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David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who was one of the first conservatives to recognize the party’s collapse into revanchism*, wrote a column for TheAtlantic arguing that Trump’s rise reflects not the tendency of a demagogue to inflame the majority, as the founders feared, but the power of a minority.
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Why have a group of conservatives who not many years ago were prepared to happily vote for the likes of Ted Cruz come to embrace a cause that few of them displayed any interest in? For political elites, Trump’s unconcealed desire to follow the path of figures like Orban, Erdogan, and Putin became the primary stakes of the era’s political conflict. Their activism put them in touch with scholars of authoritarianism and democracy who studied democratic backsliding, and the insights of those thinkers became increasingly evident in the Never Trumpers’ polemics.
{snipped}
Well, I didn’t say it was time for a brass band and fireworks, but it is encouraging to see that some have rejected the Kool aid.
*noun: revanchism
a policy of seeking to retaliate, especially to recover lost territory.
“a recipe for deep future resentment, revanchism and renewed conflict”
Trump won with 63 million votes in 2016, after 4 years of fucking everything up he touched and declaring war on democracy, he got 74 million votes in 2020.
the problem is that for about ~70 million Americans, incompetence isn’t important and authoritarianism is a good thing. I don’t know what we can do with that.
C’mon, these are ten elite establishment anti-Trumpers trying to get back in a game they lost. They have no political base, no power, no influence, no fundraising, and no audience.
And the article says exactly that:
They won’t have an opportunity to do so until the party realizes Trumpism is a political dead end. The tilted field of American government, however, allows Republicans to cater to their Trumpist base without needing to win a majority of the electorate.
Don’t put your hope on these losers. The “normal” Republicans need to find new national leadership to bind to. Nobody appears to fill that role today. Nikki Haley? Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland?
Could anyone explain what exactly they are for, rather than just being anti-Trump? I couldn’t. And neither can they. Look at this page from Moderate-Republicans.com. They’re for positions that are solidly Democratic. Anything else? Yeah, tax cuts. That’s the worst rallying cry in the history of mealy-mouthed wishy-washy Charlie Brown-ism.
No. The Republicans have to break into two and reform. But it won’t be around today’s crowd. The future will decide.
But I’m glad the whole Republican party isn’t 100% behind installing trump as Dictator for Life. I’m glad there is opposition, however small and however intellectual. It’s a start. It’s a seed.
Yeah, these are people who, for the sake of keeping things “good for business” were willing to look the other way and justify going along with the old-school televangelists and the neo-cons (until they wore out their welcome) and gun nuts and vote suppression and corporate deregulation and using culture-war issues as wedges for over 50 years.
The establishment elite were all for the “this is a republic, not a democracy” slogan – by which they meant an aristocratic-elitist Roman/Venetian Republic where the “right people” would be in charge and compete among themselves to rule the rabble. Their approach, though, had a serious vulnerability at the lower rungs of the political structure: They were perfectly happy to let the single-issuers and wingnuts and the outright ignorant populate the local/state party organizations and elected offices, under the presumption that they could then just keep them in line feeding them Heritage Foundation talking points when they needed an opinion on something serious, and only letting the best rise to the “important” positions by filtering them through the corporate world. Except that eventually an overtly authoritarian faction that does not want to power-share with other rich influentials identified someone who’s not quite from the “right people”, as the figure around whom they could rally that crowd, and by now that crowd was the core of their voters.
Say what you will, but one thing about the authoritarian faction: they called it right in that those old guard establishment elites were easily intimidated, too worried about losing, and would not push back effectively when they could have. The way to prevent the current pickle would have been for the establishment to have effectively and coherently resisted and put down Trump early. But noooo… they were all wanting to grab the Trump voters when he’d “inevitaby” quit.
I wonder if anything can be done to drive a wedge between the hardcore GOP base who are neofascist, racist and proudly ignorant, and the enablers who aren’t those things but vote GOP because they oppose abortion or support what they think the GOP stands for (less regulation, lower taxes, etc). I would assume each group makes up maybe half of the GOP voter group.
But I don’t see a rise of never Trumpers. I wish I could, but I don’t have much faith in the US. It was funny watching the wingnuts take over the party until it became clear that nobody within the GOP political elite or voter group would stand up to them.
I have several republican friends who despise Trump and everything he stands for, except the abortion issue. For that reason alone they voted for him twice.
Any discussion of whether the anti-open-authoritarianism faction of conservatives can advance their cause and grow, depends on whether they are willing to give up their Tilted Field.
When they start opposing both gerrymandering and the Electoral College, then we will know they are serious about preserving democracy.
Gives new meaning to the phrase “they cut off their noses to spite their faces, and then cropped the rest of their bodies into tiny septic pieces which infected everybody else around them and caused mass deaths.”
Well, the obvious thing to do is admit them into the Democratic party. That is, allow for various positions on, say, abortion. It wasn’t that long ago that pro-life Democrats were a thing. Pro-choice absolutism, while possibly the correct ethical choice, is undoubtedly a political liability for Democrats.
I don’t see why the party itself couldn’t moderate it’s position on taxation as well, or even some regulation, in order to bring Republicans into the fold. It would also mean being way less focused on racial and gender issues. This likely alienates the progressive wing of the party, so it’s a rather difficult line to walk. Biden is doing a decent job of it, but I’m not sure someone even more moderate than him could make it.
I suppose the other option is for the anti-Trump forces to win inside the GOP. But they don’t really have a coherent argument that gives them much of a chance. Trump certainly did well enough in 2020 (as did his enables/supporters) to not make it obvious that his movement is a political dead end. It will be interesting to see how folks like Murkowski do in the 2022 primaries (if she gets a strong opponent endorsed by Trump).
Probably the best way to help the never-Trumpers to win is for Democrats to govern well and show up strongly in 2022. If they hold the Senate and the House after 2022 I think that will require the GOP to have some deep thoughts about what direction they want to go (maybe… fingers crossed…).
The Democratic party already did this, circa 1994. It was not a resounding success.
The Democratic party already has allowances for “various positions on, say, abortion.” Believe it or not, Joe Biden is a devout Catholic (an actual, practicing member of that faith, not a figure who takes Mass on Easter and Christmas for the sake of a photo op) and is personally opposed to abortion. But he also separates his faith from his role as a representative and a president because he understands that the majority of people he represents do not share that belief, and that such a position is based on personal emotion and faith, not science and objective fact. Being “way less focused on racial and gender issues,” is what has gotten us to where we are today with the Black Lives Matter movement and people demonstrating in the streets because they are tired of being repressed and ignored and systematically brutalized by the institutions that are supposed to protect and elevate society.
Your argument seems to be to roll things back to how they were in the ‘Nineties, which is neither possible nor desirable. If “Never-trump” Republicans want to rescue their party, let them, or if they want to shift their allegiance, they can ‘rebrand’ and attract a base of moderates while finding some common ground with more progressive factors in the party. But the notion that the entire Democratic party should shift further to the right to pick up the handful of Republicans unwilling to blindly follow Trump or adhere to the Newt Gingrich-infused wing of proto-fasicsts is nonsense.
There’s an article in The Atlantic online today that sort of deals with the subject of why people buy into ridiculous conspiracy theories.
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To think that Trump is actually still the president, as some in the QAnon movement do, you first have to doubt. You have to doubt the journalism practiced by any mainstream media outlet of any political persuasion; you have to doubt all the experts and the political elites; you have to doubt the judiciary, the military, and every other American institution. Once you have thoroughly disbelieved all of them, only then can you start to believe in Trump’s ascension being just around the corner—or in lizard overlords or alien prophets.
Is the line between excessive doubt and excessive belief a distinction without a difference? I don’t think so, because it helps inform how to bring a conspiracy theorist back to reality. One must recognize that this is a person who already mistrusts what most authoritative sources say. One should ask calm questions, inviting the conspiracy theorist to explain and reflect on his beliefs, rather than advance evidence or quote the experts. The evidence and the experts, remember, are exactly what the conspiracy theorist has already rejected.
When someone has dismissed the obvious facts, repeating them will not persuade him to see sense. But when people are given time and space to explain themselves, they may start to spot the gaps in their own knowledge or arguments.
…
I dare not quote any more.
The upshot is that studies have shown it’s easier for people to doubt, cling to their doubts, and vaguely and loudly defend their doubts than it is for them to defend something that they actually believe in. IOW undermining belief is easy. Showing why you should or do believe something is harder. We are predisposed to doubt, be skeptical, and/or question the veracity of something. That takes less effort than gathering together our reasons FOR believing something. Trumpy played this up by calling everything “fake news.”
Throwing more facts at these people from sources they already don’t trust isn’t the way. Somehow getting them to articulate or at least consider why they believe this bullshit IS the way. But I don’t see how this can be done on a mass scale. Smarter people than I will have to figure that out.
Well, to be fair, they sort of have. Clinton was a moderate. Obama was a moderate. Biden is a moderate. That’s how Democrats win national elections.
Democratic tax policy is actually pretty moderate now, other than on issues like a new wealth tax. Most of the tax increases being proposed just bring things back to Obama-era rates and close a few loopholes that most people agree are good policy.
My point, for what it’s worth, is that if you want to drive the wedge between the sane Republicans and the crazy ones, one way to do it is to give the sane ones a palatable alternative. Make it extremely clear that the Democratic party doesn’t want to outlaw all private firearm ownership, for example. Repeatedly hammer away that Democrats want fiscal responsibility and return to the tax rates that were successful under Clinton and Obama. And try to ignore the noise that the GOP will churn up over “cancel culture” or whatever other culture-war nonsense they will invent next.
I have very little doubt that the Biden was one of few Democrats that would have beaten Trump in 2020, as amazing as that is. Not necessarily because Biden’s particularly moderate (he is moderate, but I think he’s to the left of Obama, and certainly the ARP was not a moderate bill) but because he is palatable (you can read in whatever gender and racial biases you want into that, or just look at his politics, I think both are sufficient). He doesn’t feed into the culture war tribalism the way some Democrats do.
The other option is to go full out progressive and prove to the voters that progressive policies work. That may be an even better alternative. But there is always a delay between implementing the vision and when voters feel the impact, which may be enough time for the reactionaries to get a foothold again and start rolling things back. And I haven’t seen a ton of evidence that progressive policies are so popular with voters that they will overcome the GOP structural advantages.
