Republican autocracy is all part of the plan

An examination of the coordination driving the race to the bottom

Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.

It’s been a busy weekend, so tonight I want to take a step back and take a broader look at the trends we’re seeing, what’s driving them, and what they mean for the future of democracy.

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The conservative campaign to crack down on freedom

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see what’s going on here. Republicans, united by a dense web of well-heeled conservative organizations, are staging coordinated attacks on the rights, freedoms, and future of every single person in the United States, whether they know it — or even like it — or not. And in too many cases, these acts of totalitarianism, whether flagrant or incremental, are being met with a piecemeal grassroots resistance facing inherently long odds.

The military takeover of Washington, DC is an unprecedented event that has been met with little institutional or political pushback, a preemptive surrender that has vastly expanded the practical power of a power-made president. The streets have been flooded by soldiers and law enforcement officers who have been given carte blanche to physically assault and detain anyone they want. It’s led to confrontations like this brutal beating of an innocent man driving a moped:

Who were the officers who assaulted the innocent Washingtonian? It’s almost impossible to determine, because they were wearing black masks and vests without name tags. No public ID means there will be no consequences for these thugs (nor flowers to the officer who whacked his head on the pavement during the altercation). DC has become a ghost town at night as fearful residents stay inside, afraid of the violence being meted out by their government’s own shock troops.

The federal government is terrorizing these residents, and instead of fearing something similar happening to their residents, Republican governors of at least three different states are deploying their own National Guard to DC to assist in the iron fist enforcement. In assisting the occupation of DC, these governors — of Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina — are not only endorsing the federal takeover, they are once again surrendering their own state to the mercy of a merciless administration.

During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Trump swarmed the district with federal National Guard troops, who were augmented by forces sent by those three states and several others. That set a precedent and has allowed him to pull the same autocratic maneuver even without the pretext of actual violence or civil unrest.

Coordinated war on the ballot box

Trump’s takeover extends to the political, as well, as Republicans in multiple states seem to be moving forward with gerrymandering plans that would severely weaken democracy. There were 300 protests against the redistricting scheme all across the country yesterday, a grassroots response that the kind of forced national and local media coverage that is essential for public understanding of such a complex topic.

(The political response, from California Democrats, may fall short of the promised five seat pickup because 77-year-old Silicon Valley ally Rep. Zoe Lofgren refused to surrender any part of her overwhelmingly blue district.)

This Republican acquiescence to the Trump government reflects the party’s growing belief in firm deference to authority. That’s been on display at the state level, as well.

The American Legislative Exchange Counsel recently boasted of the work done by its members to lower state income taxes, part of a larger coordinated push to fully eliminate one of the only progressive taxes in these states. Ohio this year created a 2.75% flat tax, which is as regressive as it gets, while Kansas enacted a 4% flat tax. Mississippi took another step toward eliminating the income tax, while Missouri is in the process of ending its capital gains tax.

According to the Local Solutions Support Center, legislators have put forward more than 800 preemption bills intended to limit the power of local officials, negate citizens initiatives, and steal rights from residents.

There have been more than 100 immigration-related preemption bills filed alone, a 900% increase from last year’s crop of anti-immigrant bills, evidencing a coordination with federal officials.

Tennessee, one of the first states to pass such a bill this year, further underscored this dynamic: HB 6002 makes it illegal for local officials in sanctuary cities to refuse to assist federal immigration enforcement officials and would essentially lead to their removal from office. Tennessee also tried to make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to attend public schools; that was only constrained by a 1982 Supreme Court decision. We’ll see how long that lasts.

There were more preemption bills concerning education introduced this year than on any other issue, with 187 pieces of legislation intended to tie the hands of local officials. Top state lawmakers also used their executive authority to impose a right-wing agenda on the minds of children, none more than Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters.

His office is now teaming with PragerU on a test that will purportedly prevent “woke” applicants from becoming teachers in the state, whose school system Walters is trying to turn into a proselytizer of Christian nationalism.

Attacks on voting rights have also experienced an uptick: four states — Arkansas, Kansas, West Virginia, and Wyoming — banned ranked choice voting, while Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Michigan, Minnesota, and South Carolina saw bills to do so introduced this session. Kansas, North Dakota, and Utah passed laws that restrict mail-in voting, and Utah eliminated the universal vote-by-mail system that has produced turnout higher than the national average.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has played a decisive role in preventing the Keystone State’s democratic slide, overturning gerrymanders and denying organized campaigns to disqualify voters. Democrats hold a 5-2 lead on the court, but this year’s justice retention votes give Republicans an opportunity to eventually flip three of those seats. Retention elections have been historically difficult to lose, but justices don’t generally face expensive “vote no” campaigns paid for by billionaire donors.

The Pennsylvania GOP really hit the jackpot: a collaboration between Jeffrey Yass and Federalist Society co-founder Leonard Leo. They’re pouring money into the Republican State Leadership Committee, a dark money group that’s already running ads against the Democratic justices justices.

Taken individually, all of these actions are disconcerting. Together, they offer a glimpse at the current aims of the GOP and its conservative apparatus in their long campaign to turn the country into an autocracy.

Reasons for hope…

• Activists in Montana have released two ballot initiatives aimed at preserving the state’s nonpartisan judicial election system. This makes Montanans for Nonpartisan Courts the second group to file ballot initiatives aimed preventing the politicization of state Supreme Court elections, an express goal of Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte. Conservatives are frustrated with Montana’s top court, which recently tossed the state’s anti-abortion bill.

• Unwilling to allow the city council to once again kill a minimum wage hike, activists in Tacoma, WA have filed suit to get its Workers Bill of Rights initiative on the ballot in November. Earlier this month, the city council held a late vote to send the initiative to voters, ensuring that it missed the deadline to put it on this year’s ballot.

• Will Idaho elect a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in more than 50 years? No, but a Republican-turned-Democratic state lawmaker now running as a populist independent is planning a strong run for the upper chamber next year. Todd Achilles is campaigning on bread-and-butter economic issues in his campaign against Sen. Jim Risch, who would be 89 at the end of his next term. He’s following in the footsteps of Nebraska’s Dan Osborne, who is running again in 2026 against Pete Ricketts.

• Outsider populists running to upset entrenched incumbents is not limited to solid red rural states: Progressive organizer Katie Wilson is leading Seattle’s mayoral race against centrist Mayor Bruce Harrell. Check out my conversation with Wilson, held earlier this week, below:

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