The expression “having a tiger by the tail” comes to mind. And a tiger, coincidentally, is orange.
I keep telling everyone that the modern Republican Party began with Nixon making his personal enemies the enemies of his followers. Reagan and Bush kept that up. Gingrich codified it. The Tea Party organized it. Trump is the ultimate result that they wanted all along. If he had an ounce of competence we would already be in an autocracy.
There will be a war between what’s left of the establishment Republicans and the troglodyte wing to see who can throw up (I mean that literally) a leader that will command his people. The Trumpers want a dictator, except they think that means somebody who hates the same people they do. (If you’re wondering how Trump got 74 million votes, that’s how.) Maybe there won’t be a new Trump they can agree on and the party splits into factions. That’s probably the best outcome we can hope for. There is zero hope that a decent human being can take over the party.
So that leads us to the inevitable question of what happens next?
While liberals are “licking their chops” over a presumptive Biden/Harris administration, SCOTUS notwithstanding, almost half the country is convinced the election was fraudulently stolen and is vowing to get revenge on the “liberal elites”. I hear talk of “civil war” and “succession”, although that didn’t turn out so well the last time it was tried and the federal troops, assuming they stay loyal to the government, should be able to easily overwhelm anything the Trumpers can muster together.
So how do we come back to “normality” again? There will always be haters in our society, but at what point do they figure out that we’re just one large diverse country and there’s plenty of room for all political stripes, no matter how crazy they are?
I don’t think that they ever do.
The only chance is to outnumber and outvote them. Convincing them that they are wrong is a fool’s errand.
I guess we can only hope that the Republican party splits into various factions that cancel each other out, or is that just wishful thinking?
I heartily agree with both of @Kimstu’s posts. But IMO there’s one point we’re semi-missing here.
In a true multi-party system the R party apparatchiks would be trapped as you say, needing to keep the Trumpist horde onside or else face electoral oblivion after the voters desert them for newer more extreme parties. This has happened to various center-left or center-right parties in Parliamentary systems from time to time.
In our permanent 2-party duopoly the members of the Trumpist horde only have 3 choices: Vote D, vote R, or don’t vote.
They aren’t picking Door #1, not one of 'em.
So the real risk a non-Trumpist pol has is entirely that they’ll be primaried by a T-ist pol. If the non-T-ist factions of the R party can get together and expel anyone with T-like tendencies, they can purge the party and the primaries of any T-ist candidates. The R voters, even those who’d prefer a T-ist candidate won’t defect to the D’s. No downside there. That’s how the R party can regain its own sanity.
That just leaves turnout in the general elections. Which is problematic in parts of the country, but a lot less than you’d expect. Rural OH isn’t going to vote for the D candidate unless nearly 100% of the Rs stay home. Which won’t happen.
The closest to what you’re describing was in Roosevelt’s second term (1937-1941). Roosevelt had been pushing his New Deal agenda in his first term and he felt the conservative Supreme Court had been fighting him. When he won a decisive re-election victory in November 1936, he decided he had a mandate to do something about this. He tried to “pack” the Supreme Court by telling Congress to add new members to the court (who would be nominated by Roosevelt).
This attempt failed. The proposal was rejected by Republicans in Congress, which Roosevelt had expected. But it was also opposed by many Democrats who felt Roosevelt was going too far. The bill failed and the membership of the Supreme Court stayed at nine. (Some people argue that Roosevelt really won. They say that the Supreme Court stopped opposing New Deal laws in the face of the threat and this was Roosevelt’s real plan all along.)
Roosevelt decided that he needed to see some changes in the Democratic membership in Congress. In the 1938 Congressional election, Roosevelt very publicly opposed a number of Democratic incumbents who were seeking re-election and endorsed other Democratic candidates to replace them. His hope was to ensure a new wave of Democrats who would be personally loyal to him.
Roosevelt failed in this attempt. The voters generally preferred the incumbents over Roosevelt’s chosen challengers. And the Republicans, who were united, won a number of seats that had been held by Democrats.
TLDR version: No, the Democrats in Congress showed they weren’t scared of Roosevelt. First, by defying him on the court packing issue and then by beating him in his attempt to oust them.
The thought that came to me was how close this [current, not FDR] sounds to accounts of China’s Cultural Revolution. At its worst, every conversation was a sort of coded loyalty test, where any sign of back-sliding or ideological drift or ambiguity was jumped on.
The underlying dynamic was fear that ‘they’ - the all-seeing, all-pervasive authorities - would consider you to be in cahoots if you didn’t loudly voice your own condemnation. In China’s case this continued right until the Gang of Four were denounced officially and publicly, and all the people who had committed excesses in their name (usually in fear of being targeted in turn) suddenly found they had other important things to do.
While Trump remains empowered, these lower level Republican apparatchiks are conscious of how vulnerable they are. They need to be seen to be individually supporting Trump, because if they don’t and others do and he somehow manages to stay in power they are dead meat. The other option - treading water until Biden gets in - is not so guaranteed while there are other Republican loons running around that it is safe not to be seen at the barricades.
They would also be conscious that the change of president only takes the game out of that theatre, it does not switch off the zealotry and retributions that will follow as everyone decides whether Trump remains potent [?!] and how close to power they can position themselves.
I think the big difference is that the communists were firmly in control of China in 1966. Regardless of which faction won, it was going to be a communist one.
We still have a functioning two-party system in the United States. If differing factions of the Republican party start attacking each other, the winner will almost certainly be the Democrats. That reality generally keeps either party from going too far in its factional infighting. The one thing all sides within a party agree on is they don’t want the other party to gain power.
Trump himself is probably narcistic enough to ignore this. He would be willing to see the Republican party destroyed rather than lose his power in the party. Trump would figure a Republican party that doesn’t obey him doesn’t deserve to live and the country deserves to suffer under the blighted rule of the Democrats if it abandons him.
But I think Trump’s followers won’t be willing to go that far. They will quietly abandon Trump and shift their loyalties to a slightly less extreme figure who’s willing to promise them a future.