Georgia in 2024: The Politics of the Absurd
The Big Lie is alive and well in Georgia. Expect the Peach State's Republican Party to weaponize it again if votes don't go the GOP's way next year.
Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize winning French novelist, pondered absurdity. A philosopher who wrote fiction, his books defined the concept through characters who search futilely for meaning in an incomprehensible world. Camus traveled to America in 1946. It was his only trip, and he wasn’t impressed. If Camus had lived at a different time and visited Georgia, he might have changed his mind. These days the Peach State’s politics give new meaning to his concept of the absurd.
A swing state Joe Biden barely won three years ago, Georgia lately has been enjoying its 15-minutes of fame. A gutsy county district attorney is trying 2020’s loser, Donald Trump, for attempting to subvert those results. Trump’s local minions are still mouthing his Big Lie, trashing fellow GOPers who nixed his coup attempt and pledging him their troth next year. And like the last presidential election, opinionators are ascribing a pivotal national role to the state where pollsters see a possible photo finish in the White House race in 2024.
The news fits Camus’ definition of absurdity to a tee. National outlets are covering Trump’s trial; the locals are reporting on the state GOP’s internecine fights; and pundits are peddling their predictions about 2024. It’s all conventional copy, competent but hardly profound, and for reporters after all, it puts bread on the table. It isn’t surprising. Nor would it have been to Camus. “The absurd,” he wrote, “is born of this confrontation between human need (for happiness and reason) and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
Perhaps that’s the problem of journalism in a media saturated age. The latest from Trump’s trials, or his presidential campaign, or his Truth Social posts may lead at the top of the hour or generate the Sunday supplement’s long form views. But the stories and their analysis ignore the massive political absurdity that underlies the flood of so-called news. The fact is, Trump and the Big Lie have fundamentally redefined the nation’s politics. What’s missing is reporting on how they are transforming the country and potentially its fate.
Georgia is a case in point. The Big Lie is the keystone in the state Republican Party’s foundation. Late night comedy writers couldn’t produce skits that outdo the consequences of the absurdity. In 2022, Georgia GOP conventioneers booed their own Governor Brian Kemp off the stage for resisting Trump’s famous post-2020 election call to “find” 11,000 votes, then censured Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State, for the same lèse-majesté. Both skipped the 2023 convention where Trump topped the speakers’ card.
That Trump’s true believers control the Georgia GOP reflects the party’s grassroots. According to an August Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) survey, 57 percent of the state’s Republican or GOP-inclined voters want Trump as their candidate in 2024. State GOP leaders have gotten the message loud and clear. David Shafer, the ex-party chairman, is one of the indicted in Trump’s Fulton County RICO trial. The state party’s two newly elected vice chairmen, secretary, and assistant secretary campaigned for their posts as election deniers. And the new party chairman backs blanket voter challenges to keep non-existent fraudsters off the election rolls.
More important, the Big Lie is undermining Georgia’s democratic process. In March 2021 the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed the Election Integrity Act. While the Orwellian-named legislation may be old news, its coming impact is anything but. The act, among other things, limits drop boxes, toughens ID requirements, and adds onerous absentee ballot rules. But the curbs on voting access, all solemnly blessed by state Republicans in the name of “election security,” aren’t what matters most.
The act empowers the State Election Board to take over a county, city, or town election board if state-level officials don’t like the local board’s actions—for example, how it’s counting the vote. More to the point, state legislators can direct the State Election Board to take that step. The Election Integrity Act’s ink was hardly dry before Georgia’s GOP lawmakers requested an investigation of the Fulton County Election Board. A Democratic Party stronghold, Fulton County accounts for 10 percent of Georgia’s registered voters.
Whatever their hope for findings that could amplify their stolen election mantra, Georgia GOPers doubtless were disappointed. After a two-year-long inquiry, the State Election Board last June found nothing amiss. The outcome only added evidence to the multiple ballot recounts and scrutiny that had already confirmed Fulton County officials did a competent job in the 2020 election and in the 2022 midterms as well. For the Georgia GOPers, that’s beside the point. A product of the Big Lie, the act abides on the shelf for partisan meddling next year.
Indeed, Georgia’s local elections last month provided a harbinger of what’s to come. In Cobb, DeKalb, and Spaulding countries, all part of metropolitan Atlanta, four Republican election board members refused to certify their counties’ election results. The results ultimately were certified in the three counties. None of the four GOP refuseniks presented evidence, instead citing concerns with procedural issues, prior year voting machine programming, or in one case, no reason at all.
“If a county election board refused to certify a major election—such as a presidential race—its results could be delayed and disputed,” the AJC explained in reporting the story last month. “Certification is a mandatory step to finalize results.”
If only 12,670 votes out of the five million cast by Georgians separated Biden and Trump in 2020, it shouldn’t take an army of investigative reporters to lay out what’s in store next year when vote counting starts in a state where the Big Lie is flourishing. As for Camus’ concept of absurdity and the news reporting on Georgia’s politics?
“Once demagogy and falsehoods become routine,” journalist and author George Packer wrote a decade ago, “there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.”
Let’s hope Packer got that wrong.