What constitutes the mainstream Republican belief and political agenda?

Trump is now calling on Republicans not to vote — declaring “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24” if his election fraud hoax is not “solved” first. He helped Republicans lose two Georgia Senate seats in January. Now he seems ready to try it again in the midterms. pic.twitter.com/ARBnsfwmzJ

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) October 13, 2021

Someone is still interested in correcting the 

massive 2020 vote fraud problem

The mainstream liberal-conservative divide in reality, reason and commitment to democracy and elections are vast and apparently not resolvable by anything other than major mindset change. Major mindset change is impossible.

Here at Dissident Politics

One set of recent comments exemplify the gulf.

Commenter: The democrats are the fascists. Wake up.

Responder 1: Prove your claim.

Commenter: Attempted gene therapy mandate, CRT brainwashing, attempting to tightly control ecomonic output, scapegoating groups of citizens (white suprematists), pushing POC supremacy, wanting to literally starve people who don't take their ineffective and possibly damaging "vaccine", gun control, causing inflation with spending and money printing, then blaming it on others, unfettered illegal immigration. Not hard to do.

Responder 2: Nah, the Repubs are way more fascist than the Dems. Attacks on the 2020 election and voting rights, attacks on abortion, liars about the vaccine, with consequences of killing people and damaging the economy, spending money and increasing the federal debt, fostering slaughter of innocents by eliminating reasonable gun regulations, attacking the free press, attacking and undermining the rule of law, etc.

Commenter: The 2020 election was fraudulent. That was obvious. No one attacks anyone's voting rights. Showing an ID isn't blocking someones rights. Only Jim Crow democrats do that.

The vaccine isn't a vaccine, it is untested gene therapy that only works for some people and only for about 5-6 months per jab. Enjoy your myocarditis.

The GOP has helped run up the debt, but not nearly as much as B. Hussein Obama and now brain dead Joe wants 3.5 trillion more debt for leftist idiocy.

We have many unenforced gun regulations. We don't need more. We need democrat control. It is them shooting each other.

The press are little more than democrat party activists and deserve to be attacked for their dishonesty. 

No one undermines the rule of law more than Biden's handlers.

Responder 2: No response.

 Elsewhere - the FRP plan for subverting elections

In the last couple of weeks, reports of what the FRP (fascist Republican Party) has been doing have come out. For the most part the FRP is focused nationwide on laying the groundwork to attack the 2022 and 2024 elections if they do not turn out its way. Baseless FRP attacks on the 2020 election continue. The Washington Post writes:

The glaring errors became clear soon after a former Wisconsin judge issued subpoenas earlier this month in a Republican review of the state’s 2020 presidential election. Some of the requests referred to the wrong city. At least one was sent to an official who doesn’t oversee elections. A Latin phrase included in the demands for records and testimony was misspelled.

Michael Gableman, the former judge leading the review, admitted days later that he does not have “a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work.” He then backed off some of his subpoena demands before reversing course again, telling a local radio host that officials would still be required to testify.

Attorney General Josh Kaul (D) this week called the subpoenas unlawful and “dramatically overbroad,” and he urged Republicans to “shut this fake investigation down.” Voting rights advocates, election policy experts and some state and local officials, meanwhile, accuse Gableman of incompetence and say his review — which could cost taxpayers $680,000 or more — will decrease public trust in Wisconsin elections.

“It’s terrible for democracy in the state,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway (D) said in an interview. “It’s corrosive. It undermines confidence in our elections, and it’s deeply insulting to our municipal clerks and poll workers. … The thing that should give everybody some confidence is the fact that our elections are not being run by people like attorney Gableman.”

The FRP's plan to subvert democracy: The FRP's goal is to replace competent elections workers with FRP partisans whose mission is to see that Democrats lose and Republicans win. A lawyer, Mark Elias, involved in court cases that defended against FRP attacks on 2020 election results sees an overarching FRP plan to subvert elections in 2020, 2022, 2024 and beyond. The plan includes passing laws that make voting harder and more complex for both voters and poll workers. The goal is to get people to make mistakes in elections. The FRP intends to point to voting mistakes by voters and poll workers as evidence of widespread vote fraud, giving the FRP the excuse its needs to subvert the voter's will.

This 8 minute video contains the attorney's argument about what the FRP is doing. In his opinion, if the FRP does subvert the 2022 or 2024 election, we will be in a constitutional crisis. I presume he would assert the same thing if the FRP manages to overturn the 2020 election. In my opinion, we have been in a constitutional crisis at least since the first impeachment of our treasonous ex-president.

 

Elias wrote an essay about the FRP plan to subvert elections at Democracy Docket, a liberal media platform focused on information, opinion and analysis about voting rights, elections and democracy. Elias wrote:

We are one, maybe two, elections away from a constitutional crisis. More than a year ago — before Election Day — Donald Trump made clear that he would not accept the results of free and fair elections if he did not win. Too few people paid attention, discounting it as the ravings of a soon-to-be failed candidate. In the days following the November 2020 election, Trump and his allies executed a plan to subvert the election results. While they failed, Republicans learned from the experience and are prepared to try again. The future of our democracy rests on whether those committed to free and fair elections will prepare as well.

Immediately following the insurrection on January 6, Republican state legislatures began laying the groundwork for 2022 and 2024. They enacted new voter suppression laws optimized to disenfranchise Black, brown and young voters. They created false narratives of election irregularities and rallied their supporters around the Big Lie. Most recently, they began using their power in the redistricting process to ensure Republicans control the U.S. House over the next decade. 

Facing this grim reality, some have begun to urge Congress to ignore voter suppression and focus exclusively on the potential for election subversion in 2024. Specifically, they obsess over the outdated and imprecise Electoral Count Act — the process by which states select and Congress certifies presidential electors.  

This misguided effort ignores the fact that voting rules that maximize participation result in fewer disputed outcomes, while complex and restrictive rules create a larger pool of disputed ballots that can be used to justify post-election challenges. Republicans learned from 2020 that the absence of virtually any fraud was a stumbling block to their efforts to overturn elections. Since they cannot force voters to commit fraud, they are redefining the term. Several states, including Georgia, Iowa, Kansas and Texas, have criminalized practices that were previously legal. Some of these laws target voters, whereas other provisions are aimed at election workers. The result is the same. The goal of these new provisions is to manufacture fraud where none exists.

By manufacturing fraud, Republicans create controversy that can be exploited after Election Day by Republican candidates who do not prevail. The faux outrage created by the right-wing echo chamber vilifies election workers and provides excuses for disregarding election results.

Questions:

1. Does the commenter represent most of the Republican rank and file or is that person just a fringe extremist or crackpot who is not very close to mainstream rhetoric and/or belief the Republican Party leadership and donors explicitly or implicitly rely on?

2. Is what Elias asserts about a nationwide FRP plan to subvert elections mostly accurate, just a plausible hypothesis, mostly crackpot conspiracy theory nonsense and/or something else? If something else, what is it?

3. Is propaganda-fueled Republican fear that Democrats are subverting democracy by rigging elections and committing voter fraud a bigger threat to democracy than what the FRP is doing, i.e., is fear of socialist-communist Democratic tyranny a bigger threat than fear of fascist Republican tyranny, or are neither significant threats, or both about the same?