Republicans Have Decided Not to Rethink Anything
For a few
days, the Republican party appeared to be undergoing a crisis of confidence, if
not an outright crack-up. First, Donald Trump lost an election, then tried to
negate the outcome throughout a series of threats and increasingly absurd
lawsuits, then his party lost control of the Senate in a previously red state,
and then Trump whipped up an insurrectionary mob that sacked the capitol. Trump
failed to check in on Pence even as his vice-president was hiding from a mob
out to literally execute him, placing an understandable strain on their
once-solid relationship.
Perhaps,
finally, things had gone so far that the party would undertake the
soul-searching it had avoided for four years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell let it be known he wished to be rid of Trump. The party “likely will
face a raging internal war over policies and political leaders,” asserts
longtime Washington hand Jim
VandeHei. “Do not underestimate how divided and confused their party is
right now,” posits David
Brooks, “Do not underestimate how much Republicans trust Biden
personally.”
But
instead of a Glasnost for the Republican party, the days after January 6 seem
instead to be a Prague Spring — a brief flowering of dissent and questioning of
dogma quickly suppressed by a remorseless crackdown.
The heady
predictions that the party would break free of the Trumpist grip already seem
fanciful. If anybody is suffering repercussions for their response to Trump’s
autogolpe, it is the Republicans who criticized it. Conservative Republicans
are threatening to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership post after she voted to
impeach Trump. House Majority Leader Kevin
McCarthy, an adept reader of the prevailing winds within his party,
offered a non-defense of his third in command: “I support her, but I have
concerns.” Adam Kinzinger, another pro-impeachment Republican, is facing censure. The
Michigan Republican member of the state board of canvassers, who broke with his
party to certify the state’s election results, is losing his
job as a result of his refusal to go along with Trump’s lie. Fox News is firing journalists
associated with its election call that Biden won Arizona.
The
clearest sign of the counter-revolutionary momentum is the flagging prospects
for impeaching Trump. Senate Republicans are coalescing around a technical
claim that Trump cannot be impeached because
he has already left office, an argument at odds with the conclusion of most
scholars, but which allows them to avoid casting firm judgment on Trump’s
incitement. McCarthy, who
last week said Trump “bears responsibility” for the mob attack, now says, ““I
don’t believe he provoked it if you listen to what he said at the rally.”
The end
of the Trump era has left the party divided, broadly speaking, into three
wings. On the left is a small wing of Never Trumpers who opposed Trump,
believing him to be unfit for office and a threat to the republic. They are
represented politically by figures like Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, and John
Kasich — and intellectually by the Bulwark and a variety of columnists at
mainstream outlets. Many Never Trumpers connected their party’s embrace of
Trump with a more longstanding anti-democratic turn. They represent the
pro-democracy wing of the Republican Party.
On the
right flank is a violent authoritarian wing of roughly equal size. These
conservatives fervently support Trump, and either endorsed his insurrection, or
else justified it as a false-flag operation. The violent authoritarians
supported keeping Trump in office by any means necessary, and oppose any
measures to hold him accountable or to punish any of his radical supporters.
This wing is represented by members of Congress like QAnon supporters
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, groups like the Proud Boys,
Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and in the media by various commentators on the
Fox News evening lineup, OAN, and Newsmax.
In the
middle is what you might call “soft authoritarians.” This faction’s political
representation is figures like McConnell and Pence, and its views are expressed
by organs like The Wall Street Journal editorial page and National
Review. They have supported most of Trump’s abuses of power, firmly opposing
impeachment, Congressional oversight, efforts to obtain Trump’s tax returns, or
any other accountability mechanism. The soft authoritarians strongly believe in
the principle of minority rule, as long as it is enforced through peaceful and
legal channels like gerrymandering and vote suppression.
This is
the faction that has determined the party’s response to Trump. The soft
authoritarians were appalled at Trump’s use of a barbarous mob to beat up
police officers and smash down the Capitol’s doors and windows. They sicken at
the prospect Trump might capture the party’s nomination again in 2024, which is
why they remain open to convicting Trump and barring him from holding federal
office again.
But the
soft authoritarians are party men, not principled democrats. And they have
surely noticed that Trump’s hold over their voters remains strong. A terrifying
seventy percent of Republican voters agree with Trump’s lie that
he received more votes than Biden. Trump’s loyalists are threatening revenge if
he is convicted. (Trump adviser Jason
Miller tells Ryan Lizza, “Republican senators need to think long
and hard about what an impeachment vote would do to the party.” Reports that
Trump is contemplating starting his own party, which
would guarantee Democrats victory in 2024, are probably a bluff. But the chance
that a figure as unpredictable as Trump just might follow through makes it an
effective bluff.
The path
of least resistance for the soft authoritarianism will be to oppose Trump’s
conviction on technical grounds, and then hope he fades away quietly. As that
happens, the centrifugal pressure Trump exerted on their coalition with his
deranged antics will ease, to be replaced by the centripetal pressure of a
Biden administration enacting Democratic priorities.
You can
already see the internal Republican tension abating as they pull together in
opposition. Did Trump make mistakes? Perhaps so, they will concede, but they
are behind us, and now they face new dangers and outrages from Biden. No
rethinking of the Republican platform — indeed, no thinking of any kind — will
be needed. Republicans can simply repurpose Trump’s attacks on Biden as a
corrupt, doddering crypto-socialist tool of AOC. The Republican civil war is
over before it even began.
