Georgetown Univ. Visiting Prof. Thomas Zimmer: “The End of Roe Is Just the Beginning. A multi-level reactionary counter-mobilization is underway.”

Another day, another brilliant/spot-on Twitter thread by Georgetown University Visiting Professor Thomas Zimmer – see below. A few highlights include:

• “The End of Roe Is Just the Beginning. A multi-level reactionary counter-mobilization is underway. Conservatives are animated by a vision of 1950s-style white Christian patriarchal dominance. It is the only order they will accept for America.”
• “We are seeing a wave of red-state legislation rolling back basic rights and fundamental liberties, intended to eviscerate the civil rights regime that has been established since the 1960s.”
• “The reactionary counter-mobilization is happening on so many fronts simultaneously that it’s easy to lose sight of how things are connected. Ban abortion and contraception, criminalize LGBTQ people…Install strict guidelines for education that are in line with a white nationalist understanding of the past and the present, censor dissent; restrict voting rights, purge election commissions…These are not disparate actions. The overriding concern is to maintain traditional political, social, cultural, and economic hierarchies. It’s a vision that serves, first and foremost, a wealthy white elite – and all those who cling to white Christian patriarchal dominance.”
• “Long-standing anti-democratic tendencies notwithstanding, the Right has been radicalizing significantly in recent years. Why now? The structural answer is that America has changed, and the conservative political project has come under enormous pressure as a result. The Republican hold on power has become tenuous, certainly on the federal level, and even in some states that had previously been solidly ‘red.’ The Right is reacting to something real: The political, cultural, and most importantly demographic changes that have made the country less white, less conservative, less Christian are not just figments of the reactionary imagination. Recent political and societal events have dramatically heightened the sense of being under siege on the Right.”
• “But conservatives don’t care about democratic legitimacy. And the Republican Party has a comprehensive strategy to put this reactionary vision into practice anyway. It’s at the state level where the rightwing assault is accelerating the most.”
• “Ideally, the Supreme Court would step in and put a stop to the escalating attempts to undermine democracy and roll back civil rights. But the conservative majority on the Court is actually doing the opposite, providing robust cover for the reactionary counter-mobilization.”