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      How Democrats Should Approach the Midterm Elections

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      Since most of us are sleeping better in the quietude of a sane presidency, it’s tempting to ignore the current craziness of the Republican Party. Between the QAnon wackos, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, the voter suppression hard-liners, the coup enthusiasts and the election deniers, the party is showing a mash-up of madness.But here’s the scariest part of all that: They’re still likely to take the House next year during the midterm elections, and possibly the Senate, as they continue to rewrite rules in several states to make it easier to compromise fair elections.That means the Biden presidency, though riding high on a popular economic agenda and public health competence, may turn out to be a brief, single-term calm between two storms of authoritarianism.Democrats can blame themselves, in part. They’ve given just enough ammunition to Republicans that a party waging war on democracy is on the cusp of undermining much of that democracy next year.The Republican tank of ideas is full of the tired and the preposterous. Cut taxes for the wealthy. Climate change is fake. Make voting harder. And the big unifier: The 2020 presidential election was stolen. Try finding a national majority for any of that. So the Republican Party will run on what the Democrats have given them. Or at least what the far left of the party has given them.“G.O.P. candidates in 2022 will happily accuse Democratic opponents of wanting to defund the police and teach contempt for the country in schools,” wrote James A. Baker III, a venerable party operative, sketching a rosy scenario in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a powerful one-two punch: Dems will make us less safe while preaching identity politics to the kids.Republicans already control a majority of statehouses, and with them, the redistricting process. They need a net gain of only five seats to take the House, and a lone pickup to get control of the Senate.The warning signs were there in 2020, and in a recent local election in which Democrats lost in a Latino-heavy part of Texas. Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than seven million, but Democrats suffered a net loss of 11 House seats.In a post-mortem, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the New York Democrat overseeing his party’s congressional campaigns, told The Washington Post that the “lies and distortions about defund and socialism carried a punch.”The way to hold off the barbarians on the right should be pretty simple. A unified Democratic message — helping people live better lives with a targeted hand from government — is hugely popular. It’s the essence of both the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act and Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill. And it should be the essence of what voters think about when they think about Democrats.Another message, on cultural issues, is much less popular. In a recent congressional race for an open seat in New Mexico, Democrats won in a landslide by emphasizing economic fairness while directly confronting attacks on law and order. The winner, Melanie Stansbury, ran an ad that featured support from a former sheriff’s deputy.The rise in violent crime is now the top concern of many voters across the country, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, and in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, according to a recent poll by Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos. Polling also shows that a majority of Americans oppose defunding the police, and Maloney says it’s a “pernicious lie” to label Democrats as the party of defund. But lies, fueled by lefty overreach in some cities as well as social media amplification, tend to have a much longer shelf life than boring talk about infrastructure.On race, the great reckoning that began with George Floyd’s death last year should continue to expose the overlooked lowlights of history and work to get rid of the bias built into the system.But in promoting the teaching of critical race theory — a term so misunderstood that it’s best known now as a Republican weapon — some educators have played into the hands of the Trumpers, even those less talented in the dark art of demagoguery. At the annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner in New Hampshire in early June, former Vice President Mike Pence said that children are being taught “to be ashamed of their skin color,” a popular Republican talking point.If the message is that being born white is something akin to the Roman Catholic concept of original sin, then there’s bound to be a backlash among the moderate voters who came around to Democrats in the Trump era.The longtime liberal strategist Ruy Teixeira warned of this very thing in his newsletter in May and said moderates are afraid to push back. “The administration is doing nothing to head off this impending culture war in the schools because to do so would bring the wrath of the stridently woke sector of the Democratic Party down upon Biden’s head,” he wrote.Trump is diminished but still very dangerous. His party is stocked with brick-headed deniers. Nearly three in 10 Republicans said they think he will be reinstated in the White House this year. This month, Trump called his defeat “the crime of the century” and got applause when he denounced critical race theory.Democrats won’t be able to contain the tornado of awfulness around Trump with the “stridently woke,” in Teixeira’s words. Common-sense politics may not be a rallying cry, but it wins elections.Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing Opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and the author of, most recently, “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Senator Joe Manchin Has a Point

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      With an opinion piece in The Charleston Gazette-Mail on Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, effectively killed his party’s ambitious voting-rights reform twice over. First, he said he would vote against the bill in question — the so-called For the People Act. (In a Senate split 50-50, his defection looks decisive.) Second, he promised to defend existing Senate filibuster rules, which allow Republicans to prevent the bill from coming to a vote in the first place.For Democrats, the op-ed held more insult than injury. Mr. Manchin’s position has been clear for months. What is new is the grounds for it: Low partisanship, he implied, not high ideals, is the source of his colleagues’ vision.He has a point.The vision of voting rights that worries Mr. Manchin was succinctly captured in a communiqué that arrived last month in the inboxes of those who support the Brennan Center for Justice at the N.Y.U. School of Law. New laws proposed or passed in Republican-controlled states — Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona — have cracked down on early voting, voting by mail and the use of unmanned drop boxes, the email warned. “Nobody,” it stressed, “should erect barriers that would curb the freedom to vote. Period.”It is a stirring exhortation, but does it make any sense? Democracy is a system, a set of procedures — not just a mood or a dream. Barriers and curbs are what it is built out of. If you don’t have them, you don’t have a democracy. The important thing is that they be reasonable.The definition of reasonableness is proving elusive. When Republicans in the Texas Legislature were on the verge of passing their new voting law at the end of May, Democrats staged a walkout, denying the chamber a quorum and stalling the bill’s passage. Observers disagree about whether these Texan tactics are protecting democracy or sabotaging it.The Democrats who control both houses of the U.S. Congress discuss the conflict over voting in apocalyptic terms. The For the People Act aims to extend the voting practices that Republicans have been curtailing. Democrats describe Republicans’ tighter regulation as “disenfranchisement” and even “voter suppression.” Representative John Sarbanes, the Maryland Democrat who introduced the House version of the For the People Act, H.R. 1, has spoken of the bill as a way of addressing “the need for comprehensive, structural democracy reform.”That is the wrong way to look at the For the People Act. It has none of the hallmarks of a revolution in voting rights. It does not open the vote to new classes of people as the 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments did. Those amendments granted the vote to ex-slaves and nonwhites (1870), women (1920) and 18-year-olds (1971). (The new bill does seek to disqualify states from permanently denying the vote to felons, though that would most likely require a constitutional wrangle over the 14th Amendment.)Since real voting-rights breakthroughs, by definition, admit people from outside the political system, they shatter political coalitions and produce bipartisan votes. Women’s suffrage did that a century ago. So did civil rights in the 1960s. By contrast, the new election bills, on both sides, are among the most partisan in memory. H.R. 1 got no Republican votes. On initial passage, Texas’ Republican-sponsored bill got no Democratic support in either chamber.You will find good ideas in the Democrats’ bills (like making Election Day a national holiday, and backing up electronic ballots with paper ones, to facilitate recounts) and just as many in the Republicans’ (Texas’ bans the public funding of third-party ballot distribution). What you won’t find is a single innovation that works against the partisan interests of its sponsors. When Mr. Manchin writes in his op-ed that the argument over voting rights “is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage,” he does not lack for evidence.Democrats are offering something different than what they say: not an expansion of voting rights but a relaxation of voting regulations. The For the People Act would codify the looser rules many states adopted in order to conduct the 2020 elections in the midst of a pandemic. That election had the largest turnout rate (66.3 percent) since 1900, and strengthened Democrats. But the looser rules were not so much triumphs of reason as concessions to Covid-19. The conditions that made the new rules seem normal or common-sensical no longer obtain. We might want those rules. But we don’t need them.There is always a paradox when it comes to democratic elections. They must be opaque, in order to guarantee ballot secrecy and prevent intimidation. But they must also be transparent, in order to prevent fraud. The perennial danger is that some actor with a partisan interest might interpose himself in one of the opaque spaces to make the contest less fair.At the crudest level, a politician can use private pressure as a way to render himself unaccountable to an electoral verdict. That is what President Donald Trump did when, on Jan. 2, two months after his electoral defeat, he phoned the Georgia secretary of state to seek the reversal of its results in that state. (“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”) Certain reforms urged by Democrats are meant to pre-empt abuses and irregularities specific to the Trump era. Title X of H.R. 1, for instance, includes requirements that presidents and vice presidents disclose their tax returns.The basic practice that Republicans seek to curb is ballot harvesting: Whenever voting happens elsewhere than at a voting booth, third parties are responsible for conveying voters’ intentions to authorities. Obviously, bringing couriers into the voting system can increase turnout — consider “shut-in” older people in nursing homes and elsewhere. Just as obviously, ballot-harvesting increases opportunities for fraud — consider the same older people, chatting about their voting preferences as they plan to hand their votes to a partisan political activist. Some states authorize only relatives or caregivers to deliver votes; others, like California, have no such restrictions, opening the way for activist groups.It is largely to prevent ballot harvesting that most states used to allow absentee voting only in extraordinary circumstances. The prevailing understanding was that, other things being equal, a slightly lower rate of participation was a price worth paying for an election less susceptible to corruption. Absent a pandemic, there is a coherent case that there should never be absentee or mail-in balloting.It is striking that reformers in both parties have so little to say directly about what is arguably the biggest problem for the country’s electoral integrity: the dragging out of vote-counting till long after Election Day. Nothing did more to escalate tensions in the days immediately following last Nov. 3 than the indeterminate results in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, as Americans waited for who-knows-how-many votes to come in from who-knows-where.Except in extraordinary cases like the Florida recount of 2000, there is no valid reason for long counting lags. They seldom happened even when vote counting was much more primitive than it is today.An election in which votes are still being received even as counts are being made public is, ipso facto, an election vulnerable to manipulation. When political operatives understand that they need only a few votes from their allies in District X to put them over the top, occasions arise for malfeasance on one side and paranoia on the other. The result can be lawsuits meant to muddy the count, desperate searches for new sources of votes and back-room chicanery of the sort in which Mr. Trump tried to involve the Georgia secretary of state.Maintaining wide and equal access to ballots is a democratic necessity. If it were the only necessity, the For the People Act would be unobjectionable, and Mr. Manchin’s misgivings idle. But there is a second necessity: simplicity. The public will trust a voting system only to the extent that it is comprehensible and resistant to manipulation. Multiplying the methods, platforms and times of voting adds complexity. And in a democracy, complexity is often corruption waiting to happen.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Trump’s Political Legacy Is on the Ballot in the Virginia Governor’s Race

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      Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat, will try to tie his opponent, Glenn Youngkin, to former President Donald Trump, while Mr. Youngkin will try to sidestep Mr. Trump but not reject him.CHESAPEAKE, Va. — There is a far-reaching and oh-so-familiar shadow stretching across Virginia’s political landscape that could have profound implications for the election of a new governor, a contest that figures to be the only major competitive race in the country this fall.Former President Donald J. Trump won’t be on the ballot in Virginia, but his political legacy will be.Glenn Youngkin, an affable former private equity executive, is testing whether a Republican can sidestep Mr. Trump without fully rejecting him and still prevail in a state where the former president lost re-election by 10 points but where he remains deeply popular with conservative activists.And in what could be an equally revealing strategy, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat seeking to reclaim his old job, is going to determine whether linking Republicans to Mr. Trump — a tactic that helped turn Virginia’s suburbs a deeper blue during the last four years — is as potent when he’s no longer in the Oval Office, or even on Twitter.Both questions reflect a larger issue: how strong a tug the country’s polarized and increasingly nationalized politics can have on an off-year state race of the type that is usually consumed by debates over taxes, transportation, education and the economy.It’s a real-life political science experiment that is all the richer because it’s taking place in a state that was once solidly conservative, and where for many years it was the Democrats who had to distance themselves from their national party.But Virginia, which supported only Republicans for president from 1964 until 2008, is a state transformed thanks to its expansive metropolitan growth. George W. Bush was the last G.O.P. presidential nominee to carry the state, and Democrats control every statewide office and both state legislative chambers.If Republicans are to win back the governorship and reclaim a foothold in this increasingly Democratic state, this would seem to be the year.Mr. Youngkin is leading a unified party, can saturate the airwaves using millions of dollars from his own fortune and has never run for office, let alone cast a vote as a lawmaker, denying opposition researchers the grist for attack ads. That’s to say nothing of Virginia’s decades-long history of electing governors from the opposite party of whoever won the White House the previous year.That’s a challenge that Mr. McAuliffe takes seriously.After he clinched an easy victory in the Democratic primary Tuesday night, Mr. McAuliffe — who is seeking to replace Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat who is constitutionally barred from seeking another term — sought to rouse his party by warning them that Mr. Youngkin’s ability to self-finance is a threat that must be taken seriously. “There are 75 million reasons why Glenn Youngkin could win,” Mr. McAuliffe told supporters, alluding to how much the Republican could spend on the campaign.If Mr. Youngkin is able to spend enough money to define himself to voters before Democrats do it, and if President Biden’s popularity wanes by November — as it did with former President Barack Obama in 2009, the last time Republicans won the governorship here — Mr. Youngkin will be positioned to at least make the race close.In contrast to the last two Virginia governor’s races, the G.O.P.’s conservative and more establishment-aligned factions are united behind Mr. Youngkin.“This is totally winnable for Republicans,” said Jerry Kilgore, a former state attorney general and a Republican who once ran for governor himself. “But if he loses, there will be a lot of depressed people, because there’s a lot of optimism right now.”To prevail, Mr. Youngkin will have demonstrate some Simone Biles-like footwork when it comes to answering for his party’s brand and, in particular Mr. Trump, the former and potentially future standard-bearer.“I don’t think he’s coming this year,” Mr. Youngkin said in response to a question of whether he wanted Mr. Trump to campaign with him.Standing outside a country-music-themed bar in the Tidewater region in the state’s southeast, where he grew up before amassing his fortune at the Carlyle Group in Washington, Mr. Youngkin was plainly more interested in contrasting his lack of political experience with Mr. McAuliffe’s decades as a party insider.And after recently winning a hard-fought Republican nomination contest, Mr. Youngkin also appeared mindful of Mr. Trump’s grip on the party and did not want to slight a party leader who is famously sensitive to slights.“I don’t think his schedule is — I think he has his schedule and is set to go to other places,” Mr. Youngkin tried again.But, he was asked a second time, did he want to stand with Mr. Trump in Virginia?“I think if he were to come, fine; if he doesn’t come, fine,” Mr. Youngkin said, settling on an answer. (In a separate interview, the exuberant Mr. McAuliffe said of Mr. Trump and Virginia: “I’d pay for the gas for him to come.”)Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor, is determined to link his rival to Mr. Trump, a president the state’s voters rejected.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesMr. Youngkin was more direct when asked if he still thought Mr. Trump was the leader of the G.O.P. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a leader of our party,” he said.That answer triggered an unprompted clarification from an aide, who requested anonymity to say that what the candidate had meant was “that the Republican Party does not solely rely on one individual or leader” and that “Glenn really is the leader of the Republican Party in Virginia, as the party truly has come together around him.”If he’s not willing to fully break with Mr. Trump — in fact, he gladly accepted the former president’s endorsement the day after claiming the nomination — Mr. Youngkin clearly wants to project a sunnier style of politics to the suburban voters who will decide Virginia’s election.“I believe that Virginians are like Americans, are ready to come out of this pandemic and are ready to look ahead and think about hope and optimism and opportunity and not spend time basically tearing each other down,” he said.Mr. McAuliffe, though, is determined to remind this state’s voters of the president they twice rejected. In his victory speech Tuesday, he cited Mr. Youngkin’s warmer words for Mr. Trump during the Republican nomination process. And in his final barnstorming tour of Virginia before the primary concluded, he ignored his intraparty rivals and lashed Mr. Youngkin to the former president.Asked in an interview why he was still focused on Mr. Trump, Mr. McAuliffe said: “He may be out of office, but he’s the most powerful person in the Republican Party,” pointing to the Senate G.O.P.’s filibustering of a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.“Are you kidding me?” he said, adding: “This man is as big with the Republican Party as he’s ever been. He has dominance over this party.”Whether that’s enough to deter Virginians from electing a Republican governor is another question, though.“As many people that died with Covid, including my mother — yes; yes, it’s still powerful,” Gaylene Kanoyton, a state Democratic Party official, said when asked whether invoking Mr. Trump was a successful strategy. “Our families and friends would have still been here if we had a different president.”Other Democrats, though, are skeptical that waving the bloody flag of Trumpism will prove sufficient with voters who are eager to move on from his presidency.“Talking about Trump in 2021 is really stale and won’t be enough to win swing voters,” said Ben Tribbett, a Virginia-based Democratic strategist, noting that even when Mr. Trump was president, Democrats had still used much of their advertising budget to highlight policy issues.The question of how much Mr. Trump can be weaponized may be determined by whether he shows up in Virginia.If he doesn’t, Mr. McAuliffe’s advertising campaign and stump speech attack lines may offer the best evidence. Already, the former governor is pairing his references to Mr. Trump with efforts to portray Mr. Youngkin as culturally out of step with a state that just eliminated the death penalty, imposed stricter gun laws and legalized marijuana.“He’s proud of being a lifelong member of the N.R.A. — brags about it; I brag that I’m the first Democratic nominee to get an F rating,” Mr. McAuliffe said.Ultimately, the governor’s race in Virginia may turn on whether a lavishly funded candidate can win without making any concessions to the political nature of his state. That’s what Republican governors like Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts have done to win in blue states and what Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, did to win in deep-red Louisiana.Asked where he differs from his party, Mr. Youngkin did not offer up any specific issue but said his emphasis was on jobs, schools and public safety.Yet he called his politics “conservative,” declined to say whether he supported same-sex marriage and answered a question about background checks for gun purchases by criticizing more aggressive restrictions.“Virginians don’t want a government to ban guns; they don’t want a government to ban ammunition; they actually don’t want a government to come seize people’s guns,” he said before adding that “having background checks for criminals to make sure that criminals do not get guns is something people want.”Asked about the race and identity issues galvanizing his party’s base, Mr. Youngkin denounced “identity politics” but then made sure to introduce a reporter to the Republican nominees for lieutenant governor — Winsome Sears, a Black woman — and for attorney general: Jason Miyares, the son of a Cuban immigrant.“This is the ticket; this is the ticket,” Mr. Youngkin said. “This is the Republican Party in Virginia.”For Democrats, particularly those who remember the contortions of their own candidates in an earlier day, Mr. Youngkin’s reluctance to accommodate the leftward drift of the state is something no amount of money can overcome.“Republicans in Virginia have to show they’re a different kind of Republican, and so far that’s not the Youngkin approach,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Virginia-reared Democratic strategist. “But their base won’t let their candidates create distance from the party or Trump.” More

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      Voter Suppression Must Be the Central Issue

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      The right to vote is everything in a democracy.Without influence over power, you are completely vulnerable to that power. There is no way to access prosperity or ensure personal protection when you live in a society in which people who share your interests are inhibited in their political participation. More

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      in World Politics

      The Next Surge of Trumpism

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      I went to a birthday party recently. The celebrants greeted each other with hugs on the patio. After an outdoor barbeque dinner, we stood shoulder to shoulder around the island in the kitchen, eating cake from small paper plates. We sang “Happy Birthday.”

      Ordinarily, an event like that wouldn’t be worth noting, but these aren’t exactly ordinary times. In this twilight world of ours, half-in and half-out of a pandemic, hanging around without masks and within spitting distance of vaccinated friends should be considered just this side of miraculous — a combination of luck, privilege and a stunning series of events on a national scale that would strain credibility in a work of fiction.

      In an Increasingly Paranoid World, Do Allies Actually Exist?

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      To get to that birthday party required, first of all, surviving the pandemic, which has so far killed somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 Americans, while infecting as much as one-third of the population (including, months earlier, a couple of the guests at that very birthday party). No foreign enemy has ever inflicted such casualties on the US, and never in our lifetimes have American civilians faced such a catastrophic breakdown in homeland security.

      Nor has the international scientific community ever responded with such dispatch and efficacy to a global crisis. Less than a year from the date of the initial outbreak, not one but several COVID-19 vaccines had been developed, tested and approved. Then came the anxious wait for eligibility and the constant refreshing of vaccination websites to try to schedule an appointment. Only when enough people like me had gone through the extended regimen of inoculation and after the infection rate had begun to fall rapidly did officials in my home state of Maryland begin to lift quarantine restrictions.

      Even though everyone at that birthday party was fully vaccinated, I still felt uncomfortably vulnerable without my mask. I hesitated before hugging people. My hands itched for a squirt of sanitizer. It was, in other words, a celebration tempered by uncertainty. We were navigating new rules of social discourse. Handshake? Bear hug? Peck on the cheek? And no one dared jinx the celebration by saying, as we normally would have, “Next year, same time, same place.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      By temperament, I’m an optimist. By profession, however, I’m a pessimist. In my day job as a foreign-policy analyst and in the speculative realm as the author of the dystopian “Splinterlands” trilogy of novels, I’m constantly considering worst-case scenarios.

      So, yes, I’m well aware that COVID-19 infection rates have dropped to levels not seen in a year and that the United States may indeed be on track to reach a 70% vaccination rate among adults by July 4, which could, as the president has promised, offer us a new version of “Independence Day.” But this country is still experiencing the same number of infections (tens of thousands) and deaths (hundreds) as it did during the lull following the first outbreak last year. More infectious variants of the disease continue to emerge globally, most recently in India, where the numbers have been horrific, as well as in Vietnam. The current vaccines reportedly stave off such variants, but what about the next ones?

      T.2?

      My professional dystopianism extends to the political sphere. I’m grateful on a daily basis that Donald Trump is no longer in the Oval Office or blathering on Twitter. I now take for granted a Democratic Congress (however marginally controlled), which seemed like a longshot last Election Day.

      But let’s face it, politically, things could go south fast. Even though the Democrats are working overtime to inoculate this country’s economy with one stimulus shot after another, the Republicans could retake the Senate and even the House in 2022 and, three years from now, Trump could still prove to be a viable presidential candidate.

      By then, for all we know, an even more infectious strain of Trumpism — call it T.2 — might have emerged in the form of far-right challengers like Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, or even (God save us all) Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their followers who lurched from reopen rallies to stop-the-steal protests were struck dumb by the failure of their Duce to cling to power in January 2021. In the months since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, with a majority of Republicans still proclaiming his election stolen, they’ve again become restive.

      Keep in mind as well that dystopia remains unevenly distributed around the globe. Trump is gone (for now), but other putatively democratic authoritarians remain in power. President Vladimir Putin is still effectively leader for life in Russia, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro cling to their offices, and rebel-turned-tyrant Daniel Ortega just arrested the woman challenging him this year for the Nicaraguan presidency.

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      Meanwhile, not only has India been overwhelmed by COVID-19, but the numbers in Brazil remain terrifying and Taiwan has recently been hit with a first wave of infections — and that’s just to begin down a grim list. Even the Seychelles off the coast of Africa, despite a world-leading vaccination rate of more than 60%, has recently experienced an unexpected uptick in cases.

      In other words, as I left that party, it just didn’t feel like the right moment to exhale. Human beings are adaptable creatures. We have an unfortunate ability to normalize worst-case scenarios. Rising temperatures? Guess it’s time to sell the beach house and move inland. Raging pandemic? A good opportunity to chill for a few months with Netflix and Uber Eats.

      But dystopias are not just about objectively terrible things. Dystopia is about losing control over your life. It’s about a faceless bureaucracy trying to evict you from your home. It’s about a virus evading all your carefully constructed defenses. It’s about right-wing crazies subverting democracy even as they claim to revere it. So, tell me the truth: In June 2021, do you really feel back in control yet? 

      The Insurrection Next Time

      The last scene of a horror film often elicits a gasp. The eyelid of the supposedly dead serial killer snaps open. A mad scientist, reportedly cured, is released from the asylum clutching a briefcase full of plans for his next planet-destroying invention. A puppy scampers into the kitchen with the telltale orange rash of a disease that was allegedly extinguished. Such scenes are obviously setups for sequels, but they’re also reminders that horrors seldom simply disappear. Instead, they mutate, hibernate and burrow into our everyday world.

      With that in mind, let’s revisit the final scene of this year’s most talked-about horror story: the storming of the US Capitol on January 6. Inflamed by the president’s lies and conspiracy theories, thousands of people overwhelmed the Capitol police, broke into what should have been one of the most protected buildings in the country, and launched a search-and-destroy mission against various politicians located inside. The noose set up on the West Front of the Capitol was an unambiguous indication of the insurrectionists’ intentions. Some of them had even brought bear spray.

      The story of the insurrection ended with order restored, legislators returning to their chambers to confirm the 2020 election results and a modicum of bipartisan horror at what had just happened. But the very last scene elicited a gasp from the audience watching at home. Even as they condemned the violence that had just taken place in their midst, a handful of Republican legislators continued to claim election fraud. Early on the morning of January 7, seven Republican senators and 122 members of the House refused to certify the election results in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

      Those votes were the sick puppy with the orange rash, the sign that the infectious horror of Trumpism had not been stamped out. At best, this country would experience a respite of unknown length before another surge captured the headlines. After all, Trump and his followers have been in the process of fundraising, assembling a cast and crew, enlisting thousands of extras and beginning to film their sequel, while promising even bigger thrills and chills to come. Their fans can’t wait.

      While most Americans go about their calmer post-Trumpian lives under the Biden administration, a significant number of their fellow citizens live in a different reality entirely. For them, a world of dystopian intensity has just begun. After all, those Trumpsters are now experiencing their worst-case scenario: a Biden victory in a “stolen” election and Congress in Democratic hands. They have no desire to normalize what they consider a socialist regime in Washington. Astonishingly, one-quarter of Republicans belong to the church of QAnon with its imaginary global syndicate of Satan-worshipping child traffickers.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Although it was the Trump administration that helped spur the creation of the COVID-19 vaccines, 41% of Republicans still say they won’t get inoculated (compared to 4% of Democrats). Against all evidence, they believe the vaccines to be unsafe, ineffective or even downright undemocratic in the way they subject their “victims” to nonstop surveillance through a supposedly injected microchip. Fixated on such imaginary threats, the anti-vaxxers are dismissive of a pandemic that is still a clear and present danger.

      In the good old days, people with such a tenuous connection to reality would retreat to their armchairs to listen to Rush Limbaugh. They’d live in their own private dystopias — stocking their bomb shelters, polishing their guns, muttering to themselves — with lots of fire and fury but little real-world impact.

      Taking Over the Republican Party

      Thanks to Trump, the Proud Boys and QAnon, however, the dystopians of today have turned their delusions into a political project even to the point of taking over the Republican Party. Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican who still believes that the 2020 election featured the “worst voter fraud and election theft in history,” repeatedly incited his followers to post-election violence. Gun nut Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, called President Biden a “tyrant” for his tepid gun-control proposals after a spate of mass killings this spring. Led by Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, the party is now rewriting the events of January 6 to blame the violence on supposed left-wing agitators.

      Equally troubling, true believers of this sort are still attempting to overturn the results of the election, beginning with the vote “recount” in Maricopa County, Arizona. The outfit in charge of that recount, Cyber Ninjas, has been set loose in a basketball arena in Phoenix like the Keystone Kops on a mad caper. In the process, they’re violating all the rules of a proper audit, from tolerating a huge error rate in tally sheets to flagging ballots as “suspicious” for things like folds, Cheeto stains and suspected bamboo fibers (the result, supposedly, of having been sent from somewhere in Asia). According to Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the Maricopa recount is “a grift disguised as an audit.”

      It’s not the 2020 election that hangs in the balance, of course, since no amount of imaginary bamboo fibers — in Arizona or any of the other states the Trumpsters are targeting — can overturn what Congress has already confirmed. What can potentially be overturned, however, is American democracy itself. After all, it’s now clear that the Trumpsters will treat every future election that doesn’t produce the results they desire as a globalist plot no different from a new vaccine or a new pronouncement by infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci. Each contested election has the possibility of generating another potential insurrection, with the rioters perhaps chanting, “Remember January 6th!”

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      The nonsense now being spouted by the loony right would be grist for satire if we hadn’t seen all this before. Karl Marx once proposed (and Groucho Marx proved) that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Trump has turned this dictum on its head, since many of the laughable things he said on his road to the presidency in 2016 — his paeans to his future “big, fat, beautiful Wall,” his white nationalism, his love of Putin — were indeed turned into tragic policy by his minions.

      We laughed when Barack Obama roasted Trump at the Gridiron dinner in 2011, but those jokes likely kindled Trump’s ambition to become president. We would be wise not to laugh at the antics of Greene, who has spouted QAnonsense and compared mask mandates to the Nazi treatment of Jews, or else she could ride similar waves of derision to even greater political heights.

      The Power of the Marginalized

      I have a great deal of empathy for many people in the Trump camp. I’ve never liked Washington, DC, and its obsession with insider politics. I share the distaste that much of Trump country feels for the arrogance of the power elite and its incessant jockeying for influence.

      After all, it wasn’t Trump who created our current mess. Sure, he turned up the heat under the pot and gave its contents a vigorous stir, but he didn’t assemble the ingredients or design the recipe. The climate crisis, the travesty of global military spending, the inequities of the global economy — these were created by the “adults in the room” backed by the mainstream political parties, Washington’s “Blob” and an ever-ascendant military-industrial-congressional complex.

      The MAGA crowd was right to reject this version of the status quo. With his economic populism, Trump gave voice to those who felt shafted by Wall Street, transnational corporations and globalization in general. The wages of blue-collar workers, adjusted for inflation, had at best stagnated since the 1970s (while the incomes of America’s billionaires have done anything but). Because the mainstream parties abandoned these voters, economically speaking, many of them naturally basked in the attention Trump showered on them. They felt that their dystopia of economic marginalization might finally be on the verge of lifting.

      In challenging one pillar of the status quo, however, Trump consciously reinforced two others: the power of the wealthy elite and of white privilege. In the process, legitimate economic grievances became entangled with anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner and blatantly racist rhetoric. Trump’s electoral defeat has by no means silenced this white nationalism.

      Fortunately, other voices have come to the fore as well, as millions of Americans rejected the status quo in more productive ways. One year ago, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, triggering the largest protests in American history (as well as demonstrations in more than 60 other countries). In exercising their freedoms of speech and assembly, those protesters were also very deliberately trying to regain control of their lives by rolling back a dystopia of police terror that has disproportionately harmed black Americans.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Similarly, the #MeToo movement has been a reassertion of control by women over their own bodies and lives. Thanks to such efforts, the dystopia of rape culture and patriarchal authority has begun to recede, though not everywhere or quickly enough.

      Environmentalists are likewise standing up to the fossil-fuel companies, while economic justice advocates continue to challenge multinational corporations. Peace activists are protesting wars and military spending, while human rights demonstrators are rallying against authoritarian leaders. These efforts all contribute, little by little, to the possibility that we can regain control over our own lives. They are part of a long-term process whereby the powerless become subjects in their own stories rather than the objects of someone else’s tales. Such challenges to the status quo would become more powerful still if joined by some of the economically marginalized previously drawn to Trump (as long as they check their white privilege at the door).

      “Splinterlands”

      I’ve tried to describe such historic efforts in essays and in fiction. In my “Splinterlands” series of novels, I’ve done my best to peer into our future and consider the worst-case scenarios of climate change, unrestrained corporate power and nationalism run amok. However, in the standalone finale, “Songlands,” I let a little sunlight break through the dystopian storm clouds to tell the story of an international community of activists coming together in the face of a planetary crisis. (George Orwell, meet Greta Thunberg.) As I said, by temperament, I’m an optimist. Sometimes, that optimism even leaks into my professional life.

      Sure, I continue to worry about what the next wave of COVID-19 might look like. I fear both the continued lunacy of the Republican Party and the pallid incrementalism of the Democrats. But I’m heartened by the energy of people all over the world determined to beat back dystopia, take control of their lives and transform the optimists’ credo of “hope and change” into something a great deal more significant than a campaign slogan.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch. John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel “Splinterlands.” “Frostlands” is volume two of his “Splinterlands” series and the final novel in the trilogy, “Songlands,” has just been published. Feffer has also written “The Pandemic Pivot.”]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      How Far Are Republicans Willing to Go? They’re Already Gone.

      by

      Determined to enforce white political dominance in pivotal states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina, Republicans are enacting or trying to enact laws restricting the right to vote, empowering legislatures to reject election outcomes and adopting election rules and procedures designed to block the emergence of multiracial political majorities.Republicans “see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in,” William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings, told CNN’s Ron Brownstein. “It’s the last bastion of their dominance, and they are doing everything they can.”The actions of Republican state legislators to curtail absentee voting, limit days for early voting and seize control of local election boards have prompted 188 scholars to sign a “Statement of Concern: The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards,” in which they assert:We have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures.Among statutes Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed or are in the process of approving are “laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections” thatcould enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.The precipitating event driving the current surge of regressive voting legislation in Republican-controlled states is Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the widespread acceptance on the right of Trump’s subsequent claim that the presidency was stolen from him. The belief among Republicans that Trump is essential to their drive to slow or halt the growing power of nonwhite voters aligned with the Democratic Party has powered the broad acquiescence to that lie both by people who know better and by people who don’t.Virginia Gray, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, argued in an email that for Republicans, “the strongest factors are racial animosity, fear of becoming a white minority and the growth of white identity.” She noted that Tucker Carlson of Fox News articulated Republican anxiety during his show on April 8:In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.Trump, Carlson and their allies in the Republican Party, Gray continued,see politics as a zero-sum game: as the U.S. becomes a majority-minority nation, white voters will constitute a smaller portion of the voting electorate. So in order to win, the party of whites must use every means at its disposal to restrict the voting electorate to “their people.” Because a multiracial democracy is so threatening, Trump supporters will only fight harder in the next election.Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, law professors at the University of Chicago, make the case in their 2018 paper, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” that in the United States and other advanced democracies, the erosion of democracy will be gradual and stealthy, not an abrupt shift to authoritarianism.“Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay?” Huq and Ginsburg ask:There are two modal paths of democratic decay. We call these authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion to three institutional predicates of democracy occurring simultaneously: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. We show that over the past quarter-century, the risk of reversion in democracies around the world has declined, whereas the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is neither exceptional nor immune from these changes.In an email, Ginsburg wrote that there are two forces that lead to the erosion of democracy: “charismatic populism and partisan degradation, in which a party just gives up on the idea of majority rule and seeks to end democratic competition. Obviously the U.S. has faced both forces at the same time in Trumpism.”From a different vantage point, Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, argues that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn in examining the consequences of Republican tampering with election administration, with one more dangerous than the other. In an email, Berman writes:The downward spiral refers to attempts by Republicans to do two related things. First, effectively making voting more difficult by, for example, restricting voting by mail, shrinking voting times and places, adding ID requirements and so on. The second is injecting partisanship into the electoral oversight process. As potentially harmful as the first is, the latter is even more worrying.In other circumstances, Berman argues, one could imagine “having a good faith debate about the conditions under which mail-in ballots are distributed and counted, whether ID should be required to vote and if so of what type, etc.”But in the current contest, “these concerns are not motivated by a general desire to improve the quality of our elections, but rather by false, partisan accusations about the illegitimacy of Biden’s victory and so good faith discussions of reform are impossible.”The Republican initiatives to inject partisanship into the oversight process, in her view,are even more straightforwardly dangerous: elections are democracy’s backbone, anything that subjects them to partisan manipulation will fatally injure its functioning and legitimacy. The officials who oversee elections are democracy’s referees — once they lose their objectivity, the entire game loses its legitimacy. Republican attempts, accordingly, to diminish the objectivity of the electoral oversight process by, for example, giving more power to legislative branches and elected politicians over it, are direct attempts to rig the game so that, should Democrats win another election that Republicans consider contested, the outcome can be manipulated. There is simply no way democracy can function if those designated to oversee its most basic institution are motivated by partisan rather than legal and constitutional concerns.Among those I consulted for this column, there was wide agreement that democratic backsliding is a process difficult for the average voter to detect — and that one of the crucial factors enabling the current procedural undermining of democracy in the states is that voters have little interest in or understanding of election rules and regulations.“Democratic erosion is subtle and slow, often nearly imperceptible until it’s too late,” Robert Blair, a political scientist at Brown, wrote in an email:The U.S. will not become an autocracy. Political parties will not be banned; elections will not be canceled or overturned willy nilly. But the U.S. may increasingly become a “democracy with asterisks,” one in which the playing field is tilted heavily in favor of whichever party writes the rules of the game.Blair is decidedly pessimistic about the likelihood that American voters will succeed in opposing the degradation of the system:I have very little faith in the American public as a bulwark against these threats. In general Americans do not prioritize democratic principles in our vote choices, and we are alarmingly willing to tolerate antidemocratic ideas and actions by co-partisans. Polarization seems to make this worse. If American democracy is at risk, citizens will not save it.Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, stressed this point in an email:“We all grow up knowing that the person who wins more votes should win the election,” Hopkins continued,but none of us grow up knowing anything about how to handle provisional ballots or which allegations of voter fraud are credible. Relatively few people are equipped to directly evaluate claims that an election was fraudulent, so voters necessarily rely on politicians, media commentators and other elites to tell them if something ran afoul. In fact, it’s precisely the public’s general commitment to democracy that can be used against democracy by political leaders willing to lie about elections.The low visibility and lack of public understanding of arcane shifts in election law — for example, the shift of responsibility for determining winners and losers from election officials to state legislatures — greatly empowers partisan elites.Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America think tank and one of the organizers of New America’s “Statement of Concern,” wrote by email:A longstanding finding in political science is that it is elites who preserve democracy, and elites who destroy democracy. Overwhelming majorities of voters support democracy in the abstract, but if they are told by elites that “the other party is trying to destroy democracy and these emergency measures are needed to preserve democracy by keeping the other side out of power,” most partisan voters are going to follow their leaders and support anti-democratic changes. This is especially the case in a highly-polarized binary political system in which the thought of the opposing party taking power seems especially odious and even existential.Like many of the co-signers of the “Statement of Concern,” Drutman has no expectation that the Supreme Court would step in to block states from tilting the partisan balance by tinkering with election rules and procedures:The conservative Supreme Court has given states wide latitude to change electoral laws. I don’t see how a 6-3 conservative court does much to interfere with the ability of states to choose their own electoral arrangements. The conservative majority on the Court has clearly decided it is not the role of the Supreme Court to place reasonable boundaries on the ability of partisan legislatures to stack elections in their favor.Laura Gamboa, a political scientist at the University of Utah, is less harsh in her assessment of the citizenry, but she too does not place much hope in the ability of the American electorate to protect democratic institutions from assault:I don’t think Americans (or most other people) have a normative preference for dictatorship. Overall, people prefer democracy over authoritarianism. Having said that, polarization and misinformation can lead people to support power grabs. Research has shown that when a society is severely polarized and sees the out-group (in this case out-party) as “enemies” (not opponents), they are willing to support anti-democratic moves in order to prevent them from attaining power. More so, when they are misled to believe that these rules are put in place to protect elections from fraud.More important, Gamboa argued that the corrosion of political norms that protect democratic governancecan definitively evolve into a broader rejection of the rule of law. Institutions do not survive by themselves, they need people to stand by them. This type of manipulation of electoral laws undermines the legitimacy of elections. Rules and norms that were once sacred become part of the political game: things to be changed if and when it serves the political purpose of those in power. Once that happens, these norms lose their value. They become unreliable and thus unable to serve as channels to adjudicate political differences, in this case, to determine who attains and who does not attain power.The fact that public attention has been focused on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and Republican stonewalling against the creation of a commission to investigate the attack on Congress, helps mask the fact that the crucial action is taking place across the country in state capitols, with only intermittent national coverage, especially on network television.These Republican-controlled state governments have become, in the words of Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding,” the title of his April paper.Grumbach developed 61 indicators of the level of adherence to democratic procedures and practices — what he calls a “State Democracy Index” — and tracked those measures in the states over the period from 2000 to 2018. The indicators include registration and absentee voting requirements, restrictions on voter registration drives and gerrymandering practices.Grumbach’s conclusion: “Republican control of state government, however, consistently and profoundly reduces state democratic performance during this time period.”The results, he writes,are remarkably clear: Republican control of state government reduces democratic performance. The magnitude of democratic contraction from Republican control is surprisingly large, about one-half of a standard deviation. Much of this effect is driven by gerrymandering and electoral policy changes following Republican gains in state legislatures and governorships in the 2010 election.In terms of specific states and regions, Grumbach found that “states on the West Coast and in the Northeast score higher on the democracy measures than states in the South,” which lost ground over the 18 years of the study. At the same time, “states like North Carolina and Wisconsin were among the most democratic states in the year 2000, but by 2018 they are close to the bottom. Illinois and Vermont move from the middle of the pack in 2000 to among the top democratic performers in 2018.”Grumbach contends that there are two sets of motivating factors that drive key elements of the Republican coalition to support anti-democratic policies:The modern Republican Party, which, at its elite level, is a coalition of the very wealthy, has incentives to limit the expansion of the electorate with new voters with very different class interests. The G.O.P.’s electoral base, by contrast, is considerably less interested in the Republican economic agenda of top-heavy tax cuts and reductions in government spending. However, their preferences with respect to race and partisan identity provide the Republican electoral base with reason to oppose democracy in a diversifying country.At one level, the Republican anti-democratic drive is clearly a holding action. A detailed Brookings study, “America’s electoral future: The coming generational transformation,” by Rob Griffin, Ruy Teixeira and Frey, argues that Republicans have reason to fear the future:Millennials and Generation Z appear to be far more Democratic leaning than their predecessors were at the same age. Even if today’s youngest generations do grow more conservative as they age, it’s not at all clear they would end up as conservative as older generations are today.In addition, the three authors write, “America’s youngest generations are more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations.”As a result, Griffin, Teixeira and Frey contend,the underlying demographic changes our country is likely to experience over the next several elections generally favor the Democratic Party. The projected growth of groups by race, age, education, gender and state tends to be more robust among Democratic-leaning groups, creating a consistent and growing headwind for the Republican Party.From 2020 to 2036, the authors project that the percentage of eligible voters who identify as nonwhite in Texas will grow from 50 to 60 percent, in Georgia from 43 to 50 percent, in Arizona from 38 to 48 percent.As these percentages grow, Republicans will be under constant pressure to enact state legislation to further restrict registration and voting. The question will become: How far are they willing to go?I posed that question to Terry Moe, a political scientist at Stanford. His reply:As for whether this electoral manipulation will “devolve into a broader rejection of the rule of law,” I would say that the Republican Party has already crossed the Rubicon. For four years during the Trump presidency, they defended or ignored his blatant abuses of power, his violations of democratic norms, and his attacks on our democratic institutions, and they routinely circled the wagons to protect him. They had countless opportunities to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and they consistently failed to do so.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      My Fellow Republicans, Stop Fearing Donald Trump

      by

      When Donald Trump, the patron saint of sore losers, appeared at a Republican event on Saturday night and compared the 2020 election to a “third-world-country election like we’ve never seen before,” it wasn’t just another false rant from the former president. His words also described his attempted subversion of democracy in the run-up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.Consider Mr. Trump’s remarks at his rally just before the attack: “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” he said. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president.”Or consider Mr. Trump’s harassment of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with the request to “find” him votes, or his relentless harassment of other election officials and governors.Many Republicans want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack. But how is that possible when the former president won’t move on from the Nov. 3 election and continues to push the same incendiary lies that resulted in 61 failed lawsuits before Jan. 6, led to an insurrection and could lead to yet more violence?If you doubt that a threat of violence exists, look at the recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which shows that a dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory is believed by 15 percent of our fellow Americans — including almost one in four Republicans, 14 percent of independents and even 8 percent of Democrats.Republicans, instead of opposing a commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, need to be at the forefront of seeking answers on the insurrection and diminishing the power of QAnon and the other conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump has fueled. While he is still popular within the party, Mr. Trump is a diminished political figure: 66 percent of Americans now hope he won’t run again in 2024, including 30 percent of Republicans. He is not the future, and Republicans need to stop fearing him. He will continue to damage the party if we don’t face the Jan. 6 facts head-on.Nothing less than a full investigation is essential. As a House Republican chief counsel during the Clinton administration, I see a clear set of unanswered questions about Jan. 6, as well as evidence that needs to be gathered and that our country needs to understand. An investigation should cover the events related and leading up to Jan. 6, as well as all the parties involved. Who planned and funded the Trump rally that day, and who picked the speakers and got attendees there? How did supporters of QAnon, Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys get there? What happened as the White House planned for Jan. 6?Whether it is a congressionally formed commission or a congressional committee, the subpoenas and testimony would produce records that tell the story. Imagine all the thousands of texts, emails, phone calls and other records from the weeks leading to and on Jan. 6 that are not yet part of the public record. This material will come out eventually — in hearings, in books or in the media — but Republicans should be part of the process, to help provide accountability and prevent future attacks.While a commission would be best, a congressional select committee with a five-Democrat, five-Republican split and the same rules as a commission would have, could also work. In the meantime, any standing committee with subpoena power could begin the information-gathering process immediately.Many Republican leaders seem to think any all-encompassing investigation will be bad for the party. I disagree. Some prominent Republicans want to uncover the truth, as are police officers who heroically protected members of Congress and their staff on Jan. 6. Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after engaging with the Trump-inspired mob, supported Mr. Trump. Officer Michael Fanone, who was shocked multiple times with a stun gun and beaten and suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, told me he is a Republican. Officer Harry Dunn said: “We were victims of an assault, of an attack, and we deserve justice and we deserve to know everybody who was involved, and we want them held accountable.” Many of our officers feel they are being left on the field, and they wonder, what happened to “Back the Blue.”Mr. Trump’s lies are red meat to those in the conspiracy world who have already demonstrated what they are prepared to do. The danger also extends to states, as Mr. Trump tells people that election outcomes in Georgia and Arizona will be overturned, and he could be reinstated as president in August. How will QAnon followers or Oath Keepers respond when that does not happen?Many Republicans rationalize ignoring his rhetoric: His speech on Saturday wasn’t even aired live on Fox or CNN, and he may end up being indicted in New York and occupied with legal and financial problems. So, this thinking goes, what’s the harm in humoring the guy a little longer?The harm is that the lies have metastasized and could threaten public safety again. The U.S. Capitol Police report that threats against members of Congress have increased 107 percent this year. Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, has noted, “There’s no reason to believe that anybody organically is going to come to the truth.” Representative Liz Cheney, another Republican, said, “It’s an ongoing threat, so silence is not an option.”Humoring the guy also emboldens Mr. Trump’s pardoned allies like Steve Bannon and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Republicans are now flocking to Mr. Bannon’s podcast to audition for Mr. Trump’s support, and Mr. Bannon says “a litmus test” will be whether they are willing to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election. Later this month, Mr. Flynn will appear at an Oklahoma campaign rally with Jackson Lahmeyer, a political novice who is challenging Senator James Lankford, the Republican incumbent. Mr. Lahmeyer claims the 2020 election was stolen and touts Mr. Flynn’s endorsement, saying we have to be willing to “Fight Like a Flynn.”Republicans would be better advised to fight like Senator Margaret Chase Smith. During the Joseph McCarthy era in 1950, she advised fellow Republicans that the Democrats had already provided Republicans with sufficient campaign issues, and they need not resort to McCarthy’s demagogy.The same is true today. Republicans need to have more faith in their policies and stop being afraid of a dangerous and diminished man who has divided the country and now divides our party. Reconsider the commission, let the investigation go ahead, and run and win in 2022 on the truth.Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican and a lawyer, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Ciattarelli Defeats Trump Loyalists in G.O.P. Primary to Take on Murphy

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      Jack Ciattarelli won New Jersey’s Republican primary and will face Philip D. Murphy, the Democratic incumbent, in November.Jack Ciattarelli, a businessman and former lawmaker, beat back challenges from candidates loyal to former President Donald J. Trump to win Tuesday’s Republican primary in New Jersey, setting the stage for one of only two governor’s races in the nation in November.Mr. Ciattarelli, a moderate former assemblyman making his second bid for governor, will now face Gov. Philip D. Murphy, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination and is hoping to ride high approval ratings for his handling of the pandemic to a second term.Democrats control all branches of government in New Jersey and outnumber Republicans by nearly 1.1 million voters.Still, Mr. Murphy’s run is dogged by nearly a half-century of history: The last Democrat to be re-elected governor in New Jersey was Brendan T. Byrne, in 1977.Mr. Murphy’s favorable ratings have slipped by about seven percentage points since the start of the second wave of the pandemic in October 2020, according to a new Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, but are still at a robust 47 percent.“He’s in a solid position that any politician would envy,” said Ashley Koning, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling.Mr. Murphy’s handling of the pandemic earned high marks from 31 percent of residents, according to the poll. But only 7 percent said he deserved an “A” grade on tax policies, a perennial, bread-and-butter voter issue in New Jersey, where residents pay some of the highest taxes in the country.Mr. Ciattarelli’s showing among his Republican base is considered likely to dictate the tenor and policy focus of the campaign. The election will come nearly a year into the first term of President Biden, a Democrat, making it an early bellwether of the electorate’s mood as the midterm congressional elections approach. Virginia is the only other state with a race for governor.“What happens really influences the direction of the Republican Party going forward,” Dr. Koning said, adding that the election will indicate whether, in New Jersey, Republicans will “continue to follow the moderation that the party has been known for” or “become more nationalized toward Trumpism.”Less than two hours after polls closed, Mr. Ciattarelli was declared the winner by The Associated Press. He had captured 49.6 percent of the vote in the four-man race for the Republican nomination by late Tuesday. His win comes four years after a second-place primary finish behind Kim Guadagno, the then-lieutenant governor.“Tonight New Jerseyans showed they are ready for a change, and we are just getting started,” Mr. Ciattarelli, 59, said in a statement. “The fact is, after four years of Murphy’s failed leadership, our state is struggling.”“We will make New Jersey more affordable by lowering property taxes,” he added. “We will create jobs. We will bring Main Street small businesses back to life. We will reduce the size and cost of government.”The Republican primary was seen as a test of the potency of Mr. Trump’s combative brand of politics among New Jersey’s party faithful, and the public discourse often touched on themes from the former president’s divisive term: the politics of mask wearing and the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s win.“We all know Trump won,” Hirsh Singh, an aerospace engineer and self-described Trump Republican who was running his fourth recent campaign for office, said as he faced off against Mr. Ciattarelli in the only public debate of the primary. Only Mr. Singh and Mr. Ciattarelli qualified for public financing, making them eligible for the debate.But it was Philip Rizzo, a pastor and real estate developer who also aligned himself with Mr. Trump, who was in second place late Tuesday with nearly 26 percent of the Republican vote, four percentage points ahead of Mr. Singh.Brian Levine, a former mayor of Franklin, N.J., finished fourth.Turnout was low, with fewer than 1 in 5 registered Republicans voting.Political analysts said the results could pressure Mr. Ciattarelli to strike national themes popular with Trump supporters instead of the good government and fiscal responsibility motifs that are more likely to resonate with mainstream Republicans and the state’s 2.4 million independent voters.Mr. Ciattarelli in 2015 called Mr. Trump a “charlatan.” In last month’s debate, when asked if he supported the former president, he said, “I supported Donald Trump’s policies.”“If he’s got to look over his shoulder every time something happens to make sure the Trump wing of the party is still with him, that’s going to be a serious constraint for him,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.But Benjamin Dworkin, director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University, said Republicans were likely to quickly coalesce around their candidate.“There’ll be some day-after stories about whether he received a high enough percentage of the vote,” Dr. Dworkin said. “But that’s not going to matter by Day 3.”Jack Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman, beat three opponents to win the Republican primary for governor. Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesAll 120 legislative seats were also on Tuesday’s ballot.One of the most fiercely contested Democratic primaries was in Bergen County, for a seat held by Senator Loretta Weinberg, a liberal icon who announced in January that she was retiring. Her exit set up a match between two former allies in the Assembly, Valerie Vainieri Huttle and Gordon Johnson. Without a primary opponent, Mr. Murphy has had a healthy head start in the campaign.By last week, he had spent $7.25 million, outpacing spending by all the Republican candidates combined, according to New Jersey’s Election Law Enforcement Commission.He has used the advantage to promote a range of first-term policy wins, including equal pay for women, a $15 minimum hourly wage, a new tax on income over $1 million and legalized marijuana.“The choice in November is clear,” Mr. Murphy said in a statement soon after the polls closed Tuesday. “It’s a choice between standing for higher wages or going back to an economy that only worked for the wealthy and well connected.”In November, the state borrowed $3.67 billion to plug an expected gap in revenue, enabling Mr. Murphy to propose an election-year budget that calls for no new taxes and few cuts, and sets aside extra funds for the state’s strapped pension program.But the governor, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs investment banker, also pushed through a $14 billion package of corporate tax breaks in less than a week, a move that irked his progressive base.Mr. Murphy’s political maneuvers were seen as helping him broker at least a temporary peace with the Senate’s Democratic president, Stephen M. Sweeney, and a onetime archrival, George Norcross III, an insurance executive and South Jersey power broker. Mr. Norcross benefited greatly from tax incentives passed under Mr. Murphy’s Republican predecessor, Chris Christie, leading to frequent criticism by Mr. Murphy — and a contentious investigation — during the first two years of his term.“Everybody recognized they’re on the same ballot this year,” Dr. Dworkin said. “There’s a détente for now.”Mr. Murphy may yet find himself haunted by another voting quirk in New Jersey: It has been more than three decades since voters elected a governor who hailed from the same party that won the White House in the year after a presidential contest.But the Democrats’ enrollment edge in New Jersey has expanded rapidly, and many voters not affiliated with either of the two dominant parties are considered social moderates.“New Jersey’s electorate is blue and getting bluer,” Dr. Dworkin said. More