No One Expects Civility From Republicans
What’s
worse: making Sarah Sanders leave a restaurant, or terrorizing election
officials?
Opinion
Columnist
- Dec. 7, 2020
Perhaps you remember the terrible
ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at
the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table
restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s
administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland
security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled at for the administration’s family
separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.
These two insults launched a thousand
thumb-suckers about civility. More than one conservative writer warned liberals
that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s
re-election. “The political question of the moment,” opined Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street
Journal, is this: ‘Can the Democratic Party control its left?’”
Somehow, though, few
are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize
election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about
voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s
experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were
finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was
about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of
armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into
bullhorns in the dark of night.”
So far, what happened
to Benson doesn’t appear to be turning into a big cultural moment. There’s no
frisson of the new about it; it’s pretty routine for Trumpists to threaten and
intimidate people who work in both public health and election administration.
The radically different way the media
treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than
hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of
democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no
point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.
Democrats have just won the popular
vote in the seventh out of the last eight presidential elections. In the
aftermath, analysts have overwhelmingly focused on what Democrats, not
Republicans, must do to broaden their appeal. Partly, this stems from knee-jerk
assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland. But it’s also
just math — only one of our political parties needs to win an overwhelming
national majority in order to govern.
Republican extremism
tends to become a major story only when there are clear electoral consequences
for it. Pat Buchanan’s demagogic culture war speech at the 1992 Republican
National Convention was seen, at the time, as shocking, and elite Republicans
later believed it helped George H.W. Bush lose the election. Twenty years later, after Mitt Romney’s
defeat in 2012, Republicans undertook an “autopsy” and went public with the
results of focus groups calling
the party “scary,” “narrow-minded” and “out of touch.” There were always
zealots in the modern Republican Party, but there were also forces interested
in quarantining them.
After that autopsy, Reince Priebus,
then the Republican Party chairman, called for a more “inclusive” G.O.P.,
saying, “Finding common ground with voters will be a top priority.”
Trump would prove that wasn’t
necessary. In 2016, he got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney
did four years earlier, but still won the Electoral College. And while
widespread revulsion toward Trump was a problem for him this November,
down-ticket Republicans performed far better than almost anyone expected.
As a result, the effect of right-wing
fanaticism on mainstream public opinion has become a non-issue. It doesn’t
matter if Biden voters don’t like paranoid militants, many of them armed,
menacing civil servants. The structure of our politics — gerrymandering in the
House and the rural bias in the Senate — buffers Republicans from centrist
backlash.
One thing would change this dynamic
overnight: a Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5.
Republicans might learn that there’s a price for aligning themselves with a
president trying to thwart the will of the electorate. They might regret the
arrogance of Senator David Perdue, who didn’t deign to show up for a Sunday
night debate with his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. Trumpism might come to
be seen as an electoral albatross, and Republicans would have an incentive to
rejoin the reality everyone else operates in.
But unless and until that happens, few
will be able to muster much surprise when Republicans condone the most
outrageous right-wing thuggery, because few will expect anything else.
The uproar over
shunning Sanders was an outgrowth of an old liberal quandary — how a tolerant
society should treat those who conspire against tolerance. The people screaming
outside Benson’s house raise an entirely different question, about how long our
society can endure absent any overlapping values or common truths. You can
condemn an anti-democratic party for behaving anti-democratically, but you
can’t really argue with it.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion
columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics,
religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize
for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment
issues. @michelleinbklyn