Gene Lyons has been one of the best journalists covering and analyzing American politics. He recently retired from doing his regular column.
But I was recently reminded of this piece of his from 2011 on how Republicans in Congress were trying to sabotage Barack Obama’s recovery program after the 2008 crash. In the 2010 election, the Republicans took back a majority in the House of Representatives.
The House's freshman contingent appears sincerely misguided. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asks sarcastically if what Tea Partyers want is a low-tax, limited government haven of conservative religious values like ... Pakistan.
Not really. What most have in mind is something more like the Deep South of the 1950s -- an imagined paradise with comfortable "aristocrats," a timid middle class, and beaten-down peasants at each other's throats.
Many of them probably saw "The Andy Griffith Show" as a documentary.
[For those who may be wondering, The Andy Griffith Show was a CBS sitcom that ran from 1960-1968. It was one of the rural-based, cornpone-humor shows that were popular at the time.]
Republican leadership definitely appears willing to prolong the pain for partisan advantage. As recently as April, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took credit for 2011 jobs growth. "Over 478,000 Jobs Created Since January, #GOP Majority," Cantor boasted on Twitter.
Never mind that Republicans had yet to propose, much less pass, a significant piece of economic legislation. The improving jobs picture was all their doing.
Needless to say, Cantor's tweeting a different tune after May's disappointing employment numbers. Now it's all the White House's fault. As Washington Monthly's Steve Benen puts it: "Heads Cantor wins; tails Dems lose." [my emphasis] (1)
Cynical and reactionary. This was the Republican Party in the five years before its bear-hug of Trumpism, an even more extreme and mean-spirited of what it already was in 2011.
If there is one thing Trump’s flurry of Trump’s 2025 executive orders should teach the Democrats is that when you have a President coming into office with a majority for his or her party in the Senate and the House, that President’s first two years in office should be peddle-to-the-metal partisan and demanding so as much constructive legislation as possible can be enacted.
Democratic voters want the government to work well and do defend prosperity and democratic rights. Nobody but lazy TV pundits and business lobbyists actually care about “bipartisanship.” Because to them , “bipartisanship” only means Democrats caving in to Republicans.
Notes:
(1) How to sabotage a recovery. Salon 06/09/525011. (Accessed: 2025-29-01).
Joan Walsh did a book back in 2012 during the Obama-Biden Administration called What's the Matter with White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.
Reading the title today, you can almost hear the Trumpistas gasping, "Critical race theory! Critical race theory!"
Chill out, folks. I'm willing to guess that no public grade schools in the US is teaching this book.
She relates how the GOP reacted against Obama during his first term as President:
Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, tried to defend the president in August 2011 with bizarre and condescending racial stereotyping. "His intent isn't to destroy," Coburn told a constituent at a Tulsa town hall meeting. "It's to create dependency because it worked so well for him. I don't say that critically .... As an African American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs." The racism and the racial idiocy were dizzying.
It was also well organized. Hillary Clinton exaggerated a little when she talked about "a vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband in 1998. Yet ten years later, an intimidating nationwide apparatus of overt and covert right-wing character assassins, fearmongers, and race-baiters made the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project look like a friendly fund -raising group for his presidential library.
Rush Limbaugh had the loudest single voice within the anti-Obama media movement. He set the tone for the leaderless Republican Party when he announced on the eve of Obama's inauguration, "I hope he fails." Limbaugh went on, "We are being told that we ... have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president," a glimpse of right-wing psychosexual anxiety I'd rather not have seen.
The Republican Party has been on their current trajectory for a while. Less than a decade after the situation Joan described in her book the Grand Old Party was storming the Capitol on January 6.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of the country's most intelligent public officials — and unlike Liz Cheney, an actual public servant acting in the interest of his society — has warned that the U.S. risks internal assaults worse than Jan. 6 if Congress, the Justice Department and the FBI do not investigate (and potentially prosecute) Trump administration officials for ... their manipulation of science during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their role in Trump's attempted coup-d'état.
Referring to the Obama administration's refusal to pursue charges against the Bush administration for the use of torture, Whitehouse recently told the New Republic, "If Obama had not [said], 'We're not going to look back, we're only going to look forward,' the Trumpsters would have been a lot less bold about doing the reckless damage that they did." [my emphasis]
We the public need to remember what the Republican Party has been for four decades. And the Democratic Party across the board needs to stop pretending otherwise.
To illustrate, here's Shrub Bush on his authorization of torture while he was President, criminal in both US and international law:
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding on Mohammed. ...
Secession fantasies are once again rumbling on America’s fringes, where a small but growing cadre of disaffected nationalists say they’ve had it with the U.S. and want out.
While secession movements are nothing new in the U.S., experts say the energy feels different now. It’s partly because, for the first time in recent history, the movements are drawing support from state-level GOP officials and right-wing media personalities with huge platforms, who are entertaining these fringe ideas. ...
The renewed energy behind these secession and separatist movements —specifically the “Texit” movement in Texas—comes during intense polarization, raging culture wars, a surge in political violence and in the wake of a conspiracy-driven insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. A poll last month from Quinnipiac University found that 76% of self-identified Republicans believe the lie that the 2020 election was plagued by widespread fraud, which offers some insight into how many people question the legitimacy of the Biden Administration. [my emphasis]
The white supremacist tradition in the US is strong. And the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative still plays a big role in it. It's not just for elderly John Birch Society cranks, either. Many younger cranks - and a large portion of the Republican Parrty - are on board with the current secessionist sentiment.
Most cults have easily identifiable leadership figures who push members to the edifice of a belief system, but Q remains ethereal even while delivering messages to the faithful for four years. Trump’s outsized presence brought him a messianic-like following within the movement. Together, Q and Trump are an ample substitute for a clear cult-like figure. According to the most zealous of believers, if Trump or Q say something, it must be true — or eventually will be. [my emphasis]
As large a political movement as the Trump supporters in the Republicans composes is obviously much more complex than a cult focuses on more limited material goals. But this analysis suggests that QAnon provides a flexible but enticing emotional content and a narrative flexible enough to be highly adaptive to changing circumstances, while himself provides the authoritarian leadership figure to give focus to the movement.
Blazakis also talks about the trend that QAnon devotees describe in which they become pulled in deeper and deeper to this thought world by what really is "research," but a type of research structured in content and helped by social media algorithms that winds up providing "researchers" with a very narrow, self-contained range of information heavily embedded in conspiracy theories:
And if someone cannot see the so-called truth, they aren’t looking hard enough. A refrain among QAnon adherents I track online is “dig deeper.” The phrase is often uttered by seemingly hardcore believers and is directed at those who begin to question the conspiracy theory or say they cannot see it.
In 2020, amid a global pandemic and a contentious U.S. presidential race, the QAnon conspiracy theory took on even more sinister overtones. The language of QAnon began to parallel that of previous cult leaders who had encouraged followers to take another step forward toward full indoctrination — a step that could result in self-harm or staging an attack. [my emphasis]
And while it's important to recognize the specifics of trends like QAnon, the Republicans spent decades building a narrative and partisan identity that validates conspiracist thinking. As the passing of Rush Limbaugh reminds us. Digby Parton (From Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump: Rush Limbaugh's legacy is the modern GOPSalon 02/19/2021) gives us this accurate summary of his poisonous legacy:
[Limbaugh's] radio show almost single-handedly created the culture war narrative that has come to define conservative politics. It's not that Limbaugh came up with every element on his own. There were plenty of racists, xenophobes, sexists, religious hypocrites and violent extremists long before he came along. But he found a way to synthesize their point of view into one over-arching worldview: coastal elites, Black people, immigrants, gays, feminazis and environmentalists are your enemy and they want to destroy America.
Seeing its organizing potential back in the early 90s, backbench congressman Newt Gingrich turned Limbaugh's narrative into a partisan weapon, launching a program designed to teach fledgling, right-wing politicians how to talk about themselves as heroic warriors for the American way and portray their political opponents as depraved savages bent on destroying everything Real Americans hold dear. When the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in decades in 1994, Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the freshman class. The new House Speaker said he couldn't have done it without him.
Gingrich was right. And there would have been no Donald Trump without Limbaugh either because there would have been no Trump base without him. Gingrich may have turned partisan, electoral politics into a blood sport but it was Rush Limbaugh who brought in the fans. [my emphasis]
"Post-truth is pre-fascism," writes Timothy Snyder, "and Trump has been our post-truth president." (The American AbyssNew York Times Magazine 01/09/2021)
More details are coming out about the specifics of the January 6 storming of the Capitol at the direct, immediate incitement of Donald Trump himself. PBS Frontline has a documentary called Trump's American Carnage that take that riot as a starting point.
Frontline also is posting long segments of some of the interviews they did for the program. This is one that focuses on the kinds of concerns on which Snyder focuses. It's with Olivia Troye, someone I don't recall having heard of before, who was a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to VP Mike Pence.
She was there in a professional capacity, not as a political adviser, and left Pence's staff in August 2020. This one was done after January 6 but before Biden's Inauguration. She talks quite a bit about the Capitol riot and Trump's encouragement and direct incitement.
She seems to have an impressively nuanced and realistic view of Pence himself. Toward the end (45:00 ff), she's asked about Pence's situation when he was in the Capitol and the lynch mob was coming for him. "I can't imagine what it must be like to have stood by someone unwaveringly, and been in this environment for four years, fully knowing how dangerous this man [Trump] can be. 'Cause we've seen this, repeatedly, and it leads to his own life [Pence's] being put directly in danger by this individual [Trump]. Right? You have the President basically setting up the Vice President of our country in a situation where he puts his [Pence's] life in danger.]."
And, speaking from her professional experience in counterterrorism, "And I have no doubt that the threat level on the Vice President [Pence] will remain high. 'Cause these people are not gonna forget." And at the end, she says, "You can't have unity if you don't have accountability." Olivia Troye is currently part of the Republican Accountability Project.
Snyder talks about how the Big Lie that Trump established around the blatantly false claim that Biden won the Presidential election through election fraud. The Big Lie is something historically associated in particular with the Hitler movement. Snyder describes that infamous Big Lie as:
... Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, [Hannah] Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.
In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.” [my emphasis]
But this Big Lie isn't just a professional-wrestling gimmick that Donald Trump came up with. It's one that the Republican Party in general have been working on for four decades. It's just now graduated from the concept that the Democratic Party is illegitimate to the notion that democratic elections are illegitimate. And the rule-of-law system along with it.
Snyder gives us a sobering reminder of how far along Trump got with his actual plan. And the role that Trump's own lack of knowledge of politics and government and his own laziness played in its failure. On the storming of the Capitol, he writes, "It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around." In other words, "for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, [Trump] could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing."
But it did provide a real-world example of how close it could come. The two groups of Republicans that Snyder calls the Gamers and the Breakers have a template for a coup that they can broadly share. And did broadly share in 2020-1.
If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.
Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished. [my emphasis]
Mark Sumner has an insightful Twitter thread on this process that has played out to this point in the Republican Party. He goes back to what Ronald Reagan called the 11th Commandment, that Republicans shouldn't criticize other Republicans, which as he puts it, "erected a wall on the Republican left, but placed not a single barrier to the right. It meant there was never any internal testing of ideas. There was no competition to challenge and refine claims. No effort to call out extreme views. ..." (01/30/2021)
The Twitter format forces painting in broad strokes. So of course we could point out that the Republican Party at times over those four decades have called out the more extreme views of characters like David Duke and Pat Buchanan. But Sumer describes the basic trend very well. David Duke may have been too bitter a pill for country club Republicans to swallow. But Rush Limbaugh wasn't. Nor Alex Jones.
Snyder also centers the white supremacy element in the current Republican drive against democracy. "In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible." And he says of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, "At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people."
Snyder uses the f-word (fascism) without jumping into the thornbush of academic definition. He writes of using the history of fascism to understand Trumpism, "One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it." Mussolini actually called his politics Fascism - it's where we get the word for that brand of politics - and Hitler modeled his takeover of power after Mussolini's. So we can observe similarities without having to quibble about the precise definition.
Snyder in this article uses the word "cult" only in the context of a "martyrdom cult" the authoritarian governing party in Poland currently uses. But understanding cults does shed light on how the current Trumpian Big Lie functions:
Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. [my emphasis]
In the more narrow sociological-clinical sense of cult, like Jim Jones' People's Temple, or the UFO cult Heaven's Gate, or the Branch Davidians, that doesn't describe the complexity of the current authoritarianism in the Republican Party. But there is a cultish aspect in Trump following.
I'll end by going back once again to what Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks:
[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Trump is no longer President. But the Republican Party is still a Trumpian party. And it is still on the trajectory that took it from 2012 to becoming the Party of Trump. In 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) didn't even bother to adopt a new party platform. They just issued a one-page resolution stating, "RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda." It really is the Party of Trump.
It's been typical since 1992 that Republican voters began repudiating former Republican Presidents as soon as they were out of office. Trump, of course, is leaving under far more controversial circumstances than Bush I or Bush II.
Digby Parton has been saying for a long time that in the Republican worldview, "Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed." She also notes, "And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal." Political ReligionHullabaloo 02/20/2006.
(I got a twinge of nostalgia seeing that post again, coming as it does from the days when blogging still had a "insurgent" vibe about it.)
I was reminded of this reading this column by Bonnie Kristian, Humoring the President Was Not Harmless 01/11/2021, in the longtime conservative American evangelical Christianity Today. Kristian points out why someone could think from a conservative Christian religious-political that support of Trump looks regrettable in retrospect:
The madness in Washington last week was not created ex nihilo. It is the due result of five years of humoring deception, of falsely believing that truth could be brought about by lies. It is what happens when you embrace a president who is dishonest in the little things, and the big things, and just about everything. It is what happens when you “call evil good and good evil” for the sake of political convenience or power (Isa. 5:20). It is what happens when warnings about the importance of character are ignored. It is what happens when those who cautioned their fellow evangelicals against backing Trump—because he has lived a very public life of gaudy rapacity, vainglory, cruelty, dishonesty, and lust—are attacked and dismissed as “liberals” or accused of insufficient care for the unborn.
What we saw in Washington last Wednesday is what happens when the president insists he won an election he lost and, instead of telling him and the American people the truth, his allies go along with it. It is what happens when they file lawsuit after lawsuit without a whit of merit, pushing legal claims so bad they are dismissed in court after court, by judge after judge—including judges nominated by Trump himself.
It is what happens when they prioritize power over honesty and cosset mass delusion, even in Jesus’ name. It is what happens after two months of the president and his associates telling millions of disappointed, frightened, angry people that they were cheated, that the foundation of our representative government was undermined, that they really ought to do something about it, that maybe that something should be violent, and that they should “never concede.”
Unfortunately, this article's argument fit fairly easily into the "conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed" framework.
The Christian Right in the form we know it today first emerged during the Carter Administration and was instrumental in unseating a surprising number of Democratic Senators in 1978 and enthusiastically backed Ronald Reagan in 1980. Voters who identify as white evangelicals are the most important segment of the Republican vote, and have been for decades.
I haven't checked on Bonnie Kristian's public record on politics during the last decade or so. But the fact that people identifying in some way with a Christian Right brand of religion are now saying that, oh, Trump was a sinner with flaws, and, gosh, maybe supporting him enthusiastically wasn't the best idea doesn't actually mean a lot.
Republicans across the board pull this trick as a matter of course when their Republican President loses an election. It's standard procedure.
Did we sell our souls in doing so? Did we compromise our values in the process?
For many of us, the answer is no, and we don’t need to go on an apology tour for our vote. Even if some of our friends were more prescient than we were, seeing that things would end badly, we acted with sincerity before God and man. And if in the years ahead, our worst fears are realized and our country lurches even further to the far left, we will remember why we voted as we did. [my emphasis]
Then he continues with his own version of "conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed."
In a two-party system especially, there are many ways that people can plausibly claim they were voting for "the lesser of two evils". But that also makes it easy for people who enthusiastically backed a candidate to claim afterward that they never really thought that much of the person and go on to the next heroic True Conservative who will one day have to be repudiated in a similar way.
The 2020 election demolished the premise that demographic shifts could create a Democratic majority if we just redoubled efforts to rally “the base.” Statistically, America may indeed become a majority-minority nation by 2050, but this election demonstrated that ethnic groups do not vote as blocs. ...
Exit polls showed about a six-point swing to Trump among Blacks, five points among Hispanics, and seven points among Asian Americans.
Kuttner looks at some of the issues affecting the three voting groups mentioned there.
He emphasizes again at the end the need for Democrats remember that "demography is not destiny" for the future performance of the Democratic Party. But he does mention a critical point that seems not to have come across as clearly as I might have expected after November:
It’s still the case that people of color voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Biden won 87 percent of the Black vote and 66 percent of the Latino vote. And it’s still the case that we need heroic efforts to register African Americans, Latinos, and other groups subjected to voter suppression.
I'm going to repeat in the next few paragraphs something I discussed in Just what does the actual vote total for Trump last week mean? 1/09/2020. Here it's important to keep some basic mathematics in mind. A comparison of the effect of the lower number of voters among a particular demographic subgroup with the higher one comparing two different percentages between 2016 and 2020.
100 people (2016 percentages) 6% = 6 people for Trump, 94 people for Clinton and other) 100 people (2020 percentages) 8% = 8 people for Trump, 92 people for Biden and other)
1000 people (2016 percentages) 6% = 60 people for Trump, 940 people for Clinton and other) 1000 people (2020 percentages) 8% = 80 people for Trump, 920 people for Biden and other)
If the turnout in 2016 is 100, Trump gets 6 votes (6%). If turnout is 1000 in 2020, Trump gets 72 more votes (8%) than in 2016.
If the turnout in 2016 is 100, non-Trump gets 94 votes (94%). If turnout is 1000 in 2020, non-Trump gets 826 more votes (92%). In other words, non-Trump gains 754 more votes than Trump gains. In other words, the lower percentage in that voter demographic in 2020 gives more of an advantage in actual numbers of votes to the non-Trump side.
So the percentage change is something to analyze and to be concerned about. But gaining more votes is more important than the percentage in terms of winning elections. So the non-Trump side in this scenario benefits from the higher turnout despite the lower percentage. A significant change in the turnout can muddy the picture in looking at changes in voting behavior among particular demographic segments of the electorate.
In other words, we shouldn't lose sight of the proverbial forest for the trees.
Laura Santhanam's story 3 voter trends that helped Biden (PBS Newshour 11/09/2020) includes this graphic illustration of the "forest," showing minority vote percentages for Biden in 2020:
The biggest lesson Democrats need to remember from figures like this is that Democrats need to deliver for these majorities among groups including African-Americans and Latinos. This is pretty basic politics. But the Democrats have to deliver on more than "woke" symbolism or superficial identity politics.
This brings us to the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument about whether class, race and/or gender is more politically important for why non-wealthy white people vote Republican. A friend of mine recently posted this on Facebook:
For the race and class aspect of this perennial argument, that image reminds us that this was a very conscious strategy by wealthy planters from way back, like in the "slave patrols" that long predated the Civil War, in which non-slaveowning white men were required to patrol for slaves off the plantation without their owners' permission. It created a definite practical and psychological bond between the wealthy slaveowning planters who were screwing over the ordinary white people and limiting their chances in life and generally screwing up the country with their slave system.
This is an old game, in which of course white racism plays a distinct role and of course class and income and opportunity play a role. The practice of companies in the South using African-American workers as strikebreakers when their regular all-white workforce went on trike was a continuation of the same game. As Donald Trump has reminded us every day for the last four years, plutocrats can be clueless about a lot of things But when it comes to keeping their "inferiors" down, they can usually manage to learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time.
We can always use particular local development to obscure larger trends and vice versa. But some issues do blend the two. For instance, it's the case nationwide that the Republicans' get-out-the-vote operations are more consistent across the country than the Democrats'. This is largely a self-inflicted wound on the Democrats' part, because they have been reluctant for most of the last 30 years to invest adequately in building local party organizations. During Howard Dean's chairmanship of the party 2005-2009, he tried to reverse that trend but Barack Obama didn't embrace the importance of that approach when he became President and head of the Democratic Party.
And in 2020, Democrats tended to do less of the traditional in-person campaigning than the Republicans did. So it still seems to me very likely that some significant part of the shift in minority voters toward Trump is a function of better turnout among people who were leaning Republican. And the very fact that Trump was such a central and sensational issue in the election tended to boost Republican turnout more generally.
The current moment and the early weeks of the Biden-Harris Administration are particular important. Not only because of the immediately urgent problems of the COVID pandemic, the economic depression, and repairing various instances of administrative dysfunction caused by the Trump-Pence Administration. But also because the Republicans are already testing the incoming Administration to see how effectively the Republicans can block them. If the Biden-Harris team responds to Republican bad faith in negotiation by pretending that it is not bad faith, that will further embolden their obstructionism.
The current fight over a new COVID-relief/stimulus bill is the first round. If the Republicans come out of this thinking they've punked the Democrats - which is where it's headed at this particular moment - they will take that as encouragement for what they intend to do anyway, to undermine the Biden-Harris Administration as much or more than they did with the Obama-Biden Administration.
Among the Democratic base, the Brunch Liberals will be ready to declare Normalcy on January 20. Eugene Robinson is already impatient to go back to brunch: Can you feel your blood pressure going down? Thank Joe Biden.Washington Post 12/17/2020. He gushes in his first paragraph. "You know what's truly remarkable and promising about the incoming Biden-Harris administration? It's so normal."
In case we might misunderstand the point, he continues directly: "Soothingly normal. Reassuringly normal. Lowering-everybody's-blood-pressure normal. And after Inauguration Day, we have reason to hope, even boringly normal for days or weeks at a time."
For weapons manufacturers and other corporate lobbyists, "normalcy" never went away. And business as usual will continue, though there will be more lobbying opportunities for former Democratic politicians and operatives. (Not that they were exactly scare anyway!) They will continue doing business as usual.
For devoted Trump fans, which apparently includes a very large part of the Republican Party at all levels, the Trump-Pence years were Normalcy, i.e., freaking out over imaginary QAnon conspiracies run by a mythical Deep State and imagining that scary black people and Latino immigrants were going to confiscate their cars and lawnmowers and shotguns, or whatever. They are already shifting from treating the Biden-Harris Administration as an ongoing crisis and will be howling endlessly about tan suits and Democratic politicians saying cuss words and an endless search for scandals and pseudoscandals of all time.
Then, of course, there are the Proud Boys and similar violence-oriented radical right groups who are already looking forward to "civil war". Their only "normalcy" is looking to promote violence and racial hatred and general sedition against democracy, but their activity and adrenaline levels are already notably increasing. (See Dave Neiwert's latest, Proud Boys torch their claims to nonviolence with hate crime attacks on Black churches in D.C.Daily Kos 12/17/2020):
One of the recurrent myths that far-right street brawlers such as the Proud Boys like to tell each other, in bullhorn speeches and social media posts, is that what differentiates them from “rioters” like antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) is that they don’t engage in arson and property damage: “That’s not who we are!” is a common refrain heard at right-wing events, including the recent pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” protests.
But it is, in fact, who they are, and worse. The Proud Boys who invaded Washington, D.C., last Saturday to protest Joe Biden’s election made that more than clear when they began attacking and vandalizing African American churches with Black Lives Matter signs and banners, tearing them down and burning them in the streets. Metro D.C. police are now investigating the acts as hate crimes. [my emphasis]
Now that Joe Biden has been elected President, even a thoroughly Both-Sides-Do-It guy like Chuck Todd is now willing to call Trump and at least some Republicans anti-democratic, as he showed on Meet the Press yesterday. But he still brought on loyal Trumpist ally Tennessee Confederate Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander to defend Trump with, you got it, Both Sides Do It. Sen. Alexander seems to think that Georgia's Stacey Abrahms was also a Presidential candidate.
But in the Bruch Liberalism daydream that now that Trump is leaving the White House, we're back to our Exceptional American normality with a Democratic President and a Republican Party with stodgy ideas and bad manners that is nevertheless willing to be a loyal opposition and respect the results of elections. Unfortunately, anyone holding on to that idea has probably been taking the commentary from people like Chuck Todd the last way to seriously in the last 20 years or so.
Because the Both Sides Do It world that mainstream pundits report on is a convenient fantasy to protect their access to shameless partisans who will give them anonymous partisan quotes to use: the world of the End of History in which taking political contests more seriously than sports matches. But that world, to the extent it ever actually corresponded to reality, is not the one we live in now.
At the latest, that world became a zombie haunting corporate media newsrooms sometime between the New York Times' first Whitewater story in 1992 and Bush v. Gore in 2000. Trying to make sense of today's US politics against a backdrop of that fantasy land is about as helpful as trying to learn how parents should approach distance learning for 10-year-old during a COVID lockdown by watching episodes of Leave It to Beaver.
But there is of course another deep worry pervasive in this country. It is about America's heretofore unbroken peaceful transfer of power between presidents. It is the notion that all of us, regardless of party, play by and revere the same democratic ideal that we the people have the power to fire our leaders in free and fair elections. This election has revealed a president who doesn't believe any of that, and a party and base that is eager to go along with him. This is not fringe; it is a movement that encompassess [sic] tens of millions of Americans. And to defeat it and preserve American democracy will require resolve, patience, ingenuity, and grit. [my emphasis]
The problem of Trumpism is a particular, symptomatic moment in the Republican Party whose Presidential candidate he was and which has followed him remarkably loyally in his anti-democracy program. The Republican Party is now the Confederate Party, the John Calhoun Party, the Trump Party.
For Democrats and anyone who considers themselves "left" in current, reality-based terms (i.e., not QAnon/One America News/FOX News/Republican Party terms), part of understanding the present is understanding how that, however "classy" and intelligent and compassionate President Obama may come off as a media figure, the combination of his political program during his Presidency and his strategy for the Democratic Party not only failed to achieve the Bipartisanship which he really seemed to value as a good thing in itself. It also left the Democratic Party unable to defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and left their leaders largely dazed and confused on how to politically combat him during the last four years.
Lili Loofbourow's article Barack Obama Sat Out the Past Four Years and It Shows (Slate 12/11/2020) is a timely reminder of this. Obama is not only a popular speaker and media star in his own right. He's also still very influential in the Democratic Party, and very much on the side of Establishment (i.e., conservative) policies and political messaging. She calls attention to one of the most important and persistent characteristics of his political rhetoric:
Barack Obama is ready to come back into the spotlight. After four years spent mostly out of the public eye, right on the heels of Donald Trump’s defeat, the ex-president is suddenly everywhere. ...
But in these recent appearances, the most surprising thing might be that his political remarks about this moment feel stale. Maybe his absence from the fray over these past four years has cost him. Maybe he’s using a different timescale to measure progress (as he sometimes explicitly says he is). But even his harshest remarks about the right don’t capture the hysterical party we’re watching try to steal an election. His recent criticisms of “snappy” leftist political slogans like “defund the police” reflect an abiding faith in a theory of politics that seems passé—as several Black intellectuals and activists have pointed out. Boiled down to its essentials, Obama’s argument is that one shouldn’t “alienate” people who might be converted to your cause if you say things in just the right way. In practice, that means tucking the political self into a package that a “reasonable person”—that usefully unmeasurable political fiction—cannot help but find acceptable and persuasive. [my emphasis]
David Bromwich wrote some useful analyses of Obama's rhetoric and messaging while he was President, although it was sometimes marred by what seemed to be a distinct dislike of the man. But this comment from Bromwich that I quoted in 2012 post is an important observation:
[Obama] has often echoed Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama's many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. [my emphasis]
That post of mine was David Bromwich looks again at Obama's words and speculates about his personality 07/12/2012, in which I also looked at how Obama rhetoric fit so well with the neoliberal policy preferences. As I noted there, Obama distrusted progressives because he's not one, though in 2004-2008 when he first emerged as a national figure, he cultivated the notion that he was. He even regarded progressives with contempt, and I noted there that it was surely in major part because of his identification with the wealthy. I quoted a contemporary speech of his on his tax policies in which he made a point to refer to "the wealthiest Americans -- folks like myself".
In her current piece, Loofbourow observes, "Obama’s commitment to not alienating people is fascinating to the precise extent that it becomes a principle in its own right." (my emphasis)
But that approach has proven to be spectacularly deficient in dealing with the Calhoun-ized, QAnon-ized Republican Party that we now have:
Obama’s personal self-packaging has long been extraordinary. He won two elections with it. But he also disproved his own theory. Despite his extraordinary efforts to perform an unoffending normalcy, he was spectacularly mischaracterized as a socialist, a Kenyan, a Muslim, a criminal, and more. He was demonized by an opposition party whose virulent determination to shove evidence aside has only grown since—they will read Biden as a communist pedophile and Trump as an athletic man of God. This is not an environment where self-editing or careful packaging matters. Nor is it one where bland political slogans gain purchase. [my emphasis]
I'll close by recalling that Obama's "principle in its own right" of non-offensiveness was applied during his Presidency with much more rigor when dealing with hostile Republicans than in dealing with progressives in his own party.
It seems obvious that they have some kind of business plan going forward. They are advertising themselves as a media company and aren't necessarily looking to only political consulting for work.
I certainly enjoyed a number of their anti-Trump ads this year. My understanding is that a lot of their television ads buys were concentrated in the D.C. media market, specifically to get Trump's attention to them. And Schmidt in this interview talks about their marketing strategies for getting under Trump's very thin skin and to try to exacerbate factional divisions in the Republican Party.
What's that you say? Those factional divisions in the Republican Party don't seem to be too evident these days with the party talking and acting like a death cult that is sunk into bizarre conspiracy theories and is massively denying the validity of the democratic Presidential election and with the President and other party officials inciting their rabid fans to armed violence against Democrats?
No, those factional divisions don't seem so clear, do they? Although, to be fair, the cult is also turning on some Republicans who decline to break the law to give the election to Trump by overriding their own state's votes in the Presidential election. (More on that below.)
But the Lincoln Project did go after some down-ballot Republicans including the odious Mitch McConnell. So their play doesn't seem to be to solely related to internal Republican Party politics. Schmidt himself formally resigned from the party, as Martin discusses in her first question, showing a tweet of his from January 2018 saying, "Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party."
Is the Republican Party really a membership organization? The Democratic Party does have an official Democrats Abroad organization that is a membership organization, that to be an official part of it, Democrats Abroad does have to approve you based on your affirmation that you are an American citizen and are living outside the US. But "resigning" from the party for someone who is not a public official or holds some formal party office such as delegate to the national convention is basically just theater.
Schmidt says just after 3:50 that for the Lincoln Project, "This election was about Trump. The second issue in this election was Trump. And the next 300 issues after that: Trump. And that was before COVID."
That was also the basic message of the Biden-Harris campaign: Biden Is Not Trump. And that most likely did contribute to the down-ballot problems. The main Democratic campaign, the Presidential one, was all about not being Trump. They did not put any particular emphasis on defining the Republican Party as an essential part of the Trump problem.
But this raises a real concern. One of the striking results of the 2020 election was that Biden clearly won, but the down-ballot candidates didn't do so well. The Democrats lost one Senate seat and several House seats. The two remaining Georgia Senate elections are next month.
And despite their tangential criticism of other Republicans, the thrust of the Lincoln Project's message was the same: Trump Is The Problem, 300 times over. They reinforced what for the Democratic Party was a problematically narrow focus on Trump alone.
Evaluating exit poll findings involves the extra complication in 2020 that the turnout of eligible voters was the highest the US has seen since 1908. But the exit polls indicated that nationally among voters who identify as Republicans, a higher percentage of them voted for Trump than in 2016. That may be a reflection of the fact that an election that generally brings out more voters would also bring out more with specific partisan affiliation, not just independents. But the results don't show any clear indication that Biden pulled any significant numbers of Republicans switched their preference to Biden.
Schmidt in the interview claims that their efforts were decisive in making the Confederate flags and monuments a more significant issue. Which on its face sound dubious to me. I haven't seen any specific evaluation of the effect that their presence online, in particular their YouTube videos, may have had. The fact that they presumably delighted Democrats and annoyed Republicans doesn't tell us a lot in itself.
After 11:00 in the video, Schmidt is careful to say of how they saw their role in 2020 on the political spectrum, "this is not the Obama coalition. This is not a progressive coalition that elected Joe Biden. It's a different coalition. If it falls apart - and you look at the structural advantage that Republicans have in Presidential elections through the Electoral College - it means that you could wind up with President Tucker Carlson in 2024. Nobody should want to see that."
In other words, Schmidt is talking the familiar line of Third Way and the onetime Democratic Leadership Council: the Democrats need to try to be more like Republicans and reject progressive approaches.
Martin after 11:30 does then press him in the interview about the process that preceded Trump's 2016 victory in the primaries, the road that the Republican Party took that wound up with it becoming the Trump Party. "What part of this do you own?"
Schmidt basically ducks the question by claiming that he has always considered himself a "Jacobin Republican" who tried to get the party to reach out to minorities. This is a Republican media consultant's 2020 version of, "Some of my best friends are black people."
But he does give an actually sensible response when he says that the Republican Party took on the identity of an entertainment show. I didn't hear anything in his response that could be said to "own" any responsibility for that development. But one of the milestones in that path was the Vice Presidential candidacy of the clown Sarah Palin. She was the pick of Steve Schmidt's Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 (he was a senior adviser), a role to which he alludes with his some-of-my-best-friends pitch, but without mentioning Palin. And, among other things, Schmidt made the accusation in 2008 about Barack Obama that he ... acted too much like a celebrity. (Liz Halloran, Republicans Press Celebrity Attack on ObamaUS News 08/01/2008) Essentially the same charge that he's now making against the Trumpified Republican Party. A reminder how much of what the Republicans typically say about Democrats alleged shortcomings and faults is based heavily on projection.
But even an ex-Republican like Steve Schmidt can't pass up an opportunity to attack those he calls "my progressive friends." So he advises in a sneering tone (remember: projection!), "To think carefully about the condescension, about the elitism, about the indifference that a lot of people hear in this country from those messages," i.e., messages he takes to be from his "progressive friends," presumably any message he deems to be "progressive," since he doesn't actually say what messages he means. Like any good Republican might, he disses the New Deal as economically unimportant (!) but good messaging for the Democrats back then.
Some of his analysis in this interview about what constitutes Trumpism is good. But we also do need to keep asking what the Lincoln Project's larger aim may be. Because his presentation here gives us no reason to think that it involves supporting policy agendas even slightly to the left of the Third Way/DLC neoliberal playbook.
About those standout Republicans who go so far as to insist they won't break election law for Trump ...
Here's Chuck Todd's Meet the Press 12/06/2020 interview with Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's Republican Voting System Implementation Manager, who gained wide respect with his emphatic scolding of Republicans who were complicit in supporting Trump's false and destructive claims in support of trying to overturn the election results: Full Gabriel Sterling Interview: Trump has a 'higher' responsibility. (Transcript here.)
CHUCK TODD:
Well, I'm just curious what was it that sparked your decision to come out as, you know, to come out as direct as you came out earlier this week? Was there a specific incidence or incidents that have been happening to you or others?
GABRIEL STERLING:
It wasn’t happening -- obviously, I have a police car outside my house right now. I could see it out the right side of my peripheral vision. There has been police protection for the secretary, his wife received sexualized, violent threats on her personal cell phone. But what, for lack of a better word, set me off on Tuesday was about an hour before, hour and a half before a producer-scheduled news conference, I got a call from the project manager from Dominion Voting Systems out of Colorado who was telling me in a very audibly shaken voice that one of their contractors had received some threats in Gwinnett County. And this is just a young tech. He took a job a few weeks ago. He's one of their better ones. And when I was going through the Twitter feed on it and I saw, it basically had the young man's name, it's a very unique name. So they tracked down his family and started harassing them. And it said his name, "You have committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul," with a slowly swinging noose. And at that point I just said, "I'm done." [my emphasis]
But check this out. Even Sterling still pledges his allegiance to the Party. Just prior to the part just quoted:
CHUCK TODD:
Mr. Sterling, you had made an impassioned plea there that we just played that this has to stop. It doesn't look like he chose to stop. Is there-- could you please debunk or, what he said there when it comes to your role in the Georgia elections?
GABRIEL STERLING:
At this point, it’s a game of whack-a-mole as we’ve been saying. The president's statements are false. They're disinformation. They are stoking anger and fear among his supporters. And hell, I voted for him. The situation’s getting much worse and it’s an environment that’s been built out over years, and it's not just -- you know, Republicans and this side this time. But even in polling up to 2019, up to 50% of Democrats think Russians flipped votes on machines. So this is going both ways. It undermines democracy. We've got to get to a point where responsible people act responsibly. [my emphasis]
Both Sides Do It! He's singing Chuck's favorite song!
Is there is any senior Democrat claiming that "Russians flipped votes on machines"? Sterling didn't cite the poll and (surprise!) Chuck Todd didn't fact-check him in real time or question the claims, which Sterling also references again later in the interview. The Senate Intelligence Committee did issue a report in 2019 that found that Russian cyber-probing of American election systems in 2016 was more widespread than previously generally believed. But as the New York Times reported, the Committee "concluded that while there was no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines, 'Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data' in the Illinois voter database. The committee found no evidence that they did so." (David Sanger and Catie Edmondson, Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds 07/26/2019)
A redacted verions of the report is available online from the Senate's website.
But Sterling goes on to express disappointment that the two Georgia Senate Republican candidates weren't talking a straightforward position against Republican efforts to nullify the Georgia elections in November. But he is careful to say that he still supports them: "I'm a Republican. We need to hold on to the Senate. So I'm still going to vote for them. But I'm not happy with how they conducted themselves in this particular situation." (my emphasis)
I think it would be too generous to call this a mixed message. He's saying he's still going to support senior Republicans who won't defend democracy. The best I could say about it is that it's just sad.
And while we should give people credit for doing the right thing, Gabriel Sterling has a public position of responsibility and trust. He is obligated to follow the law in doing so. The fact that he stands out in pushing back on pressure from his own party to do otherwise is a very damning commentary on the Republican Party of 2020. Public officials obeying the law should be entirely ordinary.
This used to be called "red-baiting". But since 2000, in the US we've been referring to the Republicans as the "red" party - a nice historical irony that I do appreciate - we can't really call their accusations against Democrats red-baiting any more. Maybe, "Reds, baiting," maybe?
I think Bob's suggestion is the right approach for both Democrats like Sanders and AOC who want to use an explicit democratic-socialism framework and for centrists like John Ossoff who may break out in hives at the sound of the s-word: make the Republicans own what they mean by "socialism".
Which, translated from RepublicanSpeak, basically means anything the government might do which benefits anyone other than obscenely wealthy plutocrats like Kelly Loeffler or grifters like David Perdue, for whom being a Senator is mainly a way to make money as a day trader. (They are the two Georgia Republican Senators running for re-election in January.)
I quoted some of Trump's political sleaze-slinging in his Saturday superspreader rally in Valdosta, Georgia, in my previous post.
Make them eat their own definitions. So, Republicans want to defund the socialist police and fire departments? They want to do aware with Social Security - it even has "social" in its name! - and Medicare, which St. Reagan himself called socialist? No more socialist public schools? Well, yeah, that is what the Republicans want to do.
As Bob puts it in his column:
The supposed “socialism” that Democrats support includes the military, police and fire departments, public schools, roads, the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, combating climate change, protecting us all against contaminated foods, overseeing essential scientific research and assuring that medications — and vaccines — are safe and effective.
The last of those are both central to combating the current pandemic and a striking illustration of the absurd lengths to which some Republicans are willing to go to fight what they deem "socialism."
Make them own their definitions!
But he adds an important caution: "it will take something at which the [Democratic] party has long been notoriously poor: messaging."
Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila in their Weekends podcast for Jacobin interviewed the historian Corey Robin in their weekend segment, Trumpism After Trump with Corey Robin 12/05/2020 (his interview begins just after 56:40:
Corey Robin is someone I have found to be consistently provocative in a constructive way.
I tweeted a dissent from one of Robin's points about Thomas Jefferson:
I don‘t how we can meaningfully project the fascism concept into the late 18th or early 19th century. TJ may not have possessed saintly (or even bourgeois) moral consistency. But how we can write him out of the history of democracy without indulging some Charles Beard fantasy?
Robin in the Weekends interview mentions that his entered left politics via the labor movement. I was also involved in labor issues and organizing in my early 20s and have always throught that a strong labor movement - including effective unions, just to be clear! - so it was interesting to hear Corey Robin mention that as part of the grounding of his political perspective.
Having spent decades on the left side of the political spectrum, I do periodically feel the need to define myself in relation to current left positions and controversies. Because, hey, it wouldn't be the left if we weren't fighting over what are the True Left positions.
The Weekends interview is one I found useful without necessarily being in total agreement with all the points he makes. I did a four-part review of his best-known book starting here, Corey Robin’s "The Reactionary Mind" (2011): (1 of 4): classical liberalism in the US 01/09/2012. That one goes into more detail on the topic of the tweet above, which is how to understand the Revolutionary generation in the US while not falling into the problems of Charles Beard's capital-p Progressive analysis of the American Revolution and the politics of the Constitution.
It starts off with his own story of a strange interaction he had with Neera Tanden, Biden's pick to head his Office and Management and Budget. He then gives a broad overview of the development of the present-day Republican Movement Conservatism. He talks about the relatively dominance of an increasingly conservative mainstream narrative after the re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972. "Their real achievement was to transform the Democratic Party," he says, referring to how the Democratic Party in response to the rising strength of Movement Conservatism embraced a neoliberal ideology that contributed heavily to the vast increase in wealth and income inequality over the last 40 years in the US. It also left them with a political message that blurred any distinct political branding for the Democratic Party.
It produced the current situation of chronic asymmetric political polarization that Andrew Hacker argues became particularly dominant beginning with the so-called Gingrich Revolution of 1994. In his book with Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005), they describe a situation that to a large extent still exists today, only hyper-charged with even more of the money-in-politics problem they identify here:
Although the two parties have both become more cohesive, there remains considerable truth to the old Will Rogers joke about the Democratic Party’s basic organizational deficiencies. (“I am not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”) In crucial areas, from fundraising to congressional leadership to the fervor of the base, the Democratic Party is both less centralized and less networked than the contemporary Republican Party. Individual Democrats, when they have enjoyed power at all, have much more jealously hoarded their autonomy than have the Republican rank and file—a reality on display repeatedly in Clinton’s two terms. Moreover, big money is a strong unifying force for Republicans, but it introduces considerable cross-pressures for Democrats. Important elements of the standard Democratic agenda, especially on economic issues, coexist awkwardly with the realities of contemporary political finance, which require that Democrats seek support from deep-pocketed business contributors. As we will see in the Conclusion, there are exceptions to these generalizations. But they are just that: exceptions. Democrats still have a hard time escaping the Tower of Babel. [my emphasis]
Fortunately, since there have been positive developments for the left along with setbacks, including some of the changes in public opinion and activism that Robin goes on to discuss (along with important historical reflection on the left and the courts in US history). Not least of those is the emergence a much stronger independent left media environment that was still metaphorically in the toddler stage in 2005. The Weekends show is a good example.
For anyone who panics at the thought of any association of Democrats with an avowedly "democratic socialist" media like Jacobin's print and online operations, I would suggest that it's time to get real about what the Republican Party of 2020 is. Their Dear Leader Trump - whose defeat in November's election most Republicans in Congress still refuse to publicly acknowledge - spoke Saturday in Georgia, telling his public COVID superspreader rally attendees that the Democratic Party led by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi is "the lunatic radical left." He said, "Very simply, you will decide whether your children grow up in a socialist country or whether they will grow up in a free country. And I will tell you this: socialist is just the beginning for these people. These people want to go further than socialism, they want to go into a Communistic form of government. And I have no doubt about it." (after 11:15 in the video of the entire speech, full of flatly false claims, from NBC News, Trump Holds Rally In Georgia Ahead Of Senate Runoff Election 12/05/2020.)
He proceeds to describe the two Democratic Senate candidates, centrist Jon Ossoff and center-left African-American minister Rafael Warnock this way: "radical John Ossoff and Rafael Warnock. Ossoff and Warnock are the two most extreme, far-left liberal Senate candidates in the history of our country."
So, no, Republicans are not going to stop calling Democrats socialists and communists. There are only two ways Democratic candidates can avoid that. They can decide not to run for office. Or they can become Republicans. Otherwise, they're going to call you a commie.
Conservatives have been attacking their opponents as "socialists" since, oh, 1865 or so, as Heather Cox Richardson explains in Marx is Not Around the CornerMoyers on Democracy 10/28/2020.
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.
He co-authored a 2012 book with Thomas Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).
It's only gotten worse since. Much worse, as Orstein discusses in that interview. (And, yes, he does say, "This is a cult, Mehdi.") Their book made me more intensely aware of how much the fact of asymmetric partisan polarization is a defining fact of politics in America now. And not just because the ideological center of gravity of both parties both moved to the right. But also because of the Republican Party far more aggressive and combative style in fighting for their own side.
As they said in the book, "Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier." Trumpism was a kind of "desublimation" that made even more raw and obvious what the Republican Party has become. Trump is a freakish manifestation of it. But he's not pursuing a fundamentally different political project than the authoritarian course that has been taken in recent decades.
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein attracted quite a bit of well-deserved attention last year for their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).
It has been much discussed and reviewed. I saw the two of them do a presentation based on the book last year, of which they did quite a few in the process of promoting the book.
They discuss the current toxic partisan environment in the national government in the US. And they rightly identified the main culprit, not relying on the lazy pseudo-centrist both-sides-are-to-blame truism of which the Beltway Village press are so fond:
Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.
Their book offers a number of ideas of reforms that might be sensible and improve the general functioning of the federal government. And they make critical examinations of a number of popular explanations of the current widely-recognized problems. They argue, for instance, that the assumption that gerrymandering is responsible for party polarization as such doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. They argue that its "impact is relatively minor and marginal" on party polarization.
They also use a phrase "the new nullification" that may prove to be a useful term, though I'm still digesting it myself:
Republicans' efforts in the tacit cause of partisan rivalry to block the confirmation of nominees - to embarrass the president and hobble his ability to run the executive branch-are troubling enough. But the new strategy has an additional, even more disturbing element: blocking nominations, even while acknowledging the competence and integrity of the nominees, to prevent the legitimate implementation of laws on the books. In many cases, if no person is running an agency charged with enforcing a law, the agency can't easily implement or enforce the law; career bureaucrats are reluctant to make critical decisions without the imprimatur of the presidential appointee who should be running the agency. We call this - together with other tactics, including repeal of just-enacted statutes, coordinated challenges to their constitutionality, and denial of funds for implementation - the new nullification, in reference to the pre-Civil War theory in Southern states that a state could ignore or nullify a federal law it unilaterally viewed as unconstitutional. [emphasis in original]
They also mention a salient fact that is typically ignored entirely when Village pundits wring their hands at the incivility of all this partisanship: "for most of the past century, the parties were less internally unified and ideologically distinctive, and more coalitions in Congress cut across parties than is the case today." So, of course in that situation, ideologically divisive issues were often settled on a "bipartisan" basis. But that's something very different than the Village's fetish for bipartisanship as a goal in itself.
Still, Mann and Ornstein don't entirely avoid the peril inherent in focusing on process and institutional issues, which is failing to give full significance to the reality that content matters.
Bipartisanship or consensus isn't a good thing in itself. Ever. It may feel good, but it's never a good thing in itself in isolation from what action or lack thereof is being decided. Some of the worst decisions the American government has ever made were done so on a broadly bipartisan basis. The ending of Reconstruction in the South in the 1870s, for instance, in which Democrats and Republicans agreed to withdraw federal forces discontinue using federal forces against armed white terrorism and leave the laws unenforced, while white Democrats overthrew the democratic governments there by force and violence, and many states sustained segregation and un-Constitutional voter suppression laws against black citizens (which also affected poor whites) well into the 1960s.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed in 1964 on a broad bipartisan basis, becoming the legal and political figleaf on which the Johnson Administration justified the full-blown escalation of the Vietnam War - an escalation he was elected in 1964 opposing.
The list could go on: the open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the rush bipartisan approval of the PATRIOT Act that same year. The debate in Congress over Old Man Bush's Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 may have been more nominally civil. But it resulted in a decision to authorize military intervention, a decision I supported at the time but in light of subsequent events and revelations about how the Bush I Administration made its case for war, I regard now as very much a bad one.
The debate over the Iraq War and the authorizing resolution in 2002 also passed on a bipartisan basis, though Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd opposed it intensely. The fact that it was bipartisan didn't make the decision any less destructive, irresponsible and reprehensible.
Mann and Ornstein devote their first chapter, "The New Politics of Hostage Taking," to the debt-ceiling fight in 2011, using it as example of how asymmetrical political polarization torpedoed a Grand Bargain, which they characterize this way: "What that produced was a year of hostage taking and wrangling in Congress, misdirected steps to deal with the deficit, and nothing whatsoever to remedy the public's greatest concern - chronic unemployment."
But what was the content of that Grand Bargain likely to have been? "Grand Bargain" basically means cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Very bad policy, a very bad idea. (See Bob Kuttner, The Grand Bargain We Don't NeedHuffington Post 3/10/2013) And we know that the Democratic President was in full Heinrich Brüning mode, as he is again at this present writing. We know he offered up a large and very damaging increase of the Medicare eligibility age by two years. He was also pushing for using the "chained CPI" scam to cut benefits on current and future Social Security recipients.
And the whole debt-ceiling debate was about how much austerity to impose on the US economy that was then and still is now in a weak recovery, employment levels still a long way from the 2007 level and well-paying jobs even scarcer. All this while Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain were demonstrating dramatically and in real time how damaging austerity policies in the middle of a depression are.
So, while the debt-ceiling fiasco did illustrate the partisan and institutional dysfunctions that Mann and Ornstein describe, in that context a more successful partisan and institutional process would have produced a really bad set of policy decisions. We can distinguish between process and result. But they can't be treated in isolation from one another. And that's not only true for that particular incident.
But the thrust of the book is to point out real problems that block the functioning of healthy democratic processes in a major way. And they do point out the massively corrupting role of big money, which is intimately connected with policy outcomes. If wealthy donors dominate the political process, outcomes will be skewed in a way that favors the narrow interest of that class.
Mann and Ornstein are also not promoting some pseudo-centrist "postpartisan" or end-of-ideology perspective here. For instance, they write:
... beware of nonprofit political groups bearing independent presidential candidates and balanced, centrist tickets. Americans hate political parties in general but the parties are essential vehicles to represent their values and views and to give direction and purpose to government. A democracy cannot float above politics; politics - and parties - are critical components of our democratic DNA. Political groups promoting the siren song of transcending politics instead of working to change the dysfunctional behavior of those in politics and government suffer from their own democratic deficit and are more likely to play spoiler or produce an ungovernable administration than to remedy dysfunctional politics. [my emphasis]
