Quacking In My Boots

Marjorie Taylor Green is so routine in her spiteful rhetoric and over-the-top claims that I sometimes mistake her for a Saturday Night Live character. From the moment she fumbled ass-backward onto the national stage, spouting QAnon theories and mangling her sentences, she’s played like a slightly sexist satire of bottle-blonde conservative women. Her racist statements, foot-in-mouth moments, and love of shouting have endeared her to the sensationalist media.

This week’s tweet about “our enemies… quacking in their boots” seems apropos. I admit having mocked her myself, because it’s consistent with Greene’s oeuvre of public gaffes, including “gazpacho police” and “peach tree dishes.” I’m having second thoughts, though, because unlike those notorious spoken blunders, this has a simpler explanation. Greene tweeted from her iPhone, and got AutoCorrected. Anybody who’s ever inadvertently typed “duck this pizza ship” knows that feeling.

Greene’s AutoCorrect error has, unfortunately, overshadowed the revealing information she tweeted out on purpose. “Quacking” is funny, yes. But the sentence’s real meat is the word “enemies.” Like President Trump before her, she characterizes her opposition as hostile adversaries, as foes who need defeated, as though politics were a real-time game of Dungeons & Dragons, and Greene sees herself as a paladin. That’s a painful insight into Greene’s moral calculus.

I remember learning, in 12th grade American Civics, how democratic politics rests on certain shared suppositions. Different political parties may disagree on the most efficient way to organize an economy or levy taxes, for instance. Such disagreements can even be beneficial, since they result in debates and evidence testing to refine first blush ideas. But small-d democratic participants have to agree on one precept: the process itself.

For democracy to function, all participants must agree that functioning democracy is, itself, a good. They must regard elections as desirable, fellow elected officials as peers, and office as service, not power. That’s why, in Congressional debates, representatives who disagree with one another on fundamental issues of power and government, are supposed to refer to one another as “my esteemed colleague” or “the honorable Representative.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

This veneer of respect is, certainly, often gossamer-thin. In 1856, Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Massachusetts senator harangued the Senate chambers, calling pro-slavery senators a string of ugly personal names. South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks responded by beating Sumner with a cane. This failure of the ability of rhetoric to resolve deep regional differences is regarded by historians as evidence that the Civil War was, by then, inevitable.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Greene’s sloppy, high-handed rhetoric isn’t evidence that a Brooks-style physical attack is imminent. However, the characterization of ideological opponents as enemies, rather than as fellow participants in the democratic process, is a sign that procedural norms are failing. Greene, Trump, and those who agree with them have abandoned the pretense of agreement. Governance, for them, is a fight to win, not a debate to resolve.

We’ve witnessed this in, for instance, the way Greene notoriously harassed gun-control advocate David Hogg. Greene eschewed standards of procedural debate and literally chased Hogg down the street. Greene’s defenders will note that she wasn’t yet elected, and her actions have no official governmental standing. But she permitted herself to be recorded, and used the resulting footage in her Congressional campaign, an action which reflects her intent.

The fact that Greene was elected to a second term this week, even as she’s continued such high-profile antics in her official status as a Representative, speaks to more than just her. It tells me that voters, at least in Georgia’s mostly-White 14th Congressional District, actually like this behavior. Greene’s voting base sees her performing such ridiculous stunts, frequently with undisguised malign intent, and says: we’ll have more of that.

Greene was one of several Representatives elected in 2020 on the promise, not to govern responsibly, but to vanquish supposed enemies. While North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn got turfed out in the primaries after, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert is, at this writing, likely to win a second term on a whisker-thin majority. The 2024 Republican presidential ticket is a likely split between culture warriors Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

Democrats continue playing the game soberly, using titles like “the honorable” and inviting the opposition party to debate. But that doesn’t work anymore. In my state, Nebraska, governor-elect Jim Pillen refused to debate the Democrat, Carol Blood, and Pillen won. Small-d democratic precepts are currently failing in America. If we don’t face that fact soon, we’ll face it when the governing party starts suspending elections and civil rights laws.