How democracy ends
Tennessee used to be a model of bipartisanship, said Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. It’s now a Republican test case for how to run a one-party state.
DRIVE ALONG THE outer rim of the exurbs north of Nashville, past structures that might be barns or might be wedding venues, around developments called Vineyard Grove or New Hope Village, and eventually you will arrive at what is meant to be the new headquarters of the election commission of Sumner County, Tennessee. A featureless onestory brick warehouse with some makeshift offices attached, it has just enough space for the tiny handful of election-commission employees, the 275 voting machines that they recently purchased, and maybe some of the maintenance workers who used to share rooms with them, back when the agency was still in the basement of the county-administration building.
Dusty picnic tables crowd against the wall. An elementary school stands a few hundred yards away. Nothing about this building or its location screams “controversy.” But when Sumner County’s local elections brought a faction that calls itself the Constitutional Republicans to power last year, that is what it nevertheless became.
To fully grasp this story, you need to understand that the standard forms of American political polarization don’t exist in Sumner, a rural but rapidly suburbanizing county where Democrats are not part of the equation at all. None has won any county office for more than two decades. Instead, the main opponents of the Constitutional Republicans, who won 14 out of 17 seats on the county commission (following a general election in which only 15 percent of eligible voters cast ballots), are the ordinary Republicans—or, as their opponents would call them, RINOs (“Republicans in name only”). The Constitutional Republicans’ website explains that RINOs are different from themselves: “They raise taxes, they vote to silence the citizens, they won’t protect private property rights. They often partner with Democrats to defeat true Constitutional Republicans like us.”
Upon taking over the county commission, the Constitutional Republicans issued a document formally declaring that their activities will be “reflective of Judeo-Christian values inherent in the nation’s founding.” They also shut down the HR department, tried to privatize a public historic building, and refused to pay for the election commission’s move to the brick building. “If we don’t fund it, you don’t get to do it,” Jeremy Mansfield, one of the Constitutional Republicans on the county commission, told the election commission at one public meeting about the move last fall. At a meeting in June, another county commissioner, angered because the new voting machines had been delivered to the new building, said that although he would “hate to pull the ace card,” the commission could always “declare this property surplus, and sell it.” That would leave the election commission, and its machines, with nowhere to go.
The building seems a small thing to get worked up about. But Facebook posts and videos of public meetings, all available online—the Constitutional Republicans are very transparent—make clear that this is not a trivial jurisdictional dispute, and these are not petty people. They have ambitions and interests that extend well beyond their county. Their Facebook page reacted to the news of Donald Trump’s latest indictment by declaring, “The Biden family is an organized crime family” and “Our justice system is rigged against Trump.” Another post asked whether Tennessee “should secede from the Union.” More to the point, Mansfield wrote a long post back in February attacking early voting and voting machines: “The gold standard for election integrity would be paper ballots filled out by people and counted by people in local precincts on Election Day.”
The Sumner County commissioners can’t arrest President Biden. They can’t secede.
But the county’s election commission, whose members are appointed by the bipartisan state election commission, is right there. It’s a local embodiment of the broader culture they dislike and of the government they distrust. If they can stick the agency back in the floodprone basement, they will.
MOST OF THE time, Tennessee politics doesn’t make national news. That changed in April, when the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two black Democratic legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. The two men, together with a white representative, Gloria Johnson, were accused of disrupting proceedings, because they repeated the demands of gun control activists on the floor of the chamber, during a recess, using a megaphone.
But their story did not start on that day. Not so long ago, Tennessee was not merely a more bipartisan state but a model of bipartisanship, an example to others. Keel Hunt, a columnist for the Tennessean newspaper (and a Democrat who once worked for a Republican governor, Lamar Alexander), wrote a book about the 1980s and ’90s, an era when moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans ruled the state; when Tennessee sent Alexander, Howard Baker, Al Gore, and Jim Sasser to the U.S. Senate; and when many of the decisions that paved the way for Tennessee’s current investment boom were made.
Today, Tennessee is a model of one-party rule. It has a Republican governor and legislature. Republican appointees run the state supreme court. The state’s ninemember U.S. House delegation contains eight Republicans; Tennessee has sent two Republicans to the Senate. The governor is the only other official elected statewide. Unlike in other states, the attorney general and secretary of state in Tennessee are appointed, and they are both Republicans.
Nor will the situation be easy to change, because gerrymandering is something of a blood sport in the state. The still-blue city of Nashville had a single Democrat representing it in Congress, but when the map was redrawn before the 2022 elections, GOP lawmakers split Nashville into three districts that stretch out into the countryside. Each elected a Republican. Instead of Jim Cooper,
a Blue Dog moderate Democrat who held the seat for two decades, Nashville is now represented by, among others, Andy Ogles, who is best known for sending out a holiday card featuring himself, his children, and his wife all holding guns in front of a Christmas tree.
I came to Tennessee partly because I wondered how similar it might feel to Poland and Hungary, where for the past decade
I’ve been warily observing the decline of democracy and the rise of the one-party state. The very large differences are immediately clear in Nashville, where music is the backdrop to everything, where everyone seems to be coming from a party or heading to one. Nashville is not Budapest-on-the-Cumberland. The Bill of Rights still applies. Federal judges rule on Tennessee laws.
The U.S. Constitution is widely and even ostentatiously revered. There is no Central European gloom.
Nevertheless, the cascade of tiny legal and procedural changes designed to create an unlevel playing field, the ruling party’s inexplicable sense of grievance, the displaced moderates with nowhere to go— this did seem familiar from other places. So was the sense that institutional politics has become performative, somehow separated from real life. Jones and Pearson staged their protest on the floor of the legislature, after all, because the conversation unfolding there had taken no notice of the much larger protests happening outside the chamber. A few days earlier, a horrific mass shooting at Covenant, a private Christian school in Nashville, had galvanized the public. Opinion polls showed that more than 70 percent of Tennesseans want red-flag laws that would let officials remove guns from people who might misuse them, while more than 80 percent support background checks and other gun safety laws.
Those enormous majorities were not reflected in the legislative debate. The house’s “two Justins,” as they are now known, brought their megaphone precisely because the Republican leadership commonly turns off Democrats’ microphones when they are speaking. Representative Bo Mitchell was once cut off when he told the house, “Please don’t say you are pro-life and put more weapons on the street”—a statement ruled to be insulting. Jones told me that he was ruled out of order during a committee meeting because he’d said the leadership was “putting a Band-Aid on the issue” of school shootings; a few days later, he was also told he had to remove a Ban Assault Weapons pin from his jacket. Republicans insist, as Tennessee House Majority Leader William Lamberth told a local television station, that speakers are meant to stick to the topic: “It’s not openmic night.”
Justin Kanew, the founder and editor of The Tennessee Holler, thinks the state serves as a kind of “guinea pig,” a test market in this same mediaverse, a place where new culture war themes can be experimentally stoked. A war on judges as well as on remote voting began in 2021, when the chair of a key house subcommittee sought to remove a judge who had ruled in favor of expanding the right to vote by mail during the pandemic. Last September, the governor and other Republicans lashed out at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, allegedly for suppressing employees who criticized the university’s gender clinic, charges the university denied. More recently, the state attorney general has investigated the clinic, demanding private medical records. One disgruntled Republican described this whole process to me as “governing by anecdote.” You could also describe it as “governing by Fox News.”
But every so often, a glimpse of something uglier appears, a hint that some people want more than culture wars designed for TikTok, Twitter, and the evening news. Walking to her home in Nashville, an acquaintance saw a car with a Shoot Your Local Pedophile bumper sticker, showing an outline of a man holding a gun to another man’s head. T-shirts with this image, phrasing, and implied approval of violence are for sale online. Cooper, the former member of Congress, told me that getting anyone to run for office as a Democrat in some parts of the state is difficult partly because Democrat and pedophile are so often conflated by Republican activists, and potential candidates are spooked. About half of the state-legislature seats were uncontested in 2022.
IN SUMNER COUNTY, Republicans won everything, control everything, and yet still feel aggrieved and victimized. As in
Hungary or Poland or as in Venezuela, the experience of radicalism can make people more radical. Total control of a political system can make the victors not more magnanimous, but more frustrated, not least because they learn that total control still doesn’t deliver what they think it should. No county commission or state legislature can possibly meet the demands of a quasireligious movement that believes it has God on its side and that its opponents herald the apocalypse. But that doesn’t mean they give up. It just means they keep trying, using any tool available. Eventually they arrive at the point described by Tom Lee, the lawyer for the Sumner County Election Commission: “It’s not enough to get your majority and get your way—they have to make the minority lose their voice.”
On a tape leaked to The Tennessee Holler after the expulsion of Pearson and Jones, this dynamic is powerfully revealed. Grim Republican legislators talked about what they think is really at stake, and it isn’t megaphones. “If you don’t believe we are at war for our republic,” one of them says to the group, “with all love and respect to you, you need a different job.” They don’t believe that this is a normal political competition, either, or that their opponents are a normal, legitimate, small-d democratic opposition. Democrats, says another, “are not our friends.” They “destroy our republic and the foundation of who we are.” At one point, an apocalyptic tone creeps into the conversation: “The Left wants Tennessee so bad because if they get us, the Southeast falls and it’s ‘game over’ for the republic.” So urgent and so dramatic is this challenge that some of them have come to believe that rules might have to be broken: “You gotta do what’s right, even if you think it might be wrong,” one of them says.
You gotta do what’s right, even if you think it might be wrong. Fight for the republic, because otherwise it will be “game over”: The language itself wouldn’t be unusual, if this were a radical minority fighting for its very existence. But this is the Republican Party, the party that controls pretty much everything in Tennessee. They are going to win the next election, and probably the one after that. Yet they sound as if winning isn’t enough: They also want their opponents to fall silent, and they are doing what they can to make that happen.
Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The Atlantic. Used with permission.