If Republican leadership won't stand up to this buffoon playing at il duce, why should we expect them to stand up to a truly dangerous, ruthless one?
This is another problem of commonplaces and how they work with ideas that everybody grew up thinking. The commonplace about the Republican Party is that it's pro-business, pro-military, anti-crime. That's their brand. In recent years they've also become the party of religious conservatives in a way they were not until the post-Voting Rights Act realignment through Nixon's southern strategy. Since then the Republicans have become the party shaped by the political imagination of the South, which is to be a one-party oligarchy.
But hardly anybody thinks of Republicans that way. Most people continue to think Republicans care about democracy as much as Democrats do. It's just that they prefer more conservative policies. That commonplace no longer reflects the truth about the Republican Party, but it works to keep their central political objectives out of view for most Americans, particularly rank-and-file Republicans like conservative suburban housewives. Next cycle they will have no problem voting for any Republic presidential candidate who presents himself as something other than a preening, misogynistic crackpot.
Michael Lind makes the case for the southern takeover of American politics in his Made in Texas, and more recently Heather Richardson makes a similar argument in How the South Won the Civil War. Southern politics has always been anti-democratic. It's always been a one-party dominant system designed to defend the rights of its "aristos" against the "demos". It has achieved that by a divide-and-conquer strategy that pits poor whites against poor blacks.
The same divide-and-conquer strategy is being used now on a national scale by enflaming the culture war, which is a proxy for the old racial strategy. The culture-war strategy is broader than the racialist strategy of the South, but, like Nixon's southern strategy and Reagan's invocation of welfare queens, much of its power depends on 'vestigial', coded racism. It's just vestigial enough that Republicans can persuade themselves that they are not racists, but rather just people with traditional values who are pro-business and anti-crime.
Traditional southern politics has more in common with Latin American oligarchies than with the politics of North Atlantic societies. I think this in part explains why Democrats are deluded if they think the Hispanic vote is like the Black vote because of traditional conservative hatred for wetbacks. Latin Americans, like southern Americans, are used to one-party rule masquerading as democracy.
The thing to understand about oligarchs is that as a group they are ruthless predators who believe that it's eat or be eaten. They got to be oligarchs because they ate rather than got eaten. They assume that the demos will eat them alive unless they have complete control of the system. That's why the New Deal freaked them out. It was popular. It worked. They don't care about making life better for the demos, life's "losers". They can't give them an inch, because to give an inch is to give a mile, and if they don't keep their foot on their throats, sooner or later they're going to come for them in their beds and cut their throats. So they have to do everything they can to insure that they maintain complete control of the system that keeps them protected from people who they believe are just as much predators as they themselves are.
Oligarchy, in other words, is a mentality that promotes sociopathy. And the Republican Party is run by people who have the mindset of paranoidal sociopaths. Does Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, or Ted Cruz strike you as just normal guys who you might have a friendly disagreement with? These people are deeply creepy. Any normal, relatively healthy human being, Democrat or Republican, should be creeped out by them.
There are creepy Democrats, too, but they don't play the outsized role in their party that these Republican leaders do. Diane Feinstein creep me out, but she and others at least respect the conventions of democracy in a way that Republicans no longer do. The Republicans are no longer the party of Norman Rockwell and Hallmark cards, but the party of Charlottesville and MAGA hatefests. And Republican leaders are ok with that because Trump is so popular, and their support of his flouting democratic conventions is becoming increasingly normalized for all Americans who lean conservative. That's what's so disturbing.
So this goes a long way to explaining why Republican leadership supports Trump. He's the predator-in-chief, and they admire that. He's willing to say out loud and do in full sight what they all believed should be done in secret, and they are amazed and delighted that he's gotten away with it. He might have lost the election, but eight million more people voted for him this time than last. They are as astonished by his popularity as the rest of us. He doesn't even give lip service to democratic traditions and practices, and yet almost half the country still voted for him. There is far less cost to that than anyone would have imagined even four years ago. He has re-written the rule book for future predators who will be bolder and more strategic than the impulsive, clumsy Trump.
And so all the Democrats have their shorts in a knot because hardly any Republican leaders will acknowledge that Biden has won the election. Democrats seem to think that most Republicans still care about democracy and secretly despise Trump. This is true of a fringe of Republicans, but it's no longer true at the core. Democrats accuse Republican leaders of sycophancy, of lacking courage because they believe that they wouldn't behave the way they do unless they were so afraid of Trump. They still keep hoping that Republicans will once again be the party they grew up with, a party that they might have some disagreements with about taxes, regulation, crime, and foreign policy, but a party that stood with them to depose Nixon.
Not gonna happen. Trump has emboldened them to give their inner autocrat full rein. We should expect more and worse in the future.
Democratic party leaders, along with most Americans, don't want to face up to the fact that Republicans are a party that is an organized form of sociopathy committed to obtain and retain power at all costs, and if that means good bye democracy, so be it. They don't fear Trump so much as they genuinely admire him. He has become what they want to be.
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