How Tennessee got so fascist
And why there's hope despite a GOP supermajority
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
Tonight, in the first part of our series on the extraordinary dangers threatening American democracy, we’re looking at the high-profile battle taking place in Tennessee and how the state arrived at such an unprecedented moment.
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Members of the Tennessee General Assembly will vote on Thursday on resolutions that would expel three Democratic lawmakers from the state legislature. Concocted by the chamber’s Republican supermajority, the expulsion effort is a new nadir for American democracy, a hypocritical act of cowardice, and a grim portent for what’s to come.
As progressives in Tennessee explain, it was also inevitable.
“We’re so hopeless here,” Aftyn Behn, an organizer in Tennessee, told Progress Report. “I mean, no one's going to come and save us.”
Behn isn’t being defeatist, but as a longtime organizer and now campaign director for RuralOrganizing.org, she’s bracingly realistic about the political circumstances in her home state. Up to this point, lawmakers have done everything they can to avoid expelling elected representatives from the Assembly in Nashville; there have only been two members ousted since the 1800s, and in both cases, the lawmakers were removed after bipartisan investigations into allegations of criminal activity and sexual misconduct.
On Thursday, they’ll vote on removing Reps. Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson for the high crime of assisting teenage gun control activists who were visiting the Capitol in the wake of another deadly school shooting. To even consider such an audacious abuse of power requires the hubris of single-party government unthreatened by public opinion or electoral democracy, as well as the firm encouragement of extremist agitators that reward evermore extraordinary acts of cruelty.
Tennessee has always been a conservative state, but the past few years have seen it veer further right than it’s been in generations. In 2020, beckoned by the state’s nihilist pro-Covid policies and the presence of teen genital obsessive Matt Walsh, conservative commentators and media companies began to move to Nashville, injecting a far-right presence into one of the state’s Democratic strongholds and a creepy counterpoint to the city’s endless cycle of bachelorette parties.
The emigrants included Ben Shapiro, who brought his perpetually dissatisfied wife and Daily Wire media company, grifter Candace Owens, and vlog host Tomi Lahren, who now haunts a Fox News offshoot. Shapiro’s outfit was welcomed with an official proclamation passed by the legislature and signed by the governor; Walsh, a documentarian focused on child genitals, led anti-trans rallies that attracted high-profile government weirdos and helped grease the skids for a ban on gender-affirming and limits on drag shows, both of which were signed by Gov. Bill Lee in March.
Walsh and Shapiro feasted on the fact that the shooter at Covenant School was transgender, exploiting the tragedy in a way that sought to justify their fixation on puberty and disqualify the desperate appeals of actual teenagers seeking relief from the plague of gun violence.
“They’re Trying to Suffocate Us”
The crux of the case against the three Democrats is that they stepped into what’s referred to as “the well,” a space of the Assembly floor reserved for legislative leadership, and led teenage protestors in chants demanding gun control.
As Rep. Johnson explained to local media, it was only after the Speaker cut the microphones on the floor and called for a recess that they brought out a megaphone to amplify protestors’ calm pleas.
And yet, the lawmakers’ violation of a “fictitious line,” as Behn put it, was so offensive to Speaker Cameron Sexton that he accused them of trying to start “an insurrection.” Sexton thus far stayed quiet about the actual assault on the floor, when Rep. Justin Lafferty shoved Rep. Jones and took his phone as the protest wound down. This despite the interaction being caught on camera.
Republicans have only incentives to pursue the expulsions. The party owns a legislative supermajority in both the state Assembly and Senate, thanks in part due to absurd gerrymanders that reduce the power of the state’s large Black population. After Democrats in the US Senate failed to pass a new Voting Rights Act to replace the husk left by the Supreme Court, Republicans in Tennessee seized the opportunity to split apart the Nashville-area Congressional seat, further shrinking the Democratic delegation from the state.
Last month, Republicans in the legislature went even further, halving the number of seats in Nashville’s city council just six weeks before municipal elections. It’s another item on the ever-growing list of indignities faced by people of color in Tennessee, where one in five Black voters is disenfranchised entirely by the state’s stringent and racist ban on returning citizens’ voting rights.
For the three lawmakers that face expulsion, the conservative fervor has become physically dangerous — a result in part of the state’s lack of gun control — and embodies a far-right pernicious that continues to escalate in red states.
“They are trying to squeeze everything, they're trying to suffocate us, and what people blue urban cores and purple states don’t understand is that they're trying to replicate this across the country,” Behn said. “So they will come for your blue cities, they will try to destroy your government. It’s already happening in Texas, we see it happening in Houston. This is their playbook.”
Behn’s warning is a reference to state Republicans’ increasingly aggressive approach to preemption laws, something that we’ll cover in the next edition of Progress Report.
Silver Linings
It all sounds dire, but Behn also sees a potential silver lining. The impending vote has turned a national gaze to the GOP’s iron grip on Tennessee’s politics and the viciousness with which they govern, and could spur the investment and longer-term interest that could assist in building a more effective resistance.
Lawmakers like Rep. Jones can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with progressives in any other state, and his media appearances since the expulsion resolutions were filed suggest a political heavyweight in the making.
The expulsions could also backfire for Sexton, the Assembly Speaker who has ambitions of running for governor in 2024, Behn says. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but fighting for true democracy and progress in Tennessee requires a deep belief in the face of rampant cynicism. It’s possible that being silenced by elected officials could leave last week’s teen protestors jaded, but youth vote trends, combined with the urgency of both gun control and the survival of democracy, suggest that a new generation of activists is being radicalized in Tennessee by the ongoing events.
Regardless of how the vote goes on Thursday, the Tennessee Three, as they’ve been dubbed, will remain defiant and look to the future.
“We have plans to launch their campaigns for 2024 that afternoon and hopefully get people excited about knocking on doors,” Behn said. Before that, they’ll start the day with protests at the Capitol, and no expulsion warning will stop them.
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Sad to see how bad things have gotten in Tennessee. Single-party rule has proven to be disastrous before (i.e. mid-1800s), and if it continues, businesses will start to question the wisdom of investment in a state with no respect for the rule of law.
Thank you for the helpful explanation.