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.