Texas and fascist governors are defying the federal government

Razor wire at the border, the Supreme Court, and fighting fascism

There’s a constitutional crisis. And it’s not brewing it’s boiling. First, Texas Governor Greg Abbott put up razor wire at the southern border. Bodies of dead migrants have been found caught in the wire, sparking outrage and righteous accusations that these brutal, barbaric barriers are deadly. Federal border patrol agents have cut or removed segments of the wire in the past while arresting migrants, but then, according to the Texas Tribune:

On Jan. 12, National Guard members at the park blocked a Border Patrol agent from accessing the river after three migrants drowned while crossing the Rio Grande and two other migrants were still struggling in the water.

This horrendous move led to a rapid Supreme Court ruling where the justices declared 5-4 that federal agents can remove the razor wire Texas has placed at the border. Normally, this would be the end of the story. The court’s federal authority would be respected and that would be the end of it. But we’re dealing with a different beast here. Not just in the form of the Governor of Texas, but in the form of the MAGA movement and the new American right. Greg Abbott responded to the Supreme Court ruling with an immediate statement that “this is not over." He also went further and stated that since Texas has officially declared migrants to be “an invasion” his state has a right to defend itself and that this “authority is the supreme law of the law and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.” 

At this point, you might already see that constitutional crisis I mentioned. The second biggest state is declaring federal power invalid, ignoring both the Supreme Court and the executive branch. But in the blink of an eye the issue escalated even further Thursday. 25 Republican governors issued a joint statement supporting Texas in its border dispute with the federal government.

Then, when you think you can no longer be shocked, the Governor of Oklahoma went on Newsmax to talk explicitly about a civil war between several states, like Texas, Florida, and his own state of Oklahoma, and the federal government. Yes, you read that correctly. And yet, according to journalist Paul Blest, there was “not a single story about this on the front page of the New York Times or AP sites right now.” The Washington Post had one, as of yesterday. As of the publishing of this piece, two or three more articles have been written, yet the country’s biggest outlets remain oddly quiet on this seemingly important situation.

I’m sure breaking news will develop even as I publish this piece, but the underlying dynamics have been around for some time, and aren’t going anywhere. For one, the rise of MAGA and the overtly fascist Republican Party that opposes democracy and doesn’t care about the norms that have held our government together, as flawed as the whole thing may be, isn’t new. The Trump era was a paradigm shift, not because most of the policies he and his team pushed for were new, but because they didn’t care about the law, checks and balances, or the typical way of doing business to such a degree that they began to break American politics. As many of you know I think our system is so flawed that it’s worth building something radically different. And what fascists do, among other things, is capitalize on this widespread discontent and say that we should have a radically different system as well. That’s why they rise during difficult or turbulent periods. Yet their solutions, their cries of “drain the swamp,” never reflect any desire to build something new and helpful to the masses. Instead their new proposals always amount to an anti-democratic consolidation of power in order to bolster the capitalist system by fusing it with authoritarianism.

So these fake MAGA outsiders, often millionaires or billionaires themselves in this country, have always needed to lie to sell the false premise that they’re different, that they’re challenging the status quo in any meaningful way. And those lies, combined with their unabashed desire for personal power, have inevitably led to the crisis we’re seeing today. We’ve already had January 6th, we’ve already seen a whole generation of Republican election deniers rise up, and we already know they oppose democracy. Now we’re seeing that they oppose the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, even one that’s generally stacked in their favor, and more broadly the jurisdiction of the federal government.

Now it’s important to see that, although they have now made formal declarations to this effect, declarations against federal power and in support of Texas, bluster is playing a significant role here. In large part because these Governors feel they have no choice. You get politicians, so often already predisposed to pursue power, and combine that with a base that has been steadily whipped into a fascist frenzy for years, and backing down becomes impossible. The fact that there is a lot of political theater involved here doesn’t make the situation less volatile or less dangerous. Because even though this crisis could very likely calm down and blow over in numerous ways over the next few days, it could also escalate. And, either way, it could set a dangerous precedent.

The precedent that could be set is that MAGA Governors can get away with defying the Supreme Court and the federal government as a whole. And the stakes are high. On the one hand, Abbott is doing this in order to hurt, maim, and even kill migrants. At the same time, he’s doing it to build his personal power as part of the broader fascist push to exercise power outside of conventional lanes and build their movement. The right as a whole doesn’t just view politics as elections, or as governing within narrow lines. Part of throwing out the rule book is that there are infinitely more options for building and wielding power outside the narrow constraints of liberal democracy. And many of them are frightening. Fascists are organizing militias, they’re even willing to use the National Guard as their own militia. They will lie, cheat, use violence and more to gain and maintain power. On the national level, they know that they do not have a majority of voters, and they know the dishonest and violent path is likely their only route to victory. So they’ll take it. And Democrats, sticking to rules long cast aside by their opponents, are reminiscent of the Maginot Line, which Hitler’s tanks simply ignored, and went around.

Democrats, for the last seven years, have largely been the Maginot Line. They have been the opposition that postures, waves around symbolic gestures, and is unable to really squash the fascist opposition or even take the wind out of their sails. Trump and MAGA have been treated largely like conventional opposition, even when they storm the capitol. For instance, while the January 6th rioters go to jail and prison, not a single encouraging or enabling politician has been dealt with. Instead, Democrats cling to norms while the GOP tosses them aside. In Congress and across the country Democratic leadership continues to imagine a level playing field when their opponents have left the field entirely and all but taken up arms. 

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

Even these past several weeks, as a border crisis of constitutional proportions mounted, Democrats tried to appease their fascist counterparts with an inhumane, draconian border bill. And that appeasement is crashing down and failing because the demagogue leader of the right decided that his party shouldn’t compromise with Democrats, even on something atrocious, if it might help Biden in the election. Elected Democrats aren’t just bringing a knife to a gunfight, they’re bringing a rule book to a bare-knuckle brawl.

So I hope their tune changes, as I’ve been hoping for many years. I hope a constitutional crisis and the open defiance of the Supreme Court by many Governors change their minds, but I can’t say I have tons of faith any dramatic change of tune, or approach. It’s worth trying to apply pressure, in my opinion, given the magnitude of this problem and the need to save the lives of migrants and stand up to fascism on the biggest stage. But we shouldn’t put too much faith in the President and Congress producing a solution here, especially a solution that is helpful in the long run. I say that in large part because the draconian border appeasement that Democrats have been trying these last few weeks. Their attempt to move right to appease an opposition and an opposing base that will take a mile if given an inch has failed, and is emblematic of their broader failure to deal with fascism in this country.

So, I put my hope in us. I choose to have faith in us. As I wrote over a year ago, “Fascists are escalating, mobilizing, and unfortunately doing a lot of work themselves. The cops high-five them, chit-chat with them, or stand idly by. So we need to keep going. We need to out-organize the opposition. We need to know that it’s on us to defend our communities.” And in many ways I feel the same today. That piece was about the right attacking libraries, drag queens, queer kids and more. But although the events we’re talking about today are dramatically scaled up, our responses can be similar in two key ways. First we, you and I, can understand that our opposition has thrown out the rule book, and respond by throwing it out ourselves. We don’t have to just stick to elections and demand that unwilling politicians take action. We can act, we can organize, we don’t have to wait.

The second similarity is that this will also take confrontation. I would never have thought, growing up, that we would have to repeatedly discuss how appeasement doesn’t deter fascists – it enables them. But here we are. Fascists have been appeased and appeased and now they’re defying the federal government to barbarically trap migrants in floating saws and barbed wire. So this will take action, and confrontation. The President should stand up, Congress should stand up. Both should act. But who knows what they’ll do? So I hope that, as we apply pressure, we also control what we can control. Which is ourselves. We can act, we can organize, we can build power to fight these ghouls. So I hope we do all we can, for ourselves and for migrants and for our future. Solidarity.