Tuesday
Suddenly it’s not only liberal bloggers like myself who are invoking George Orwell’s 1984 to depict today’s GOP. About Donald Trump’s recent contention that Arizona’s Maricopa County erased its voter registration database to hide election fraud, Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, tweeted,
Wow. this is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now. We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5. If we don’t call this out….
GOP math also proved too much for those responsible for overseeing Maricopa’s election. Boston University history professor Heather Cox Richardson reports on their response to those Republicans attempting to throw out recount the results:
In a remarkable Twitter thread, the Maricopa County official account destroyed the effort by the private company Cyber Ninjas to recount the 2020 votes in that county. “The 2020 elections were run w/ integrity, the results certified by the county & state were accurate, & the 2 independent audits conducted by the County are the true final word on the subject,” the account said. “We know auditing. The Senate Cyber Ninja audit is not a real audit.” The account went on to list all the many ways in which this audit is simply a propaganda effort to shore up the Big Lie that the election was stolen.
I quote Richardson, whose daily e-mail posts on contemporary politics have become must reading for thousands, because her historian’s perspective is useful. When a party engages in shenanigans to overturn elections and shrink the electorate while failing to discipline out-of-control members (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green), it will alienate a critical number of its voters. Pushback from such members as Richer and principled conservative Liz Cheney, recently stripped of party leadership for telling the truth about the election, will take its toll. “The Republican Party,” she predicts, “is nearing the end of its dominant run in our democracy.”
Whether Richardson is right or not, it’s worth returning to Richer’s 2+2 allusion to understand how the Trump cultism operates. Winston at one point writes in a journal which he thinks is private,
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Later, right before he and Julia are arrested, he has a momentary vision of hope. Bleak though their own prospects are, they can share the future with children yet unborn if they pass along this vision of freedom:
You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
Orwell’s novel then blots out this hope as Winston, under torture, surrenders that freedom. To be sure, he resists at first as O’Brien (a.k.a. Big Brother) questions him. Think of the electric shocks administered as the equivalent of Trump threats to any Republican that defies him:
“Do you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?”
“Yes,” said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the party says that it is not four but five–then how many?”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five.
By the end of the session, Winston is responding to the fingers question, “I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six–in all honesty I don’t know.”
O’Brien then explains his rationale to Winston:
Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
By the end of the book, Winston has changed:
Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:
2+2=5
“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is FOR EVER,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
I have a sense that something has been cauterized out of the current GOP. As some have noted, many appear to believe in nothing but their own reelection. In today’s Republican Party, one can be pro-free trade or anti-free trade, pro-infrastructure spending or anti-infrastructure spending, pro-regulation or anti-regulation. One can be elevated to a leadership position even if one voted against the Republican 2018 tax cuts, as we see with New Yorker Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, once a moderate Republican and now a Trump sycophant and election truther. The one thing Republicans are not allowed is to think for themselves.
In other words, with occasional exceptions, they have been cured. There was massive voter fraud in 2020, Trump was the real winner, the January 6 insurrection was tourists strolling through the Capitol, and 2+2=5.