From Thomas Edsall's column this morning regarding right wing disappointment that the Supreme Court didn't support the president:
A poster whose name cannot be printed in this newspaper declared, “I can’t wait to taste your blood.” MakeLiberalsCryAgain put the case bluntly:
It’s INSANE. Many of these contested states have REPUBLICAN majorities in their legislatures. They had the power all along to stop this, and they haven’t done blankety blank. They held hearings to give the appearance of caring, but in the end, they all cucked out like the spineless, traitorous cowards they are. It looks like the uniparty is reality. What’s the point in voting when they’re all the same?
Even more explicit, dinosaurguy declared,“War it is,” joined by AngliaMercia, “We kill now.” Chipitin warned: “Never forget those justices were handpicked by McConnell and the Federalist Society. They told him they’ll help him out picking the best — only to make sure they’ll pick those that will betray him. Time to go to war with the Republican Party.”
It would be interesting If the crazier fringe on the Trumpian Right continues to turn against the GOP establishment. It makes sense. The Trump base has absolutely no reason to trust and support establishment Republicans like McConnell and their institutions like the Federalist Society. So it makes sense that as their fantasy of aggrievement escalates, they will turn against the GOP. In the short run it might actually keep Trump supporters from voting for the Republican candidates in the Georgia runoff. This will give the Dems a chance at pushing McConnell out of the driver's seat. I've been skeptical about this as a real possibility, but I've come to believe there's a chance now made possible by Trump's personality cult divorcing itself from the party.
So in the last month, we've seen the Trump base reach a whole new level of crazy, so divorced from reality, so driven by anger, so unstrategic, that whatever damage it causes in the short run, it might work in the Democrats' favor in the long run.
And then running parallel to this in the longer run, if the craziest fringes of the Trump base start actually acting out their violent fantasies, this will do even more damage to the Republican coalition. Violence makes things real.The Republican establishment types will recognize that their absurdist theater designed to keep the pitchfork crowd in line will no longer be enough.These craven Republicans will be forced to either condone or to disavow the violence. Either way they lose legitimacy, which will further diminish their real power in Washington. We'll see if it plays out this way.
The Republicans have been acting in completely nutso, irresponsible ways since Gingrich was speaker, but it's mostly been theater, symbolic gestures that didn't require any real results, except to keep them in power, to lower taxes, and deregulate corporations. The hundreds of occasions they tried to repeal Obamacare and the sixty some odd lawsuits they've brought to overturn the election are the most egregious examples of that kind of symbolic theater, along with the Benghazi and Clinton emails brouhahas. All baseless nonsense. But if in Trump's name the crazier, fringier elements of his base start bombing, assassinating, kidnnapping, and whatever else they come up with to expresss their grievances and delusion, there will be two results.
First, it will fail because the U.S. military and domestic security community will not support it even if there are some rogue elements within the military and police who might join in. This violence won't be supported by most Trump voters because, frustrated and angry thought they might be, they are not violent sociopaths. Success requires strategic thinking by experienced operatives, and what will be more likely is the kind of clown act by the weekend warriors we saw in the attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Wittmer. Even if some actions are more successful, the full power of the state will be brought to bear on snuffing it out, and most Americans, me included, will applaud its doing so. The irony, of course, is that this will strengthen the administrative surveillance state these people hate so much rather than to weaken it.
Second, because it will prove ineffectual, it will likely soon burn out as violent leftist extremism burned out in the 70s. And if Biden and some of the saner establishment Republicans actually get some important things done without GOP obstruction, this whole thing might disappear into the rear-view mirror as the chaos of the 60s and 70s did.
It may or may not be significant, but Steve Schmidt, the campaign manager for McCain in '08, and largely responsible for bringing Sarah Palin from the boondocks to the Main Stage has recently declared that he has become a Democrat. His argument is simple. It's no longer about policy differences but about whether you believe in American Democracy. The Republican Party has proved time and again that it no longer cares about Democracy, therefore he feels compelled to join the party that still does care. He's right, and I think he might be the first of many who will follow him. We'll see. It's clear that there's no space any longer in the Republican Party for anybody who truly cares about preserving American democracy more than he or she cares about retaining power.
I can imagine a future two-party realignment that would coalesce around sane, moderate centrist Republicans and centrist Democrats defining a new party competing with more Progressive faction in the current Democratic party as the hard right fades into the fringes where it belongs. Schmidt's defection could be a sign of the beginning of such a realignment. But it can't happen unless the forces of sanity get a grip on the steering wheel in D.C. very soon and start getting things done as the Trumpian Right, we hope, burns itself out tilting at windmills.
But I'm just thinking out loud here. Reading Edsall's column this morning actually gave me some hope that the Trumpian right is so crazy, so anger driven and unstrategic that it could actually work to help political sanity to reassert itself. Most Trump supporters are naive and ignorant, not violent sociopaths like those quoted in the excerpt above. They have been conned into supporting a celebrity demagogue and can be forgiven for not knowing better. Events, if they continue along this path, will serve to snap them back to the real world.
Near the end of his article, Edsall quotes Steven Pinker–
The key but unanswerable question, Pinker continued,
is how strongly reality will push back once Trump’s power and pulpit are diminished. There undoubtedly will be Lost Cause warriors and post-1945-Japan-style cave fighters, and it would be nice to think they will eventually be marginalized by their own preposterousness. But myths can persist within a closed network when belief in them is enforced by punishment, so a denialist G.O.P. faction could survive for a while.
Reality will push back sooner or later, but it's not clear how much damage will be done in the meantime.
We'll see how I feel on January 6. Will Georgia come bearing gifts for those of us who have remained more or less sane, or will the insanity continue with Mitch McConnell remaining in a position to obstruct everything?
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