No Normalization for Pro-Trump Terrorists

It is astonishing to me that the House Democratic leadership cancelled a planned session of Congress this Thursday due to a possible attack plot by pro-Trump terrorists, without making a full-court, unmistakable press in the media to hold not just Donald Trump but the GOP accountable for their role in encouraging this far-right menace.  After all, the FBI has assessed that the fake theory that Democrats stole the November election from Trump is inspiring far-right extremism — a falsehood propounded not only by the former president but by a strong majority of Republicans in Congress, to the point that adherence to this slander against our democracy has become a litmus test for Republican loyalty not only to the former president, but to a sinister, ever more authoritarian brand of anti-democratic politics.  For Democrats to cancel Congress for a day due to threats from GOP-aligned terrorists, and not spend that day talking nonstop about how these terrorists are inspired by election lies propagated by Republican politicians, is simply bizarre.   These violent threats against Congress are an abomination, and should be treated as such; they should certainly not be normalized.

Thank goodness no attack materialized this week, but closing Congress, even as a prudent precaution, without an accompanying indictment of those politicians who provide the terrorists inspiration and political cover, also promotes the distortion that Congress as a whole is the target, when the reality is that it’s Democrats in Congress who are the real targets of the Trumpist terrorists.  The Republicans’ broad refusal to denounce the fake tales of conspiracy that drive these insurrectionists is an act of complicity, and deserves the harshest ongoing condemnation.

Thursday’s closure itself is also a worrisome decision, substituting fear in place of what should be a stance of furious resolve against armed insurrectionists.  I understand that there is a Democratic strategy, certainly coming out of the White House but also embraced by most Democratic members of Congress, to turn down the temperature on some conflicts and press on with the people’s business.  But even as the Democrats pushed Thursday’s planned work into Wednesday evening to avoid disruptions, this closure still tells far-right terrorists that their plots do in fact have a chance of interfering with the Democrats’ agenda. That does not seem like a great recipe for shutting down and discrediting this extremist movement.

A Harsh Wakeup Call on Foreign Policy Front

Two events last week offered a jolting reminder that though we may have exchanged an authoritarian president for a mainstream one, dangerous tendencies of U.S. foreign policy that predated the Trump administration still continue.  Airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria, and a Biden administration decision not to punish the Saudi Arabian leader who ordered the killing of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, signal that violence and accommodation of anti-democratic governments remain sickeningly close to the heart of American foreign relations.

The airstrikes remind us that the United States, no matter who the president might be, remains committed to a series of open-ended, undeclared wars around the globe.  The presence of U.S. troops in Syria, a sovereign country on which we have not declared war, and bombings in its territory — even those aimed at terrorists — have never gotten anything close to the public debate or open political discussion they merit.  On multiple fronts, of which Syria is only one, the U.S. government — from the president and the bureaucracy he commands, to members of Congress responsible for oversight of the executive — have consistently failed for years to make such momentous decisions the focus of appropriate political debate, treating them instead as unobjectionable, natural features of our role in the world.

The second story speaks directly to the U.S.’s long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia, and more generally to the perennial tradeoff between democratic values and realpolitik.  The Biden administration has officially determined that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the killing of Khashoggi, but has determined not to punish the prince directly.  Instead, the administration is sanctioning various other Saudi officials; not insignificant, but not a full reckoning, either.  As for the reasoning that went into this decision after Joe Biden had called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” during the 2020 election campaign, the New York Times notes that, “The administration concluded it could not risk a full rupture of its relationship with the kingdom, relied on by the United States to help contain Iran, to counter terrorist groups and to broker peaceful relations with Israel. Cutting off Saudi Arabia could also push its leaders toward China.”

These justifications have some power.  After all, the U.S. has an obligation to make foreign policy decisions that protect American lives and interests, and there will always be a balancing of risks and rewards.  However, the assassination of Khashoggi was so brazen, shocking, and overwhelmingly meaningful that it should continue to focus attention on what exactly the American long game is, not just towards Saudi Arabia but towards other murderous dictatorships.  After all, given that Khashoggi was an American resident and a columnist for a major U.S. newspaper, his killing was not just an attack on a single person, but indirectly an assault on our own freedom of the press and ability to provide security for those who call the United States home.

Likewise, if U.S. policy is to promote democracy and human rights around the globe, then how exactly do we expect Saudi Arabia to progress towards democracy when its leader kills and intimidates his political opponents?  For Bin Salman is responsible for many more Saudi dissident deaths beyond Khashoggi (and this is to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of civilians slaughtered in the Saudi-led war in Yemen).  As Nicholas Kristof writes in response to the administration’s decision:

 [E]ven through the lens of realpolitik it’s a missed opportunity to help Saudi Arabia understand that its own interest lies in finding a new crown prince who isn’t reckless and doesn’t kill and dismember journalists [. . .] it’s precisely because Saudi Arabia is so important that Biden should stand strong and send signals — now, while there is a window for change — that the kingdom is better off with a new crown prince who doesn’t dismember journalists.

Particularly inflammatory in the death of Khashoggi is how it constitutes such a wholesale inversion of democratic, liberal values.  Bin Salman ordered the full power of the Saudi state against a single man because that man refused to submit to the leader’s will.  Without due process, without any particular charges against him being necessary, without a trial, the Saudi state summarily executed him in a brutal and chilling manner.  In the United States, in contrast, we recognize the importance of laws and rules that ensure that even a single person can stand against the power of the state — that no person can be wiped away by the government as if they never existed.  The United States is far from perfect in the practice of this ideal — but seeing it so grotesquely violated by a country deemed to be an essential ally should make us all question the value of such an alliance.  Certainly it should prompt a harder look at what we consider to be common interests with such a monstrosity.

Though the Biden administration may be able to justify its measured response to the killing of Khashoggi, can it justify looking away from the larger pattern of Saudi violence and violations of democratic norms?  And looking farther afield, will there be any sort of hard look at America’s stance toward other countries that actively wish us and our democratic values harm, but which we continue to consider as allies out of expedience? What is the strategy for moving toward a better world?

Violent Tendencies

Journalist and political analyst Ronald Brownstein has written a comprehensive, essential piece on the links between rising violent right-wing extremism and the Republican Party’s increasing sympathy with this awful trend.  At the level of GOP elected officials, this attitude is reflected in the party’s unwillingness to hold President Trump accountable for his acts of insurrection, or to discipline the assassination-minded Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

But parallel to this party-level dereliction of duty is a widespread sympathy for violent means within the GOP’s rank and file.  According to polls and research cited by Brownstein, “51% of Republicans agreed with the statement that "we may have to use force" to save "the traditional American way of life,” while more than 40% of Republicans agreed with the statement that, “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”  More concretely, another poll found that nearly 20% of GOP voters supported the attack on the Capitol.

These are frightening numbers; equally disturbing is the fact that they appear to be supercharged by white Americans’ reaction to demographic trends leading to a higher proportion of minorities in the American population — trends that will not be changing.  Among those who believe that discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than discrimination against minorities, more than 60% of Republican respondents agreed that "we may have to use force" to save "the traditional American way of life,” even as nearly 75% of Republicans who think minorities experience more discrimination disagreed.  In a similar vein, “Nearly half of the Republicans who see widespread bias against Whites say Americans must consider violent action; almost four-fifths of the other Republicans reject that idea.”

Brownstein notes that, “These attitudes don't suggest large numbers of Republican voters will pursue violent actions themselves; but, as the past few weeks show, they make it less likely that Republican leaders will clearly excommunicate such extremism.”  One expert estimates that there may be 75,000 to 100,000 people dedicated to actual armed insurrection; but outside this is a “larger group of Republicans expressing sympathy for the attack on the Capitol — and a much larger group than that expressing sympathy more generally for the belief that the threats to American society as they define it have grown so great that force or violence is justified to respond to them.” 

In other words, huge numbers of white Americans afraid of losing their status, power, and wealth due to the increasing diversity of our population have decided to sanction violence to defend themselves.  Even if they themselves will not pick up a gun to do so, they offer a permissive environment for the most murderous of right-wing extremists.  The roots of this trend toward violence seem unlikely to change, and so all decent citizens and politicians have no choice but to act to confront and defuse it lest the GOP increasingly endorse terror tactics to work its minoritarian will on the American people.

Yet, as Brownstein frames it, GOP party leaders simply appear unwilling to confront either the extremist forces or the growing sympathy for violence among GOP voters.  The ominous result is that the GOP as a party is helping make political violence appear acceptable and reasonable — exactly the opposite of what needs to be happening.  Like I’ve said before, violence and physical intimidation are the antithesis of a democracy.  In condoning such activities, the Republican Party is coming close to declaring war on the American people and government.

Faced with a GOP that has lost its adherence to the peaceful competition for power that’s the bedrock of democracy, primary responsibility for backing America from the brink of murder and mayhem at the hands of GOP-aligned domestic extremists falls squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party.  The first step is for the Democrats to recognize and accept this responsibility; the next is to devise strategies that head off violence as much as possible and inflict a maximal political price on the GOP.  If we are at the start of a period in which domestic terrorists sanctioned by large swathes of the Republican Party attack American civilians and society, then ensuring that federal and state law enforcement prioritize reining in and prosecuting this threat is paramount.  On this count, there are early signs that the Biden administration is taking matter seriously.  For example, at his Senate confirmation hearing on Monday, Attorney General-nominee Merrick Garland highlighted the domestic extremist threat as being greater than during the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and indicated he would prioritize investigation of the Capitol assault.  A message from the top that right-wing extremists are public enemy number is essential to communicating to the public, and to the extremists themselves, that they will not be coddled and encouraged as they were under the Trump administration.

Beyond this, Democrats should move aggressively to pass legislation ensuring that white supremacists and other violent extremists are banned from any positions in law enforcement, and making it illegal for police and federal agents to support such organizations. Likewise, any members of the military with ties to white supremacist organizations should face court martial and prison time.  If such legislation raises a howl from Republicans, then so much the better; let the voting public judge the acceptability of politicians who can’t bring themselves to denounce extremists, or who seek alliances with them.  As with the prioritization of rolling back white nationalist violence, the aim is not only to stop these forces, but to draw a bright line in American politics and society demonstrating that they and their tactics lie beyond any conceivable claims to legitimacy; that they and their choice to intimidate and kill mean they have chosen to make war on America.

The Democrats also can’t hesitate to hammer on the links between GOP attacks on democracy — such as propagation of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — and the way such attacks incite and serve as recruitment tools for domestic insurgency.  Republican politicians must be denied the plausible deniability that their anti-democratic rhetoric and legislation (such as attempts to restrict voting based on fictional voter fraud claims and concerns) is somehow unconnected to the fury and motivation of armed insurrectionists.  

Similarly, GOP rank and file must not be allowed to maintain the illusion that they can sympathize with violence and somehow consider themselves to be upstanding Americans.  There is nothing noble, there is nothing legitimate, there is nothing Christian about countenancing the murder of your fellow American citizens — which is in fact the aim of violent extremists.  Some on the far right may try to obscure matters by talking about being engaged in a “civil war,” but when you target unarmed people to achieve political ends, you’re simply committing terrorism. Every Republican voter needs to be forced to confront the political evil of this attitude, and be denied room to believe that violence in politics means anything but the murder of innocent civilians, and constitutes a war on democracy that will be opposed and defeated by the American majority.

I keep coming back to this unpleasant topic because it’s one of the central dangers of our time, but is not getting nearly the full attention it deserves.  I am guessing that many Democrats are adopting a head in the sand approach, reasoning that if we don’t talk about it, it will somehow go away.  But the opposite is likelier to be true — that failing to register the appropriate horror, outrage and defiance towards those who would choose violence over citizenship only encourages them on their dark journey.  This goes not only for the right-wing terrorists, but also for those millions who “merely” sympathize with using force to protect a retrograde and discredited vision of America.  Any support for such violence is a moral abomination and a betrayal of their citizenship, and should be talked about in such terms.

On Cruz Control

This past week witnessed a deployment of firepower not seen since the bombardment of the Normandy coast prior to D-Day.  I am talking, of course, about the national scourging of Ted Cruz that followed exposure of his Margaritaville excursion to sunny Cancun, Mexico, in the midst of a deeply destructive Texas deep freeze.  Cruz is a long-loathed politician, and his enactment of an updated “let them eat cake” lifestyle deserves all the mockery and disdain it’s received.

But while hitting Cruz for his repugnant abdication of responsibility and deranged lies about why he was making the trip (he infamously sought to blame his daughters) is good for the cause of holding our political leaders accountable, the best commentary I’ve seen links his southern sojourn to the wider failure of an anti-government mindset that finds its home in the Republican Party.  Jared Yates Sexton has written the best of the pieces I’ve seen, in which he notes that the disaster that befell Texas “is the result of decades of vilification of government and shared society, a building rejection of basic human needs and the very process by which we are supposed to come together, resolve our differences, decide on courses of action, and somehow, someway make this reality better.”  In Cruz’s behavior, he sees a politician of a piece with this degraded political world, who “is not senator to help people, he’s senator to build his brand and find exposure.”  By Cruz’s own terms, his behavior is normal:

When we look at Cruz in disgust and see him as a shuffling pariah, what we see is the literal embodiment of a system that has been corrupted and repositioned away from the pursuit of the public good and a festering, poisonous infection.  

[. . .] What Ted Cruz did wrong was to act authentically.

I think Sexton is correct about how Cruz views his position — he clearly did not see his responsibility in this moment of crisis as exerting his political powers on behalf of his constituents.  Instead, what prevailed was an attitude of indifference rooted in his belief that nothing in particular was wrong, just as he had seen nothing wrong during Texas Republicans’ long war on government and social goods, or for that matter in the Trump-inspired insurrection on January 6th.  To act as if the results of GOP mismanagement constituted a crisis would be to admit the existence of that crisis and the failures of governance that made it possible.  Cruz’s ability to deny the severity of what had happened, to not anticipate the political blowback to his callous vacationing, is emblematic of an entire political party that is unable to change course, that cannot admit its catastrophic errors: a party that’s truly on Cruz control.

Burning Down the (People's) House

Lately, I’ve been trying to argue how the Republican embrace of political violence during the Trump years — from the former president’s suggestions that supporters beat up protestors at his rallies, to the grand fascistic crescendo of the Capitol assault — should taint a broad range of the GOP’s anti-democratic measures that preceded this escalation and that continue through the present.  You might phrase it like this: violence is what authoritarian-minded people turn to when gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression fail to get the job done, but they’re all part of the same authoritarian playbook.  

But a huge part of the reason I want to make this connection between violence and other anti-democratic methods is because political violence is uniquely destructive and irreconcilable with democratic politics.  Peaceful means of addressing our conflicts and doing the public business, whether through voting or legislation, is so much a part of our system that I would guess most people usually didn’t even think about this basic assumption of nonviolence — at least not until the Trump presidency.  That’s why the phrase “peaceful transfer of power” seemed, until this year, to be a sort of redundancy, a piece of old-fashioned verbiage dragged out ritualistically every four years.  Of course transfers of power are peaceful, why wouldn’t they be?  Sadly, we have learned otherwise.

This is why the Democrats can’t hesitate to tie the GOP not only to the Capitol assault, but to broader instances of right-wing violence and intimidation around the nation that have been fostered and in some cases overtly encouraged by Republican politicians.  The GOP comfort with political violence needs to be kept very much at the forefront of the Democrats’ case against the Republican Party.  This is both because it’s crucial to stop the violence, but also to deny the GOP the plausible deniability in which the party seeks to cloak its increasing comfort with it.  You can already see the second challenge playing out with the Capitol attack, with many in the Republican Party condemning the assault, yet finding themselves unwilling to hold President Trump to account for inciting it, or to renounce the myth of a stolen election that helped ignite the insurrection.  Meanwhile, still other elements of the right claim the attack either wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed, or was the work of leftist agitators like antifa.  

This is a classic case of having your cake and eating it, too: the Republican Party is attempting to reap the upside of violence while evading the downside.  One of the main downsides is that a great majority of the American people are repelled, horrified, and angered by political violence, as well they should be.  The baseline taboo nature of violence for most Americans has doubtless played a large role in keeping it to the margins for many years.  But we can now see that all the play-acting of militia types has simply been laying the groundwork for attacks and insurrection, as Josh Marshall discusses here.

It should be clear that the GOP is not making common cause with the armed far-right just because they want their votes, though the necessity of squeezing out every last vote of their diminishing white base does encourage this courtship.  Republican politicians who speak approvingly of armed gangs that take over statehouses and show up at Black Lives Matter events as auxiliary police forces know full well that the purpose of these armed men is to intimidate and terrorize their political opposition.  For a horrifying example of this phenomenon, check out coverage of the growing amity between militia movements and Republican politicians in Michigan.  In that state, the two groups have found common cause in opposing a Democratic governor and Democratic legislators around coronavirus measures.  It’s a profile in cowardice, opportunism, and moral turpitude, not to mention a case study of fascist politics in action.

Yet GOP politicians are happily signing onto such intimidation as a political tactic to overwhelm, demoralize, and strike fear into their Democratic opposition.  This report from Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo describes how this is not a future problem, but has already traumatized some of those targeted by right-wing extremists around the country.  Reporting on protests at state legislatures in Michigan, Oregon, and Idaho, he writes that, “The lingering threat of political violence, legislators told me, still hangs over the work they do daily. It has chilled the democratic process and made elected representatives afraid for their own safety, and in some cases hesitant to fully express their views.”  One state representative remarked to Shuham, “[D]oes it really make sense to get up and make a big speech about why I’m making this vote, or is that just going to land 50 armed guys terrorizing my family outside my House?”  Even now, the right-wing terror campaign is already having its intended effects, to the benefit of the perpetrators and their GOP allies.

In the Capitol assault, we see the outlines of an even more terrible strategy: killing your political opponents when you can’t beat them at the ballot box.  In the context of January 6, such behavior has been widely acknowledged as treason and insurrection; the task of Democrats now is to communicate to the American people that “lesser” forms of violence, such as when Republicans ally themselves with armed right-wing militias, likewise constitute treason and insurrection.  And while they need to appeal to the decency of most Americans, they also can’t take for granted that the use of political violence is self-apparently bad.  It’s essential that the taboo nature of political violence be revisited and revived; that these grounds for condemning, repudiating, and rolling back the GOP be made crystal clear. 

Impeachment May Be Over, But The Work of Tying GOP to Capitol Insurrection Has Just Begun

It may or may not matter as time passes and we gain greater perspective; but the Democrats’ revolving resolve to call a witness to the impeachment trial and then to simply accept a written affidavit felt to many like an unnecessary backing down from a position of strength.  It wasn’t the prospect of getting Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler on video describing what she’d heard Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy say about Donald Trump’s refusal to send help to the besieged Capitol, but of a larger initiative to gather damning witness statements, that very temporarily energized so many Democrats.  Of course nothing was going to change enough GOP senatorial minds to result in conviction; but as many (including myself) have argued, the single most important purpose of the impeachment process was to educate and energize Americans as to what happened on January 6, and to make it clear that the GOP is complicit in the former president’s insurrectionism.  As Ronald Brownstein wrote on Saturday, “this trial was Ds biggest chance to show public how far Trump has moved GOP toward anti democratic means & acceptance of white nationalist extremism. Taking time to fill out that case day by day, especially w/witnesses, would have filled in picture much more for US.”

So, yes, it was unnerving to see Democrats appear to embrace and just as quickly back down from this opportunity, as it suggests they don’t fully grasp either the authoritarian nature of their GOP opposition or the Democrats’ responsibility in the fight ahead to defend American democracy.  But this may be an overly bleak reading of events.  It sounds like there was conflict among Democrats about how to proceed, and even a bad decision by leadership is not fatal to the Democrats’ chances.  But the events of this weekend only reinforce my sense that the Democrats absolutely must abandon their mindset that they are in any sort of “normal” democratic competition with the GOP for votes and power.  The decision of an overwhelming majority of Republican senators to retroactively green light the president’s violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government — an attempt that may well have resulted in the deaths of some of those very same senators — needs to be seen as the crossing of the Rubicon that it is.  In casting their votes to acquit, 43 Republican senators joined the cause of insurrection.

Though the impeachment is over, the Democrats must do everything they can to communicate to the public the terrible import of the January 6 attack and the decision of Republican senators to acquit the president.  Remember — the primary GOP response to President Trump’s loss, and subsequent coup attempt, has not been to re-examine the party’s decision to overwhelmingly back an authoritarian psychopath over the last four years.  Instead, it’s been to turn their attention to undermining state voting systems with the aim of preventing likely Democratic voters from being able to cast their votes or have their votes fairly counted, all rooted in the Big Lie that the Democrats cheated their way to power in November.  Their response, in other words, has been to continue Donald Trump’s insurrection by other means.  America’s existential political challenge is not Donald Trump; it is the Republican Party. The assault on the Capitol, and the vote to acquit Trump, are cudgels to use against the GOP for years into the future.

The Democrats must also drive home a related sin committed by the GOP in the impeachment acquittal: by signaling that the attempt at violent insurrection was no big thing, they’ve also sent a powerful message to the domestic extremist groups that took part in the Capitol attack that the GOP has their back; that the GOP and the terrorists are on the same side; that these groups should, as Trump himself notoriously put it, “stand back and stand by.”  A party that provides comfort to violent extremists deserves the support of no American voter.

There’s renewed coverage today of a conflict in the GOP between those who continue to support Trump and those who want the party to distance itself from him.  As an example of the latter group, this article in The Washington Post points to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who gave a speech denouncing Trump — yet McConnell only did so after voting to acquit the former president.  McConnell’s reasoning for opposing conviction is textbook McConnellian flimflam, and as coverage is rightly pointing out, leaves out his own role in refusing to recognize Biden’s victory for weeks upon weeks (not to mention his years-long abetting of Trump’s immoral and authoritarian presidency).  Already, state parties are mobilizing for retribution against the paltry handful of GOP senators who broke ranks and voted to convict; there’s no reason to think that this renewed “civil war” will end any less decisively in favor of Trumpist forces than it did when declared finished a few weeks ago.  And at any rate, as I’ve argued repeatedly, there’s a clear continuum between “normal” Republicans who simply want to restrict Democratic-likely voting by any legal means necessary, and those Trumpist politicians who now look kindly on violent intimidation to achieve their political goals.  The entire party has been corrupted by an anti-democratic animus, and the Democrats would not be well served by acting as if some Republicans are reliable partners, while others are compromised by their associations with Trump.  Democrats need to make sure this entire disastrous political party is known as the enablers of Trumpism and violence.

The struggle we are in can feel daunting, particularly after a day like yesterday when a Democratic fighting spirit seemed to self-extinguish in a matter of hours.  But at worst, this only means that voters need to continue to impress on their elected officials the need to defend American democracy, and to vote out those Democrats who won’t stand up for us.  It’s also well worth reminding ourselves that GOP authoritarianism is supported by a minority of Americans.  Indeed, looking at the impeachment vote in the Senate, it turns out that senators who backed conviction represented 202 million Americans, or 61.6% of the population, as opposed to those senators who voted for acquittal, who represented only 125 million Americans, or 38.2% of the population.  We should take heart that, when we put aside the anti-democratic distortions of Senate representation, the vote to convict Trump represented an even larger repudiation of his lawlessness.

Impeachment Is About the Future, Not the Past

As much as House prosectors hearken back to the intentions and fears of America’s founding fathers as they argue for the conviction of Donald Trump, this impeachment trial is very much about the immediate and urgent conflicts of American politics.  With most GOP senators unwilling to turn on the president, the trial has become a judgment on the fitness of the Republican Party to hold power in this country.  In refusing to take seriously the need to hold the president to account for actions that culminated in the Capitol attack, recalcitrant GOP senators are telling America, and their supporters, that violence is an acceptable way to contest power in this country.

The Capitol attack is so resonant for understanding American politics, and the devolution of the Republican Party, not only because it represents the GOP’s increasing willingness to court violence to achieve political ends, but also because this violence is merely the most extreme of a continuum of anti-democratic activities that the party has embraced going back decades.  From gerrymandering districts and limiting voting sites in Democratic precincts, to overtly racist purging of voter rolls, to propagating the Big Lie that the Democrats actually lost the November election, the GOP has largely decided that the key to its future is disenfranchising Democratic voters and casting doubt on the legitimacy of any Democratic victories.

As I wrote last week, this means that Democrats have a responsibility to make this trial about the Republicans who supported the president as much as the president himself.  After all, without the mass backing of GOP federal officials, the president would have had far more difficulty sustaining his inciting lie that Democrats stole the presidency.  He would have appeared much more as a madman, and less like the authoritarian leader the GOP seems to crave.

The purpose of doing so is to make sure that accountability for GOP politicians’ complicity will ultimately be obtained at the ballot box.  Greg Sargent is exactly right when he notes that “Democrats need to make it as politically uncomfortable for Republicans as possible to acquit — and to extract a political price for it among the suburban moderates whom the GOP continues to alienate with its ongoing QAnon-ification.”  But beyond tying the GOP to Trump’s illicit actions, the Democrats must also work to communicate to the public that anti-democratic animus marks the whole of the GOP, even with Trump out of office.

So far, it seems that the Democrats have decided against implicating the GOP via the trial; as Sargent and Paul Waldman write in a piece out today, “The role in this whole saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalization, and its increasing comfort with anti-democratic tactics, openly authoritarian conduct and even political violence, is largely going unmentioned,” though he adds that, “Whether they are saying so or not, the case the House managers are making most definitely does implicate much of the Republican Party.”  So while this may be a missed opportunity for Democrats, I would argue that it’s not a blown opportunity.  Somewhat counter-intuitively, opportunity will present itself to Democrats in the likely refusal of most GOP senators to vote for conviction.  At that point, Democrats can easily make the logical case that the GOP condones Trump’s violence, and use this as an entry point to foreground the Republican Party’s increasing lawlessness.  The impeachment of Donald Trump will be a crucial political milestone and electoral millstone around the neck of the GOP, even if the Senate fails to convict, because Democrats can forever point to that failure as the ultimate evidence of GOP sympathy with the president’s means and ends.

The audience for House prosecutors truly is the American public, not unpersuadable Republican senators.  The Democrats need to educate as many voters as possible that the GOP has turned its back on American democracy; just as importantly, though, it needs to mobilize Democratic voters in particular to stay engaged in politics in the coming years, to rise to the moment of this authoritarian threat. This Democratic base will be crucial both in blunting GOP efforts to further suppress voting rights in the wake of the 2020 election, and to advance democratic reforms that ensure every American’s vote matters and is counted.

Democrats must not underestimate how much material they have to work with to condemn the GOP in the eyes of the public.  To build on a point I made above — going forward, Democrats can make the case that all prior and ongoing GOP efforts to subvert elections are on a continuum with the violence we witnessed at the Capitol on January 6.  Measures like gerrymandering and voter ID laws that disproportionately disenfranchise minorities bear not just an anti-democratic stain, but a kinship with the violence that is the ultimate recourse of people who refuse to accept the will of the majority and that every American gets an equal voice in this country.  Likewise, all future acts of violence by right-wing extremists can be tied back to the Capitol insurrection and viewed as echoes of that awful attack — and more, can be tied back to Republicans’ inability to take the obvious step of convicting the president for the violence he incited against our country, and to the argument that the GOP sees right-wing insurgents as its allies, and not the enemies of America that normal Americans see them as.

A Telling Moment in the Capitol Assault

As the Senate trial of Donald Trump gets underway, I wanted to note yet another reason for his impeachment that may or may not get its proper due in the Democrats’ prosecution of their case. A few weeks ago, shortly before the House voted to impeach Donald Trump for “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made an argument for a strong, separate reason for Trump’s impeachment: his hours-long refusal to call off his supporters from their Capitol assault, or to authorize additional federal forces to intervene. Marshall notes a chilling but essential fact: “He refused because he liked what he was seeing.”

As I’ve written before, the spectacle of politicians calling on Donald Trump to call off his supporters captured the true horror of the moment.  These calls reflected immediate, widespread acknowledgment that the attackers constituted an insurrectionist army headed by Trump, and Trump’s eventual decision to make a feeble attempt to rein them in was the president’s tacit acknowledgment of his generalship.  But, as Marshall indirectly reminds us, Trump was simultaneously still the U.S. commander-in-chief, upon whom the country relied to authorize its own defense.  This was obviously not a tenable reality — you can’t be the defender and destroyer of a country at the same time — but thinking about Trump’s dual role that day, as acknowledged even by his political supporters, helps provide another dimension to the depravity of his actions.  There is even a sort of dark paradox when you look at it in this light — the moment he acknowledged being de facto head of an insurrectionist assault, his role as commander-in-chief of the United States was no longer comprehensible, and the fact that the nation had to wait for his say-so to get proper reinforcements into action, while necessary from the perspective of our constitutional order, made zero sense from the perspective of logic or common sense. In inciting insurrection, he ceased to be our president.

Right-Wing Extremists' "Civil War" Talk Is a Cover for Terrorism

There’s been an inevitable and necessary discussion about what words to use to describe recent political developments in the United States.  Is Donald Trump a fascist or an authoritarian?  Did he attempt a coup, an autogolpe, or an insurrection?  Should the people who attacked the Capitol be termed rioters, insurrectionists, or domestic terrorists?  Words shape our sense of reality, and given our recent experiences, it’s probably a sign of health that reporters and others are so heavily interrogating the language they use to describe these events.

It’s not a word, but a phrase and an idea, that’s caught my own attention in the last couple weeks: the notion that certain right-wing extremist groups are preparing for, or are trying to foment, a “civil war.”  Before Donald Trump, and certainly before the Capitol assault, this idea held a certain abstract or even unreal quality that I think let it pass unexamined.  The idea seemed so fantastical that it was on a spectrum with hearing about people preparing for the Rapture.

But with the sight of camouflaged men with machine guns storming the Capitol and hunting around for politicians to lynch, and the Department of Homeland Security issuing a warning about further extremist violence inspired by “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives,” I’m starting to think that describing extremists’ interest in “civil war” has begun to perform a somewhat, or even deeply, misleading function.  A movement that attacks civilians and government buildings to achieve political ends is engaging in terrorism, not classical warfare.   A movement that seeks to assassinate political leaders has not prepared for civil war, but for domestic terrorism.  

After the attack on the Capitol, it’s fair to infer a larger point about what these groups mean when they use the phrase “civil war.”  They are not talking about engaging in firefights with opposing armies or groups.  After all, one of the things they hate about liberals is their supposed desire to rid America of guns.  Nor are they talking about a suicidal stand against a U.S. military equipped with tanks, high-tech fighter-bombers, and submarines armed with ballistic missiles.  Instead, what they fantasize about when they talk about a civil war is more along the lines of a mass slaughter against unarmed adversaries: not a civil war, but a one-sided killing spree.  Given the white supremacism at the center of many of these groups, it’s hardly going too far to say there’s a genocidal aspect to their ideas of civil war — a chance to cleanse the nation of the racially impure.

The concept of these groups “preparing for” civil war is particularly pernicious.  When you’re the only side preparing for war, that means you’re actually preparing for the slaughter of unarmed civilians.  Associating their actions in any way with those of soldiers, or even legitimate “militias” like the state national guards, strikes me as deeply misleading as to their ideologies and intentions, in a way that serves to hide their true ends.  Civil war is an awful thing — but what these groups desire is far worse even than that, and the term suggests an entire society bent on violence, when in truth these right-wing extremists are in a league of their own, psychos longing to murder innocents.

Impeach the GOP, Part III

Last week, I tried to make a case for recognizing the Republican Party’s descent towards a politics of violence, and the need for the Democrats to force a maximum price on the GOP for this devolution as necessary to defending our embattled democracy.  Particularly since the January 6 assault on the Capitol, I’ve been shadowed by a sense that much of what I write sounds like the synopsis for a dystopian political thriller; despite all the gathering evidence, I still feel some sense of shock (not to mention outrage) when I try to accurately describe the derangement of the GOP, and the dangerous time our country is in.

But it seems that even my most cynical-seeming musings are having a tough time keeping up with our quickly-evolving reality.  Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has a post arguing that, “After early efforts to deflect blame or even blame Antifa for the Capitol insurrection, Republicans are shifting to the view that it was understandable, even justified and may need to happen again to secure Republican ends.”  In other words, the GOP is turning openly pro-insurrection.  Marshall describes the GOP’s ongoing route to radicalization:

Each decision not to draw a line on the path of political extremism exerts a concomitant force pulling the GOP still deeper into the politics of extremism and threatened violence. This ratcheting effect is too little appreciated. Each episode of enabling and deflecting draws the institutional GOP deeper into the clutches of insurrectionist politics.

I think Marshall is right about the inexorable logic of Republican politicians’ behavior.  The party is, in an accelerating fashion, effectively working to legitimize violence as a political tool — which is indistinguishable from embracing an attack on our democratic politics.  In a sinister fashion, the GOP’s willingness to retroactively bless the attack on the Capitol is accompanied by a growing sense of menace posed by Republican congresspersons to their colleagues across the aisle.  Late last week, Nancy Pelosi House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters that, “the enemy is within the House of Representatives,” adding that, “we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.”  This follows reports that extremists GOP representative Lauren Boebert tweeted Pelosi’s location while the insurrection was underway; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter smackdown of Ted Cruz in which she asserted that his actions almost resulted in her murder on January 6; and efforts to determine whether GOP elected officials gave tours of the Capitol to insurrectionists or were otherwise party to the breach of the building.

The idea that the Republicans have put themselves in a bind of their own making helps press home that the Democrats have no choice but to address this threat: it is not going away on its own, but only by the Democrats actively countering and undoing it.  On top of this current “ratcheting effect,” as Marshall describes it, deep long-term incentives remain in place for the Republican Party to try to undo democratic competition in favor of an anti-democratic politics of menace, enhanced voter suppression, and a general attack on the legitimacy of free and fair elections (particularly when GOP candidates lose).  The Republican Party has great incentive to keep promoting lies that charge up its base — even when those lies also help radicalize and incite members of the far-right to violence — because so many of the basics of the GOP platform are unappealing to voters.  From cutting Social Security and Medicare to opposing health care expansion and minimum wage increases, the GOP has at its center a plutocratic agenda that it is able to carry forward by appealing to many of the victims of that very agenda through increasingly extreme appeals to white nationalism and white supremacy — a basic dynamic described and documented by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their recent book, Let Them Eat Tweets.  By Hacker and Pierson’s reckoning, increasing economic inequality will continue to supercharge the GOP’s incentives to amp up their appeals to Americans’ prejudices and resentments, whether racial or cultural.  And even if you don’t buy their emphasis on economic inequality being the driving force behind the GOP’s increasing authoritarianism, it also seems undeniable at this point that many millions of Republican voters simply do not care if GOP economic policies hurt them, so long as the party pursues an agenda of sadism and punitive measures against non-white Americans; that is, so long as the GOP maintains an agenda of white supremacy.

What seems especially striking in this moment, apart from the GOP’s descent into authoritarian derangement, is its politicians’ calculation that they can survive whatever backlash their actions provoke on the part of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters.  In many ways up to now, of course, this calculation has been broadly validated, as the GOP’s work to insulate itself from unpopularity has produced huge dividends, whether via the gerrymandering of states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, or a right wing-dominated Supreme Court that has already protected them from pesky things like limits on corporate campaign donations.  

But I think the Republican calculation of being able to avoid backlash is starting to look less like cynically canny politics, and more akin to a bad bet placed by a hedge fund on GameStop stock, now that it has crossed the line into outright violence.  On the one hand, the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, in the name of a stolen vote asserted not only by Donald Trump but a significant portion of GOP members of Congress, retroactively clarifies the anti-democratic nature of previous anti-voter efforts by the Republican Party.  There is now an undeniable continuum between non-violent efforts to suppress Americans’ votes, and violent efforts to throw out those Americans’ votes when they aren’t in favor of the GOP.  We can see now that these attempts to game the system have never been just politics as usual, but the early signs of an attack on our democracy itself that have gradually led to the embrace of violence to retain power.

In the coming days, the single most effective way to communicate to the American people the GOP’s tragic turn, and to confront its move into anti-democratic animus, will be the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.  I made this case last week, and I am glad to see that others are also on board with using it to highlight the GOP’s perfidy, including in the likely event that nearly all GOP senators vote not to convict the former president.  Over at the Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman write that, “If Republicans are going to vote to acquit Trump, they should be made to defend him after being fully confronted with his extraordinary dereliction and malevolence. They should face a full account of how the lies their party sustained for weeks about the election inspired the violence.”  As the GOP moves to break American democracy, Democrats should aggressively and creatively use the tools of our democracy — beginning with impeachment - to hold to account not just a lawless and violent president, but an increasingly lawless and violent party.

Impeach the GOP, Part II

It was dubious when it started a few weeks ago, but I think we can all now safely laugh away any references to a “civil war” within the Republican Party between those who continue to embrace Trump and Trumpism, and those who want to break from the former president and his racist, plutocratic politics and persona.  This CNN article by Stephen Collinson gives an excellent overview of the many ways in which whatever resistance to keeping Trump front and center in GOP politics has now melted away to insignificant pockets.

The most striking evidence of the triumph of Trump’s will was the decision by 45 GOP senators to essentially vote against proceeding with an impeachment trial of the former president, accompanied by a forceful campaign to paint any effort to hold the president accountable as a deranged, leftist, divisive plot by Democrats to shirk the nation’s real business.  Given that the accountability Democrats are seeking is for Trump’s incitement of an attempted violent insurrection against the U.S. government, most GOP senators (as well as the overwhelming number of representatives who voted against impeachment) have now given their tacit approval to violence as a means for Republican politicians to gain and maintain power.  The GOP’s comfort with violence as a political tool can likewise be gauged by congressional Republicans’ acceptance of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert into the House caucus, even though both have engaged in violent rhetoric towards political opponents.  

More ominously, in continuing to accept President Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, GOP elected officials are continuing to incite insurrection by far-right groups who equate a stolen election with a call to battle (not to mention poisoning the minds of millions of rank-and-file GOP voters with hatred of the Democrats, and helping radicalize some untold number of these voters to join the ranks of the violent insurrectionists).  Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security released a bulletin “to alert the public about a growing risk of attacks by ‘ideologically-motivated violent extremists’ agitated about President Biden’s inauguration and ‘perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.’”  In fact, these “false narratives” and “perceived grievances” are being promulgated by the congressional GOP, making the party responsible for inciting white nationalist terrorists.  This should be the top story in American politics right now.

As I wrote a couple days ago, faced with an opposition party that, in refusing to accept the results of elections and approving of violence as a mean to achieve political ends, the Democrats can no longer behave as if the GOP is a normal, democratic political party.  In failing to protect the republic from a treasonous president, and propagating lies that inspire that president’s most violent supporters while radicalizing many others, the GOP has robbed itself of democratic legitimacy — and the Democrats should en masse start talking, and acting, this way.

First and foremost, the Democrats must insist that there will be no “moving on” from the horrors of January 6 without full accountability for all the perpetrators, including the president, the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol - and those in Congress who refuse to take responsibility for their role in inciting the events of that day (not to mention not forcefully opposing, or in some cases, openly supporting, Trump’s various other machinations to overturn the election results).  As has been widely reported by now, the nation came very close to seeing members of Congress assassinated, and the peaceful transition of power not just interrupted but broken.  While the attack was underway, President Trump watched with apparent glee, for hours unwilling to authorize the deployment of forces necessary to drive back the rioters, acting for all intents and purposes not as the commander-in-chief of the United States, but as the leader of a treasonous rebellion against our country.  So, no, the United States will not “give the man a break,” as the hapless Nicki Haley pleaded yesterday.  

But more than this, the Democrats should not give the Republican Party a break, not for one second, so long as the GOP continues to embrace and promote Trumpist conspiracies, and to wink at political violence as long as it’s done in the name of Republicans.  Not only should the Democrats convert the impeachment trial into an exposé on the complicity of congressional Republicans in the assault on the Capitol, they should also make sure it covers GOP complicity in the Big Lie that the election was stolen, and in the president’s multi-pronged efforts to get the election results thrown out prior to the violent attempt to get his way.

Longer term, so long as the GOP continues to embrace Trump’s legacy of white supremacism, violence, cronyism, and xenophobia, the Democrats should make clear to the American people, as much as possible, the full, deranged meaning of this dark commitment.  Jeet Heer describes how this could work:

Instead of calling on Republicans to move past Trump, the Democrats could tar the GOP for its continued Trumpism. With Congress under Democratic control, continued investigations into Trump’s misdeeds are a priority. Trump’s corruption could be kept in public view and Republicans could be forced to defend it.

Trump will almost certainly remain a power in the GOP, either as a kingmaker or, quite possibly, as the 2024 presidential nominee. Given this possibility, the best move for the Democrats is to hammer away at the fact that the GOP is the party of Trump. Trump remains massively unpopular with the general public and there is no reason not to use that unpopularity as a political weapon.

The CNN article I noted above makes the crucial point that Republican politicians’ desire to keep Trump-loyal voters energized and within the party fold is a huge element in why they are choosing to hew closely to Trump even though he’s out of office.  But the number of Trump voters will not be growing over time, only shrinking; whites continues to decrease as a proportion of the population, and it is highly likely that Democrats can win back a good number of those Latino and African-American voters who voted for Trump and the GOP in the last election (particularly if the Democrats are unafraid to foreground the GOP’s basic identity as a white supremacist party).  From this perspective, the idea of “tar[ring] the GOP for its continued Trumpism,” as Heer puts it, becomes a way of energizing all those millions of Americans who don’t fit within the GOP’s twisted idea of who “real” Americans are. 

This, in turn, helps address the concern among some Democrats that turning away from an emphasis on bipartisanship, and opening themselves to GOP accusations of divisiveness, will end up exciting the GOP base into even greater opposition.  The fact of the matter is that the GOP base is already riled up; the point now is to rile up a larger, Democratic base that can overwhelm the numbers and enthusiasm of the Republicans.  This is how democracy works, particularly in our fraught time, when there are fewer and fewer independent voters, local politics reflects national divisions, and ticket splitting is increasingly rare.  As an example of this blunt talk, look no further than this recent appearance by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Chris Hayes’ show, in which she said, “Republican members of Congress don’t want consequences for white supremacy or insurrection against the United States because their political strategy is to embrace white supremacists and the scepter of the Confederacy to get power in the first place.”  Imagine if all elected Democrats took up this unsparing line of attack, and collectively offered the GOP no respite from its alliance with such malevolent figures and currents of American history.

The clincher is that talking about the GOP’s turn to white supremacist, Trumpian politics also segues easily into talking about all the things that the GOP refuses to do, but that the Democrats have placed at the center of their politics: reducing economic inequality, advancing equal rights for all Americans, securing health care for Americans, protecting the environment, and keeping Americans safe from threats like violent white nationalists.

Impeach the GOP

After four long years, there’s an understandable desire among millions of Democrats and other opponents of Trumpism to believe that we are through our time of crisis, but we all need to free ourselves of any traces of this mindset.  Donald Trump spent nearly the entirety of the post-election interregnum attempting to overthrow the election results, with either the active or tacit support of most Republicans in Congress.  With their assistance, he propagated a lie that Democrats had stolen the election from him — a lie that constituted the fuel of the Capitol assault, and the consequences of which will remain with us for years, as the majority of Republican voters now believe that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president.  Though Trump may have given the speech that lit the fuse on January 6, plenty of Republican elected officials had amplified his attacks on American democracy before then.

As Zeynep Tufecki writes, though, as horrendous as it was, the physical attack on the Capitol was not the worst event of the day, but rather “what happened just a few hours later on the floor. After all that mayhem, the legislators were escorted back to the chamber under heavily armed escort, and a stunning 139 representatives—66 percent of the House GOP caucus—along with eight GOP senators, promptly voted to overturn the election, just as the mob and the president had demanded.”  What the insurrectionists had failed to do by force, the GOP attempted to do by abuse of their office.  And as Tufecki reminds us, these politicians who attempted to overthrow the U.S. government by more cunning means still remain in office.  In other words, even if Trump is gone, his spirit remains very much alive in the Republican Party (multiple state GOP parties have now endorsed the lie that the election was stolen, including here in Oregon).  Yet, as she writes, “There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.”

It is true that some Democrats want to hold their Republican peers responsible for their actions that day.  A few, like Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, have called for the expulsion of all Republicans who voted to overturn the election.  Others have focused on a smaller band of prominent ringleaders, like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and the representatives who spoke at the January 6 Trump rally.

But if most Democrats wanted to avoid facing the culpability of two-thirds of the GOP House caucus and 8 GOP senators who acted on the lie that also led to the insurrectionist attack, this will not be possible once the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is underway.  I see no logically or morally consistent argument for Trump’s conviction that doesn’t also serve as a damning accusation against the Republicans who voted to reject the electoral college tally.  The Democrats’ case that Donald Trump incited the Capitol attacks cannot be made without asserting that he laid the groundwork with his lies about a stolen election.  And if Donald Trump is not fit for office because of such lies, then neither are those members of Congress who acted on them by voting to reject the election results.  The assault on the Capitol and their votes later that day were two sides of a single insurrectionist coin.

Republicans are fully aware that any effort to hold Trump accountable for his anti-democratic actions lies perilously close to an effort to hold them accountable for their own anti-democratic actions.  This is especially the case as we learn more details about the complicity of individual Republican congressmen in Trump’s schemes to overturn the election results.  To convict Trump would be tantamount to convicting themselves of their active or tacit support of his months-long disinformation campaign against American democracy.  This, combined with their unwillingness to anger the still-loyal Trump base, means that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that more than one or two Republican senators will vote to convict him, no matter how damning the evidence.

This CNN article points to one of the main GOP strategies to disarming the conviction effort: asserting that conviction after a president has left office is unconstitutional.  This way, they can vote to acquit Trump on false technical grounds while pretending not to be excusing his attempts to overthrow the election.  Simultaneously, the GOP is also adopting a broader strategy of pretending that President Biden and the Democrats are viciously seeking to divide the country, whether by passing laws that Republicans don’t agree with or by pursuing impeachment as an act of vengeance.  From this perspective, the crime is not that Trump incited a coup attempt, but that Democrats are trying to hold him accountable for doing so.

In other words, the Republican Party has signaled it will fight tooth and nail to prevent holding Trump accountable.  But as I noted, why wouldn’t they, since so many are fundamentally guilty of the same incitement and disinformation of which the president is accused?  Given this bad faith, lawless attitude so early into the Biden presidency, I really don’t see a way forward for Democrats but to seek to hold the GOP to account for its role in fomenting insurrection against our government.  We are at the point that continuing to act as if the GOP is a good faith, normal democratic party lends it a credibility it no longer deserves.

In terms of the impeachment, Democrats should go all in on something they should have done with the first, unsuccessful impeachment effort — structure the proceeding not just as a case against the president, but also against GOP senators who participated in his fraud against the American people and refuse to hold the president accountable.  Only 8 Republican senators voted to overturn the electoral college results, but nearly all of them were silent or actively complicit in his attempts to denounce the election results.  As much as possible, Democrats should make it clear that a vote to acquit Donald Trump is a vote in favor of violent insurrection.  This has the virtue of being true, and would also send the unmistakable message that those who refuse to condemn political violence need to be considered its abettors.  If it’s impossible to sway all but a handful of Republican senators anyway, why not make it clear to the American people that a vote to acquit Trump is a vote in favor of lawlessness, authoritarianism, and violence?

If the GOP is going to continue down its radical path, and to spread lies and propaganda about Democratic voters and the legitimacy of our elections, Democrats may as well put GOP authoritarianism front and center in the national dialogue.  Bipartisanship is a meaningless ideal when one of the two major parties won’t even accept election results any more, or the legitimacy of any Democratic victory.

This is all the more urgent since, as political observers like Ron Brownstein argue, the forces and incentives that have pushed the GOP to this dark place are likely only to increase, not decrease, in the coming years.  At The Atlantic, Brownstein writes that:

[T]he breadth of anxiety inside the GOP coalition about the fundamental demographic, economic, and cultural changes remaking America strongly suggest that these party tendencies won’t disappear when Trump leaves the White House. If anything, they could intensify as those changes accelerate and as the incoming Biden administration—which has given prominent roles to people of color, LGBTQ people, and women—embodies all of them.

[. . .] Trump’s redefinition of the GOP as a vehicle for the white Americans most uneasy about racial and cultural change has alienated many previously Republican-leaning white suburban voters, even in previously Republican-leaning states—as this week’s Georgia losses painfully demonstrated to the party again. That means, to win elections, virtually all Republicans now need superheated turnout from the Trump base: white, non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical Christian voters. And that means Republicans of all stripes will feel pressure to continue portraying Democrats not merely as misguided or wrong, but as an existential threat to GOP voters’ lives—even as Wednesday’s riot captures how those alarms are exacerbating the greatest strains on the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.

There is a superficial but false equivalence between GOP efforts to demonize the Democratic Party, and a Democratic effort to unambiguously treat the GOP as an authoritarian threat to America democracy.  It’s understandable that some Democrats would want to do what they can to de-escalate tensions, but there can’t be any accommodation with politicians who incite insurrection.  The attack on the Capitol, and its incitement through the Big Lie of a stolen election, represented a red line that, once crossed, cannot be forgiven, not without fundamentally compromising the Democrats’ own commitment to democracy.  Democrats should feel confident that their cause is based in truth, justice, and the rule of law; they should also know that unless they maintain our system of laws and a discourse based in facts, there will be no democracy, or Democratic Party.

Donald Trump’s incitement of violence, his alliance with far-right extremists, and the Republican Party’s broad willingness to participate in the lies that give aid and comfort to such extremism should be treated as politically disqualifying.  With the passage of time, the president’s decision to ally himself with the violent white nationalists who took part in the Capitol attack will only grow more radioactive for his legacy, and for the party that enabled him.  As Americans come to realize the president has unleashed a white supremacist insurrection against American government and society, Democrats must be sure to aim public anger and revulsion at those who offered aid and comfort this terroristic movement. The GOP has tied itself to a losing, amoral cause, and the Democrats should use impeachment to hammer this home, and to put the GOP’s cowardice and disgrace on display for all the nation to see.

The International Wrecking Crew

As the country continue to put together a full picture of the events of January 6, and grapples with the undeniable existence of far-right groups and ideologies aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government, an additional perspective needs to be added to the mix: the fact that such far-right extremism is growing across much of the western world.  Indeed, as this New York Times report makes clear, the assault on the Capitol was viewed with glee and is being studied for lessons by various European extremists.  German neo-Nazis and other extremists cheered on their American counterparts from afar; and January 6 has them dreaming of a violent future, seeing the assault “as a teaching moment — about how to move forward and pursue their goal of overturning democratic governments in more concerted and concrete ways.”

The United States was not the first country to have its seat of government assaulted by far-right extremists in recent years; last August, far-right protestors tried to break into the German parliament building, the Reichstag.  As Cas Mudde writes at The Guardian, “In the past decades rightwing politicians and pundits have opportunistically pandered to the far-right electorate by defining them as ‘the real people’ and declaring this loud minority to be an allegedly victimized silent majority.”  As in the United States, this willingness by major political parties to rhetorically split nations into the authentic populace and a grab bag of moochers, liberals, and immigrants has provided plentiful fuel to movements that take such de-humanizing, zero-sum thinking to its eliminationist conclusions.

Americans should be aware of this international perspective as an urgent reminder that how the United States handles this crisis will very likely influence the fates of democracies around the world.  When neo-Nazis storm the American Capitol, German neo-Nazis celebrate, and are energized to pursue their depraved goals of overthrowing their own democracy.

But understanding the international phenomenon of right-wing extremism also provides corroborating evidence that the Republicans’ far-right turn is actively encouraging violent white nationalist and other forms of far-right extremism in the United States.  And this, in turn, offers a damning perspective on the GOP’s general refusal to come to grips with the seriousness of the Capitol assault.  The party rejects any connection between the attack on the Capitol in the name of overturning the election results, and the votes by 140 of its representatives and 8 of its senators later the same day to . . . overturn the election results.  In other words, some two-third of Republican representatives voted to sustain a lie that incited the most extreme reaches of the American populace to commit violence in the name of that lie.  The GOP has made itself an inciter of armed insurrection aimed at toppling American democracy; that right-wing militants across Europe are celebrating the attacks gives an additional, damning measure of the Republican Party’s descent into authoritarian madness.

Against Insurrection

Perhaps the single most disorienting aspect of the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol has been the lack of a decisive message from America’s leaders that the perpetrators will be brought to justice.  A prime reason for this is that this message would normally come from the president; in this case, as Donald Trump helped incite the attack, we are left in the harrowing situation in which the president is neither willing nor able to rally the nation to its own defense.  Compare this to the nearest analogue, the terrorist attacks September 11, when President Bush very quickly announced to the American public and the world that the United States would be moving quickly against those responsible.

Instead, we are witness to a spectacle of fortification, of both Washington, D.C. and the various state capitols, that communicates both grave danger and a fundamental passivity in its face.  We are effectively being told that we Americans need to be afraid, when the message very much should be that it is the violent insurrectionists who should be afraid.  It is as if war had been declared on the United States by a hostile country, but the United States declined to declare war in turn.

Still, there has not been complete silence from our leaders.  Many Democrats have spoken passionately about the need for justice, and to investigate exactly what happened on January and in its lead-up.  The House impeached the president for his role in the attacks. And the FBI director has warned the insurrectionists that the FBI is coming for them.

But given the gravity of this event, we need President Biden, as soon as he’s sworn in, to not only make it clear that the full force of American justice will be brought against the insurrectionists, but that the government will act to disrupt and dissolve any white nationalist, neo-Nazi, or QAnon organizations who were involved in its planning, or who are plotting future attacks.  Though the death toll was a tiny fraction of 9/11, this assault was just as, if not more, serious and consequential.  The idea that there are thousands or even millions of Americans who have been emboldened or radicalized under Trump to take up arms against their own government is no less a danger to the United States than a handful of terrorists in 2001 who got lucky with lax U.S. airline security and a president who ignored the multiple warnings of an imminent attack. Biden has a responsibility to explain this reality to the American people.

Decisive action by Biden is also called for because of how this attack was given aid and comfort by the lies of election theft spread not only by Donald Trump, but affirmed by many in the Republican Party — including the 100+ representatives and 7 senators who voted to reject the results of the November election.  Because of this willingness of the GOP to risk incitement of violence, the stakes are even higher — Biden must make it clear that there will never be a scenario in which violence can successfully overthrow the American government.

It is not enough to leave this fight to the workings of the criminal justice system; the assault on the Capitol was a political attack as much as a violent, criminal one, and requires a political response from the president.

No Mercy for Members of Military Who Took Part in Capitol Assault

The January 6 assault on the Capitol was a true American horror show, with a ghastly cast of characters encompassing neo-Nazis, white supremacists, QAnon adherents, insurrectionary Trump voters, and members of law enforcement.  But arguably the most horrifying participants of all were current and former members of the U.S. military.  At least nine former members have been arrested so far, while authorities are investigating the involvement of at least 25 active duty and retired personnel.

Over at The Nation, Jeer Heer argues that the particular responsibilities and skills of the armed forces require intervention by the military’s code of justice, and that this should be applied to both active and retired members of the military:

[F]ormer soldiers should be regarded in a special light if they engage in political violence. As soldiers, members of the armed wing of the state, they received special training. For them to use this training against civilian politicians strikes at the heart of democracy. It’s a betrayal of the fundamental principle that the military has to be subservient to the people. It’s a rejection of the soldier’s oath to the Constitution. There is good reason for that oath to be lifelong and not bound by the period of active service.

By having military tribunals handle former soldiers who attempt a coup, a deterrent is set up for the entire military. Further, the military will be forced in this way to deal with its own internal problems and to weed out potential insurgents. Cleaning up the military and making sure it has not been infected with seditionists will be a major task in the coming years. Forcing the military to deal with rogue soldiers, both current and retired, is a way of hastening this crucial cleanup operation.

Heer is dead-on in pointing out how important it is to keep the military free of insurrectionists; he reminds us that one bright spot of the Trump years has been the military’s solid resistance to being sucked into the president’s undermining of democracy.  And ensuring that even retired military personnel cannot escape military justice helps shine a spotlight on the gravity of their crimes. Indeed, this approach is being articulated by some in Congress; Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego (a veteran himself) said that, "I think we should throw the book at them, to the furthest extent possible. If you're off active duty, I want to figure out a way we can bring you back and charge you”; Gallego also noted that convicted veterans should lose their retirement benefits.

But apart from the critical goal of maintaining the military’s subordination to the democratic order, investigating and punishing treasonous soldiers would also convey to American society the gravity of the attack on the Capitol, and the fundamentally traitorous nature of the insurrectionary forces the president has incited to action.  As a highly regarded institution, the military has the credibility to remind Americans that there are no grey areas when it comes to attempts to overthrow American democracy.  At the same time, highlighting that malign actors can exist even in the military will help remind the public that our institutions must be actively maintained and critiqued, never taken for granted.

There is also a clear need for the military to get its house in order on the extremism front. Reporting indicates that the Pentagon’s efforts to extirpate white nationalists and other extremists from its ranks have not been sufficiently consistent or thorough, leading in part to the spectacle of the FBI running background checks on the Nation Guard soldiers being deployed to Washington to guard the inauguration. It is in fact mind-boggling that the military has not considered this a more serious issue up to now; presidential leadership and congressional oversight will both be required to ensure that military maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward extremism in its personnel.