'One-party rule' has made 'radicalized' Tennessee Republicans act like far-right authoritarians: report
Republicans in the Tennessee State Legislature sparked a national outcry earlier this year when they voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson, in response to their participation in a gun control protest. A third Democrat, Gloria Johnson, escaped expulsion during a vote. While Johnson is white, Jones and Pearson are both Black.
The Tennessee Republicans who voted for expulsion had no interest in debating Jones and Pearson on the merits of gun control. They simply wanted to see them removed from office.
Journalist Anne Applebaum takes an in-depth — and very unfavorable — look at Tennessee's political environment in an essay/think piece published by The Atlantic on July 18. Tennessee, she laments, has become a one-party state ruled by far-right ideologues she compares to authoritarians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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Technically, Orbán and Erdogan are not dictators. They don't enjoy dictator-for-life status like Spain's Gen. Francisco Franco, a.k.a. El GeneralÃsimo, or Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and they were reelected. But they have seriously undermined their countries' systems of checks and balances, which, Applebaum argues, is also what MAGA Republicans have been doing in Tennessee.
"Just as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán fights with opposition-controlled Budapest — and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fights with Istanbul, and Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński fights with Warsaw — so do Tennessee Republicans fight with opposition-controlled Nashville," Applebaum observes. But ultimately, she says, Tennessee now has "one-party rule," not serious debates. And the state's MAGA Republicans believe they are governing on behalf of God when they push "restrictive voting laws" or try to "shut down debate."
"As in Hungary or Poland or as in Venezuela," Applebaum warns, "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 quasi-religious movement that believes it has God on its side and that its opponents herald the apocalypse."
Applebaum discussed her Atlantic essay during a July 18 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
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The journalist told host Mika Brzezinski, "One of the effects of having a supermajority, which the Republicans have in Tennessee, is that they don't really have to listen to anybody. They don't have to listen to the public. They don't have to listen to the Democrats. They don't have to listen to political opponents…. Because they're there based on a tiny group of partisans who show up to vote. And the lesson, again, is that when you have that kind of control, it doesn't make you nicer…. It's becoming more and more difficult for Democrats to be heard in the (Tennessee State) Legislature and more broadly."
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