"It is galling to be lectured about democracy by a man who took power in an election so sketchy that many Americans don't believe it was even real."
Things are the way they are because of how they got there. It is why people study history.
Yesterday this blog predicted that a challenge for future historians would be to figure out why so many "good Republicans" went along with Trump and his flagrant effort to overthrow an election. That consent for Trump weakened democratic norms. It sent the GOP on a path that would have seemed impossible to those very same Republicans a decade prior. What happened to them?
The crazy shock-jocks of the political-media world, from Marjorie Taylor Green to Alex Jones, are understandable. "Fringe groups" have always existed. A function of a political party is to win elections by creating a united front of ideas that are broadly acceptable to the public. That means that the crazy-crowd is kept a fringe. This time the GOP failed.
During the 2020 election and its aftermath, the gatekeepers of the Republican brand had a dilemma: Trump was in full election denial. The normal order of business would be to rebuild the party with concession rituals. Party leaders would pay respect to the rule of law, Constitutionalism, and respect for voters. Trump could go off a cliff on his own, but the respected leaders could consolidate the party around the civic virtues of flag and country. Had as few as a dozen Republicans with national reputations spoken up, American history would have played out differently. Who? Senators who represent the current and future GOP: Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Joni Ernst, John Cornyn, Rand Paul. That alone would probably have been enough. Adding a few present and former House Members--Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan--would have assured it.
The Georgia runoff elections interrupted the concession rituals. The partisan balance of the senate was at stake. The runoffs were on January 5, 2021, the day before the January 6 Capitol riot. Mitch McConnell needed to keep the GOP together and unified between November 3 and January 5. Since Trump was claiming he won, McConnell could not take the chance Trump-forever Republican voters would fail to show up in Georgia. The two months were fateful. Instead of the concede-and-regroup, Republican leaders enabled and validated the Trump stolen-election narrative. It grew in intensity in that period. The "good Republicans" this blog referenced yesterday--people who obey the law, stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, and who accept the verdict of elections--were led down a path of election denialism by the mumbling of GOP leaders. Leaders didn't want to rock the boat before the January 5 runoffs.
By January 6 the GOP was committed to a path. My Republican U.S. Representative, Cliff Bentz, said he voted to overturn the Pennsylvania election results because his Republican constituents expected it. They did, indeed. Even now, two years after the election, Tucker Carlson on Fox presides as the most popular opinion host on TV by continuing to question democracy in America. He calls the election "sketchy" with a sneer. Putin's government pushes political opponents out of windows, but Carlson says Putin is more legitimate than Biden.
History is full of turning points. The assassination of Lincoln, which put Andrew Johnson into office. France and Britain backing Poland in 1939, which gave Germany a western front and eventually brought the U.S. into the war. Those were turning points. At a critical window of time two senate seats in Georgia required Republican unity with Trump, not Republican concession. Two paths diverged, and the GOP took one.
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The path taken encouraged a political party and its media megaphone to go the direction of autocracy and populist resentment. They heard that a great crime had been perpetrated against them. People who disagreed became the fringe--Liz Cheney--not the center. This new consensus added fuel to a parallel fire, resentment over displacement of White heterosexual Christians as the default and only fully legitimate American. They are out to get us. They are picking on us. The election theft is a culture theft.
That fire is intensifying. GOP presidential candidates are following that path and adding fuel to that fire.
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8 comments:
Oh good, more attention for super privileged, sexist and racist TC.
His average viewership, of mostly like-minded, angry, entitled, white men, is 3.3 million. The adult population of the US is over 258 million.
The obsession with TC and Faux News continues.
Why did the white working class (and now more and more members of the working class from other races) go for Trump? Their abandonment by the globalist elites running this country‘s economy. Which areas vote for Trump? “Flyover country”, where the factories were closed and their jobs exported to fuel profits for the elites.
That’s what created the opportunity for a populiist like Trump. It’s too bad we didn’t get a more responsible populist, but c’est la vie.
Historians will likely be analyzing how the GOP degenerated from the party of Lincoln to the party of Trump for many years, but the simplest explanation is often the best. When Barack Obama was elected president, white nationalists and other assorted nut cases went berserk. Recognizing the need to broaden their base, Republicans welcomed them with open arms. Now the inmates have taken over the asylum.
The sordid spectacle their coup attempt has become demonstrates how fragile our Republic really is. Will we succumb to stupidity and madness, or hold the ringleaders accountable? Over two years later, the outcome remains in doubt.
AI will take care of the elites and then so many of us will be unemployed universal income for all may come into being. In the meantime what is galling is TC reporting being galling when he is such a hypocrite. I hope Fox “news” gets sued for more than 1 billion, make it 20 billion and then they might stop knowingly lying.
It's not really a political party anymore. Like a zombie; it looks like it's alive but it's actually walking dead. What it's become is a structure for self-serving opportunists to use for their own advancement, whether for power or profit or both.
And as we are learning, they have an equally venal media network reaping billions in their service.
Attributing to the Jan. 5, 2021 Georgia Senate election the failure of GOP leaders to part with Trump is probably an instance of the fallacy of single causation. He had already demonstrated his hold over the Republican base and his willingness to go after any Republican officeholder who didn't toe his line.
Lyndon Johnson created the Republican Party that rejected its Lincoln heritage. There were once four parties (D. and R., right and left; south and north; east and west). After LBJ, the left and right ideologues aligned into two lanes only, with the anti-civil rights group staying or moving into the new GOP. Social media made it easier for those ideologues to create a national voice of grievance, and Trump (a pure media creation) was its natural leader. That's the history so far. Humans can do anything!
It’s an interesting theory, that the working class went for Trump as a repudiation of globalist elites. Trump is a globalist elite. Most of what he sells, other than the bullshit, is made overseas. The more likely reasons for his appeal are his racism and pathological lies – the “birther” conspiracy and all that.
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