'Radicalized' Tennessee Republicans act like far-right authoritarians in a single-party state: report

Tennessee has become effectively a one-party state where Republicans battle with far-right conservatives and Democrats barely even compete for seats, an in-depth article in the Atlantic reported Tuesday.

Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum took a deep dive look into the state which she said is ruled by far-right ideologues she compares to authoritarians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

"Just as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán fights with opposition-controlled Budapest — and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fights with Istanbul, and Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński fights with Warsaw — so do Tennessee Republicans fight with opposition-controlled Nashville," Applebaum observes.

She says the political contest in the state is between the state's MAGA Republicans who publicly claim they are working for God, and “RINO” Republicans – with Democrats largely demonized.

"Jim Cooper, the former member of Congress, told me that getting anyone to run for office as a Democrat in some rural parts of the state is difficult partly because Democrat and pedophile are so often conflated by Republican activists, and potential candidates are spooked," writes Applebaum. "About half of the state-legislature seats were uncontested in 2022."

"As in Hungary or Poland or as in Venezuela," Applebaum warns, "the experience of radicalism can make people more radical. Total control of a political system can make the victors not more magnanimous, but more frustrated, not least because they learn that total control still doesn't deliver what they think it should."

She described a group calling itself Constitutional Republicans that rose to power last year in Sumner County, Tennessee.

"The main opponents of the Constitutional Republicans, who won 14 out of 17 seats on the county commission (following a general election in which only 15 percent of eligible voters cast ballots), are the ordinary Republicans—or, as their opponents would call them, RINOs (“Republicans in name only”)," Applebaum's report states.

After their victory, the Constitutional Republicans declared their activities will be “reflective of Judeo-Christian values inherent in the nation’s founding.” On their website, they declared that their beliefs are "derived from the bible," and they "pray at every meeting and we seek God in all we do! His wisdom guides our decisions.”

Tom Lee, the lawyer for the Sumner election commission, is suing the county, saying the group believes everything that came before them "doesn’t count" and they have no "allegiance to the past."

The Constitutional Republicans also seem to think pedophiles are lurking around every corner.