Washington Post Accuses Republicans of Systematically ‘Undermining Democracy’

The Republican Party “systematically undermines democracy,” and the establishment media must call it out, according to a recent Washington Post piece calling on media outlets to stop treating Republicans as “normal politicians” and recognize the GOP for the threat it poses to American democracy.

The Tuesday essay, titled “The media must say it: The GOP is undermining democracy” and penned by Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, begins by claiming that many newsrooms have made an “important investment” in their hiring more reporters to cover “threats to democracy.”

However, she wrote, “many outlets are failing to meet the challenge” because they’re “treating the threats as a free-floating danger as opposed to the operating procedure of one party.”

She then lists seven fundamental “tactics” used by “aspiring authoritarians,” courtesy of a recently published guide for the media from Protect Democracy, a left-wing nonprofit that claims to help “prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.”

The listed tactics are: attempting to “politicize independent institutions;” spreading “disinformation;” aggrandizing “executive power at the expense of checks and balances;” quashing “criticism and dissent;” targeting “vulnerable or marginalized communities;” working to “corrupt elections;” and stoking “violence.”

“It shouldn’t take long to recognize that Donald Trump engaged in virtually all of these,” Rubin wrote. 

In addition to having “politicized institutions,” she claimed, he “never stopped disseminating lies, culminating in his false claims of election fraud.” 

She also insisted that then-President Trump’s remarks about “very fine people” in the Charlottesville riot and his call for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate, demonstrated he had “used or encouraged violence, a violation of the fundamental principles of democracy.”

As has been demonstrated repeatedly, then-President Trump said he “totally” condemned the neo-Nazis in attendance at the Charlottesville rally.

The phrase “very fine people,” as is clear from the transcript of his remarks, was an explicit reference to the peaceful protesters on either side of a dispute about the removal of a local confederate statue.

His call during the first presidential debate in 2020 for the Proud Boys, a right-wing fraternal group that counts ethnic minorities among its membership, to “stand down” and allow law enforcement to work was similarly taken out of context after Joe Biden falsely implied the group was a white supremacist one.

Rubin then accused the Republican Party of “continuing to support” such anti-democratic conduct.

“The party continues to politicize election administration, perpetuates the ‘big lie’ of a stolen election and flirts with violence — sometimes not so subtly,” she wrote. 

“Even if not all elected Republicans engage in such conduct, the GOP protects its members who do (e.g., refusing to impeach Trump, refusing to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, refusing to punish members who use violent rhetoric),” she added.

According to Rubin, when it comes to “quashing dissent,” the rest of the Republican Party has “picked up where Trump left off.” 

“Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s effort to strip Disney of its state tax benefits for opposing his ‘don’t say gay’ bill is just one example,” she wrote. “And the tidal wave of book-banning and laws targeting critical race theory comes from the right.”

She describes the “major shortcoming” of much of the establishment media as failing to “identify that these threats overwhelmingly if not exclusively” come from former President Trump and the Republican Party, as opposed to President Biden and the Democrats. 

“State Democrats are not suppressing access to voting. President Biden is not instructing his attorney general to punish enemies,” she wrote. “While Biden has made use of executive orders, he has not bypassed congressional appropriators nor has he moved, for example, to unilaterally ban certain weapons.” 

“The dissemination of blatantly false information on covid-19 came from Republican officials, not Democrats,” she added.

She accused the media of frequently “bend[ing] over backward to avoid pointing the finger at the GOP as the source of antidemocratic activity.” 

“Mainstream outlets describe GOP efforts to limit voting as ‘strict voting laws,’ while failing to “challenge the GOP’s attempt to create equivalence between overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and the grab-bag of violent right-wing actors embraced by Republicans.” 

Regarding “disinformation,” she added, the media “still so often frame it as ‘Republicans claim X, Democrats claim Y’ when the Republicans’ claims are demonstrably and intentionally false.”

She also decried media outlets being unable to “bring themselves to explain that one party alone systematically undermines democracy.”

“Media outlets might pat themselves on the back for more attention to ‘democracy coverage,’ but too many fail in the most fundamental respect: explaining that only one party consistently and systematically threatens our democracy,” she wrote. 

“Until they do that and stop treating Republicans as ‘normal politicians,’ the threat to democracy will not abate,” she concluded.

In March, Rubin penned an op-ed blasting the GOP and claiming Republicans are obsessed with “toxic” and “grotesque” masculinity.

Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.