Call It What It Is: The GOP Is Pushing for Political Apartheid by David Corn June 22, 2021 
Georgia voters stand in a line that stretched around the Metropolitan Library in Atlanta to vote in primary elections last June. A short while ago, a levelheaded friend sent me a one-sentence email: “What can we do to stop this next coup?” That sounds hyperbolic. But she was referring to an extreme development: the extensive Republican effort to undermine the democratic political system and rig it in the GOP’s favor. And the goal of this Republican scheme can—and should—be described with a harsh term: political apartheid.
By now you’re familiar with the various components. GOPers are in a frenzy to pass laws at the state level to restrict—or suppress—voting, knowing these measures will disproportionately thwart voters of color and other citizens who have tended to support Democrats. The Brennan Center notes, “Between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 14 states enacted 22 new laws that restrict access to the vote...Overall, lawmakers have introduced at least 389 restrictive bills in 48 states in the 2021 legislative sessions.” Perhaps what’s most troubling is that many of these bills will grant state legislatures the power to challenge or negate election results they don’t fancy. As the New York Times recently reported in a piece headlined “How Republican States Are Expanding Their Power Over Elections,” in “Georgia, Republicans are removing Democrats of color from local boards. In Arkansas, they have stripped election control from county authorities. And they are expanding their election power in many other states.” This is the most dangerous manifestation of the Republican Party’s embrace of the Trumpish authoritarianism that has totally subsumed the party. As the last election demonstrated, Trump and his cult members did seek to supplant the rule of law in attempts to overturn the results of a democratic election. The system managed to repel this attack, as election officials and legislators in key states (some of them Republicans) held the line. Now the GOP is seeking to tear down the safeguards for what seems an obvious purpose: future putsches.
At the same time, Republicans in state legislatures across the country are in the position to intensify gerrymandering to win an advantage for their party. Creating districts to establish partisan gains has a long tradition in US politics, and both major parties have engaged in such scheming. But in recent years, the GOP has excelled at this underhanded flimflammery. After the 2018 midterms, the Washington Post provided a good example: “Majorities of voters in at least three battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina—chose a Democrat to represent them in the state’s House of Representatives. Yet in all three states, Republicans maintained majority control over the chamber despite winning only a minority of votes.” 
This was an outright defiance of the people’s will. Moreover, the composition of state legislatures in most states determine how congressional districts are drawn, and gerrymandering has provided Republicans a competitive edge in the fight for control of the US House of Representatives. One striking (and stunning) example of this comes from the 2012 election. In Pennsylvania that year, Democrats won more than 50 percent of the total number of votes cast in House races, yet because of gerrymandering, Republicans bagged 13 of 18 House seats. That is, with less than half of the vote, the GOP wound up controlling 72 percent of the House of Representatives delegation from the Keystone State. In the redistricting to come after the 2020 census (which will cause big Democratic states, including California and New York, to lose congressional seats), GOP gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere could guarantee enough gains for the GOP to seize control of the House.
To top off this list of assaults on democratic representation, there is the structural bias of the Senate. Per the original design, states with smaller populations are granted the same political power as much bigger ones. But as the red-blue divide has become sharper in recent years—with rural states trending hard toward the Republicans and the larger city-centric states trending toward the Democrats—this has created a strong tilt within the chamber. As Nate Silver explains, the Senate “has two or three times as much rural representation as urban core representation...even though there are actually about an equal number of voters in each bucket nationwide.” The Senate also represents a much whiter population. And not only does this institutional bias shape legislation (giving the red states disproportionate power to block bills, especially with the filibuster); it affects the composition of another entire branch of government: the judiciary. With the Senate in charge of approving federal court nominees, the GOP-controlled smaller-population states have much more say in who makes it—or doesn’t—to the bench.
Add all of this together and maybe you can call it a slow-motion coup aiming to topple—or pervert—American democracy. But it can be fairly described as a Republican endeavor to impose political apartheid: a set of circumstances that affords a minority of the nation long-term majority control of the political system.
With Republican Party identification having decreased in recent years—presumably the result of dramatic demographic shifts and the Reign of Trump—the GOP is seeking to compensate through this devil’s brew of ugly political gamesmanship. Some measures (voting restrictions, gerrymandering) come out of the familiar playbook. Others, most notably granting state legislatures more power to nullify election results, are more ingeniously sleazy. All together—and with Trump and his minions continuing to lie about the 2020 election results—they form a well-funded assault on American democracy.
This grand scheme needs to be fully called out. Key elements of the GOP plot—such as the party’s many attempts to undermine voter rights—do draw criticism. And the For the People Act, which would address some of the Republican skullduggery, is scheduled for debate this week in the Senate (and will likely not survive a GOP filibuster). But the Republican effort to make America a minority-ruled nation is not yet a fully accepted talking point that is widely recognized. President Joe Biden and many in the Democratic Party are justifiably focused these days on passing legislation and taking action to revive the economy and beat back the pandemic so next year the Democrats can campaign on accomplishments and results. And much of the voting public, they assume (perhaps correctly), does not relish or respond to hyperpartisan messaging. But to protect American democracy, Biden and the Democrats will have to speak plainly about the Republicans’ crusade, for the surest way to lose a war on democracy is to not acknowledge it is already underway. 
Dumbass Comment of the Week It’s early in the week, so let’s harken back to the previous one. As you know, the minds of the nation’s children are being destroyed and the nation is about to perish due to a new crisis: critical race theory. Or that’s how the world looks on Fox News, as conservatives are drumming up their latest racist mania. (The Dr. Seuss crisis seems to have passed, with the republic still standing.) The right has taken a relatively obscure academic notion that has been around for decades and transformed it into an immediate threat, claiming that schoolkids are being indoctrinated in this supposed philosophy of hate. (Education Week sensibly describes CRT this way: “Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.”) This is just another brazen effort of Republicans and conservatives to exploit race to change the subject and frighten voters—and to do so with lies. In all this fuss, two GOP officials who jumped on this crazy train demonstrated they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, and they were in competition for last week’s honors.
First, Alabama state Rep. Chris Pringle. Even though the state legislature is not in session, he pre-filed a bill to make it illegal to teach critical race theory in Alabama. When newspaper columnist Kyle Whitmire asked Pringle to define CRT, the lawmaker replied, “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin, period.” Actually, it does not. And when Whitmire queried Pringle for examples of critical race theorists who peddled such balderdash, Pringle said, “Yeah, uh, well — I can assure you — I’ll have to read a lot more.” Indeed. Then there’s Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. On his monthly call-in radio show, he proclaimed he was “opposed to critical race theory.” He, too, had trouble defining what it was. Critical race theory, he said, was “Marxist” and “socialist” and “defining who we are based on race and that sort of thing.” Wrong.
It looked as if Ricketts and Pringle would have to share the dumbassery award. But these two cynical pols were outpandered by the king of political cynicism: Ted Cruz. The Texas Republican senator showed no one can touch him when it comes to exploiting ignorance- and hate-fueled demagoguery. “Critical race theory is bigoted, it is a lie, and it is every bit as racist as the Klansman in white sheets,” he huffed. This absurd statement was a stellar example of the racist playing of the anti-anti-racism card. No proponent of CRT ever lynched a person, burned down an entire neighborhood, or waged a violent coup against a democratically elected government. But like all savvy demagogues, Cruz knows that the aim of his rhetoric is not to win an argument but to advance misleading impressions, create false narratives, and inflame the paranoia and resentments of the target audience. Yes, what he said was mighty dumb. It was also dangerous.
Got a suggestion for a Dumbass Comment of the Week? Send it to thisland@motherjones.com. What to Read, Watch, and Listen To Phoebe Bridgers, “Summer’s End.” The singer-songwriter covers a John Prine tune. I’m still angry and sad we lost Prine last year to COVID-19. I’ve been listening to his entire catalog, one album at a time. It’s damn impressive. He was one of America’s top songwriters. My band has been playing his “Great Rain” in tribute to this great artist.
Lord Huron, “Not Dead Yet.” How did I not know of this LA-based indie band? I was driving in the New York area and heard this recently dropped single on the radio—can’t recall which station—and said to myself, “Remember this song.” And I did.
Jon Batiste, “It’s All Right.” Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s bandleader, has a fabulous new album, We Are, which showcases his great-at-everything talent. But check out his cover of a Curtis Mayfield tune that was the closing track for the movie Soul.
For All Mankind. I have seldom experienced as satisfying an hour of television as the season 2 finale of For All Mankind, the alternative-history drama on Apple TV+. To reach that point, you will have to watch the previous 19 episodes of the first two seasons. And that’s good news. The show is one of the best what-if creations, based on the premise that the Soviets landed a man on the moon in 1969 ahead of the Americans. The commies then added insult to injury by placing the first woman on the lunar landscape. All this sets off a Cold War moon race that leads to militarized bases and, yes, weapons on the moon. (Stupid humans!) The show follows the American astronauts (guys and gals) and NASA officials in the heart of this decades-long storm, while dishing up intriguing historical detours (Ted Kennedy as president, an alive-and-well John Lennon as a global peace activist campaigning through the 1980s, a Cuban Missile Crisis–like confrontation in the Reagan years). At times the soap-opera part of the tale—astronauts have complicated love lives!—gets too foamy. But this is smart and unpredictable television with wonderful cliffhangers and imaginative plot turns. I can’t wait for them to reach Mars.
Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began by Guido Tonelli. Several years ago, I thought it was important to read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief in History of Time. After all, shouldn’t any thinking person be curious about the universe in which we live and ponder its origins? I did learn much about the Big Bang, black holes, and cosmic matters from Hawking’s book, but I confess there were times when I would read several paragraphs (or pages) without comprehending the incoming information. It was hard to wrap my head around the notion of space-time. A marshmallowy plasma that wraps itself around... well, everything? I don’t know—and watching Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar didn’t help much. But by the end of the book, I had been able to sprinkle some of Hawking’s stardust inside my noggin.
Recently, while roaming through one of my favorite indie bookstores—Symposium Books in Providence, Rhode Island—I came across this new book by Tonelli, an Italian particle physicist who helped discover the Higgs boson. (Don’t ask.) Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began is an elegantly written (and translated) work that guides us through the start of the universe. There’s a load of theoretical physics here, but Tonelli offsets that with often poetic commentary on the meaning of it all. The book starts with a warning: “In order to understand the origins of our universe, we must be prepared to undertake a risky journey. The danger comes from the fact that we need to push our minds into areas or environments so remote from those we are accustomed to that our usual conceptual categories are no longer of any use.” What he said! There’s a lot of unaccustomed-to terrain here, as Tonelli guides us through particle theory to explain how a void became the universe—or that the universe is “still now a void state that has undergone a metamorphosis.”
The book proceeds through seven days of creation, though the days are not quite 24 hours long. The first lasts 10 to the -32nd seconds: the first tiny fluctuation in the void that leads to a sudden swelling (“which took quantum foam to cosmic dimensions”). Day two was 10 to the -11th seconds long, as mass, energy, or whatever it was breaks free of symmetry: “From that irregularity, from that small fundamental flaw, everything was unleashed.” Subsequent “days” last hundreds of thousands of years (it took a while for light to develop on day four) and even hundreds of millions of years. Day five brought the first star. And, damn, it took a long time for the first galaxes to form (500 million to 4 billion years—day six).
There were stretches of this book when I could barely hold on to the comet’s tail. But overall, Tonelli keeps us planted on terra firma. The book’s fundamental value—at least for me—was the gift of perspective that comes from being reminded of basic (though overwhelming) facts. There may be 200 billion galaxies in the universe. Our Milky Way—which revolves around a “well-behaved” supermassive black hole called Sagittarius-A*— contains 200 billion stars. And it’s small; the IC1101 supergiant galaxy holds over 100 trillion stars. (Feel free to cue up Eric Idle’s “Galaxy Song.”) It’s hard—or it should be hard—to get upset about a tweet, when you keep that in mind. And it can also be rather intimidating to contemplate our own lives compared to this incomprehensible immensity. How not to get stuck in what’s-the-damn-point-of-all-of-this? But Tonelli did not write this book to lead us into an abyss. He considers the search to understand the universe a key aspect of the human experience and, citing Plato, describes it as a philosophical exercise of “wonder mixed with anguish.” I can live with that mix.
Got any feedback on the above or recommendations of what I should be reading, watching, or listening to? Send them to thisland@motherjones.com. Rock 'n' Roll Flashback: The Clash, the First Time It once was difficult to find certain music. Not everything was somewhere online. You had to search through the bins at record stores for particular offerings. Such was the case for the first Clash album, self-titled The Clash. It was released by CBS Records in England in 1977 and introduced the band that dared to meld harmony with ferocious punk music. Though this album represented a breakthrough moment for popular music, CBS Records refused to release it in the United States. The explanation: It was not “radio friendly.” But I had heard a Clash track on my college radio station (WBRU in Providence), and I spent weeks looking for the record in the import rack at various stores. And I was not alone. The Clash became the best-selling import album in the United States. One day, there it was. Imports cost a few bucks more than the regular albums. But at least, the album came in a thick plastic sleeve.
The extra money was worth it. The album was a gamechanger: punk that was musically smart, lyrics with political bite, anger without nihilism. These guys were raw and skilled. I was hooked. And I was lucky because soon they would be coming to the United States for the first time for a brief tour, and one of their shows would be 44 miles away in Boston.
At the time, the punk scene at my college comprised about six guys and gals who had explosively colored hair, wore various items of razor-ripped leather clothing, reveled in dark make-up, and pierced assorted parts of their anatomies. It was not my look or scene. But I was in a band that had a punkish sound, and to a degree we cohabitated in a cultural space with this small crew. Our combo—two guitarists, a drummer, and an electric cellist—once played a house party hosted by this set. The punk gang’s leader, to set the mood, had hung from the ceiling plastic specimen bags holding dead mice obtained from the medical school. One such bag dangled in front of my microphone. I threatened to walk were it not removed. After much heated discussion about getting or not getting the joke, I prevailed.
It was the punkers, constantly on the lookout for the cutting edge, who had caught wind of the upcoming Clash show and snagged tickets. They were the way in. As I recall it now, one of my bandmates, Randall Goya, the electric cellist, had negotiated our passage: tickets plus a ride to the show in the van piloted by the bagger-of-dead-mice, Mr. Punk. The venue for this maiden Clash concert was the Harvard Square Theater. (Five years earlier, Bruce Springsteen had played the joint and prompted Jon Landau, a local music critic, to write, “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Landau went on to become Springsteen’s manager and producer.)
The night of the show, Randall and I piled into the barren back of the van with the punkers. Mr. Punk drove like he was in a demolition derby, alternating between intense accelerations and urgent braking. We bounced around. I couldn’t see much out of the van, but at times it felt as if the highway’s shoulder was bearing most of the van’s burden. I tried to keep my eyes closed, held on to whatever—or whomever—I could grab, and willed the minutes to pass safely.
We survived and made it to Cambridge. Our reckless driver pulled the van into an alley a few blocks from the concert hall. Was this a parking space? He didn’t care. Question Authority—and all that. At this point, no one was thinking about the ride home.
Inside Harvard Square Theater, the soldout crowd—punkers, rockers, music intelligentsia—was pumped to be witnesses to history. (The band was playing only seven American cities in 10 days as part of its “Pearl Harbor Tour.”) They patiently listened to the opening acts. First came the Rentals, a local Boston group, and then the legendary Bo Diddley. Don’t ask me what they played. I don’t remember. (Sorry, Bo.) But we did recognize that Diddley’s place on the bill was a sign of respect for the American roots of the Clash’s rock ’n’ roll.
The Clash opened, naturally, with “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” It was a musical detonation. The crowd rushed the stage as the band attacked their instruments, and Joe Strummer, in a bright red shirt, unleashed his vocal fury. It was a transcendent moment. At least for me. I had never experienced such musical ferocity. “This must be like seeing the first Who show,” I thought. For the rest of the show, no one sat down. “It was an AWAKENING,” one attendee wrote many years later.
The Clash rammed through most of the songs on their first two albums, including “Guns on the Roof,” “Janie Jones,” “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” Safe European Home,” and “London’s Burning.” Damn, did Strummer’s growl hit home during “Garageland” when he sang, “I don’t want to know what the rich are doing.” Except for the reggae cover “Police and Thieves,” it was one ripping number after another. I felt as if I had been pummeled—in a good way.
Afterward, though Mr. Punk couldn’t quite remember where he had parked the van, we somehow found our way back to the vehicle. The return trip was almost as nerve-wracking as the first. But we were dazed and exhausted. I have a vague recollection of occasionally passing out only to be jolted awake by a sudden swerve or by an exclamation from whoever was in the front passenger seat. We did make it back without incident or accident.
The next day, Randall and I met to recount the experience of the previous night. Referring to the driver, he casually said, “You know he was on acid the whole night, right?” No, I did not. Randall, though, had, and he had neglected at the time to share that information with me. At first, I was mad about that. But upon reflection, I realized that had I been told, I probably would have done the sensible thing and declined to get into a van being controlled by a punk full of LSD. What else could I do but thank Randall for his silence on this point?
Every generation since the birth of popular music has its before-and-after turning points, and the Clash gave birth to one. It was grand to be present at that creation. I don’t know what happened to Mr. Punk. Recently, I discovered sad news about Randall. Perhaps I will visit that in a future issue of This Land.
Nowadays finding music is absurdly easy. No need to leave your home and rifle through bins and racks. You can even hear that entire Clash show for free here.
Screenshot/YouTube/Mick Wellings A Note From Me By now, you have figured out that I have launched a newsletter. Sign up and it will arrive in your inbox several times each week. The newsletter will include my reflections on recent events, behind-the-scenes looks at the political media world (including my own journalistic work), personal tales (which my kids cannot bear to hear any more), and recommendations on music, films, television shows, and books. There will be interactive features so you can engage with me and other subscribers, including comment threads and perhaps even online salons. That means you can be part of the conversation. At the start, the cost of this newsletter is nada. But soon some of its content will be available only for those who subscribe by sending in a few bucks a month. In the meantime, jump on now. Please tell your friends, loved ones, neighbors, colleagues, tweeps, and nemeses about this endeavor. And feel free to send me suggestions on how to make this product better. (Do so at thisland@motherjones.com.)
Oh, the name of this newsletter: This Land. I’ve been in and out of bands for much of my life. (Some of those stories will come later. Have you been in a punk band with a one-armed woman drummer? I have.) And there’s always that difficult moment: What’s our name? I have long thought This Land would be a fine name for a combo. It references a grand cultural tradition—a song that ought to be our national anthem—and an expansive connection between... well, all of us. But as a name for one of my past bands it never came to be. (My current group, formed last year, was dubbed “Bandemic.”) So before it’s too late, I want to put This Land to some use. Thanks, Pete. Finally….MoxieCam™ 
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