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Friday
The United States has not yet become Gilead, the Christian fascist state in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, but by electing Mike Johnson to Speaker of the House, GOP legislators have brought us a step closer. As Jamie Raskin, the principled Maryland representative and constitutional scholar, remarked the other night to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Johnson appears to be rooting against handmaid Offred and for the patriarchs who preside over the dystopian society.
Perhaps our own Christian fascists are attempting to ban Atwood’s novels from schools because it reveals their plans.
The new speaker is authoritarian through and through. After Joe Biden won the election, he was the principle architect of a Texas lawsuit aiming to throw out the votes of four states that voted against Trump. Johnson pressured fellow GOP lawmakers to sign on to the amicus brief by threatening, “Trump said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.” He also endorsed the theory that the ghost of Hugo Chavez planted vote-stealing software in the vote-counting machines.
In other words, a man who doesn’t believe that Biden is a legitimate president is second in the line of succession for the presidency. As Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri observed after Johnson’s fellow Republicans unanimously elected him,
In a stunning abandonment of principle that was sure to reverberate through the country over the coming year, House Republicans, led by Mike Johnson (La.), accepted the results of an election.
Participation in Trump’s coup attempt is only one of Johnson’s extreme positions. He has co-sponsored bills calling for a nationwide ban on all abortions after 15 weeks. He has also introduced legislation that would prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as related subjects, at any institution that receives federal funds.
Like the leaders of Gilead, Johnson believes that abortion is the cause of many social ills, including school shootings. Atlantic’s Irin Carmon has the quote:
Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.
Sometimes Johnson links his policy positions in imaginative ways, such as regarding abortion as the cause of the funding problems faced by social security and Medicare, which he wishes to slash. In a statement that eerily resembles a passage in Atwood’s novel, he explains his reasoning:
You think about the implications on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of social security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this … I will not yield I will not. Roe was a terrible corruption of America’s constitutional jurisprudence.
So American women—including those impregnated through incest and rape—must be forced to produce future workers and taxpayers. Here’s a comparable passage in Handmaid’s Tale, describing the book that Offred’s Commander reads to his household every evening:
It’s the usual story, the usual stories. God to Adam, God to Noah. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Then comes the moldy old Rachel and Leah stuff we had drummed into us at the Center. Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. And so on and so forth.
Like many Republicans, Johnson evokes a mid-20th century golden age to justify his proposals. The Atlantic’s Carmon reports,
Having genially presented himself as law abiding and his cause as bipartisan, Johnson proceeded to tell a story of America not unlike the one Trump would narrate: a little mid-century nostalgia, a little American carnage. “A society that has become gradually more coarsened, more dangerous,” he said, adding, “When I was a kid, the most popular show on television was The Brady Bunch. When my father was a child, it was The Andy Griffith Show. Now it’s murder and mayhem. We’re not in a good place in America, and I think that’s beyond dispute.”
In Gilead indoctrination, meanwhile, Aunt Lydia shows the women images of past “murder and mayhem” to justify the current order of things:
Sometimes the movies she showed would be an old porno film, from the seventies or eighties. Women kneeling, sucking penises or guns, women tied up or chained or with dog collars around their necks, women hanging from trees, or upside-down, naked, with their legs held apart, women being raped, beaten up, killed.
Aunt Lydia then tells the women how lucky they are to be living in a state that respects them:
Consider the alternatives, said Aunt Lydia. You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of women, then. Her voice trembled with indignation.
Johnson himself has a “covenant marriage,” designed to make divorce difficult, with his wife. Just like the Commander and Serena Joy.
Given that the House is now headed by someone who tried to overthrow a free and fair election, it’s useful to review how the Christian fascists come to power in Atwood’s novel. It’s not unlike the fantasies of some of Trump’s followers, especially General Mike Flynn.
One of the plans was to have Trump supporters clash with Antifa on January 6, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency and call in the military. As it turned out, Antifa members very smartly stayed away, anticipating such a plot, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, similarly wary, did the same. But had either of those decided differently, we might have seen a scenario such as Atwood describes:
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
…I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.
So as not to end on an entirely pessimistic note, it’s worth remembering that most Americans are not buying what MAGA is selling. Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin yesterday quoted from Public Religion Research Institute’s recent survey:
[I]n a positive sign of public sanity, “Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”
And:
Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.
In Atwood’s novel, a series of environmental catastrophes, including San Andreas Fault earthquakes that cause nuclear meltdowns, open the door to social disruption. I suppose similar chaos could open the door to neo-fascism. Then again, we had a major epidemic and came out intact, so maybe our institutions are not as fragile as we fear.
To be sure, we must remain vigilant. But we shouldn’t become hysterical.
Further thought: I should add that Johnson believes he was “ordained by God” to be Speaker and explained the absence of his wife at the swearing in ceremony by telling those in attendance that she was worn out as “[s]he’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord.”
Star Trek’s George Takei, who comments regularly on social media, quipped, “What is the name of Mike Johnson’s wife again. Is it Ofmike?”