Centrist New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman’s assessment of the domestic political environment will always be subject to a certain skepticism. After all, this is the man who famously insisted that the United States was always on the cusp of “turning the corner” in its war on Iraq (so much that his predictions spawned the derisive term “Friedman unit”).
Shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection, however, he earned my wry admiration in an interview with Anderson Cooper, when he compared many of the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol that day to militants he’d seen in the Middle East, aptly characterizing them as ”all these young men who have never held power, a job, or a girl's hand.”
Friedman’s columns for the Times usually involve foreign affairs, trade, and the Middle East, areas in which the three-time Pulitzer winner is most comfortable. But over the past few months he has shifted his focus to the political scene in this country, and with that his perceptions have grown increasingly alarming. His latest column in the Times captures the real gravity of the situation, as a Republican Party still firmly in the grip of Donald Trump falls into the fulsome and willing embrace of fascism.
Friedman writes:
We are not OK. America’s democracy is still in real danger. In fact, we are closer to a political civil war — more than at any other time in our modern history. Today’s seeming political calm is actually resting on a false bottom that we’re at risk of crashing through at any moment.
Friedman is sounding an alarm already being voiced by many: The comparative lull and sense of relief the country is experiencing during these first months of the Biden presidency is looking more like just a temporary respite from something truly horrific looming down the road. As the GOP’s embrace of Trump’s “Big Lie” becomes an absolute litmus test for Republicans at any level, “local state and national,” who seek power. Friedman believes this disturbing development constitutes an existential threat to the future of democracy in this country, a threat that is simply unprecedented, without any reference point for comparison in our history.
Friedman quotes Guatam Mukunda, a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and host of the NASDAQ podcast World Reimagined, on the near-total subservience of the Republican Party and its assimilation of the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
“This is creating a filter that over time will block out anyone willing to tell the truth about the election.” It will leave us with “a Republican Party where you cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in the East, a Republican Party where being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement.”
Friedman warns that the prospect of an entire political party so obviously willing to succumb to a self-serving, mass delusion equals a party that “will lie about anything, including who wins the next election and every one after that.” A democratic society simply can’t continue to function or operate with half of its voting population willing to embrace a totalitarian, eliminationist mindset, where one party insists that “if it loses it will just lie about the results and change the rules.”
But that’s exactly where we are headed: a country where the governing principle of one party is that the opposition holds no legitimacy and can be blithely disregarded. Friedman observes that Trump’s Big Lie has provided the cover and rationale for the Republicans to dismantle the entire democratic process through voter suppression or simple outright refusal to honor the results of our elections. He calls the hundreds of voter suppression measures introduced by Republicans in 47 states “the equivalent of lighting a fuse to a bomb planted beneath the foundations of our democracy.”
He also brings up something that should be plain to Democrats and Republicans alike, but is seldom acknowledged.
Imagine if all or many of these measures are passed — and in 2022 and 2024 Republicans manage to retake the House, Senate and White House with, say, only 42 percent of the popular vote, effectively establishing minority rule. Do you know what will happen? Let me tell you what will happen. Disenfranchised Democratic voters will not sit idly by. They may refuse to pay their taxes. Many will take to the streets. Some might become violent, and our whole political system could become paralyzed and start to unravel.
Republicans’ embrace of the “Big Lie” is not occurring in a vacuum, whatever illusions they may hold. If you deliberately disenfranchise the majority of people in this country, you invite anger and retaliation. In fact, you’re begging for it. Friedman observes that an opposition which has simply abandoned all policy—which is where the Republican Party is going—and simply tries to win without bothering to provide anything toward the population will simply cause the Democratic Party to move more sharply to the left. While that may seem like a worthy result to some of us, it ultimately leaves us with a country that is wholly ungovernable, completely paralyzed, and easily susceptible to autocratic rule.
What is happening to the GOP in this country is unprecedented here, in this country, but from a global perspective it is not unique. Friedman believes that this transfiguration of the Republican Party into a cult of pure white grievance, with Trump as its messianic figure is not something that Democrats are in much of a position to change. He points out that in Middle Eastern countries that underwent political upheavals after 9/11, it was always the internal battles within the parties that were the most significant; the “war of ideas” arising upward from those party’s roots that ultimately determine their fate.
That’s why Friedman believes that the best thing Americans can do, if this country’s democracy is to be salvaged, is to “support in every way possible the few principled Republican legislators fighting this trend from the inside—like Liz Cheney, Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Sen. Mitt Romney.” Without that war of ideas within the Republican Party itself, this country, he believes, is likely headed for a “political civil war” over the next election.
Many would argue that civil war is already underway, with the first shot being fired by Donald Trump in his winking acknowledgment of the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, or his incitement of the insurrection on Jan. 6. Others would suggest the war began long before that, with Nixon’s “southern strategy” or Reagan’s soft-pedaled but no less virulent racism. Still others might venture that the original Civil War never really ended at all.
Jan. 6 showed us exactly how bad things can get. It showed us the worst specimens of American existence, exerting their muscle in order to destroy everything most of us dreamed would be with us through our natural lives. It showed us what an America based on pure, unbridled hate would look like. And as the coming year plays out, if the GOP continues on its current trajectory, the ranks of such people, now fairly small, will continue to grow.
As Democrats, we already know what to do: Call out the lies, organize and mobilize against those who spread those lies, and above everything else, get our voters to the polls. But whether this country continues to exist is ultimately going to depend on the fate of the Republican Party. They’re the ones who’ve willingly chosen—out of fear and greed, spite and ignorance—to drive us all toward that cliff.
If they can’t find a way to stop the car, we’re all likely to soar over the edge.