Monday
I’m here to report a Bertolt Brecht sighting, this one with regard to Republican voter suppression efforts. Adam Serwer’s article in The Atlantic applies Brecht’s poem “The Solution” perfectly.
If Republicans voted to block a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 coup attempt, Serwer says, it is
not because they fear Trump, or because they want to “move on” from 2020. They are blocking a January 6 commission because they agree with the underlying ideological claim of the rioters, which is that Democratic electoral victories should not be recognized. Because they regard such victories as inherently illegitimate—the result of fraud, manipulation, or the votes of people who are not truly American—they believe that the law should be changed to ensure that elections more accurately reflect the will of Real Americans, who by definition vote Republican. They believe that there is nothing for them to investigate, because the actual problem is not the riot itself but the unjust usurpation of power that occurred when Democrats won. Absent that provocation, the rioters would have stayed home.
Serwer notes that, in the past, both parties have been guilty of attempting to disenfranchise voters, with the problem now that all the disenfranchisers are in the same party. It is in this discussion that Brecht appears:
The closest historical analogue is perhaps the Gilded Age, when both parties worked to restrict American democracy to its “best men.” In the North, this meant seeking to blunt the influence of immigrants and workers; in the South, it meant disenfranchising Black men and the white poor. The result was a country with widening inequality, and one with an emerging bipartisan consensus on the justness of white supremacy. In Brechtian terms, they dissolved the people and elected another—but at least things grew more civil and less polarized.
Brecht’s “The Solution” is about East German workers striking against work quotas during the Sovietization of East Germany. (Brecht moved to East Germany after the House on unAmerican Activity Committee (HUAC) drove him out of the United States.) Not afraid to call out tyranny wherever he saw it, Brecht challenged doctrinaire communism as he had previously challenged capitalism. The poem was too hot to publish until after Brecht’s death, however, and even then it could only appear in a West German newspaper.
Brecht reminds readers that the government should reflect the will of the people, not the other way around. That principle should be in effect in the United States no less than in East Germany. Here’s the poem:
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
The mindset that Brecht describes, Serwer emphasizes in his conclusion, suggests that, following the 2022 mid-term elections, we are very likely to see minority rule in the United States for some time to come:
Trump’s election was, among other things, a gesture of outrage from his supporters at having to share the country with those unlike them. Successfully restricting democracy so as to minimize the political power of rival constituencies would mean, at least as far as governing the country is concerned, that they would not have to. Most elected Republicans have repudiated the violence of the Capitol riot, but they share the belief of the rank and file that the rioters’ hearts were in the right place.
Indeed, in the last three days we’ve learned that
–Trump tried to get the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election results;
–Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, told Trump advisor Steven Bannon on a public show that Trump won Texas only because he blocked a great deal of mail in-voting; and
–Oregon Representative Mike Nearman held a meeting with Oregon anti-maskers to plan “Operation Hall Pass.” In the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson, “That operation ultimately opened the Oregon capitol building to far-right rioters, who endangered the entire legislature. The video, which shows Nearman winking and nodding at setting up the invasion, has raised questions about whether other Republicans worked with insurrectionists in other settings.”
Worried about democracy working as it should? Dissolve the people.