I've been trying to make sense of the power grab by North Carolina Republicans.
The basic outline of their power grab is that having lost two key statewide races (governor and state supreme court), Republicans in North Carolina's legislature, with the willing help of outgoing Republican governor McRory, passed laws to strip both the incoming governor and soon to be Democratic majority on the state's Supreme Court of significant power.
Superficially, it's a temper tantrum of monumental proportions. At a slightly deeper level, it's an attack on established democratic institutions. You lose this time, I lose next time; if I try to screw you when I lose, you're going try to do the same thing when you lose. It's an offensive and brazen attempt to undermine the democratically determined outcome of the election. But it's also the sort of behavior that invites such a huge backlash it seems self-defeating.
David Atkins at Washington Monthly described it as "apartheid calculus":
There is a precedent for this sort of political desperation: apartheid South Africa. South African whites knew that to allow true democracy in the colonial nation would mean their permanent disempowerment. Their reaction was to violate international norms and become a pariah in order to hold onto power that, once lost, would never return. Political factions with a legitimate claim on power and a reasonable argument for the majority of the public know they can temporarily give up control in a democracy and win the next time around.
Atkins' argument is fairly basic:
The Republican approach to power dynamics here more resembles asymmetric warfare than traditional political conflict: parties that expect to regain power once they have lost it don’t typically behave this way, because they know that bad behavior can become a precedent used against them that will make it difficult for them to govern when they return to power. The Republican strategy here only makes sense if they expect never to regain power once they have lost it.
(Emphasis added)
He goes on to argue:
But Republicans know that absent some sea change that improves their numbers among women and minority voters, they cannot expect to regain power once states like North Carolina are lost to them. And they know that they cannot count on flukes like Donald Trump’s narrow electoral college victory for long as the map continues to shift away from them.
That’s what makes the current incarnation of the Republican Party so dangerous. They have total control now, but they know their time is limited if elections remain fair. They’re reduced to the apartheid calculus: either implement authoritarian control, or watch everything they have worked for disappear in four to eight years, perhaps forever.
It's a troubling argument with troubling implications. Republicans are trying to freeze their power into place to prevent future majorities from making changes they don't like. The push for anti-gay marriage amendments to state constitutions a decade or so ago was a comparable strategy; conservatives believed they could prevent marriage equality by passing these amendments. The idea was that state law could not be interpreted to allow same sex marriage if the state constitution forbade it (even if other parts of the constitution and/or state law would otherwise allow same sex couples to marry). It would make it significantly harder for future majorities which would favor marriage equality to implement it as policy. In essence, Republicans in North Carolina have changed the ground rules in an attempt to prevent future majorities from doing something with which the current majority disagrees.
I believe there is a different interpretation for Republican behavior.
Republicans have spent decades (since at least the early 1990s if not before) denying the legitimacy of the Democratic party as a governing party. They charged Clinton was an illegitimate president because of his plurality wins. They have spent 8 years attacking Barack Obama's bona fides as president - challenging even his citizenship. At a deeper level, Republicans have attacked liberalism as anti-American and liberal policies as destructive of core American values.
At a fundamental level, Republicans deny that Democrats can legitimately win elections and govern in the US. They treat Democratic states (i.e. California) as if they are not part of "real" America. They treat Democratic electoral victories as inherently invalid, created through illegitimate means. Republican rhetoric about voter fraud is directed almost entirely at disenfranchising Democratic voters. The actions taken by North Carolina Republicans deny the newly elected Democratic governor power and authority they willingly gave the outgoing Republican governor. The effect is simply to deny a democratically (small d) elected official power and authority because he is a Democrat (capital D).
Republicans, in other words, have adopted the apartheid mentality which denies that their political opponents may even participate in the process.
To put it more simply, Republicans have decided Democracy is only valid when they win. This behavior is another example of Republicans dangerous political fundamentalism. Like fundamentalist Christians who refuse to accept that liberal Christians are authentically Christians, Republicans have decided that Democrats are authentically American.
Such attitudes are toxic to a democracy.
Cross posted at OneUtah