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.