Paul Krugman’s latest column is a response to the spectacle of the leadership of the Republican Party refusing to come to its senses.
Here’s what we know about American politics: The Republican Party is stuck, probably irreversibly, in a doom loop of bizarro. If the Trump-incited Capitol insurrection didn’t snap the party back to sanity — and it didn’t — nothing will.
...On Tuesday Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who has said that Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the insurrection was impeachable, voted for a measure that would have declared a Trump trial unconstitutional because he’s no longer in office. (Most constitutional scholars disagree.)
On Thursday Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader — who still hasn’t conceded that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency, but did declare that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack on Congress — visited Mar-a-Lago, presumably to make amends.
In other words, the G.O.P.’s national leadership, after briefly flirting with sense, has surrendered to the fantasies of the fringe. Cowardice rules.
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I would differ with Dr. Krugman on one thing. For some it is not cowardice — it’s calculated.
Charles P. Pierce came to the same conclusion years ago. The metaphor he uses is the party is suffering from the prion disease caught by eating infected brains, and it was under Ronald Reagan that the party ate the brains.
The GOP is stuck in a feedback loop. Between extreme gerrymandering and right wing media that thrives on division, disinformation, and outright CT, the party can only keep moving deeper into Crazytown. They are a full-blown right wing authoritarian cult. Crazy is a feature, not a bug.
Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Once upon a time, the only place you might have seen a headline like this is at The Onion. Not today.
GOP Congresswoman Blamed Wildfires on Secret Jewish Space Laser
The most recent Greene view to be unearthed comes via Eric Hananoki. Just over two years ago, Greene suggested in a Facebook post that wildfires in California were not natural. Forests don’t just catch fire, you know. Rather, the blazes had been started by PG&E, in conjunction with the Rothschilds, using a space laser, in order to clear room for a high-speed rail project...
There are some signs of sanity in a few places. Corporations and other donors are cutting the GOP off following the attack on the Capitol. People are leaving the party in droves. (What remains to be seen is will they vote for Democrats, will they just stay home, or will they still vote red as independents?)
But as Krugman notes:
And the Republican response to electoral defeat isn’t to change policies to win over voters; it is to try to rig the next election. Georgia has long been known for systematic suppression of Black voters; it took a remarkable organizing effort by Democrats, led by Stacey Abrams, to overcome that suppression and win the state’s electoral votes and Senate seats. So the Republicans who control the state are doubling down on disenfranchisement, with proposed new voter ID requirements and other measures to limit voting.
The bottom line is that we don’t know whether we’ve earned more than a temporary reprieve. A president who tried to retain power despite losing an election has been foiled. But a party that buys into bizarre conspiracy theories and denies the legitimacy of its opposition isn’t getting saner, and still has a good chance of taking complete power in four years.
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It’s up to Democrats to make sure that doesn’t happen. There are some things that can be done.
- Full speed ahead — Democrats must carry out the promises they made. They’re popular. Waste no time trying to get Republicans to buy in — the GOP base will eat them alive if they do. Republicans want people to believe government doesn’t work; Democrats have to give them undeniable proof it does — when Democrats are running it.
- Kill the filibuster. Make it clear that it has become a tool of obstruction. Let people know when popular bills are being blocked, and by whom. With enough pressure, it can be done.
- Get rid of the Electoral College by any means possible. That alone will make it much harder for the GOP minority to take the White House against the popular vote.
- Don’t let calls for unity translate into surrender to the GOP. Elections have consequences. It’s the GOP that needs to reach out and prove they can be trusted to deal in good faith.
- Ignore the clueless idiots in the Mainstream Media who always expect the Democrats to do the heavy lifting, and are always looking for ‘both sides’ framing and false equivalence.
- Message, message, message. Market the hell out of Democratic initiatives. The Biden administration gets it. Taking highly visible actions every day, holding press briefings with real substance — this makes the headlines work for the Democrats. As long as Trump has his social media accounts blocked, there’s a chance to be heard.
- Find a way to come up with a Fairness Doctrine for the digital age, develop strategies to disincentivize disinformation.
- GOTV like mad. Republicans are scrambling to repress voter turn out. Learn from Stacey Abrams and do GOTV across the country. Restoring and strengthening the Voting Rights Act is essential.
- The GOP is in disarray; let them crash and burn.
- Put the GOP on trial along with Trump. Make it clear that too many of them were fully complicit with Trump all along — and still are. The information coming out about all the things that happened on January 6, 2021 should have a lot of GOP Congress people getting nervous. Good.
- Robert Reich has a suggestion. Make the vote on whether to convict Trump a secret ballot — as juries do. Too many Republicans know it would be political suicide to go on record against Trump. It might be actual suicide as well, given the death threats out there. Secret ballots would let them vote their conscience — assuming they still have one.
All the way back in 2018, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones was calling for what needs to happen: GOPus delendus est.
Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.
Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place...
Got any suggestions? Feel free to spell them out in comments.
• Several people have picked up on DC statehood as something that would make a difference, as would statehood for Puerto Rico. I’d add a couple of ideas, a bit more difficult to pursue but worth looking at. One is the automatic assumption that Red States can’t elect Democratic Senators. Senatorial elections can’t be gerrymandered. Another is changing the way Senate seats are parceled out. What if we decided areas above a certain population density were entitled to Senate representation — ie: Cities?
• The Supreme Court has been brought up. Expanding the number of seats on the court is one suggestion. (As long as they are appointed by Democrats.) Another approach is to change the Supreme Court so justices have a mandatory retirement age and specific terms — although they need not be barred from from being re-appointed. This would insure a steady turnover on a systematic basis, rather than waiting for death or illness to set off a scramble.
• Tom Sullivan at Digby’s Place lays out what has happened: Trump gave it a face and a name. The party has abandoned any pretense of practicing democracy.
What is plain now, Maxwell said, is that Republicans are no longer pursuing any political strategy. “They’re not engaged in this project of democracy that the rest of us are participating in, because they don’t actually want voters to make decisions and elect people.”
Sullivan’s post lays out all of the ways Republicans across the states are working to keep people from voting, by hook or by crook. Jack Holmes at Esquire lays out the case for HR1. A matching Senate Bill S1 might finally see action under Democratic control. The bills would protect and enhance voting rights, address the problem of dark money, and impose reforms on lobbying.
• The press is a big problem. Mark Sumner weighs in with “After normalizing Trump’s incompetent extremism, the press feels out how best to attack Joe Biden.”
Eric Boehlert at Press Run Media has chapter and verse on how the press still doesn’t realize Trump still owns the GOP. Memo to media: the GOP's Trump "reckoning" is never coming. Boehlert has numerous examples at the link.
For five years, the press has gotten this story wrong. Why? Today's Republican Party represents an unwieldy challenge for news outlets. It spent the winter wantonly trying to invalidate election results, while simultaneously endangering the masses during a public healthy crisis by deliberately misinforming Americans about the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also taken no disciplinary action against a new Congresswoman who previously supported the killing of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Yet the press remains committed to portraying the GOP as a mainstream, center-right entity. That's why it keeps botching the "reckoning" story — reporters assume there is a Republican breaking point with Trump and the politics of hate and revenge he represents. But there never is.
Nathalie Baptiste at Mother Jones drives the lesson home: There Is No GOP Civil War. The Party Has Already Chosen Trumpism. The high-minded “autopsy” report from 2013 shows how dramatically the party has surrendered.
Despite their losses in the 2020 elections, the Republican Party has no real incentive to reverse course. Trump won majorities among white voters, white Protestants, men, and Southern voters. Instead of coming up with policy ideas to address a pandemic, an economic crisis, and health care, the GOP has opted to combine voter suppression and appealing to racial animus to concoct a winning formula. In the aftermath of the Capitol siege, most of the party is choosing to stick with Trumpism and owning the libs as ideology...
...All the handwringing about impeachment and where the party goes without Trump is merely bluster. Since the 2013 autopsy, the Republican party has only gotten more popular among its mostly white base as it’s doubled down on the conditions that made Trump president in the first place. For the GOP, this moment isn’t a civil war at all, it’s an unconditional surrender. The Republican Party will simply purge the traitors and re-emerge, once again, further committing to white grievance as ideology. After all, it worked so well in the past.
That’s why Tucker Carlson reacted so strongly when Biden said we must confront white supremacy and domestic terrorism. That’s what the Republican Party has embraced. This Washington Post headline sums it up: Tucker Carlson is telling his viewers that Democrats see them as terrorists.
It’s certainly not new for a cable-news opinion host to use inflammatory rhetoric to reinforce their points. This was part of Stirewalt’s criticism, too, that there are rewards for firing people up. What’s different here is that Carlson is pushing a line of argument that tells millions of Americans that their government sees them as dangerous racists. He’s pivoting from the very real concern among experts that white nationalists will commit acts of violence in the United States to telling those watching that this is simply a backdoor for the Biden team to target them. He’s pushing his viewers into a corner.
This isn’t just a reinforcing of their existing beliefs. It’s an amplification and an obviously risky one. It’s Carlson — Fox News’s most popular primetime host — seeking to make a point about the perceived policing of points of view but doing so in a way that encourages his viewers to think of themselves as being in direct conflict with the government.
Twenty-two days ago, we saw how dangerous such beliefs can be.
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What The Washington Post does not realize is that Carlson is telling the truth — they ARE in direct conflict with the government. When Biden calls for national unity, this is what we must unify against.
GOPus delendus est.
Friday, Jan 29, 2021 · 6:06:03 PM +00:00
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xaxnar
UPDATE: More from Pierce
This is one of those days where I wonder if I'm crazy or they are. The FBI is still rounding up the people who occupied the Capitol for the purpose of overturning a presidential election. The trials are going to be in federal courts all over the country for years. More dreadful material is bound to come pouring out about the insurrection, and about the administration that welcomed it. And barely three weeks after the mob overwhelmed the Capitol, the Republican Party has decided that it can't win an an election without the mob, and without the president* who incited it. For all our political divisions, I thought we all still agreed that overthrowing the republic and submitting to the rule of Buffalo Head Guy and the Walmart Warlords would not be a satisfactory outcome. For all our political divisions, I thought that cop-killing was something that devalued your political relevance going forward. Clearly, this calls for further study.