Stealing It Fair and Square
Let's deconstruct a MAGA mindset
The short Facebook Reel dropped on April 3. It was a clip from Loud Light, apparently from 2022, in which Kansas House Elections Chair Pat Proctor (R-Leavenworth) mansplained, well, how elections worked. (Sorry, non-FaceBookers: at the time of this post, it’s not yet available on Loud Light’s YouTube feed.)
Here’s an audio file (if it works, if I did this right, blah, blah…):
There’s like all these like women uh like 20 to 30 year old women who, you know, that you never saw at the polls before. And it’s like a long line. The long line.
And they’re all there to vote. It’s just uh, it’s, they’re stealing it fair and square.
They all came back out, cause I can see ‘em. You know you had seven hundred unaffiliated female voters, 20 to 30, that all came out just to circle in one circle because it was the only question on the ballot. And they all came back out for the general to vote again.
As you can see from the image above, by the next day, hundreds of folks had commented and shared the clip. Most of the comments fell into two categories, which I will call PROCTOR’S AN IDIOT and PROCTOR’S A FASCIST.
The PROCTOR’S AN IDIOT remarks noted correctly that voting is the right of, well, voters, so it’s kinda hard to “steal” an election by voting in an election, making “stealing an election fair and square” a somewhat idiotic statement.
Somewhat more on-point, but underdeveloped, were the PROCTOR’S A FASCIST comments, which implied that the House Elections Chair doesn’t seem to want women who aren’t solid, conservative, anti-abortion, card-carrying Republicans to vote in elections on proposed constitutional amendments the solid, conservative, anti-abortion, card-carrying, Republican supermajority of the Kansas legislature placed on an August primary ballot in the first place once the state supreme court ruled that our constitution protected the right to choose.
The same two categories of replies emerged when I shared the Loud Light clip. A great friend of mine noted the self-contradiction, and I responded.
I think my remarks need some unpacking.
So let’s delve into the psyche of MAGA and its brain-poisoned, supremacist servants like Rep. Pat Proctor.
No One Can Steal From You Something You Don’t Already Possess
Let me say that again: No one can steal from you something you don’t already possess.
So when Proctor was so outraged that 20- to 30-year-old women were “stealing” the 2022 election on abortion rights in Kansas, he revealed a tell.
He was signalling that he, his Republican party, and their supporters were the true owners of that election, the rightful deciders of the question of whether people should have bodily autonomy in Kansas.
You know this is true because Republicans set it up that way, placing the vote for the constitutional amendment, lyingly titled “Value Them Both,” on a primary ballot, when notoriously few regular-Joe and -JoAnn voters turn out, and when the hardest of the ideological die-hards can be guaranteed to show.
And when they did show up, he complained about it: people—women—were stealing the election fair and square. Young women. Women who hadn’t really been all that active or engaged in politics before. Completely outside the natural order of things. What the hell was happening? What’s next?
You also know this is the reigning mindset because of other things Kansas Republican electeds have said on the issue, like when former Republican Rep. Brenda Landwehr tried to justify a 2024 bill prying into the reasons and backgrounds of abortion seekers by explaining, “We just want to have more information. Make sure we’re making the right decision for these women.”
We make decisions for women. Women don’t make decisions for themselves. That’s not how this is supposed to work.
Republicans in Kansas hold the power. They decide. Their agendas dictate. Be those agendas libertarian (low taxes, low service, low regulations) or theocratic-authoritarian (telling you what to do in your bedroom, ogling what’s in your pants, selectively penalizing disfavored services like abortion, or stifling the reality of diversity in public life), the GOP here believes they run the show, so of course, they believe that every election is their property and every outcome must confirm their power.
That’s how the election is “theirs” to be “stolen” by uppity women “you never saw at the polls before.” That’s the root of Proctor’s outrage.
The upset is almost funny. Almost.
Want to keep young women, young people away from voting? Then don’t overreach. Don’t overturn half a century of constitutional rights. Don’t greet the news of an increasingly diverse United States with white supremacy and male supremacism. That would probably ensure politics remain sufficiently safely boring to keep young adult voter turnout low.
But they just … couldn’t do that. They couldn’t just do … good government. They had to press their advantage, pander, ride the various tigers or leopards they unleashed, then have the audacity to be stunned and outraged when the people targeted got activated about it.
Stealing Implies an Owner … and a Thief
If men like Proctor and his GOP are the “rightful owners” of any election in Kansas, then who could possibly be our thieves? People who have no legitimate claim on the election, on the power to decide public policy and laws here. People who are … by definition, illegitimate.
Illegitimate when they seek to have their say, to have any say that matters. Illegitimate when they try to vote. Illegitimate when they try to influence their elected representatives to vote a certain way, or even vote based on facts as opposed to partisan interest or pressure or ambition or propagandistic hate-mongering.
None of us should be strangers to the theme that “some people are illegitimate.” The current POTUS opened with it during his first foray into politics by questioning the “legitimacy” of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, a dog whistle chord hitting the combined racist trope-notes of “Black men are not qualified to rule this white country,” and “Black men are illegitimate from birth, in that they don’t even know who their fathers are” — a nod to the long-standing right-wing smear of cultural dysfunction in Black families,1 of the “unnatural” dominance and sexual profligacy of matriarchs in Black households who fail to raise up Black boys “the right way,” thus dooming them to failure, criminality, and other waywardness.
Trump’s and the rest of the GOP’s “Stop the Steal” messaging came to focus on urban centers, typically more progressive in voting patterns and more racially diverse than, say, practically anywhere in Kansas. Allegations of voter fraud focused on cities, painted by Trump as corrupt and crime-ridden, their vote results preemptively declared rigged.
It became plain that the message was really Too many progressives and too few white people live in these cities, so their vote-totals are, by definition, illegitimate. Only True Americans—heartland, rural, white Americans—are legitimate Americans, so only their views count, and only their votes should count.
Which is to say, People who should have no say are voting, people who shouldn’t count or matter are trying to count and matter, and that’s against the natural order of things.
It’s a common theme for modern Republicans since the Democrats embraced civil rights. The Claremont Institute, the think tank that went Trump before going Trump was cool, and whose board member John Eastman was one of the brainiacs behind the legal-sounding fake elector scheme to overturn the 2020 election, was out in front on this very kind of thinking in its “esteemed” publications.
Here’s Glenn Elmers, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and a visiting research scholar at the Claremont affiliated Hillsdale College,2 in 2021, incensed about Biden’s election:
The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.
I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.
…a majority of people living in the United States today can no longer be considered fellow citizens
People who don’t think like Republicans, like “conservatives,” like MAGA, aren’t really citizens, aren’t truly Americans at all. So we don’t have to listen to them. It’s not exactly about skin color or sex, except that too many people of certain shades and a certain sex choose this unAmerican wrongthink and thus exclude themselves from American citizenry and its protections and privileges.
Such people and what they say, what they want, are illegitimate. Literally, “made illegal,” which is what Rep. Pat Proctor seems to want to do in his job chairing the House Elections Committee, axing the grace period for voting as yet another way to “chip away” at voting rights, announcing he would like to get rid of advance voting, and helping yank the leash of the Governmental Ethics Commission as it looked into campaign finance and elections misconduct.
And now Pat Proctor is running for Kansas Secretary of State, our top elections officer.
Proctor’s own tone and language speak volumes. He singles out age (“20- to 30-year-olds”) and sex (“women”) and experience in or knowledge of politics (“who you never saw at the polls before”).
Consider the obverse to find where Proctor and those like him locate legitimacy: in older male politicos. His whole vibe is a man offended at the most basic, Schoolhouse Rock workings of democracy, and that can only happen in one of two ways: stupidity or entitlement.
I don’t believe Proctor is dumb as rocks. He’s got a doctorate in history, and while that title has tarnished for me as I’ve learned that it’s based on stubbornness as much as on brilliance, I don’t think you can call the man stupid. But this leaves his gaffes and the leaks of them to be explained: if he’s so smart, why is he so often on camera, caught in lies or screwing the pooch?
I think it’s because he’s arrogant. He believes he was born or forged or promoted to rule and command, that he knows best, and others need to fall in line. Because that attitude isn’t yet a perfect fit in the halls of whatever remains of Kansas democracy, he forgets that some of his comrades might find it, and maybe him, off-putting, to say the least. So recordings get leaked. Which is saying something, because the Kansas GOP has pretty much run off virtually every “moderate” it ever had in office. If he’s alienating even this new crop of Yes-Men and -Women, some of them must really dislike him or his approach.
What About “Fair and Square”?
The dissonance in Proctor’s remarks stems not just from “stealing the election,” but from stealing it “fair and square.” What to make of this? Is it just Proctor being dumb?
No. Again, I think it’s a tell, and again, a source of right-wing outrage.
In the right-wing mentality, doing things fair and square means doing the things you have the power to do. You get the power, then you exercise that power to maximum advantage for your agenda, against your enemies. On paper, at least, so far at least, in America at least, you do this in something like technical conformity with the rules, but nobody says you have to do it according to the spirit of the law or the ideals of democracy or any principles that transcend, well, winning.
Donald Trump wins the White House in 2024. He immediately begins insisting and governing as if he has a popular mandate, despite an extremely narrow victory. He has no popular mandate, but he does have a mandate of power over his party in the form of Elon Musk’s money to fund primaries against dissenting legislators or to donate to lickspittle suck-ups who fawn over Trump’s whims. He also has an extrajudicial power mandate in the form of his skill as a stochastic terrorist: legislators who fight him fear for the life and well-being of themselves and their families, according to multiple reports. And now that he commands the federal government’s executive agencies, he has a mandate over police powers, as we’re seeing in the news almost daily.
It’s worth it to note that the word mandate and the word command have shared roots. To the modern GOP, they basically mean one and the same: if you win an election, you have the mandate to command. You are on top, so you set the rules.
This is why GOP legislators don’t bother pretending to represent the one-third or so Kansans who don’t vote for them, why they have little scruple vilifying those voters as “not real Kansans” or “outside, paid agitators.”
Such folks aren’t fellow Americans, grudgingly accepting a loss at the polls who nevertheless try to persuade and lobby politicians of a different party to see the benefits of policies they’re not inclined to like or turn away from plans whose dangers they don’t take seriously. No, they’re losers who backed the enemies who dared to challenge their rightful rulers, thus traitors once removed. Why listen or trust or give the time of day to fools or quislings? Hell, they should be rounded up and shot for treason, certainly if they won’t accept their fate and obey.
It’s the Prosperity Gospel in political form, and this isn’t coincidence, given the influence of Christian nationalism’s teaching that adherents are called to conquer the Seven Mountains of culture, including and perhaps especially the “mountain” of government. One who wins an election is one anointed to do so, one who deserved to do so, as proven by the win, vote totals standing in for dollars in a bank account to signify personal virtue and God’s favor. Unless they’re from the other party, in which case the devil won that particular battle in the Spiritual War and we must outmaneuver him immediately to retake it. Any win by the “demonrats” is, by definition and designation, illegitimate.
So “fair and square” means maximally using one’s power to defeat one’s enemies and enact one’s agenda. This can mean extrajudicial action, but it doesn’t have to. We sloppily allow loopholes and obsolete laws and procedures to remain on our books, believing that we have learned important lessons about abuse of power that will never be forgot. We naively imagine we are all Americans here, all patriots here, all decent human beings here, whatever the bipartisan myth—so the halo of good faith settles over everyone, and we get complacent.
Then the Trump Administration dusts off the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and starts disappearing people allegedly from Venezuela because they allegedly have some connection to a gang few had heard of.
And they dredge up IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, so he can go tariff-mad on the entire world thanks to the fiction that the country faces a national emergency from outside its borders.
What “emergency”? Well, it changes. Fentanyl was one. I’m unsure what the trade-war-with-the-world excuse is that tanked the stock markets. (The McDonald Island penguins seem unlikely fentanyl smugglers, but—hey—you never can tell these days, right? Slippery little guys, they are.)
Congress has the ability to yank back the tariff power and shut all this down, but the Republicans control Congress, and Trump continues to control the Republicans, so they passed a procedural measure to change the meaning of the 24-hour day so they would no longer have the power to stop Trump’s tariffs under the IEEPA.
Is any of this “legal”? Who the hell knows? But it is “fair and square” to Republicans.
“Legal” Versus “Fair and Square”
There are two problems with the whole question of “legal.”
First, to alter an old saying, “Power can fly across the world while Legal is just getting its boots on.”
We’re less than 90 days since Trump’s inauguration and look around. Yes, scads of stuff has been challenged in court, and SCOTUS has even weighed in on a few items, kinda-sorta, but everything’s appealable, TRO-able, injunctionable, and the courts don’t have material power to force anything. So Trump can assert that he has the power to do X, Y, and Z under the flimsiest of pretexts. The DOJ’s lawyers can make fools of themselves with bad faith arguments and non-answers in front of judges. And we just get … another hearing. Maybe a contempt citation … against the lawyers.
When the courts order the Administration to, you know, “turn the planes around” or “get that poor soul back from the lifetime concentration camp you sent him to in a completely different country,” the Administration pivots to “oh, well, you didn’t write it down,” or “the plane was in International waters, so you lost jurisdiction because, um, the President handles foreign affairs,” or “you’ll have to take that up with the dictator who runs El Salvador because, suddenly, we have no power over him.”
All of which sends everyone back to court for more hearings and motions and briefs and rulings and appeals and emergency applications for certiori. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for when cabinet secretaries are going to report on whether they think it’s warranted for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which will open up a whole new suitcase of additional power for Trump to exploit.
Point: “Move fast, break things” isn’t just a saying in the tech world. It’s one helluva great mantra for Republicans who want to wield power without much concern for what the law might say down the road, one day, years from now, if SCOTUS decides to take up a case, if they rule against the Administration, etc. Use power, break the law—by the time any consequences come, if they come, we will have solidified our advantages and accomplished most of what we wanted to do.
We see this in voting rights cases all the time: a state violates voting rights, say, by drawing racist gerrymanders. Challenged in court, maybe they lose at SCOTUS. But it’s too close to the election, so the racist districts stand for now, and bigots get into power. The fact that they rigged the game doesn’t remove the elected officials from office or void their votes. No, they take their seats and rule, voting as they’re told to until the next election, when they might be redistricted out or have to run again. And that’s assuming anything remains of laws like the Voting Rights Act by the time re-election time comes round, with SCOTUS gutting more and more of its provisions and underlying rationale. Why? Because they have the power to do it.
The second big problem with “Legal” is this: Legal is political.
We love to tell ourselves that there are transcendent principles of the law, the rule of law, that supercede partisan infighting, the winner-loser dynamic. That fealty to that system overrides the petty question of who’s on top this week. But I think it’s more than fair to say that we’ve left those days behind us, if they were ever real at all.
I mean, come on. I could go back in history and talk about the Federalist Society or Leonard Leo’s influence. I could talk about the ways in which SCOTUS rulings defy precedent and logic and the established facts of the very cases they discuss. But really, we just have to look around.
The rule of the road in the Trump Administration is that the DOJ serves Trump’s agenda, not the rule of law or any other part of legal ethics. Judges are so important to the GOP that Merrick Garland was blocked from even a hearing, then Brett Kavanaugh’s background was ignored by the FBI on orders from POTUS, and Amy Coney Barrett was shoved in while Ruth Ginsburg was still warm in the morgue. Up in Wisconsin, Elon Musk blew what was pocket change for him but the dreams of avarice for most normal Americans trying to get his preferred candidate onto their state supreme court. In Kansas, we’re looking at electing our supreme court judges because “merit” now means “damn the law—give us what we want!”
Even honest-but-naive judges get rooked into the game of “fair and square” when they buy into narrow textualism instead of seeing the forest for the trees, when they presume good faith on the part of advocates and parties who consistently demonstrate, over time, their commitment to bad faith that, taken together, makes hash of the rule of law. So they decide on microscopic issues of law that allow the powerful to blow holes in the republic and then later, maybe, write a memoir that confesses their regret over, say, their decision in Citizens United.
As Corey Robin posted on Facebook April 6th:
…these maximal foundational questions of major political morality always get pressed and pushed into what seem like these teeny-tiny questions of law and policy and institutional delegation. No one can ever explicitly argue the very big questions in this country, but they somehow know, in their weird legalese, how to conscript the tiniest questions to serve as instruments of those bigger questions. It's bizarre and makes for a profound bad faith in our arguments. We're never really arguing about what we care most about. But that makes our arguments so fascinating and furious. It's like a family that argues over the stupidest things because it can't argue over the real divisions at stake. Our super technical debates can never really support the full weight of what the protagonists in these debates are really arguing about. And they can't admit that. But it does make the job of unpacking and interpreting those debates almost the equivalent of a psychoanalyst's interpretation of a dream.
To sum up, “fair and square” does not mean “legally.” It means “technically within one’s power.” And it’s the technically part that Republicans zero in on. The technicality might be thrown out later by courts, but so long as they can advance an agenda in the meantime, they get a win. Even a loss in court is a win in some ways. They get to attack the courts as biased, unelected, mandarins in robes, deep-staters, whatever, thus playing to their populist knee-jerking base, amassing more support for contemptuous flouting of courts and orders in future, or measures to end-run courts or make judges elected rather than appointed, as we see in Kansas.
When Pat Proctor bemoans legal citizens of Kansas casting legal votes in an election his party scheduled to end-run voter turnout by all but conservative die-hards, he calls it “stealing the election fair and square.”
He means that people he views as illegitimate still have some residual ability to exert electoral power, despite all the ways his party has tried to restrict them. Dammit, there are still legal loopholes that allow these losers to vote against us! We haven’t done enough with our power!
As for elections going forward, there’s a lot of room to restrict the losers. Lots of ways to make us more illegitimate.
There’s proof-of-citizenship requirements to vote. Often, these involve birth certificates, which large portions of the population cannot readily lay hands on. The more paperwork required to certify one’s ability to legally vote, the greater the disincentive to try. Couple this with a wall of indifference or contempt toward those who wish to reach and move legislators from the opposing party, and a lot of folks don’t see the point of jumping through more hoops. The SAVE Act in Congress threatens to disenfranchise anyone whose married name doesn’t match their birth certificate, and that sort of thing must delight the likes of Secretary-of-State hopeful Pat Proctor.
So, no, folks, Rep. Proctor’s remarks do not indicate he’s dumb—except insofar as tearing down the system of justice and rule of law, of the pillars of democracy, all so you can enact a winner-take-all partisan vision of human hierarchy is very dumb indeed.
Which is to say, it is fascistic. And fascism is stupid. It eats its own.
Let’s not let it eat Kansas by giving Pat Proctor any more power.
Though New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan started it.
Remember the 1776 Commission? Trump’s first-term response to the 1619 Project? Whose report on “patriotic education” that dropped two days before Biden’s inauguration denigrated progressivism and identity politics in the same category of “challenges to America’s principles” along with slavery, fascism, and communism? The Commission and its report were punted by Biden pretty much immediately, and almost forgotten, but what we’re seeing in the first three months of Trump v2 should call it all back to mind.
All the members have evil backgrounds, but Claremont was very prominent. The Commission was headed by Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, and one of the Claremont Institute’s founders and former presidents. Charles Kessler, also on the commission, is editor of the Claremont Review of Books and head of the Institute’s Publius Fellows program, which funnels conservatives and politicos into Claremont for indoctrination. Kessler now works with Chris Rufo (of anti-CRT, anti-DEI fame) on the board of trustees at Ron DeSantis’ pet-project anti-woke university the New College of Florida, which is supposed to be a Hillsdale College of the South. Charlie Kirk, of Turning Point USA, was on the Commission. He funneled through Claremont in 2021 under the auspices of their Lincoln Fellowship program. (Rufo was a Lincoln Fellow in 2017.)