Saturday, December 5, 2020

Another reminder: the Republican Party is a Trumpist party

Michael Tomasky has written an assessment of the 2020 election results that strike me as unusually pessimistic from him: What Did the Democrats Win? New York Review of Books 11/18/2020 (12/17/2020 issue).

But his assessment of the Trumpification of the Republican Party is realistic:
But even if Trump himself fades, it’s hard to see the changes he has effected being undone. No one else will be quite as brazen as Trump, but he and his 73 million votes have taught the party that created him a great deal. Openly being a white ethnonationalist carries surprisingly little penalty, and in fact brings considerable reward. Ditto flouting constitutional traditions and norms—oh, they will eviscerate you on Morning Joe and the Times editorial page, but Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court and Merrick Garland does not. You can lie and lie and lie and invert and pervert the truth endlessly, and half of the media and country will be onto you, but the other half will pick up on your cues and rearrange their understanding of the world to suit yours, and together you will fight the other half to a rough draw, even on a matter as serious as the effective negligent homicide of tens of thousands of Americans, if not more.

The Republican Party will not stop doing, or being, all of the above. Its authoritarian impulses, which predate and have enabled Trump, will continue. There is no one in the party—no one—urging it to pull back from the pursuit of total dominance by means of the courts, racial gerrymandering (which it will continue to control), the rules of the Senate, and the imbalance of the Electoral College. [my emphasis]
I hope Democrats will recognize this. There is no Golden Age of Bipartisan Harmony on the horizon. Much less standing just the other side of Joe Biden's Inauguration.

No comments:

Post a Comment