The Republican primary in Alabama to choose a senatorial candidate for the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions has startled many in the GOP establishment. In part this is because President Trump himself supported and in fact campaigned for the losing candidate, Luther Strange (who currently holds the seat via gubernatorial appointment). The significance of the outcome is also bound up with the fact that Moore is a long-time extremist and all-around weirdo whose possible election to the Senate portends a further move rightward for the Republican Party. As the New York Times details, many Republicans see Moore’s victory as a clear signal that the GOP base has turned against its current leadership, though the conclusion of Republican strategists that “the conservative base now loathes its leaders in Washington the same way it detested President Barack Obama” seems like a unresolvable question, akin to that old theological debate about how many profound hatreds can dance on the head of a pin.
Due to his political extremism, many Republicans wonder if Moore might lose against the Democratic candidate in bright-red Alabama. As summarized at Talking Points Memo, “Moore is a hardline religious conservative who was twice kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to obey the rule of law and disregarding higher court rulings, first for erecting then refusing to remove a monument of the ten commandments a decade ago then for rejecting the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage. He’s said homosexual conduct should be illegal, suggested the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks happened because America has turned away from God, and claimed that parts of the American Midwest were living under Muslim Sharia law.” Moore had also argued that Democratic representative Keith Ellison should not be seated in the U.S. Congress due to the fact that he’s Muslim.
Yikes.
It’s not much of a stretch, though, to conclude along with TPM that Moore won not despite his extremism, but because of it. His positions are no mystery to Alabama voters, and we also have to weigh in the fact that they had plenty of cover to vote for Moore’s opponent via President Trump’s backing of Luther Strange. Steve Kornacki at NBC argues that not only is a GOP base voter insurrection underway, but that it’s part of a larger pattern that has played out for the past ten years, in which extremely conservative candidates ride to primary victory on a wave of voter disgust with the GOP establishment. This movement has encompassed the rise of the Tea Party movement and failed senatorial candidates like Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell and Todd “legitimate rape” Akin. Kornacki not surprisingly includes Donald Trump in this anti-establishment movement, and makes the point that Trump “cracked the code” of the Tea Party — that it was not about “policy or ideology,” but about cultural rebellion. As confirmation, he points to Trump’s lack of legislative accomplishments in contrast with his endless enthusiastic culture-war battles meant to rouse and pacify his core voters.
In this context, Roy Moore’s victory seems more like a vindication or continuation of Trump’s strategy than a repudiation of the president. Like Trump, Moore practices a politics that foregrounds cultural resentments and the notion of a haggard people besieged by godless others. Moore, after all, has made his reputation by provoking culture war-type fights. Kornacki is right on in playing up the continuities between Trump and Moore — and indeed, Donald Trump immediately began signaling his support for Moore following his victory, even going so far as to delete previous pro-Strange tweets. He also observes that though Strange was Trump’s pick on the basis of mutual loyalty, it was Moore who could more strongly make the case that he’d be the the one more likely to fight against the GOP establishment and give Trump political room to be himself.
Moore’s election is one of several looming insurgencies that challenge Republican incumbents, which many believe may raise opportunities for Democratic candidates. In fact, a recent piece in Politico details how Democrats are closely watching races in which Republicans are poised to field and perhaps select extremist candidates. But as one Democratic party strategist observes of how the ground has shifted in the last seven years, “Unfortunately, the goal posts have moved on what’s considered sane and reasonable now.” Indeed — and Donald Trump is Exhibit A.
Over at New Republic, Jeet Heer goes all in with dunking nascent Democratic optimism in cold water, pointing to the last eight years of politics as evidence that excited predictions of Republican collapse are always proved premature. He writes:
What’s striking is that this so-called war between the establishment and the populists always ends in the same way: with the establishment absorbing elements of the populist agenda to win elections. Seen in this light, these so-called insurgencies or civil wars never really hurt the Republican Party. Rather, they give it more energy by riling up the base. The gamble that [Steve] Bannon is making is that religious extremism will create a more powerful GOP. Alas, there’s no reason to think Bannon is wrong.
I’d agree that Heer has got recent history on his side — however tenuous and fraught the GOP’s balancing act seems, the party does keep ending up ahead. But he importantly notes that it’s not just the base’s energy and the establishment’s ability to keep channeling that energy (while of course also being changed by it) that’s helped the Republicans move to control all three branches of government. As Heer puts it, even with the burden of candidates who appall the middle, “a Moore-style GOP can remain an electoral force in the same way that the current GOP does: with a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Senate and Electoral College’s overrepresentation of small, rural, overwhelmingly white states—their bias toward conservative voters, in other words.” These additional factors are in fact necessary for the Republicans to continue achieving electoral success. Unfortunately for them, these are all practices against which Democrats have a fighting chance, in that they are uniformly anti-democratic arrangements that thwart the will of the majority, and that in the case of gerrymandering and voter suppression are based on immoral and racist foundations.
It’s also important not to misinterpret the cultural resentments that provide so much of the political fuel for Republican politicians. A progressive politics can’t and shouldn’t match ideas like anti-immigrant hatred or homophobia, but it can put forward policies that address the economic insecurity that make people so receptive to illiberal, tribal appeals in the first place. The GOP is already behind in numbers — the party can only suffer so many voters being peeled away before what seems like impregnability will turn to catastrophic vulnerability. And if Democrats can come back enough, they can pass laws to eliminate the anti-democratic tools Republicans have used to secure their majorities in too many states. There are worse platforms to run on than defense of democracy.
Which brings us back to Roy Moore and the race in Alabama. He's a politician so extreme, so contemptuous of the rule of law, that the Democrats would be fools not to make support for him a litmus test for other Republicans, and to fully back former state Attorney General Doug Jones against him. This is not because they will necessarily win, but in order to draw a bright line between what is acceptable and what is not. And it turns out that in addition to his disdain for the Constitution, separation of church and state, and human equality, Moore’s biggest backer is an outright modern-day secessionist who apparently mourns the South’s loss in the Civil War. With such an association, Moore pushes the definition of right-wing past the breaking point — if you accept money from someone who literally doesn’t even believe in the existence of the United States, we are well beyond conservative politics and into some new-fangled hodgepodge of farce and disqualifying anti-Americanism. It is inconceivable to me that with this sort of neo-Confederate, un-American baggage, a well-funded, intelligent Democratic campaign could not give Moore a run for his money. At the very least, it's an opportunity for Democrats to highlight the absurdity of a GOP that flaunts its patriotism while acting in a way that's anything but patriotic.
