The Disturbing World of the New GOP

“The Disturbing World of the New GOP.  “  John Nichols. The Nation.

 

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republican-party-2022-midterms/

 

The Disturbing World of the  New GOP     The 2022 midterms saw the Republican Party complete its devolution into a party that has fully abandoned its conscience.   By John Nichols The Nation Nov 25, 2022 - The Republican Party that will take narrow control of the House of Representatives in January 2023 has gone through a dramatic transformation in the two years since Donald Trump and his allies attempted a violent coup to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.    The party that was once torn over how to respond to Trump’s assault on democratic norms is no more. It was replaced in 2022 by one that did not merely tolerate Trump’s election denialism but embraced it by nominating January 6 insurrectionists and apologists for congressional and statewide posts—a strategy so noxious that it cost Republicans key US Senate contests and the “red wave” GOP strategists were counting on.    But post-election pundits who imagine that the party will do an about-face and suddenly adopt a more politically rational course are sorely mistaken. The new Republican Party has a base—and many leaders—that does not merely fall for Trump’s lies. Republican partisans are increasingly looking beyond the scandal-plagued former president and taking inspiration from right-wing European nationalist leaders with politics rooted in a fascist sensibility that employs racism, xenophobia, and a win-at-any-cost approach to elections and governing. This transformed Republican Party will exploit its control of the House and state posts for a 2024 presidential election in which Trump and a rising generation of ruthless partisans will plot a return to unitary power—with a vision that is dramatically more authoritarian than anything seen in the 45th president’s first term.   From Semi-Fascist to the Full-on Variety   This is something Democrats need to recognize as they prepare for this next political moment. They won’t be governing with a political party that realistically compares with the very conservative yet still institutionally inclined caucuses that controlled the House on and off between 1995 and 2019. In 2022, the GOP moved past its “semi-fascist” stage and began “barreling toward full-on fascism,” says former US representative Joe Walsh, who was considered among the most right-wing members of the House after his election in the Tea Party wave of 2010.    “The country needs to understand that my former political party is fully anti-democracy. It is a fascist political party. It is a political party that embraces authoritarianism,” as evidenced by Republicans at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) celebrating European nationalists and domestic insurrectionists. “We’ve got to move on now and just defeat them.”   A lot of Republicans were defeated on November 8. But the party still won the power, via its new House majority, to derail much of President Biden’s agenda. Incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s Republicans did not gain as many seats as they might have achieved as a more conventional, institutionally inclined Grand Old Party running in a more traditional midterm election. But they succeeded in melding concerns about inflation and crime, racial backlash messaging, and a fiercely negative and immensely well-funded campaign to secure victories that should have been unimaginable. In part, this was because America’s rigid two-party system forces an either-or choice on most voters. Such a system creates a situation in which the right can exploit economic and social anxiety to attract voters who don’t necessarily agree with the whole GOP agenda but who want to—in the parlance of former Alabama governor George Wallace’s racist campaigns—“send them a message.”   The message this time is a daunting one, because the party that surfed a wave of resentment over high gas prices and post-pandemic instability is not the GOP of Ronald Reagan, the George Bushes, or Dick Cheney. None of those figures would have stood a chance in the Republican primaries of 2022. Indeed, Liz Cheney, the standard-bearer of the social and economic domestic conservatism and foreign policy neoconservatism that held sway until Trump came along, won just 28.9 percent of the vote in her Wyoming Republican primary reelection bid.   There is no question that the Republican Party began veering dangerously to the right long before the 2022 midterm election season. This is, after all, the party that welcomed Southern segregationist Strom Thurmond into its ranks during Barry Goldwater’s 1964 “extremism in the defense of liberty” presidential campaign. But as I watched the 2022 races play out in states across the country, it was clear to me, and to many other longtime observers of the GOP with whom I spoke, that it’s taken a far more dire turn. This Republican Party is proudly unapologetic about its excesses; there is an open acceptance that “we’re doing bad things and we don’t care because we think it will work politically.”   The determination that we saw in the none-too-distant past to maintain a veneer of respectability—with admittedly disingenuous efforts to push back against accusations that the party was running overtly racist, crudely xenophobic, and aggressively dishonest campaigns—has been abandoned. As has any willingness to acknowledge that particular candidates, such as the Georgia US Senate nominee Herschel Walker or the newly elected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, are too toxic to be supported. Thus completes the GOP’s devolution into a party that has fully abandoned its conscience.   Whether the party is described as authoritarian, neofascist, or fascist, the trajectory is clear. “Trump had done everything he could to seize the laurel crown and declare himself an American Caesar,” says Sarah Churchwell, one of the great scholars of American fascism. “He hasn’t given up yet—and, what is more, neither have most of his supporters.” Even as the 2022 results pointed to dozens of races in which Trump’s interventions had saddled the GOP with weak candidates—who in many cases lost what should have been winnable seats—Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, such as House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik, rushed to endorse the 2024 presidential bid he announced in mid-November. And while the same pundits who imagined that Trump would be rejected by Republicans in 2015 and 2016 are now sure that Florida’s Ron DeSantis has the juice to snatch the nomination from Trump, polls still show Republicans favoring the former president by a wide margin over the governor he decries as “Ron DeSanctimonious.” The mistake the pundits are making is to imagine that most Republicans are eager to move beyond the crude hatemongering that has characterized that party since Trump banished talk of “the big tent” and started describing anti-Semitic white nationalists as “very fine people.”   Today’s Republican Party gleefully amplifies the language of its once shunned but now broadly accepted ideological mentor, Steve Bannon, the connoisseur of European fascist literature and movements. It embraces an ideology that promises not just retribution for political rivals—and for longtime targets of its vitriol, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and the liberal philanthropist George Soros—but a wholesale restructuring of federal power.   Even with a narrow majority, a Republican-controlled House will immediately stop exercising its oversight powers to get to the bottom of Trump’s coup attempt and will begin attacking the January 6 committee’s investigators and the very notion of accountability. That will be only the beginning of a campaign to make Joe Biden a lame-duck president by rejecting his policy proposals and weaponizing the budget process to deny funding to federal agencies. Outlined in a September “Dear Colleague” letter from Texas Representative Chip Roy, an emerging force within the House Republican Conference, the strategy would reject continuing resolutions in order to block “tyrannical government agencies, offices, programs, and policies that Congress regularly funds through annual appropriations bills.” The theory is that the ensuing chaos will convince voters that only a switch to full Republican power will make the wheels of government turn once more.   If and when Republicans gain control of all three branches of the federal government, they will execute their explicit mission to politicize the government along the lines Bannon has laid out. In his War Room radio show and podcast, the veteran Trump whisperer amplifies the messages of the former president’s congressional coconspirators, election deniers, and extremist rising stars, promising that his reelection in 2024 will put “4,000 shock troops” in charge of reconstructing the federal government as a battering ram for right-wing ambition.   Bannon is not alone in applying the language of fascism to the Republican Party. This is a party that now openly courts European right-wing extremists. Remember that, along with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, one of the stars of the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference was the Italian politician Giorgia Meloni, the leader of a party that traces its political lineage to the neofascist movement that emerged from the wreckage of Benito Mussolini’s World War II alliance with Nazi Germany. Meloni is now Italy’s prime minister, a political ascent Texas Senator Ted Cruz hailed as “spectacular.” Fox Newsgushes over her election as “the dawn of a new day.”

THE NATION 12.12–19.2022 

“This political movement is supported by a minority of people in the country,” explained Steve Schmidt, a former presidential campaign strategist for John McCain. “But that minority controls all of the institutions and the levers of power at the local, county, state, national levels of one of the two political parties. So a minority movement filled with extremists that wants po- litical power sees a route to achieving it through a majority election that cloaks the minority ex- tremist cause. You have some people who look at what’s happened with Herschel Walker and say, ‘It doesn’t matter at all, because he’s a vessel by which we can ride to power.’ And in this case, in- creasingly, the inference is ‘Once we’re in there, we’re not giving it up.’” 

Schmidt is honest about the fact that he and others like him played a role in the transforma- tion of the Republican Party—not least with McCain’s decision to make former Alaska gover- nor Sarah Palin his vice presidential nominee in the 2008 campaign. But Schmidt has since been sounding the alarm bells with a passion that ex- ceeds that of many Democrats. When we spoke during the 2022 campaign about today’s GOP, he warned about “all of the elements that have to come together for an autocratic movement.” 

“What do you need to have a cult of per- sonality? Right away, you need two things: You need charismatic leaders, and you need followers. But that’s not enough,” Schmidt said. “You need financiers. You need the billionaire class.... You need the propagandists. You need the cynicism of the elites.... When you put all that together in a coalition for power, history teaches us that things can go off the rails, that evil can be committed. 

“We’re in this moment of profound gaslighting, in- sanity,” Schmidt added. “And there is a lack of a focused, fierce, oppositional better 

message.”

So what will the oppositional message be? It has to involve more than the Democratic Party tripping over its own messaging and stumbling over its own strategies, which we saw frequently in 2022.

 Against some of the worst Republican candidates in history, Demo- cratic candidates still couldn’t thread the needle. And they won’t do so going forward if they avoid the reality of the Republican Party’s devolution. 

“Two of the hallmarks of a fascist political party are: One, they don’t accept the results of elections that don’t go their way. And two, they embrace political violence,” Representative Jamie Raskin reminded us in September. He was talking about the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But less than two months after Raskin ex- pressed his concerns, Trump and other prominent Republicans were peddling conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pe- losi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in their home. 

Democrats need to be prepared to discuss the devolution of the Republican Party, just as
they need to ask themselves: “What are the hallmarks of an anti-fascist party?”
The party must be prepared to   speak—as former vice president
Henry Wallace did almost 80 years
ago—about “the danger of Ameri-
can fascism.” And it must be about
the business of addressing the eco-
nomic, social, and racial injustices of
the moment, not merely because it
is the right thing to do morally but
because it is the right thing to do politically. This was clearly illustrated by John Fetterman’s successful run in Pennsylvania, which turned out to be the only Democratic bid this year that flipped a Republican-held seat in the Senate. 

Democrats and their allies need to start framing the fight in broader, more idealistic, and more hopeful terms. They did better than expected in 2022, as voters in many states rejected election deniers and win-at-any-cost Republicans. They can do better still in 2024 by refusing to compromise with extremists and by calling out the corporate and media elites who give aid and comfort to authoritarians. They must proudly assert the rule of law in official quarters. But they must also mobilize across the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and class for a bolder vision of the America that must be. 

Two hallmarks of a fascist political party 

are: Don’t accept the 

results of elections, and 

embrace violence.” 

We’ve been too weak in our enthusiasm for democracy, too slow to recognize that Wallace was right when he wrote, “Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to ‘make the trains run on time.’ It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and de- cency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of mo- nopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outrun our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to 

speed up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.” The hour is late. But the authoritarians who now steer the Republican Party and those who compromise with them are a minority in our politics—as the results on November 8 confirmed. Thanks to gerrymandering and billionaire money, they now have control of the House. But it is not fated that they will take charge in 2024. The pro-democracy majority has been too confident in the belief that it can’t happen here. 

Now that majority must rise up and declare it won’t happen here.

N 31 

On line title; How the GOP Gave Up on Democracy.