Some cancers you can’t avoid. They follow you down the ancestral path, stalking you until they come out of hiding, seemingly from nowhere. Others are the result of poor choices, habits that we know better than to indulge but we do anyway. The short term pleasure is just too much of a temptation, the risk ignored until it is too late. That happens to other people but it won’t happen to me.
The Republicans have been smoking three packs a day for decades and the piper is about to come a-callin’.
A couple of times on this channel I have referred to the decision made in the mid 60’s by the Democratic Party to suffer the consequences of purging the white supremacists from their midst, knowing full well the political consequences of that decision. It led to Nixon, and after even that great a disaster, Carter became a brief correction that was easily swept aside for 12 years of Reagan and Bush and another 8 of a less than progressive Clinton administration followed by Bush. During all this time, white supremacy adopted a coded language that kept it, not merely alive, but thriving.
Though there was much to be criticized by progressives about the Obama administration, it was a huge step forward. Electing a person of color alone was a radical statement to the status quo, and the passing of any kind of health care initiative was a massive victory after a nearly 50 year struggle to make any dent on the issue. Gay marriage was passed.
So much happened so quickly, the whiplash was dramatic. Trump took advantage of the moment and embraced every dark corner of the American psyche, giving them a voice, a home and finally, a party. Now out of the closet and raging, the voices of hate could be heard clearly in state capitals, presidential rallies, growing, surging, until they were regurgitated in the halls of Congress, partisan fear of the growing mob leading to greater and greater support of the ugly chants, unable to turn their legislative backs on the mob and the money that followed it.
In 2020, the Republicans let the President off the hook in an impeachment trial that featured all the evidence any court of law would have ever needed. The Ukraine phone call was really the entire story, not the least bit grey in tone or substance. The case was a slam dunk and the gravity clearly shown, because if this was possible and excused what else would be let loose on the American people by this shameless bully? Adam Schiff tried, but it wasn’t enough.
Because, you see, it wasn’t a court of law. It was, as all impeachments are, a political exercise, and the Republicans knew where their power came from now and they were not ready to relinquish it simply because their leader was a common shake-down artist. He was embarrassing, certainly, but he was effective and the money was racing to the top, so they found ways to turn the other way, to not acknowledge what was known by all but a very addled but committed base being gaslighted to their own disadvantage. The white management class hadn’t turned on him back in January 2020. They knew what he was, but their 401s were looking pretty stout now, too, and they thought he was a harmless but useful gasbag, pathetic but ultimately a good investment. The suburbs were holding, though there were some cracks. Some women had had enough, but not too many. The men were firmly on board.
When Covid-19 hit and the response was a national disaster, the cracks widened and then ruptured into an insurmountable fissure that Trump could not close. There had finally been consequences to the incompetence that had come home to even the white neighborhoods. Suburbanites knew people who were dying. The laughter stopped and he lost as the women turned on him.
But not the men. White men made it a contest, keeping the battleground states close. They were empowered like never before by the first neo-nazi President in the nation’s history and their overwhelming support almost made the difference. They came just short, but they had enough power to elect Trump spawn into the halls of Congress in both the House and the Senate. They would lose the key Senate races in Georgia, though they would elect a representative that was the perfect example of the very powerful minority there. Q Anon had come to Congress.
The suicide pact had begun.
When faced with the clear choice of facing the modern day Bull Connors, George Wallaces, John Birchers that Trump had released on America, they balked. They would not stand up to evil if it would have a cost. Power and Party over patriotism.
The second impeachment trial was even more of a slam dunk than the first had been, which at the time seemed impossible. The evidence was overwhelming and presented incontravertably, powerful and morally searing. America watched this case built brick upon brick, unpacking the years of this administration’s bullying and incitement to greater and greater heights of violence and insurgence. It was too much to bear, watching what we had allowed to happen, our own shame displayed and for many finally hitting home. Millions found their line in the sand and realized they had crossed it a very long time ago. They simply could not go on.
But the Republican Party could.
Having sat through one of the great presentations ever seen on the Hill, the Republicans ignored it all. The first vote taken during this impeachment was on the constitutionality of the proceeding itself, and in keeping with the opinion of the majority of legal scholars across the country it passed, 56-44. With that question a settled decision, the Republicans nevertheless voted to acquit based on their lack of constitutional authority to hear the case at all, unable to refute the tsunami of evidence they had just seen. What should have been a vote simply unavailable to them on constitutional grounds was the basis of their refusal to hold the President accountable. That justification was a stiff middle finger to the idea of congressional authority itself. After the final vote was taken, Mitch McConnell summed it up by admitting that the President was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capital but followed that with the largely discredited “former President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction.” They didn’t even try very hard to hide their complicity.
What McConnell was trying to do was keep the party from crumbling beneath the weight of his own and his colleagues support of a monster. He threw a lifeline to the MAGA minions by voting to acquit while admitting Trump’s guilt, throwing a lifeline to republicans that could simply not stomach the abuses of the office we had just lived through.
Here’s why it won’t work.
In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million citizens of the United States. After two years of his leadership the House switched hands in a massive Democratic win. In 2020 his margin of defeat more than doubled to over seven million Americans and the Senate flipped to Democratic control as well. In greater and greater numbers the public is appalled by what we just went through, and they are taking responsibility for it. Americans caused this, and only Americans can fix it, and they are. The impeachment trial brought the savagery of the Trump administration, the entirety of it, under a microscope and revealed it for what it was. The longer the President was in power, the more his support had been slipping away. The House managers’ presentation only accelerated that process. It turbo-charged it. The national shame is becoming more and more clear and a price will be paid.
House and Senate republicans are doubling down on the vote of the haters. The absurdity of the acquittal is not lost on democrats, of course, but what you may not acknowledge are those republican suburbanites who are waking up to the humiliation we have just been through. We saw that in the Georgia results in the run-off elections for the Senate. The Atlanta suburbs came out with strength as Trump’s campaign to gaslight the country about the validity of the vote was in full swing , and it probably cost the Republicans the Senate. It was all too much. It turned out there are a lot of normal people. Who knew?
Before you say “But Linc, look how close it was! We only won by a whisker!” remember this was Georgia! The home of George Wallace and some of the worst white supremacist violence the civil rights era produced. Racism has been a birthright there for generations. We won Georgia! That is a stunning achievement. Texas became competitive in this election. Texas! There is a pushback against Trumpism that is quantitative and growing in this country. If gerrymandering was suddenly erased and fair districts established across the board, the advantage would immediately be obvious. North Carolina would be represented by people their Democratic majorities have been voting for in several consecutive voting cycles, rather than the stolen seats the GOP have occupied instead. You may not notice it as the insurgency gets all the press, but we got the Senate and the presidency.
We won.
In spite of all this the Republican Party for the most part has doubled down on the unhinged, conspiracy theory driven MAGA insurgency. Both senators and representatives alike live in fear of the mob, as it has shown itself willing to kill to overturn decisions it doesn’t approve of. They are loud and unashamed of their depravity and seem like a political force. They aren’t. They are a violent force, and they scare people.
It no longer matters if the party actually splits with the formation of the threatened Patriot Party. That party is largely unnecessary now as the insurgents have hijacked the Republican Party itself already. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not officially sanctioned by Congress for endorsing every ludicrous conspiracy theory that came across the Parler social network and promoting violent rhetoric against her own colleagues. Forty-three of 50 Republican senators voted to acquit the President faced with the most overwhelming evidence ever presented to convict a President, charged with encouraging a coup. The seven who crossed party lines and made this the most bi-partisan impeachment vote in the country’s history are facing sanctions by their parties at home. The crazies have already taken over the party and have no incentive to leave it to start a new one. They own the levers of the infrastructure of one of the two major parties in the United States. Few have the courage to stand up to them, and those that do are finding the going very tough.
But that minority of senators and representatives who still cling to the traditional republican ideologies will never be able to imagine it is they who need to split off and form their own party. They will always see themselves as the “real” Republicans when the reality is they no longer are. They are dinosaurs not surviving the meteor of hate that has hit their old GOP planet, reduced to fossil remains. They won’t leave the party, they will just become irrelevant within it.
Well, not quite irrelevant. As the public turns in larger and larger numbers against the newly defined Republican Party, the mainstream Republicans will sustain the civil war within it. While their mainstream supporters may not break away and become Democrats, they also won’t support the crazy candidates that will be put forward by the insurgency within. Many mainstream voters will sit out elections, and they will do it in enough numbers to influence those elections, much as they did in the runoff in Georgia. Similarly the insurgents won’t support the mainstream candidates that will be offered, seeing them as sell outs, refusing to support a white supremacy platform through violence and intimidation.
There will be no need for a third party to make Republicans irrelevant. They will do it internally, to themselves.
The GOP is committing suicide.
It is unclear where an intervention might come from.