The Atlantic: “To fully grasp this story, you need to understand that the standard forms of American political polarization don’t exist in Sumner, a rural but rapidly suburbanizing county where Democrats are not part of the equation at all. None has won any county office for more than two decades. Instead, 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”). The Constitutional Republicans’ website explains that RINOs are different from themselves: “They raise taxes, they vote to silence the citizens, they won’t protect private property rights. They often partner with Democrats to defeat true Constitutional Republicans like us.”…
The Constitutional Republicans are confident in these views for a reason. “Our beliefs are derived from the bible,” their website declares: “We pray at every meeting and we seek God in all we do! His wisdom guides our decisions.” The same source gives them confidence that their enemies are wrong. “Evil never sleeps,” Mansfield wrote on Facebook, after reflecting on the critics who he said were attacking him for fighting against new development in the county, “so we must heed Churchill’s words, never give in, and never give up fighting for what is good and right.”…
Nevertheless, the cascade of tiny legal and procedural changes designed to create an unlevel playing field, the ruling party’s inexplicable sense of grievance, the displaced moderates with nowhere to go—this did seem familiar from other places. So was the sense that institutional politics has become performative, somehow separated from real life. The Tennessee Three staged their protest on the floor of the legislature, after all, because the conversation unfolding there had taken no notice of the much larger protests happening outside the chamber. A few days earlier, a horrific mass shooting at Covenant, a private Christian school in Nashville, had galvanized the public. Opinion polls showed that more than 70 percent of Tennesseans want red-flag laws that would allow officials to remove guns from people who might misuse them, while more than 80 percent support background checks and other gun-safety laws.
Those enormous majorities were not reflected in the legislative debate. In the days following the school shooting, it was just “business as usual,” Justin Kanew, the founder and editor of The Tennessee Holler, told me. Kanew, a transplant from California like a number of people in Nashville, is himself a former Democratic candidate for Congress in Tennessee. During his campaign, he saw a gap in the public conversation, and that experience led him to found the Holler. Or rather the Hollers: There are now several Twitter offshoots—the Chattanooga Holler, the Clarksville Holler, and so on—all focused on the hyperlocal issues that the statewide media were missing. Kanew’s own talent is for a form of campaigning journalism: He produces short video clips, often of state legislators, and then circulates them on social media. Sometimes they go viral. That’s what he was doing on the day the Tennessee Three made their protest. “There were thousands of people showing up at the capitol,” he told me, “asking for something to happen. And if nothing had happened, that would have been pretty deflating.””