This is an important read from Brian Beutler. Far too many progressives think that if we win this fall, and repeat again in 2020, everything will return to normal and the danger will have subsided. We underestimate the danger of the Republican fascist cult at not only our peril, but the peril of generations to come. Beating Republicans in a couple of elections isn’t enough, it isn’t nearly enough! The Republican party is such a threat to our democracy, it must become a vile dirty word in American politics, it must never be allowed to threaten us again.
In 2012, the political scientists Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann threw in the towel. Their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, laid the blame for the increasing dysfunction of America’s political system at the feet of the Republican Party, which, they admitted, had become “an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
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“The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy,” they argue in The Atlantic.
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Rauch and Wittes have put a finger on the cardinal fact of American politics. Unfortunately their prescription for a voting-booth boycott of Republican politicians is inadequate.
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But Republicans have been defeated before without being chastened. To reverse this alarming antidemocratic trend, the modern-Republican Party’s style of politics must be made anathema.
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Nobody really conceived of it as a boycott at the time, but this is essentially what happened during President George W. Bush’s second term
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Rather than adopt a political style with mass appeal, they became even more reactionary. They committed themselves to sabotaging President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in order to shorten their climb back to political power.
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Republicans spent the full eight years of the Obama presidency making arguments they didn’t believe, claiming to be outraged about things that didn’t really outrage them, fabricating controversy out of things they knew to be uncontroversial.
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It’s a matter of absolute certainty that if voters “boycott” Republicans in sufficient numbers to throw control of government to Democrats, Republicans will return to the same playbook.
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The Republican Party isn’t going to “right itself or implode” unless that kind of unprincipled behavior is rendered toxic.
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The institution with the most direct power to shape post-Trump Republican politics will be the Democratic Party. Obama came to power having promised to transcend partisanship and amid multiple national crises. For these reasons and others he determinedly avoided the kind of retrospective inquiries that might have boxed Republicans into accounting for their Bush-era political sins
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When Republicans gain power—even against the will of the voting public—they aim to crush their political enemies…. Republicans captured governments in multiple swing states, where they set about dismantling public-sector unions, suppressing the Democratic vote, and gerrymandering congressional districts, to guarantee themselves enduring power, whether their constituents approved of their governance or not.
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After Trump, Democrats could adopt a more aggressive approach than they have in the past, on the fool-me-twice principle. They could abolish the filibuster, expedite legislation to widen the franchise and reform campaign finance laws, right Mitch McConnell’s theft of a Supreme Court seat, and conduct oversight of the institutions of government Trump corrupted. They could set up a commission to examine, the role of propaganda in American media, and report out how and why, under Trump, the Republican Party entered a de facto partnership with hostile foreign intelligence to influence American politics.
Unfortunately, history will criticize Obama for his naivete. He failed to understand who Republicans actually are and believed he could “negotiate” with people who took America hostage and wouldn’t hesitate to do unimaginable things to the hostages. Even at the end of his presidency he believed Mitch McConnell wouldn’t let a hostile foreign power attack our democracy in order to help Republicans take power, he was wrong.
When the Democrats take power they must be willing to do things they never dreamed of doing a few short years ago. The expression I like to use is, they must be willing to shove democracy down the throats of Republican fascists. I’m not sure our constitution is strong enough to withstand the type of attack the Republican fascists are mounting. Laws will need to be passed to make our democratic norms, democratic laws.
The Republicans will learn how close they came to gaining total permanent power and they’ll be eager to use their right wing propaganda machine to come back and finish the job. A wise person once said Republicans had a basket of deplorables and that there was a vast right wing conspiracy. That person was more right than they could imagine.
RESIST!
Nov. 6 isn’t just election day, it’s judgment day!
