A comedy or a horror?

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reviewed the recent election history. The result in court cases was 2-33. Appellate lawyer Raffi Melkonian described it this way:

Non-lawyer followers: this litigation (in all the states) is truly blowing my mind. It's as if you're playing chess and your opponent lets off a whoopie cushion, throws a Zebra Cake on the board, and then runs off without pants and says they won. I don't know what else to say.

The next step, according to Eleveld:

So just as soon as their string of legal losses was coming to a close, Giuliani and Co. ran to the mics where they could lie with abandon. And lie they did.

I had described the press conference featuring Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Powell’s big moment, described by Eleveld:

Powell’s most convincing coup was mustering up the trappings of raw emotion, including hints of a quiver in her voice, as she declared the imaginary fraud "stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating, and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in."

Finally Eleveld turned to the GOP, who have mostly been standing by as the nasty guy trashes the nation on his way out the door. Their silence is just as treasonous. David Neiwert of Kos reported the eliminationist hate speech coming from the far right has become a flood since the nasty guy has refused to concede. Eliminationist means the speaker wants to do more than defeat their enemy, they want to eliminate their enemy. Neiwert includes a few quotes of this kind of speech. Some of it is so intense it can be hard to read. And a great deal of it is projection – accusing Democrats and Liberals of hating the country and having committed treason. Things they are planning to do. They proclaim the punishment of treason is death. Which they proclaim they are willing to dish out, whether or not there is a trial to determine guilt. So far this flood of talk hasn’t turned to action. Yet. Mark Sumner of Kos has empathy for reporters. Are they supposed to cover the post-election events as a comedy or a horror? Losing 33 lawsuits is ridiculous. Confusing the Four Seasons Hotel with Four Seasons Total Landscaping is hilarious. But what the nasty guy is after – subverting democracy and starting fires at home and abroad – as he does these comical things is a horror. That balance will be hard to get right. And media will need to walk that fine line at least for another two months. Sumner reported that three GOP senators – Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah – have signaled they might revolt from the rest of the party and approve Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees. But Murkowski said words similar to Moscow Mitch, that she’ll approve folks that are “within the mainstream.” Sumner wrote:

The idea that the “Uneasy Three” will step out to moderate the worst McConnell will do is interesting. It may even be hopeful. However, what’s clear is that it’s a move mostly designed to benefit the senators in question and to make leaving Republicans in charge of the Senate seem just a little bit less awful. This is a long, long way from reaching the point where this splinter group threatens to dislodge McConnell by conferencing with Democrats.

Yeah, there is still vote counting going on in some states. As of a few days ago Kyle Griffin tweeted:

Joe Biden now has more than 79.5 million votes. His popular vote lead over Trump is more than 5.9 million votes.

Leila Fadel of NPR talked to Jason Stanley who wrote the book How Fascism Works: The Politics Of Us and Them. I worked from the transcript. Fadel asked for a definition of fascism. Stanley said:

So fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by minorities, liberals and immigrants. He represents the cities as corrupt, filled with foreigners and disease, and the heartland as the true nation that he represents. And then he takes over a political party, transforms them into a cult of the leader and says only he can deal with the problem. So we're - we've seen his election campaign focus on Black Lives Matter, on a minority social justice movement. We've seen him promise patriotic education in a second term - all sorts of tactics that we ideologically associate with far-right ultranationalism, i.e., fascism. … The heart of fascist politics is the destruction of truth. Fascist politics is based on a friend/enemy distinction where your enemy's not a legitimate opponent. Your enemy is hiding terrible crimes, and you can't treat them as any kind of normal opponent. And this is the purpose of conspiracy theories like QAnon. … [Conspiracy theories] persist because that's the core of representing politics as militarized. Fascist politics transforms politics into a battlefield. And in the battlefield, like, you don't care if your opponent is speaking truth or not. They're the enemy. They want to kill you. So the goal is to represent politics as a battlefield. If your leader says false things, it doesn't matter. He's trying to win the battle, win the war for you. So that's the structure.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Talia Lavin of The Cut on the future of the GOP. She wrote about Madison Cawthorn, age 25, heading to Congress. Alas the excerpt doesn’t say where Cawthorn is from.

Cawthorn is a young man who’s demonstrated racist views and been accused of misogynist behavior — and hasn’t let either stop him in his quest for power. Add in a photogenic set of cheekbones and a marked tendency to pose with girth-y rifles, and you arrive at the message the GOP has imprinted on its rising stars: one of instinctual cruelty and little else. It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that this is the future of the Republican Party, and the main of what it has to offer.

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale. One of his books is On Tyranny. He tweeted a thread. Excerpts:

Democracy is undone from within rather than from without. The occasion to undo democracy is often an election. The mechanism to undo democracy is usually a fake emergency, a claim that internal enemies have done something outrageous.

Apparently that something outrageous was to vote.

Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless. ... In an authoritarian situation, the election is only round one. You don't win by winning round one. Peaceful demonstrations after elections are necessary for transitions away from authoritarianism, as in Poland in 1989, Serbia in 1999, or Belarus right now. It is up to civil society, organized citizens, to defend the vote and to peacefully defend democracy.

Chris Hayes of MSNBC tweeted:

Apropos of nothing, the Confederacy's refusal to actually accept defeat and instead embrace a Lost Cause narrative of betrayal was a key aspect of its successful efforts to wrench back one-party totalitarian control of the South, which it did both through violence and propaganda.