The Tennessee Three: Whataboutism as Fascism Apologia

You've no doubt heard at this point about "the Tennessee Three", three Democratic members of the Tennessee State House facing an expulsion vote for their role in a protest against gun violence that occurred on the state legislative floor. Expulsion is a rarely-invoked procedure in Tennessee, typically reserved for obvious cases of criminality of misconduct (e.g., a bribery scandal) in cases that garner bipartisan support. To use it to kick out minority party members for a raucous protest the majority found embarrassing is a huge overreach, an exploitation of the GOP's supermajority status to further undermine basic democratic principles.

I wanted to flag a particular comparison Tennessee Republicans are using to justify their conduct -- comparing the protest to the attempted insurrection on January 6:

House Speaker Cameron Sexton compared the incident to Jan. 6: "What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the State Capitol," he said.

Sexton also noted that Jones and Johnson had previously been "very vocal about Jan. 6 and Washington, D.C., about what that was."

There was, of course, no insurrection here: the protest had no ambitions of overthrowing the government. But there's something revealing about this rhetorical move that I think typifies the way conservatives are normalizing and justifying fascist behavior.

Even now, many Republicans are kind of willing to concede that there was something ... untoward about January 6, and the broader campaign of election denial that spawned it. "Kind of" because they face tremendous pressure to outright endorse it, as Sexton's "maybe worse" aside makes clear. But to the extent they to recognize that there's something wrong with what happened on January 6, what they want to do is present things like January 6 as an ordinary sort of ugliness, the sort of foul or misconduct one can see from all parts of the political spectrum. Yes, maybe the January 6 thing went a bit too far. But it's not distinctive; this is a problem one can see across the aisle too. Look at Black Lives Matter protests -- why aren't they being treated like the insurrectionists? Maybe Trump shouldn't have denied the election, but is it really any different from Al Gore demanding a recount in 2000? Trump stole classified documents; well, what about her emails? Whatabout, whatabout, whatabout.

By transferring these egregious examples of anti-democratic thuggery into the realm of "normal" politics, Republicans justify treating them via the "normal" (partisan) political process. Sure it might be a bit distasteful, and more than a little opportunistic, but hey, that's politics. There's nothing exceptional here that demands standing on a broader principle. Everything blurs into an indistinguishable mush of "sometimes politics gets ugly." And in that universe, well, it's just realistic that Republicans probably won't pay much attention to their "normal" nips that might cross the line. Cynicism styles itself as realism, but it's really just cowardice.

None of this is to say that straightforward political thuggery isn't sufficient explanation for why Tennessee Republicans are acting the way they are. But there is a broader justificatory narrative being crafted here. The Tennessee Three isn't just about state and national Republicans being contemptuous of democratic norms (though it's certainly about that too). It's yet another effort to pull the extreme conservative threats to basic rule of law principles out of the realm of "extreme" and blur them into the normal hurly-burly of every day politics. Exploiting the media's instinct to "both sides" everything, the GOP will just troll all the way down