There is nothing left of the Republican Party but fear. They peddle fear as their singular policy agenda, a regressive strategy to oppose any progress for the working people of this country while convincing those same working people that it is in their best interests to live in fear as well. They also live in fear of their fascist leader and his money machine and the working people who rose up and voted him out. Fear is both their chief motivation and their primary agenda item and campaign tool. Let’s look at these one at a time.
First, and perhaps most of all, they fear Trump, and no matter which way they turn the fear follows them. Trump is the most effective individual fundraiser the party may have ever seen. He is a media magnet and the embodiment of the idea that whether the press is bad or good, the attention is fantastic. A driver of the 24 hour news cycle and a master of propaganda he is able to eliminate any outside news, making his words the only ones heard above the din giving them an implied legitimacy with no room left for dissenting voices. His carnival barker act is so outrageous his uneducated base flocks to the circus and the money follows. What sets him apart is the shamelessness of it all. The imitators attempt to match the bravado, the arrogance, the dismissive hatred of the other, but they can’t help but suffer the self-awareness that they are pretending. They know they are mimicking something they really aren’t, and their embarrassment at their own phony antics seeps through. Ted Cruz is universally hated for this very shortcoming, always being recognized as flagrantly disingenuous and Josh Hawley is working on it. They are tolerated because they support the leader, the shameless one, the cash cow. Without Trump they are nothing. Without Trump the party itself is nothing, and they know it.
But with him? They are losing ground. They fear losing him because the money dries up if he goes, but keeping him makes the base dry up. It has gotten smaller and smaller as the hate rhetoric and mismanagement takes its toll on the middle class and the suburban voter, particularly the women in these demographics, leaving only the terrified white men who don’t seem terribly put off by it. But it was most certainly the difference in the Pennsylvania vote and it turned Georgia upside-down for the first time in decades. As incompetence was revealed as perhaps a greater killer than Covid-19 itself and the locus for the ineptitude found undeniably in the Oval Office, Trump is also the greatest burden the party has to carry. He lost the election, not only for himself but pushing the Senate into the arms of the Democrats, too. He had accomplished what seemed impossible. Trump almost single-handedly delivered a unified Democratic federal government.
Which leads to the third thing the Republican Party fears. Voters. Those slippery bastards just can’t be trusted. The GOP fears voters so much, they are playing the only card they have left in the pursuit of, not governance, but power. They are trying to systematically eliminate as many voters as possible as precisely as possible. They are not using scalpels in the process, they are swinging broadswords at specific demographics trying to take out huge swaths of their enemies, fellow Americans all, with each swing. Far right-wing legislatures have forwarded over 250 bills in 40 states seeking to make it harder to vote. Reduction of early voting times, elimination of or strong restrictions to mail-in or absentee voting, reduction of drop-off locations, stricter voter ID requirements, elimination of registration options and increased justifications for voter roll purges, all targeting traditional Democratic strengths. The applied wisdom here is that if voting is free and fair in the United States the Republican Party is history, so move from the quantity of votes to the “quality” of votes. If they win this battle for the electorate, or lack of it, America is effectively over.
Lest this sounds like partisan hyperbole, let me point out that I am actually quoting from the mouths of party leadership. This isn’t some hippie liberal crying in his cereal. This is unbiased reporting, easy to access and confirm.
Arizona State Representative John Kavanagh was quoted this week, saying “Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote. But everybody shouldn’t be voting.” But he couldn’t stop there. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.” The fraud he is attempting to protect us from has never been found.
In March of 2020, concerns for the safety of the American voter in the face of a global pandemic started to enter the news cycle and soon was being addressed by Congress. In the first bill addressing Covid-19 relief many measures that expanded mail-in and early drop-off voting were included for the safety of the electorate and eventually passed. In the run-up to the vote on the relief bill, President Trump appeared on “Fox and Friends” and just said it out loud. Referring to the bill, he said “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” No voice pushed back against that calculus. It was an unspoken given, a conventional wisdom.
Last week, Michael Carvin, a lawyer for the right wing “think tank” the Federalist Society representing the Republican National Committee before the Supreme Court defending suppressive voting measures in Arizona, was asked by Justice Amy Coney Barrett what interest the Party had in defending these measures. He was clear and succinct. “It puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero sum game. Every extra vote that they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us. It’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election.” The purpose was clear, and it was a losing argument.
Voter suppression has long been a tactic to only allow the “quality” votes to count. The Democratic Party perfected it in the South in the Jim Crow era, crafting tests and policies that would prevent black people from voting and being represented in their own states. These policies and the terror tactics of the Ku Klux Klan were so effective that states with majority populations of people of color would see their votes suppressed to under 5%.
The Voting Rights Act addressed some of these inequities, requiring voting laws in states that had been prone to racial disenfranchisement to be approved at the Federal level, but in 2013 those restrictions were lifted by the Supreme Court in their Shelby County v. Holder decision, and states like Texas and Georgia were off to the races, closing polling venues in predominantly black neighborhoods. It was the tip of the iceberg. All manners of creativity were applied to ways to restrict potential Democratic votes while maintaining plausible reasons for doing them, the definition of plausible being stretched beyond recognition.
These are the things Republicans fear. Trump, No Trump, and voters.
That is the basis for the other Republican addiction to fear. In order to cope with their internal fears, they must instill fear in their followers. Fear is their front-line issue, their modus operandi. There is no national vision, no overarching domestic concept for the country’s future, no cohesive foreign policy, no real aspirations. There is only the lack of power and the insatiable need to regain it by any means necessary. Fear is the tool. This has been true for a very long time. From Eugene McCarthy’s unhinged witch hunts that destroyed lives and careers, to the militarization of the suppression of the anti-war movement and Nixon’s decrees of “law and order” to the John Birch Society renewing the bogeyman of communism and liberalism to Reagan’s full on assault on the government itself, declaring it to BE the problem.
But few since McCarthy have been so ruthless in their fear mongering as Donald J. Trump, and his enormous success with people who had been smoldering since the Obama administration put a black man in the White House led others to follow suit and support a new found supremacist party. The white cis man finally had a champion. Trump got it. The Problem was “them”, and there were a lot of “thems”. Black thems, immigrant thems, Muslim thems, Chinese thems, gay thems, transgender thems, poor thems, elite thems, egghead thems, scientist thems, disabled thems, student thems, women thems. The list seemed endless, a cacophony of people to mock and vilify. He ran on this idea as a platform, leveraging the lowest common denominator in a class war that used the insecurities of the lower classes to enrich the upper. He was barely off the escalator before he was calling desperate refugees rapists and drug dealers. He found his audience, empowered and mobilized them into a force that would overwhelm a newly disinterested Democratic Party no longer mobilized by a historic sea change in the Executive Branch. Party enthusiasm waned as their candidate with too much baggage and too little stump appeal made some notable gaffs and was sucker punched with accusations that would ultimately come to nothing. She was unable to win even as her opponent had grotesque revelations that no other candidate could have survived. As Democratic enthusiasm disappeared, secret Republican enthusiasms became less secret, more accepted as they were crafted into dangers to the American Way. Fear was the tool. With enough fear, nearly anything could be forgiven.
People were not people anymore. They were “invaders”. “Sickos”. “Fakers”. “Liars”. And worst of all, “Liberals”. Liberals became “socialists” and then “communists” and “traitors”. There was no community of ideas, no compromise, no common ground. There was just outright political warfare. Mitch McConnell had openly declared that war against President Obama at the very outset of that administration, stating openly that he would stop Obama’s agenda and that his primary job was to make the Obama Presidency a one term proposition. He would fail, but it would not be for a lack of trying.
Trump doubled down on the warfare motif, defining his enemies and making them his only policy agenda. Obama was his main target and he attacked everything the former President had done in any way he could. His base loved it, even as he shredded the health care protections Obama had won largely for the very base Trump now commanded. Other presidents had actively tried to unwind previous administration’s agendas before, but what had changed was the openness of the motivations. Things that had once been expressed in coded language that allowed for deniability were now out of the closet, no longer shameful expressions of racism or misogyny or xenophobia but exuberant proclamations of the new Patriotism. It was thoroughly American to be a hateful white male bigot, a sign of true allegiance to the flag.
This week, Senator Ron Johnson (R) of Wisconsin showed exactly how the new hate speech operates. In an interview with conservative talk show host Joe Pags, Johnson delivered this heavy handed message to the new Americans, mixing outright lies with false bravado and explicit racism.
“Even though thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law eforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned…
“…Now had the tables been turned – Joe, this could get me in trouble – had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
Let’s be very clear about something. Senator Johnson evacuated the floor with all the other legislators fleeing to safety. He didn’t sit in his chair and wait for his fellow patriots to swarm the chamber and greet them with a warm welcome to Washington. He was right not to do so, as the crowd was out for blood, and Johnson is not Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley or some other high profile supporter of the new Justice. He is a lipstick smear on Donald Trump’s substantial buttocks without the recognition that would have saved him from the frenzy. The crowd did not honor law enforcement. They attacked them, vilified them, beat them with every weapon they could get their hands on from bicycle racks to flag poles flying the Stars and Stripes. They were not law-abiding citizens, they were trespassers, insurrectionists, batterers and most likely conspiracists. They are being rounded up by the hundreds across the country and charged with criminal activity with evidence so readily available it is frequently not being contested. Merrick Garland, in his hearing before the Senate for his confirmation as Attorney General of the United States made it very clear that administering justice to the people that perpetrated the attack on the Capitol would be his first priority, and he was confirmed with a large bi-partisan vote of 70-30. Few members of the Senate find his priorities inappropriate.
But who were the 30 that voted to turn Garland away? The professional fear mongers. Ted Cruz. Josh Hawley. Marco Rubio. John Kennedy. Mike Lee. Rand Paul. Rick Scott. Richard Shelby. Pat Toomey. Tommy Tuberville. The matches that light the scorched earth policy of the Republican Party. These thirty, though a considerable minority in the Senate, represent 60% of Republican senators. They are the mainstream of their party, the policy thrust of their agenda. They are what drives a defining ethos of fear mongering for power, fishing for votes with the squirming worm of “The Other”.
I’m getting vaccinated in a bit over a week from now. Almost half of Republicans will not follow suit because they fear. For some it’s microchips, others a rejection of science, and still more fear of centralized control.
More and more I feel I am getting vaccinated against Republicans.