As we look back on the past year, and ahead to what might unfold in 2023, the crisis of democracy still dominates any efforts to follow and understand U.S. politics. After a midterm election in which avowed Republican opponents of democracy fell short in various critical elections, including secretary of state and gubernatorial races in swing states, it’s reasonable and healthy to conclude that Americans’ belief in democracy outperformed cynical expectations. Yet the Democrats’ ability to hold losses in the House to a minimum still resulted in the Republican Party re-taking power in that chamber (a victory greatly enabled by GOP gerrymandering — but it is also a fact that GOP candidates won more votes than Democrats, lending an undeniable democratic legitimacy to their victory). That the Democrats, two years after a coup attempt orchestrated by a Republican president and retroactively embraced or downplayed by a majority of GOP house members, have not been able to convince a decisive American majority of the illegitimacy and danger of Republican rule remains perhaps the second-most unsettling facet of American politics, close behind the essential fact of Republican authoritarianism.
To win the fight not just to defend democracy, but to expand it in ways that ensure that this anti-democratic movement is decisively crushed and deprived of the oxygen it needs to continue, we need to keep the terms of this fight front and center as much as possible. As I’ve argued over the last couple years, an illuminating lens is to view the post-January 6 Republican Party as essentially insurrectionist, the political wing of a broad right-wing movement in rebellion against modern America, in favor of conservative Christianity, misogyny, and white supremacism. Its insurrectionist credentials were forged in the fires of January 6, when, for the first time in American history, a president attempted a coup to stay in office, and his party not only failed to rebel against him, but in the weeks that followed made clear that Donald Trump remained the party’s leader. Broad support for Trump continues to brand the GOP as insurrectionist in spirit and intent, but its range of anti-democratic actions and rhetoric demonstrate that this insurrectionism burns brightly quite apart from the party’s obsession with the former president, and lives on in possible successors like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. GOP efforts to subvert elections through denialism, voter suppression, and the spreading of lies about nonexistent Democratic fraud constitute an unarmed rebellion against American democracy as the majority of the citizenry understands it. Meanwhile, GOP complicity in manifold threats and outright violence against election workers, educators, and racial and sexual minorities tilts the party into support of an uprising against American democracy and society while maintaining a thin veneer of plausible deniability.
It’s the job of democracy’s proponents — starting with the Democratic Party — to deny the Republican Party this layer of plausible deniability, and to describe the actions and goals of the GOP in explicit, unforgiving terms.
The repeated unsuccessful attempts by Republicans (as of this writing, they are up to 13 votes) to elect a House speaker is providing a test case for how such coverage might, or might not, play out. The dominant theme in reporting has been a sense of chaos emanating from the GOP, a party that managed to win back the House yet can’t decide amongst itself who should lead in the chamber, despite having had several weeks to get their ducks in a row. But reporting has correctly settled on the 20 or so holdouts who have so far refused to support Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid, despite the well-reported fact that he has essentially given in to every extreme demand they have made of him — including a proposal that it would only take a single House member to call for a new leadership vote, which as many pointed out would seriously hamstring McCarthy even if he did win, as well as seed the ground for future chaos.
As outlets like The New York Times have reported, there is a direct link between these holdouts and extremist, anti-democratic politics. Most prominently, nearly all of them either deny the 2020 elections results and/or “voted to overturn the 2020 Electoral College results.” And now, apparently, they are running the show in the House, so that the there is a clear link between insurrectionist sentiment and the chaos they are inflicting on their party and their country. That the GOP House majority will likely be at the mercy of such extremists is a non-controversial statement, and the Democrats should keep this fact front and center in their messaging about the unsettled House situation. Among other things, it helps answer the question, “What do these guys want, anyway?” As the holdouts continue to withhold their support despite McCarthy bending over backwards (and then some) to meet their demands, we already know what they want, because they’ve voted and talked about it before: they want to throw out the results of free and fair elections. And remember — a majority of their fellow House Republicans also voted to throw out the 2020 presidential results, so that this group is merely the most extreme manifestation of a general antipathy to democracy among GOP House members. Extreme as they are, on matters that count, it is fair to say that they are not a lot different than the rest of the House majority.
That the House leadership vote is still in progress as of the second anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol makes it all the more important, and resonant, to draw connections between the GOP’s inability to get its act together and the party’s complicity in Trump’s coup attempt. Indeed, a House member even nominated Donald Trump to be House speaker (there is no requirement that the Speaker be an elected official). As Josh Marshall noted at Talking Points Memo, the Democrats can and should object to such a nomination, on the basis of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition of those who have engaged in insurrection from holding public office. Indeed, this feels like the ultimate no-brainer, a way to keep the GOP’s endorsement of insurrection in plain view, and to force the GOP to either back down or explicitly embrace armed rebellion against America.
And in a more general sense, Democrats and others should make the case that the GOP, riven by extremism, isn’t actually able to participate in democracy, and through its current House shenanigans is undermining our shared stability and prosperity. As a New York Times analysis puts it:
to see [Republican struggles] play out repeatedly on the House floor this week has left little doubt that Congress as an entity would struggle to carry out even its most basic duties in the coming two years, such as funding the government, including the military, or avoiding a catastrophic federal debt default.
Already, the functioning of the House had ground to a halt before it even began, rendering the body essentially useless. Without a speaker, lawmakers were unable to pass bills, form committees or even get sworn in. And Mr. McCarthy had promised still more concessions to the hard-right group that would substantially weaken the speakership in exchange for their votes, effectively giving them new tools for disrupting business in the House — and the ability to hold him hostage to their demands.
While it’s well within the structure of our democracy for parties to vote for leadership, as has been happening in the House, what is not compatible with democracy is for one of those parties to have a critical number of members who don’t appear to have any particular investment in governance — who, in fact, seem to be motivated by a desire to burn down our structures of democracy, finance, and defense. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat tweeted earlier this week, “Today's spectacle is what happens when you give up compromise, cooperation, and solidarity in politics. This party, now wedded to authoritarian methods, can no longer manage democratic procedures.”