Fifth Column of Fools

I have spent a lot of time in these pages warning about Insurrection 2.0: the slow-burning but highly aggressive Republican effort to undermine American democracy and secure permanent power for themselves, in defiance of the will of the electorate.

I am far from alone in raising that alarm. It is ringing throughout the chattering classes, from the pages of The Atlantic to the latte-soaked cafes of Brooklyn Heights to the meeting rooms of the Center for American Progress, for all the good it seems to be doing.

I’m one of many who regularly note that this slow motion coup is all the more worrying because it’s not merely Mitch McConnell and his cabal of mustache-twirling GOP supervillains at work (though they’re leading the charge), but a large chunk of the public — about one in three of our countrymen — who are all onboard with right wing autocracy and happy to help advance it. In the words of Kate McKinnon, we know dis.

But the election results in Virginia and New Jersey last Tuesday make it clear that there is a third group that is also abetting this insurgency: those casual, low information American voters who are treating the GOP like a garden variety political party operating within the accepted norms of our representative democracy…..which is precisely what the GOP would like the American people to think.