The
Unbearable Weakness of Trump’s Minions
Senator
Josh Hawley isn’t just engaging in civic vandalism—he is an emblem of a weak
and rotten Republican Party.
10:50 AM ET
Contributing
writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC
Those hoping for a quick snapback to sanity for
the Republican Party once Donald Trump is no longer president should temper
those hopes.
The latest piece of evidence to suggest the
enduring power of Trumpian unreality is yesterday’s announcement by Senator
Josh Hawley of Missouri that he will object next week when Congress convenes to
certify the Electoral College vote.
Hawley knows this effort will fail, just as
every other effort to undo the results of the lawful presidential election will
fail. (A brief reminder for those with faulty short-term memories: Joe Biden
defeated Trump by more than 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College
votes.) Every single attempt to prove that the election was marked by fraud or
that President-elect Biden’s win is illegitimate—an effort that now
includes about 60 lawsuits—has flopped. In fact, what
we’ve discovered since the November 3 election is that it was “the most secure
in American history,” as election experts in Trump’s own administration
have declared. But this immutable, eminently provable
fact doesn’t deter Trump and many of his allies from trying to overturn the
election; perversely, it seems to embolden them.
One such Trump ally is Tommy Tuberville, the
newly elected senator from Alabama, who has suggested that he might challenge
the Electoral College count. And there are others. But what makes Hawley’s
declaration ominously noteworthy is that unlike Tuberville—a former college
football coach who owes his political career in a deep-red state to Trump’s
endorsement in the GOP primary against Jeff Sessions—Hawley is a man who
clearly knows better. According to his Senate
biography, he is “recognized as one of the nation’s leading
constitutional lawyers.” A former state attorney general, Hawley has litigated
before the Supreme Court. He graduated from Stanford University in 2002 and
Yale Law School in 2006. He has clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts; he
taught at one of London’s elite private schools, St. Paul’s; and he served as
an appellate litigator at one of the world’s biggest law firms.
It is one thing for Hawley to position himself
as a populist, something he had done even before he was elected in 2018; it is
quite another for him to knowingly engage in civic vandalism and, in
ostentatiously unpatriotic ways, undermine established norms and safeguards.
This is precisely what Senator Hawley is now doing—and he is doing so in
the aftermath of Trump’s loss, when some political observers
might have hoped that the conspiracy mindset and general insanity of the Trump
modus operandi would begin to lose their salience.
A longtime acquaintance of the Missouri senator
explained to me Hawley’s actions this way: “Hawley never wants to talk down to
his voters. He wants to speak for them, and at the moment, they are saying the
election was stolen.”
“He surely knows this isn’t true,” this
acquaintance continued, “and that the legal arguments don’t hold water. And yet
clearly the incentives he confronts—as someone who wants to speak for those
voters, and as someone with ambitions beyond the Senate—lead him to conclude he
should pretend the lie is true. This is obviously a very bad sign about the
direction of the GOP in the coming years.”
Think about this statement for a moment: The
incentives Josh Hawley and many of his fellow Republicans officeholders
confront lead them to conclude that they should pretend the lie is true.
Those who have hoped that Republicans like
Senator Hawley would begin to break free from Trump once he lost the election
have not understood the nature of the change that has come over the party’s
base.
Trump was the product of deep, disturbing
currents on the American right; he was not the creator of them. Those currents
have existed for many decades; we saw them manifested in the popularity of
figures such as Sarah Palin, Patrick J. Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Oliver North,
and many others. But their power grew in force and speed over the past decade.
In 2016, Trump tapped into these currents and, as president and leader of the
Republican Party, he channeled those populist passions destructively, rather
than in the constructive ways that other Republicans before him, such as Ronald
Reagan, had done. (Even if you’re a progressive who loathed Reagan, the notion
that he was a pernicious and malicious force in American politics in the style
of Trump is simply not credible.)
What is happening in the GOP is that figures such as Hawley, along
with many of his Senate and House colleagues, and important Republican players,
including the former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are all trying to
position themselves as the heirs of Trump. None of them possesses the same
sociopathic qualities as Trump, and their efforts will be less impulsive and
presumably less clownish, more calculated and probably less conspiracy-minded.
It may be that not all of them support Hawley’s stunt; perhaps some are even
embarrassed by it. But these figures are seismographers; they are determined to
act in ways that win the approval of the Republican Party’s base. And this goes
to the heart of the danger.
The problem with the Republican “establishment”
and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or
that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are
weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are
willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by
their own tribe. I’m guessing that many of them haven’t read Nietzsche, but
they have embraced his philosophy of perspectivism, which in its crudest form
posits that there is no objective truth, no authoritative or independent
criteria for determining what is true or false. In this view, we all get to
make up our own facts and create our own narratives. Everything is conditioned
on what your perspective is. This is exactly the sort of slippery epistemic
nihilism for which conservatives have, for more than a generation, reproached
the academic left—except the left comes by it more honestly.
The single most worrisome political fact in
America right now is that a significant portion of the Republican Party lives
in a fantasy world, a place where facts and truth don’t hold sway, where
“owning the libs” is an end in itself, and where seceding from reality is a
symbol of tribal loyalty, rather than a sign of mental illness. This is leading
the party, and America itself, to places we’ve never been before, including the
spectacle of a defeated president and his supporters engaging in a sustained
effort to steal an election.
The tactics of Hawley and his many partisan
confreres, if they aren’t checked and challenged, will put at risk what the
scholar Stephen L. Carter calls “the entire project of Enlightenment
democracy.” This doesn’t seem to bother Hawley and many in his party. But what
he should know—and, one hopes, does know, somewhere in the recesses of his
heart—is that he has moved very far away from conservatism.
Whether the Republican Party can be salvaged is
very much an open question. I don’t know the answer. But here is what I do
know: Patriotic Republicans and conservatives need to fight for the soul of the
Republican Party, for its sake and for the sake of the nation. America needs
two healthy and sane political parties. Trump’s departure on January 20 should
open up space for at least a few brave and responsible figures to arise, to
help ground the GOP in truth rather than falsehoods, reality instead of
fantasy, and to use the instruments of power for the pursuit of
justice.
Their task won’t be easy; right now the
political winds are in their face rather than at their back. Trump’s hold on
the GOP remains firm, and separating from Trump and Trumpism will trigger
hostility in an often angry and radicalized base. The right-wing ecosystem is
in a mood to find and (figuratively) hang traitors, whom it defines as anyone
in the Republican Party who doesn’t acquiesce to Trump’s indecency and
paranoia. Which in turn means that those hoping to lead a Republican
reclamation project need to find ways to be shrewd and persuasive, to be crafty
while maintaining their integrity. They need to connect with the base but find
ways to elevate it instead of pandering to it. In better times, many Republican
leaders have done so, starting of course with Abraham Lincoln, “the great hero
of America’s struggle for the noblest cause,” in the words of his early
20th-century biographer Lord Charnwood. But others have done so as well.
Our collective hope should be that principled
Republicans will find their voice and prevail—one courageous step at a time,
one act of decency at a time, one year at a time.
PETER WEHNER is
a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political,
cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author
of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.