Wednesday
Having recently read Robert Kagan’s alarming Washington Post article about the GOP’s plans to rig the next election, I find a tweet mentioning Checkhov’s loaded gun unnervingly on target. Allow me to explain.
First to Kagan’s piece. The columnist is no liberal, which gives his fears about the Republicans’ authoritarian swing particularly convincing. After all, he’s seen these people up close. In Kagan’s view, January 6 is a foretaste of what we can expect in the future. After predicting that Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee, Kagan writes,
Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way.
He then points out the worrisome portents:
[T]he amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote.
What sets Trumpism apart from previous U.S. political movements, Kagan says, is the fact that, for millions of Americans, “Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments.” His followers feel that have an unbreakable bond with him.
Kagan concludes,
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now.
Which leads me to Chekhov. Last week tweeter Jeff Sharlet shared a photo of a protester carrying an AK-47 outside the Arizona state capital and observed,
At this point, it’s unremarkable. Most of us just roll our eyes, & even as we loathe this, accept it as inevitable. We’ve normalized Chekov’s gun—the one in the 1st act—& we continue as if the next act isn’t coming.
“Chekhov’s gun” is a dramatic principle that anything irrelevant to the plot should be removed from the story. As the author once advised,
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.
If Kagan is right, all those rightwing militants we see carrying automatic weapons are the first chapter. Those who stormed the Capitol didn’t bring their guns with them (thank you, Washington gun laws!), but maybe that’s just because we haven’t gotten to the second chapter yet. Kagan is predicting that the gun absolutely will go off.