Right now, it is a very good thing to be an older progressive. Just ask Bernie.
The GOP faces an existential crossroads that is of its own making. With an impending impeachment trial in the Senate, Republican lawmakers will have to stand up and be counted. Will they stand up for the Orange Menace or the continuation of the American experiment in democracy?
There is ample evidence of the former President’s incitement to riot. Hell, the nation’s lawmakers lived through much of the evidence themselves, and many of them know they are at risk of being accused of the same crime. After the appalling attack on the Capital, many Americans faced a wake-up call, realizing for the first time that they had been in a very abusive relationship, been played for fools, used for political gain. For the first time they realized that all the fascist rhetoric had consequences, and it turns out that many of them had not signed up to be violent revolutionaries. Even the dependable base that had found the hateful and divisive tactics of the President and his ardent political supporters amusing and largely an act had split. There were those that were willing to die or go to jail to defend the lies they had been constantly fed for years, and they will. But there were those that found the attack of our own seat of government disgusting and a bridge too far.
There is literally no chance that the first group of wanna-be martyrs would ever support the candidacy of a Mitt Romney or a Ben Sasse for president. None. They see them as traitors to the cause, much like the South saw Tennessee native David Farragut as he rose to be the Union’s greatest naval commander. There is just as small a chance that a Hawley, Cruz or Graham candidacy could garner enough support to unify a party, half of which looks at them as enemies of the State and a humiliation to the party. While Mitch McConnell considers the possibility of a guilty vote in the upcoming Senate trial in hopes of extricating the party from the stench of Trumps criminality, the Senator’s former rabid supporters are calling for his head.
There is talk of the creation of a new party, floated as the Patriot Party, which would be the new home of the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the Oath Keepers and their myriad supporters, the die-hard extremists that thought a coup was possible, that violence was the answer. There’s even merch! They are coming to the realization that their numbers just aren’t there for a successful coup, that it would simply be a fun way to die, so they are considering doing it the American way, through political persuasion.
Ironically, it would almost certainly lead to the end of conservative political influence altogether. If the Republican party split into two rival ones, their vote would be divided between rival candidates, and since they have only managed a popular vote victory once in the last seven presidential cycles while being a single unified party, they would quickly become irrelevant and progressive goals would become easier and easier to attain, as the House and Senate would become reliably Blue as well.
Think this is wishful thinking? I don’t. While some of the Republicans are desperately trying to hold the party together, the venal underbelly wants absolutely nothing to do with it. There is no compromise here, no middle ground to attain. Trump metastasized and infected the whole body politic. McConnell is trying to remove the tumor, but it may be too little too late.
None of this is really a surprise. When LBJ committed political suicide by declaring war against an ingrained social order of overt racism in the South by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he knew the southern states were lost for generations. Richard Nixon would soon follow, seizing on the opportunity of a collection of states in need of a home. A Democratic George Wallace was no longer possible, but a Republican version would soon become the norm. The GOP would welcome them into the fold and find a new way of speaking to them without quite speaking like them.
Not all Republicans were part of the secret society. There were still the fiscal conservatives, the cold war to contend with, women’s rights to avoid, corporations to defend. The code words of racism could be ignored if one wanted to, plausible deniability cooked into the new semantics. But there was an internal, unspoken divide that had been introduced to the Grand Ole Party, and it would grow and fester while being willfully encouraged.
Law and Order became an important code word, a way of using the legal system as a new hidden Jim Crow, creating a new class of unpaid workers and a way of cleansing America of “undesirables”. Nixon and Wallace used it against the youth of America that was pushing back against war policies that would be proven undeniably to be politically motivated, against people who marched for equality for people of color and for an awakening women’s movement. Trump would co-opt the rhetoric targeting protesting people of color at the end of their options. He promised to reign hell down on them.
Conservatives fought change whenever it was tried. Reagan would become the tit that industry would suckle, starting the unwinding of the tax base of the country and the lie that tax cuts at the top would mean a windfall for the little guy. Economists at the time knew it was a lie, but they had a great salesman and it was selling like wildfire. Ronnie then threw kerosene on the fire of ignorance and misinformation by removing the Fairness Doctrine that had regulated a balance to news coverage, and shortly thereafter opportunists started “news” organizations that would take advantage of the new freedom to simply lie.
As lies became truth, things began to accelerate and soon there was a growing base in the Republican party that had become radicalized. We have watched it grow for a generation or more. We privately chuckled about it for years, and then Ruby Ridge, Waco and Timothy McVeigh wiped the smirk off our faces. Shortly after, we switched our attention to other radicalized terrorists that were conveniently browner and foreign and our own domestic threat was forgotten again for a time, and with our inattention it grew. Militias spent weekends in the woods, preparing for all kinds of unavoidable disasters. Race wars, financial collapse, immigrants, gay people. Progressives.
Janet Napolitano tried to warn us when she was the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration. She considered domestic terrorists, and white supremacists especially, the greatest threat to American safety and stability and said the military was a breeding ground for these threats. She was vilified almost immediately forcing her to make multiple apologies, though Glen Gardner Jr, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars defended her position while wishing it had been phrased differently.
Trump didn’t create this. He allowed it to come out of the shadows, to strut in the street and to imagine an America where they held power, that the fantasies born in the woods of Ohio and Wisconsin and Virginia and California could actually be the reality in Washington, D.C.
There is a direct through line from the John Birch Society of our youth to the Patriot Groups of today. Nixon invited it into the Republican Party, and it has been there ever since, but it has never been the entirety of the party. Trump has cleaved the party in two, revealing the underbelly that was a political quid pro quo, and may have killed it altogether as a result.
Mittens are cool again.