John Dean, that is. In the last paragraph of this article: The Coming Post -Election Chaos: A Storm Warning of Things to Come If the Vote Is as Close as Expected Findlaw.com 10/22/04 (my emphasis).
It does not seem to trouble either [Karl] Rove [Bush's chief political strategist] or [George W.] Bush that they are moving us toward a Twenty-first Century civil war -- and that, once again, Southern conservatism is at its core. Only a miracle, it strikes me, can prevent this election from descending into post-election chaos. But given the alternatives, a miracle is what I am hoping for.
Yes, I guess he did say "civil war."
Dean's provides a useful look at the prospects for a drawn-out legal battle over the results of the November 2 vote, which are well worth reading.
Along the way, he provides some important historical reminders, including some of the factors in the current state of partisanship in America that I discussed in a recent post (Partisanship 2004 10/21/04). This one about the Chief Justice of the United States, and of course a key member of 2000's Scalia Five, is a good one:
In 1986, former Assistant United States Attorney James Brosnahan (today a noted San Francisco trial attorney) testified - based on an investigation the Justice Department had dispatched him to conduct - that as a young Phoenix attorney, Justice William Rehnquist had been part of conservative Republicans' 1962 efforts to disqualify black and Hispanic voters who showed up to vote. Brosnahan's testimony was supported by no less than fourteen additional witnesses. Rehnquist nevertheless became Chief Justice - thanks to the continued support of conservative Republicans.
If the name James Brosnahan sounds vaguely familiar, it's because he was the attorney for John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban."
Dean also talks about the very specific connections between old-style Southern segregationists, who were essentially all Democrats until sometime in the 1960s, and today's Republican Party:
Even Nixon had his limits, and he was more interested in wooing white Southerners into the Republican ranks [than in encouraging Rehnquist-style voter-suppression tactics on his own behalf]. He did so, successfully, when such Southern Democratic stalwarts and pillars of bigotry and racism as Senators Strom Thrumond and Jesse Helms joined the GOP. They renewed the party's effort to disqualify voters who, and votes that, did not see the world as Republicans did. The racism became less blatant. After all, it had become a crime -- which called for new tactics. Yet the revised stratagems were (and remain) anything but subtle.
The 2000 presidential race in Florida is an excellent example. Reportedly, Bush's Florida victory came courtesy of 537 votes out of some six million. It's plain from this slim margin that the GOP's voter and vote disqualifying tactics cost Vice President Al Gore the presidency. (In the October 2004 issue of Vanity Fair, an excellent article entitled "The Path To Florida" explains how the Republicans nullified and disqualified literally hundreds of thousands of Florida votes.)
And Dean reminds us forcefully not to expect the election to be settled on the evening of November 2:
It may be days or weeks, if not months, before we know the final results of this presidential election. And given the Republican control of the government, if Karl Rove is on the losing side, it could be years: He will take every issue (if he is losing) to its ultimate appeal in every state he can. [my emphasis]
The cost of such litigation will be great - with the capital of citizens' trust in their government, and its election processes, sinking along with the nation's (if not the world's) financial markets, which loathe uncertainty. After Bush v. Gore, is there any doubt how the high Court would resolve another round? This time, though, the Court, too, will pay more dearly. With persuasive power as its only source of authority, the Court's power will diminish as the American people's cynicism skyrockets.
Did he really say "civil war"?
4 comments:
I was appalled at the strong-arm tactics employed by the Republicans in the days following the 2000 election, and I came to the conclusion that Bush, with the aid of the Supreme Court, had stolen the election. Even so, I focused on the process after the election, and seeing that as a one-off event unlikely to recur in a great long time, I was not so concerned as I ought to have been.
Now, as this election approaches, and we see how close it will be. And we consider the more complete picture of vote suppression and outright fraud being perpetrated by the Republicans, I am deeply concerned -- that this election might end in violence and a deepening of the wounds inflicted on our society by the Bush/Rove machine.
If this man steals the Presidency again -- if he loses the popular vote but squeaks in by suppressing votes in key states -- if he succeeds in disenfranchising large numbers of blacks and latino's and immigrants and poor of all races, then violence will and ought to ensue. It is only right -- if the ballot is denied again, then it may have to be the bullet.
What point is there to a war to bring democracy to Iraq if we will not fight to protect it at home?
Neil
I don't think we've quite gotten back to the state that the Southern states were in during Reconstruction, when elections did become the occasion for violence on a wide scale.
I'm assuming that Dean was using "civil war" mainly in the metaphorical sense. I doubt seriously that he's picturing pitched battles in the streets, although he may have been partially thinking of the urban riots of the 1960s in which political polarization played a role. In the article I linked here, his concern is to see that orderly democratic process is observed. But he's obviously concerned about the potentially dangerously polarizing effects the Republicans overreaching could have.
One tactic that the Republicans have announced they are using in Ohio is that they've supposedly got thousands of volunteers lined up to challenge the validity of newly-registered voters. If that's not handled very carefully, by both the participants and the election officials, that might tempt more than one person to throw a punch at someone trying to block them from voting. And, who knows, some of the people planning this stuff on the Republicans' side may even be hoping for something like that.
But I'm assuming Dean was indulging in a bit of political hyperbole here. (Maybe that much of the influence of the Nixon crew is still lingering with him!) - Bruce
Incredible, Bruce. Absolutely incredible.
That Happy Chica,
Marcia Ellen
I saw that comment in the Dean article the day it came out. I was shocked that someone had put in print what my husband and I have been saying for a while. John watches a lot of Civil War programming on the History Channel, and has read a few books, and we talk about it ocasionally. We have noticed a striking similarity in the Republicans of today with those secessionists of the past. John is convinced that if Bush "wins", there will be rioting in the streets. I'm not so sure. We on the left tend to not get as caught up in conspiracy theories and be more reasonable (over all, anyway, but I know there are exceptions.) I am afraid of what those on the right will do when Kerry wins. Those people are terrified (just the way the Bushies want them to be) and completely unreasonable!
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