A week doesn’t seem to go by without the GOP providing fresh evidence that it has transformed into the party of insurrection. Witness the Republican National Committee issuing a condemnation of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger asserting that, via their participation in the House January 6 commission, they are aiding Democrats in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” In other words, the Republican Party has now asserted that the attack on the Capitol was “legitimate political discourse.” Not only is this retroactive support of an insurrection against the United States, it defines violence as a legitimate element of politics going forward.
Violence, though, is the enemy of democracy, the attempt to substitute force for the casting of votes and peaceful adherence to election results that are the very heart of democratic politics. Declaring the violence is a proper way to conduct politics is simply another way of declaring war on democracy. This is insurrectionary behavior, not an intemperate statement. It gives aid and comfort to those who participated in the January 6 attack, but also looks ahead to the future, informing Republican voters and others on the right that the party will have their back if they participate in future violence against the republic. It is also of a piece with Donald Trump’s recent calls for Republican rank-and-file to engage in street actions if state prosecutors begin charging him for his many crimes. The rule of law is to be opposed with the law of the jungle.
So we need to be using the terms “insurrection” and “insurrectionary” when talking about the Republican Party — not only for the sake of accuracy, but because they capture and communicate the urgency of our American political crisis. They let us better comprehend the ways that the GOP is in rebellion against both the democratic rules of American politics and the ideal of a free and equal society, attempting to overturn them with a mix of violence, subversion of elections, and attacks on civic harmony. They break through the illusion that there is anything ordinary about the present political stakes, or that politics is confined simply to the action in Congress and statehouses.
For instance, this rebellion certainly encompasses the GOP’s unending war on the war on covid, in which anti-vaxx and anti-mask animus ensure that the U.S. suffers mass death, social chaos, and economic destruction in the name of denying Democrats victories in the 2022 and 2024 elections. It also includes the support among elected officials for truck protests akin to those afflicting Canada; many in the GOP are quite comfortable with fomenting economic mayhem through such protests, so long as it gives them a leg up in the November elections. It also arguably includes the widespread right-wing effort, to which many GOP politicians have happily subscribed, to subvert public education so that the classroom becomes an incubator of white supremacism and disempowerment for minority students.
We are experiencing a broad right-wing, white supremacist uprising against American democracy and society that aims to transform it into something authoritarian, morally repugnant, and, crucially, politically illegitimate. The Republican Party is the primary agent of this reactionary movement. Any politics that seeks to defeat it needs to broadcast and confront the GOP’s insurrectionary nature.