Two weeks before the election, the top story on Fox and Friends is that Joe Biden’s son Hunter – or so says Rudy Giuliani – has taken bribes from China and Ukraine, and there’s now supposedly evidence unearthed on an old laptop that he’s given kickbacks to his father. But then they say Biden is only a puppet who’s already showing signs of dementia. If he becomes president, the country will actually be run by the ‘radical socialists’ Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who intend, Laura Ingraham says, ‘to punish anyone who gets in the way of their cultural revolution’.The Republicans have cultivated a party and media environment in which grievance and projection are constant. Along with their national program of voter suppression and fundamental opposition by their Congressional party throughout Obama's Presidency and their well-funded astroturf operations like the Tea Party events, the have been able to achieve much of what their oligarchical donors want. Far-reaching freedom from taxation for the wealthiest individuals and massive corporations. Drastic cutbacks in business regulations. Shameless corruption in government. Starving the IRS so they are unable to conduct adequate tax oversight on business and the wealthy. Pushing privatization schemes, notably including wrecking the Post Office as a prelude to privatization. Blocking virtually all policy initiatives that would enhance social insurance and the social state. Promotion and support of authoritarian policing. Packing the federal courts with rightwing hacks. To name a few.
If the Democrats prevail, Fox News warns, Americans will be ruled by an ‘unholy alliance’ between ‘the billionaires and the Bolsheviks’: billionaires want to depress wages, so they’re in favour of opening the country’s borders to immigrants who’ll take American jobs and remake the culture. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks will use ‘every tool in the government’s power to harass Americans who defy the socialist edicts. It’s going to be a long, dark period of recriminations and retribution.’ You won’t learn these truths in the New York Times or on CNN. Only Fox News can be trusted. More than half its viewers say there is nothing Trump could do that would ever cause them not to vote for him. [my emphasis]
This model is working for their donors. And for a Republican Party that depends on the less-democratic aspects of our Constitutional structure to maintain their power, it also works. The fact that Donald Trump turned out to be so astonishingly incompetent at governing it not something that is going to make them retire their authoritarian playbook.
In any case, incompetence and corruption comes with authoritarian government, even when they manage to implement policies that economically benefits some significant part of the general public. Remember George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? Hurricane Katrina? Heckuva job, Brownie?
Speaking of the unspeakable, part of the Republican Party is queueing up another Cheney to pick up the wreckage in the likely event that Trump loses the election (Alex Thompson, ‘She Kind of Reminds You of Margaret Thatcher’: Liz Cheney Prepares To Make Her Move Politico 11/01/2020):
Now [Dick Cheney's] 54-year-old daughter—whose devotion to an unapologetically muscular [i.e, militaristic and prowar] foreign policy is every bit as ardent as his own — has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s fastest-rising leaders. ...The Cheney fans do not represent any kind of fundamental change in direction for the Republican Party. It's a rejection of the Trump crime family's faction. But not of the party's direction.
As with many ambitious Republicans, however, Cheney’s future hinges on what happens Nov. 3 as the country renders a verdict on Trump’s Republican Party with his blend of “America First” foreign policy and populist, big-spending domestic policy. Many of Trump’s most prominent supporters sneer at the idea of a Cheney being the future of the party, confident that Trump’s 2016 victory is a sign that the Bush-Cheney-era conservative moment is over. ...
Whatever direction the party takes, Liz Cheney will have something to say about it. For just as Donald Trump Jr. is a devoted advocate for his father’s views, so, too, is Liz Cheney a latter-day avatar of her father’s legacy.
Behind her veneer of support for President Trump—she votes with him “something like 97 percent of the time,” she bragged on “Fox & Friends” in July—there’s a far harsher reality: Many of her and her father’s closest friends and ideological allies have become the most virulent Trump critics. The large group, which includes former national security adviser John Bolton, Steve Schmidt, Steve Hayes, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin, are rooting for Liz to restore their brand of conservatism after Trump.
"I've talked to a lot of people about the conversation we have to have in the Republican Party, about how to cut this albatross off from around our necks if he loses,” Bolton told POLITICO, referring to Trump. “And I think it's going to be very robust across the board." [my emphasis]
And it's not new for the Republicans to go through a post-election ritual of nominally repudiating a Presidential candidate that just lost - Old Man Bush, Robert Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney. The same thing happened with Shrub Bush after he termed out with terrible approval ratings after eight years of plutocratic policies, the disastrous Iraq War, the 9/11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. Digby Parton explains the attitude like this: Conservatism can't fail, it can only be failed. And since Republican policies always fail the majority in some substantial way, some kind of ritual rebranding is a regularly recurring necessity for the Republicans.
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