About Undermining Confidence in Elections
So a couple days ago Joe Biden gave a press conference, at which, among other things, he talked up the probably-doomed election reform bills currently pending in the Congress. Someone asked him whether, if those bills are not enacted, whether the 2022 congressional elections would be illegitimate, and he said something along the lines of “yes.”
Naturally everyone has lost their minds over this: the common refrain is that he is joining Donald Trump in attacking/undermining confidence in the integrity of our elections.
Lots of people have already been pointing out the problem with that criticism:
I think there’s something deeper going on here and it’s pretty ominous.
There is a very clear effort underway in this country to create a minority-rule fascist regime under color of law: in other words, a situation in which the fascist regime is unambiguously “lawful.” The impetus for the fascists to seek the color of law for their overthrow of democracy is quite clear: the U.S. military is in fact quite committed to its own subordination to the Constitution, and is extremely unlikely to go along with any sort of extralegal coup. For that matter there’s likely to be considerable public hue and cry, if you try something like the January 6th attack. But if you could clothe the coup in the law itself, then you might actually get people, the people who matter in the end, to go along with it.
For present purposes, the details of HOW you go about getting the color of law for your coup attempt don’t really matter. The point is this: if they ever manage to succeed in that quest, the country will be confronted with a question. Do we follow the law, or do we resist the fascist takeover? There is going to be a LOT of weight on the side of “follow the law.” And that I think is the proper context for the people yelling at Biden. They are preemptively laying down a marker, whether this is their conscious intention or not, that when the time comes it will be improper to resist a fascist takeover under color of law. To do so, you see, would be to undermine confidence in our governing institutions, and we can’t have that.
Everybody go read Letter from Birmingham Jail.
