you posed. It’s provocative, but it’s also urgent. In your article you wrote, “What will the institutions of liberal democracy do when Republican officials simply refuse to concede Democratic victories? The question isn’t as far- fetched as it may seem, and the reckoning may be coming far sooner than most expect.” Can you talk a little bit more about why you think this isn’t far-fetched?

David Atkins 10:01

We’ve seen over and over again that the Republican response to losing the election in November has been to change the voting laws, not only to prevent people from coming out and being able to cast their ballot, as well as trying to restrict franchise, particularly to {inaudible} groups. They’re also trying to change who gets to certify elections. So you’ve seen in various states, them, sometimes it’s very specific to a specific elections official, trying to take away the power of the Democratic secretary of state from certifying election – which is odd, because you can’t know for sure forever that the Secretary of State is likely democrat or whatever, right – so these are very sort of temporary things. But also in other cases like Georgia, they are taking the power away from local elections officials to be able to conduct elections in a manner the board will see fit. And also to certify those elections. They’re taking power away from Republican secretaries of state that are seen as not hardline enough and reverting those to the state legislatures.

Ultimately, what it’s all in an effort to do, whether it’s a Senate election, or a presidential Electoral College election, instead of allowing the people’s vote, to be certified to say: “Hey, you know, we just don’t know there might be voter fraud, and we can’t certify that this is a real vote count. Therefore, what we are going to do is hand it over to our extremely gerrymandered state legislature to simply decide who won the election.” And because these are highly gerrymandered state legislatures, like in say, Wisconsin, where Republicans lose the popular vote in Wisconsin by eight points, but their legislature is 64 to 32, or something like that, for the GOP. That’s a functional sort of authoritarian government, functionally apartheid kind of government. They’ll just overrule the will of the people. That has been their reaction to losing the popular vote last six out of seven elections. It’s their reaction to losing a November. It’s not a far- fetched theory. That’s what they’re actively doing.

Sam Goldman 12:01

One of the things that we’ve been discussing on this show is that the fascist DEF CON level, if you will, is rising. You say it in your article that every lever of Republican power has since post the election been wielded to punish members of the GOP, who in some way didn’t go along with Trump’s tilt. Including the threats of physical violence from threats of nooses to black election officials to anti gay slurs being wielded to the wife of the Georgia election official receiving death threats individually. And on the show, other guests and I have talked about what we have to confront in that we have a party, the GOP, willing and proving able to toss out the norms, and whatever semblance of democracy there is, declaring any election they don’t win illegitimate and positioning through gerrymandering and voter suppression laws to guarantee that legally. But as we saw with January 6, preparing to carry it out either way.

This was something that in your piece, I thought you got out very sharply when you wrote, “An unwillingness to concede any electoral victory by a Democrat as legitimate and an eagerness to punish any Republican elected official who concedes the will of the voters. The big lie that Trump really won the election is now cannon among the majority of Republican voters.” And you went on to say that “The context of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt by congressional Republicans to refuse to certify the electoral college tally in the hopes of sending the election back to the gerrymandered Republican state legislators, thus handing Trump a win as part of an anti-democratic coup it was a physical coup attempt designed to intimidate Congress into enforcing a legislative coup.” I’m hoping that you could talk a little bit more about the seriousness of the danger posed here. And I’m wondering if you see that this danger heightened in that such a coup continues to go unpunished. While those who may have participated in January six, the thugs on the capital have gotten consequences, those who were a part of facilitating it have gone unpunished.

David Atkins 14:16

It’s a huge problem. What’s the old saying, history may not repeat, but it does {inaudible}. So modern fascism does not necessarily look like what it looked like in the 1930s. You know, authoritarians learn from past examples. What is currently happening with modern Authoritarianism is what you’re seeing in places like Hungary or Poland, or on even stricter scale, like Russia, where you have the semblance of democracy, but in reality, what they’ve done is rigged it in such a way that the popular will cannot be heard. Because the way that the elections are done, the way the districts are drawn, way the judiciary is set up, basically prevents the right wing ever losing power. And you can do this in a variety of ways. Probably the easiest, and the one metaphor I use a lot, is apartheid. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it’s an easily understandable way in which you have a surface democratic system, but that is just functionally rigged against democracy and in favor of a small recalcitrant conservative white supremacist minority. And that is, I think, dangerous. Republicans are now a white identity grievance party, for the most part. Trump did make some gains among non-whites, but with that minor complication aside, by and large, the GOP is now a more rural, less educated, white supremacist, patriarchal, highly evangelical, white grievance party. That’s who they are.

That segment of the population is shrinking. It is not the majority, and it has not been the majority for some time. The Republicans have lost six out of seven of the last national elections. They continue to lose by bigger and bigger margins. So the public is not really with them. Then if you expand that to where the major population centers are, the cities are definitely not with them. Where the most economic activity is, the creative centers, they’re sort of losing power, not just as a numerical basis, but also with most of the major cultural institutions of America. And they sense that they’re losing that. It’s understandable. They feel they’re losing their grip on power. But rather than moderate or modulate themselves to become a party that could actually win majority support, what they have decided to do, for a variety of reasons that are mostly related to the fact that they’re controlled by infotainment news networks. Fox News is not the media arm of the Republican Party, the Republican Party is the legislative arm of Fox News. So there’s an incentive structure where grievance- oriented media continues to push the right wing base farther and farther and farther. That segment of the population radicalizes further into the disinformation bubble, and in ways that are almost indistinguishable from cult kind of thinking, at a certain point. Even if they wanted to modulate themselves to be majoritarian party, and to change their messaging in such a way that they could literally win 50% plus one of the American people, they not only refuse to, but they can’t. They’re base won’t let them be. The incentives of Fox News and Newsmax won’t allow them to. So they can create systems whereby it’s impossible for them to lose, even when they lose elections. There’s only a few ways to do that, and they all look like authoritarianism, and they all look like a modern 21st century fascism. It looks like what they’ve done in Russia or Hungary, or Poland. Looks like threats and intimidations, death threats against elected officials, the use of state power to intimidate people if they can get away with it. And also creating structures that are just anti-majoritarian. They are apartheid structures. With the election structures, if you can gerrymander in such a way that a rural white evangelical person’s vote counts way, way more than a city person or a non white person, and then you make it so that even if you lose the popular vote in your state, 60 to 40, the majority of your Congressional delegation because of the way you drew the lines, is in your favor, and then you say that state legislature or that Congressional delegation will decide who won the election, because we’re going to say, without any evidence whatsoever that all you guys are committing voter fraud. Then you can stay in power, regardless of the actual votes that come in. And look, that is authoritarianism. That is a form of modern fascism. And then if they wield that state power to further restrict the franchise or the further restrict democracy, or to install a bunch of judges that will align that way, then you don’t have a democracy.

Sam Goldman 18:34

I think that laying out that strategy is really helpful for people to understand what they’re doing, especially when you look at voter suppression and what they’re doing at different states; how that’s part of not just an act in of itself, but part of a whole game plan they have. One of the lines that I remember when I first read it and that stuck with me and you see playing out probably more so this month than when it was first written was, you wrote, “A Republican Party hostile to democracy can use America’s creaky constitutional system to create a series of unprecedented roadblocks to majority rule. Not just by suppressing the vote or drawing unfair districts, but by refusing to accept the vote itself. The result could throw the nation into political violence unseen since the days of Ku Klux Klan terrorism, if not, the Civil War itself.” This is a heavy statement that people should not just take seriously, but consider the implications of. And to not just stress what we’re saying, but look at what you see happening and line it up. Does this conform to what is happening and what we’ve seen? And I’m wondering, how do you see this shaping up? What scenarios do you see happening in 2022, 2024, with the elections, especially given the Democratic Party’s hollow appeasement? I mean, as it is now, it would be a pretty one-sided Civil War. It would be genocidal.

David Atkins 20:01

Yeah, I mean, it really depends on on how it would play out. I think I’m not as pessimistic about that as I think you might be. It depends on how it happens. But the danger, of course, is that in 2022, for instance, Democrats could do better in midterms that historically one might suggest. Usually the party in power, the party with the president loses significantly in the midterm election that follows. There are reasons to believe the Democrats might be able to out-perform that, out-perform the historical challenges, because of the way the realignment has come, and the fact that Donald Trump is not on the ballot. Republicans have yet to prove that they can generate all of that sort of missing white voter, we shall say, politely, turnout without Trump on the ballot and the fact that the realignment has pushed so many suburban, stable, sort of suburban voters who vote frequently and vote easily by mail, and for whom society has sort of oriented.

But the conditions of structural racism have tended to advantage suburbanites voting, which ironically has, we’re down to now in favor of Democrats as the suburbs have shifted blue. So there’s reason to believe the Democrats might over-perform their midterm expectation. And if that happens, and Democrats do win Senate seats, but those Senate seats like in Georgia, are in red areas where the Republicans refuse to certify results, because they baselessly claim that the big cities were conducting election fraud, they refused to certify the elections in those urban counties, you could see a situation where they simply refuse to certify and to seat senators who won. And then what happens to the Senate? Then you would have a failure to be able to send the senator to the Senate. You might see the GOP try to take control of the Senate fraudulently in 2022. Imagine the same sort of thing at a much higher level of the presidency and the Electoral College tallies, because if there’s no certification for Electoral College, let’s say that Biden or Kamala Harris or whoever the Democratic nominee is wins the 2024, and a big, previously red state…they refuse to certify that, it goes back to the State House delegation, which is gerrymandered Republican. They decide, oh, Trump or Josh Hawley or Tucker Carlson won the election, after all, because we just say so, and that happens. I don’t think that you would see Democrats lying down. I think you would see a fairly significant pushback. You would see a significant pushback, not only from folks like you and me, or the left, and the center left, but also from fairly large portions of institutional society. You saw the way corporate America reacted to the Georgia votes, for instance. You saw the way sporting organizations have reacted. You see the way the military actually has been standing up to Donald Trump. I think it’s not entirely clear to everyone, well, like lie down, go gently into that good night. But the conflicts that would arise could be fairly massive.

On the flip side, of course, if the institutions in power do back up Democratic victories in the face of Republicans throwing all these log jams and basically telling there 70 to 100 million people who aligned with them that these are all fraudulent. You could see forms an escalating domestic terrorism arising from right wing groups. And once that happens, once you start seeing those levels of civil conflict of say that result in violence, it’s really hard to predict. Then you start to get into a sort of chaotic feedback loop, where you don’t really know what is going to happen. And one thing that, to close with this thought is, presidential systems themselves lend themselves to this form of instability. I know that Matt Iglesias has not been endearing himself to progressives of late, but Iglesias did write a fantastic piece years back on the danger of presidential systems and the instability of it. I think that America has gotten away with it for some time by basically conforming itself to institutional racism. But there’s a danger in the fact that we have a winner take all presidential system that leads itself, and that we have so many like Electoral College roadblocks, and these weird sort of constitutional systems that allow these road blocks to stay in place. These frankly don’t exist in more streamlined parliamentary democracies. That makes it dangerous. And we have to work out eliminating – within the framework of the Constitution has allowed – eliminating as many of these procedural hurdles as possible, and streamlining our democracy in such a way that the will of the majority is allowed to rule in elections.

Sam Goldman 24:18

I really appreciate your perspective on this. I think that it is something to think about how once it plays out, it becomes beyond their control these complex and and in some ways, we’ve seen little shimmer of that already. So I think that that’s important to keep in mind. I’m thinking that given that the danger cannot be overstated, and I think that I’m not fear mongering in that in that what people used to say could never happen would be impossible. People wouldn’t allow people would do… has just been like, yep, that was another day in Trump land. I think that we should get into a big question that’s on my mind, and I’d like to hear from your perspective, your thoughts on it, why are the Democrats seeking what, in my opinion is a toxic and unviable strategy, of unifying, healing in the absence of justice? Fetishizing so called “bipartisanship” with a party that wants them and anyone who challenges their rule dead? Why don’t you see them, like throwing all the stops to, let’s say, abolish the filibuster or get this For the People Act through?

David Atkins 25:26

I think I’m gonna give two answers here, one that is somewhat more critical of the party, and one that is maybe a little bit more understanding. I’ll start with more critical bit. I like to frequently point out that gerontocracy is an underrated aspect of office. A lot of Democratic leaders cut their teeth as far back as the Kennedy days. But most of them lived through the 1970s era. They lived through the dominance of the Reagan Republican era, through the Gingrich era, and are reflexively I think defensive, because there was always the danger of that governance and American politics were primed for right wing backlash. That Republicans had a silent majority that any push to the left would carry negative consequences and they sort of internalized that defensive crutch, that sort of culture of fear that is no longer warranted. It may well have been true that in the 1980s, or 1990s, that was the case. It may well have been true that in the darkest days of the Bush-Cheney administration, that may have been the case to a certain extent, but if it ever was true then, there are all sorts of arguing about that neoliberalism now, etc.

But, even if it was true then, it’s not true now. The public is with us on these questions. There’s no need to fear that amount of backlash. Unfortunately, folks who have internalized that culture of fear and have a hard time letting it go. So I think that’s one big thing. And a lot of them do pine for the days of Tip O’Neil. They’re institutional. So a lot of them even for good reasons – like take Stephen Breyer, he won’t retire – I mean, the rest of us can see what’s happening, but Stephen Breyer has the sort of high- minded allegiance to the institution of the Supreme Court. You see, senators have a high minded allegiance to the institution of the Senate, and debate, and all of that, that is just sort of very antiquated moment that we are in, but it’s also a product of the times which they were raised. And that’s really bad, because we’ve got to get past that. And I think getting some more new blood that really sees things the way they are will. But the other aspect, too, is part of it is, you know, when you say the Democratic Party, quote, unquote, coming out in November, I hate to sound like an apologist that we have the slimmest of House majorities, and a literally 50/50 Senate that we didn’t even expect to have, but for the surprising with Georgia, right. And so, the Senate majority, which is 50/50 is being carried on the backs of, in part one Senator for West Virginia, one of the Trumpiest states in the nation, and one Senator from a very, very newly blue Arizona. And this goes back to the apartheid totalitarian sort of anti-authoritarian question itself. The median senate seat leans four or five points by some metrics, seven points, to the right, more Republican than the median average American. So the Democratic majority, nothing that we can pass gets through without Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema or Dianne Feinstein. That’s the hypocrisy problem. So can you move Sinema? Can you move Manchin? Part of the problem is that the Senate depends on senators from West Virginia and Arizona, rather than the median opinion of the average American. If the Senate reflected the median and the average American, I think in some cases, you would see a lot more aggressive action by the Democratic Party. So part of it is a culture of fear, but part of it is dealing with the realities of the semi apartheid system that we currently have in place that privileges conservatism, even among Democratic office holders.

Sam Goldman 28:51

Thanks for listening to the Refuse Fascism podcast. I encourage everyone to read the new mission of Refuse Fascism, that I shared at the beginning of today’s episode, by visiting RefuseFascism.org, and to share it widely. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Share them with me. You can tweet me @SamBGoldman, or drop me a line at [email protected] or leave a voicemail by calling 917-426-7582. Even better, you can record a voice message by going to anchor.fm/Refuse-Fascism and clicking the button there and if you do it that way, you might even hear yourself on a future episode.

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