The president of the organization that essentially invented second-term Trumpism isn't content with what the Trump administration has done, and what it intends to do, at the federal level. If you live in a big city in a red state, it wants your state to take away your right to self-governance.
Right Wing Watch reports:
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urged right-wing state legislators this month to “de-charter” liberal capital cities and replace them with “state municipal districts.” ...
"When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense,” he urged.
Roberts called Austin, Texas his "adopted home town" and described it as "a once-great place that has been taken over by Marxists."
Roberts’ justification for this brazen attack on democratic self-governance? He claimed that the biggest threat to the Trump-Vance agenda, which is essentially the Project 2025 agenda promoted by Roberts and Heritage, is “that there are government entities that illegitimately are imposing something other than the American dream on their people.”
Roberts said this in a speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which crafts many of the right-wing laws that Republicans pass in states where they hold power.
What Roberts is describing is apartheid. Any city run by "Marxists" -- the current right-wing name for "liberals" -- should, according to this vision, become an occupied territory, like Gaza, or like the Bantustans established in apartheid-era South Africa. (No surprise, of course -- these cities are too liberal for the right and insufficiently white.)
Roberts describes liberal city governments as "government entities that illegitimately are imposing something other than the American dream on their people," which makes Heritage's worldview clear: even though voters in these cities democratically elected these governments, and have the right to vote them out in the next election cycle if they don't like the results, the governments, Roberts says, are mistreating "their people" -- meaning people like Roberts, who are the only legitimate citizens a government should serve.
Hardcore Republicans believe that only Republicans are Americans, and have felt this way since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan's first interior secretary, James Watt, said, "I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans." When House Speaker Mike Johnson recently said that President Trump's approval rating was 90% according to CNN, he wasn't lying or exaggerating -- earlier this month, CNN's Harry Enten reported that Trump's approval rating was 90% among Republicans. To Johnson -- and Roberts and the rest of the GOP -- these are the only voters who matter.
Which is why they think it's fine if Democratic city-dwellers lose their basic democratic rights. I think it's only a matter of time before a red state tries to carry out this aspect of the Heritage agenda.
Republished with permission from No More Mister Nice Blog.
