According to the media and the House committee investigating January 6, the face of rising fascism has been a young one. Or young-ish, anyway, especially in a graying country like the United States. A lot of attention has been paid to the incel and 4chan communities, or other places where young men in their teens and early 20s are being radicalized. The 2017 "Unite the Right" riot in Charlottesville, Virginia crystallized the image of modern fascists as college-aged men with floppy haircuts and polo shirts. A number of authoritarian groups have grown up under Trump, but by far the most attention has been paid to the Proud Boys, whose name and manner of dress cast an image of youthful streetfighters. In the American imagination, "fascists" are young men, such as Hitler's Brownshirts, who are believed to have the energy and stomach for the skull-cracking necessary to impose their will to power.
As demonstrated by January 6 and the years of street fights in Portland, Oregon, this threat of relatively youthful violence should not be ignored. But there's a quieter, more pernicious threat to democracy: Older, retiree-aged Trump fanatics.
To understand the threat, it's crucial to look at how elections are being undermined in 2022 and ahead to 2024. As January 6 showed, violence may make a big splash, but it's harder to actually hijack elections that way in the high-tech 21st century. For that, you need systematic breakdowns. The GOP has long used red tape regulations to gerrymander and suppress voter turnout. Even Trump, despite his fascination with violence, first tried to get the courts to steal the 2020 election for him, before resorting to inciting the Capitol riot. Even then, the violence of January 6 ultimately revolved paperwork: Preventing electoral votes from being counted in hopes of invalidating the election.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
What you need, in other words, are people who have the time and resources to engage in bureaucratic meddling. Trump is very fortunate in that regard — by far his largest and most robust vein of support comes from people of retirement age. (People over 65 turned out for Trump in greater numbers than any other group of voters.) A veritable army of Fox News-drunk grandparents is forming, ready to interfere every step of the way with the systems that turn out, collect and count votes.
Last week, in a segment for the "Fever Dreams" podcast, Daily Beast journalist Will Sommer reported that the popular Trumpist website Gateway Pundit has put together a surprisingly intense 11-page "how to" guide for jamming up elections on a local level. Of course, the guide doesn't admit that's the goal; it claims to be designed for taking "proactive" steps to "prevent Democrats from cheating and stealing elections."
Reading the guide, however, clarifies that the goal is to hinder the ability of election workers to do their jobs. The guide tells readers to insist they "be stationed at major ballot transfer locations," which includes every post office, "loading dock at the central tabulation centers, and possibly at the print vendors." The guide instructs readers to routinely demand "investigations" of any box of ballots at any point in time and to throw fits if their unreasonable intrusions are rebuffed. Instructions are included for various ways to slow down the process, challenge the counting of ballots and otherwise make it difficult, if not impossible, for ballot counting to move smoothly and efficiently. The guide recommends readers "rent a motor home for the very problematic tabulation centers" and "[p]ark it close to the facility as the command center" for teams of election meddlers to work from. ("Problematic" is unsubtly defined as "Democrat run facilities" — basically a way to direct their readers to districts where Democrats vote.)
The guide admits its elaborate plans for election obstruction would take a lot of time and energy to realize: "This is hard work so have some fun too!"
That's why it matters that Trump's allies have an army of retirees to draw on — the kind of people who have the motor homes to use as "command centers" and the time on their hands to spend harassing election workers.
Last month, the Washington Post reported election officials in various swing states are complaining about "an unprecedented wave of public records requests" that "may be intended to hinder their work and weaken an already strained system." The requests often use the exact same wording. What appears to be happening is a campaign of copy-pasting from guides spreading online in right wing forums, much like the one published by Gateway Pundit. At least one surge of nuisance records requests has been traced back to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who explained on his pro-Trump podcast how his listeners could overwhelm election officials with these requests.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
Lindell claims he's not trying to disrupt elections offices by overwhelming them with pointless busywork, but the timing and repetitiveness of the requests say otherwise. At the same time, many of those filing requests can't explain, when asked, exactly what they're looking for. It all points to the same goal, according to the Post: "[M]aking it more difficult to run smooth elections and giving critics new openings to attack the integrity of election administration."
Mail-in ballots are being sent out, early voting has started and elections offices are gearing up for the final crunch time, and there's every reason to worry this campaign will only ramp up. It's hard to track the spread of these guides, but it's reasonable to worry they are finding a significant audience through community spread, as Trump supporters share with each other through email forwards and on social media. Masses of Trump supporters, mostly retired, with plenty of time to badger and harass election officials could do a lot of damage by slowing down and perhaps stopping the collection and counting of ballots, all under the guise of fighting "fraud." Imagine thousands of Ginni Thomases, drunk on conspiracy theorists and blessed with nothing but free time to act on them.
The perennial organizing problem for fascists and other flavors of authoritarianism is that they are usually unpopular, rarely getting more than 25-30% of the public's support. (Even the recent election of "post-fascist" Giorgia Meloni in Italy was accomplished with only 26% of the vote.) They win in part because the opposition is divided and distracted. But political success, for authoritarians, also means putting in the work hours necessary to overwhelm the will of the majority. Hitler's Brownshirts were young, but they also had a lot of free time due to high levels of unemployment. With low unemployment, nearly everyone in the U.S. is too busy right now to give much time or energy to political organizing, except retirees. Retired right wingers could be the secret ingredient to making Trumpism succeed despite its unpopularity.