“The heckler’s veto”

Created
Wed, 29/03/2023 - 01:30
Updated
Wed, 29/03/2023 - 01:30
The politics of loud and obnoxious Jamelle Bouie turns a phrase that distills the loud-and-belligerant’s approach to politics: the heckler’s veto. From Clear Skies to Healthy Forests and beyond, American conservatives have displayed a knack for couching objectionable legislation in unobjectionable terms. When Democrats were 19th-century America’s conservative party, they framed their defense of slavery as “states’ rights” — “pro-slavery” being too gauche even for Southern slave owners. MAGA Republicans’ 21st-century enthusiasm is for “parents’ rights,” a catchall for “pro-book-banning,” “pro-censorship,” and “pro-discrimination.” Particularly in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida-based, freedom-frosted fascism incubator. Envious GOP governors in Texas and Virginia nip at his heels. Bouie explains: The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others. Jim Crow practices secured the blessings of white dominance over former slaves for 100 years. The taste for dominance in Jesus’ name over racial, ethnic, religious, and other disfavored monorities never worked its way out of much of American culture. It’s where the phrase “dominant culture” gets its bite, after all. And, of course, the point…