There are many good and cynical reasons why the GOP has, until now, avoided a full embrace of a white supremacist agenda as the party line. Plausible deniability limited racist appeals to the dog-whistle and indirect policy variety: Republicans were not willing to risk being labeled as overtly racist, for fear both of losing independent voters and provoking an unknowable backlash from the American media and business establishment. And as for its full embrace of authoritarianism in the form of Donald Trump, well, the potential has always been there in its emphasis on law and order politics — but this emphasis at least nominally involved respect for the Constitution and a balance between the three branches of government. The party’s authoritarian tendencies have also been embedded in the party’s extensive, systematic, and norm-breaking gerrymandering of political districts and voter suppression over the past decade: a strategy designed to maximize the GOP’s power at the expense of American democracy, and which not incidentally embodied the party’s inherent racist leanings in the way it sought to minimize the voting power of African-Americans and other minorities. These anti-voting measures reflect the way in which authoritarianism crept up as a dominant aspect of the party’s identity, as another way to look at them is not merely as a way to give advantage to the GOP but as a strategy that leads in the direction of one-party rule. The GOP’s current stranglehold on American politics has less to do with Republicans’ appeal to a majority of Americans and far more to do with its comfort with using undemocratic means to secure power.
But we can plausibly make the case that the GOP has systematically been working towards this end point for many, many years, whether fully-consciously or not being besides the point. White supremacism and authoritarianism go together hand in glove: if your guiding philosophy is the superiority of whites over other races, then you will inevitably go down a path that embeds non-whites’ political inequality in the law of the land, via gerrymandering and voting restrictions. White supremacism can be brought fully into the open when the fears of electoral backlash are minimized, as is the current situation, where Democrats must win around 55% of the total vote to have a chance of taking back the House of Representatives.
As horrific as this crossroads in our history is, it’s worth thinking about the risks that the Republican Party is running as it embraces its full Trumpian identity. At the most basic level, a racist and authoritarian agenda puts it at odds with a fundamental American commitment to democracy and equality, and to a broad understanding that no American is born superior to any other. There is no majority support for the sort of race-hatred or voting rollback that is at the center of the GOP today (and we will leave for another day the equally compelling case to be made that its pro-1% economic agenda likewise has scant popular backing). Let’s put it this way: the GOP has bet its future on a vision of America that is only a dark funhouse mirror version of what this country aspires to be, and has tied its identity to that bleak vision. The GOP’s bet only works if the America that most of us have tried to live up to ceases to be, if America becomes a place where you can’t win an election no matter how many votes you get. Once a party turns against democracy, it takes on a stain that really can’t be washed away.
Equally, the more the GOP’s anti-democratic, racist vision is espoused, the more it incites violence against not only minority groups but against members of the opposition party — clear demonstration of which we’ve seen over the last few, alarming weeks. Violence is incompatible with democracy, and a party that encourages it is likewise incompatible with democracy.
I suppose what I am saying is that the opposition needs to figure out, stat, how to make the Republican Party pay a price for a vision that may bring it maximal power but at the cost of being a credible adherent of the American democratic order. The GOP’s support for Donald Trump constitutes a reckless power grab that would wreck American democracy to achieve an apartheid-level state of discrimination and inequality that, I have no doubt, will not stand for long, but would come with a terrible human and moral cost.
We are long past the time that the Democratic Party either act in a manner appropriate to the state of crisis Trumpism has brought to a head, or be superseded by a new party or new leadership that doesn’t fear a clear fight that places democracy over autocracy, equality over racism, and economic security over mass exploitation. Whatever the outcome of the midterms, the opposition needs to put front and center the fact that we cannot have a democracy where the party that gets less votes still gets to rule; that we cannot have a democracy where states get to pick and choose who gets to vote and who doesn’t; and that it’s somehow acceptable for a president to incite violence against anyone he deems an “enemy of the people.”
Obviously, many things have gone wrong for us to have reached this awful point. But while we have allowed our sense of collective responsibility and commitment to democratic processes to atrophy, we are fortunate to at least have powerful traditions on which to draw. It’s not like we have to invent democracy out of whole cloth. The basics are known to us all.