GOP “Trumpism” will persist with or without Trump

Since last January’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. political establishment has been locked in a battle to define the events and to draw the political consequences from them. Democrats, and a handful of “never-Trump” Republicans, have sought to draw a line on January 6. Over the last year, the congressional investigation into the events at the Capitol have built a case against Trump and his hangers-on for instigating the riot intended to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Along the way, it has exposed the mobilization of far-right street-fighting organizations, from the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers, under the Trumpists’ “stop the steal” mobilization.

Meanwhile, most of the institutional GOP wants to act as if January 6 either didn’t unfold the way congressional investigators are revealing. Others have gone so far as to normalize the events as little more than a tourist visit that got out of hand. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee went even farther. It passed a resolution censuring the two Republican House members who are serving on the congressional panel, accusing them of “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Those last three words—that seemed to compare the January 6 mob action aimed at overturning a democratic election to an exercise in civics—brought swift condemnation from mainstream media figures, and establishment politicians, including, most significantly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said: “We all were here. We saw what happened. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

The RNC has since made some attempt to walk back its endorsement of the January 6 riot, saying that only meant to defend those GOP politicians and activists who attempted to present themselves as Trump electors in the event that challenges to states’ certified vote totals succeeded. This RNC attempt at damage control may have inadvertently confessed to the core of Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election. That was to have then-Vice President Mike Pence rule that in states where there were competing slates of electors, it was too difficult to determine who had won, despite certified vote tallies showing Biden the victor. If Pence had gone along with the scheme, Biden electors either wouldn’t have been counted, or the House of Representatives would have been able to choose Trump.

Given this background, deciding whether “legitimate political discourse” means a right-wing riot or discounting the votes of millions of Americans is not much of a choice. It demonstrates that “one half of a two-party system has entered a post democratic phase,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the New Yorker. The RNC may want to wash off a bit of the stain of January 6, but it’s hard to forget that it hosted the infamous November 2020 press conference where Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell made ludicrous claims that Venezuela and China had hacked U.S. voting machines to fix the election for Biden.

McConnell’s criticism of the RNC resolution, following by a week Pence’s statement that Trump was “wrong” to assert that Pence could throw out certified electors on January 6, kindled speculation in the mainstream media that Trump’s grip on the GOP might be loosening. It’s too early to tell, and the longings of “never Trump” Republicans to reclaim the GOP as a “normal” political party won’t make it so.In any event, whether Trump is finished as kingmaker in the Republican Party will depend more on the court cases circling around him and whether his anointed candidates in Republican primaries win than on anything McConnell or pundits say.

Even if the U.S.’s main conservative party manages to distance itself from the chaos and corruption that Trump exudes, its Trumpiness will persist. That’s because it exists in an era of economic instability and political polarization that pushes it to make ever-more extreme positions a “new normal” in U.S. politics. There are several reasons why this is the most likely outcome.

First, even though the majority of positions that the Republicans take—from support for outlawing abortion to believing that Joe Biden wasn’t really elected—appeal to only about one-third of the country, it’s not necessary for the GOP to win majority support to push its agenda. The U.S. political system, from the ridiculously anti-democratic U.S. Senate to the Supreme Court—where five unelected judges can invalidate democratic and social rights—enshrines minority rule.Osita Nwanevu, writing in the New York Times, made this point:

Jan. 6 demonstrated that the choice the country now faces isn’t one between disruptive changes to our political system and a peaceable status quo. To assume that choice is to indulge the other big lie that drew violence to the Capitol in the first place. The notion that the 18th-century American constitutional order is suited to governance in the 21st is as preposterous and dangerous as anything Mr. Trump has ever uttered. It was the supposedly stabilizing features of our vaunted system that made him president to begin with and incubated the extremism that turned his departure into a crisis.

That the elements of the far right have sought shelter in the GOP’s “big tent” is neither new nor unfathomable. As far back as the early 1960s, far right groups like the Minutemen and the John Birch Society worked inside the Republican campaigns of Sen. Barry Goldwater, leading the historian Richard Hofstadter to write about how that New Right was the inheritor of the “paranoid style of American politics.” When the Newt Gingrich-led “Republican revolution” swept the Democrats out of congressional power in 1994, they brought with them politicians like Rep. Helen Chenoweth (Idaho), who made little effort to hide her sympathies to the right-wing militias of the day. Today, organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, although pre-dating Trump’s rise in the GOP, have taken advantage of Trump’s support to build their ranks.

While the threat of the far right is real—and needs to be confronted—it shouldn’t divert us from noting that “perfectly legal” attacks on our rights are also a clear and present danger. There is a real possibility that long-time social rights won in the 1960s and 1970s—affirmative action, the right to abortion, voting rights—will be vaporized in state legislatures and in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Second, the hopes that big business will exercise a moderating influence on its A-Team in Washington is also misplaced. True, the major business organizations, such as the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, did issue statements denouncing the January 6 events. Some leading corporations even proclaimed that they wouldn’t contribute to Republicans who voted to support Trump’s phony claims on January 6. Yet, within a few months, most of them had started giving donations to GOP politicians again.

There was precedent for this. And in both 2016 and 2020, most business money went to the Democratic presidential candidates. For big business, Trump’s chaotic style, his opposition to free trade and immigration, and his failure to stem the pandemic were more than enough reasons to prefer Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. However, once Trump was in office and—rhetoric and Tweets aside—operated as a traditional conservative on taxation, deregulation and pro-business judges, business was more than happy to go along. So, no one should think that business is seriously thinking of abandoning the GOP.

A third factor is the opposition—or lack thereof—that the GOP faces. Even though it’s clear that Republicans stand for a host of unpopular positions, the majority hasn’t successfully pushed back against them. One of the main reasons for this is the role of what author Paul Street calls the “inauthentic opposition”of the Democratic Party. The generations’-long shift in mainstream politics to the neoliberal right has been a bipartisan affair. The Republican administrations of two Bushes and Trump made disasters for ordinary people that Democratic administrations cleaned up. But instead of charting a new direction, in all cases, Democratic administrations made changes that preserved the neoliberal status quo on a new footing.

Even in the short periods where they held a “trifecta” in Washington (the White House and two houses of Congress), the Democrats never made the moves they promise during election campaigns, for example, codifying Roe v. Wade in law or passing permanent federal protections for voting rights. For Democrats, the threat of Republicans taking these rights is always a way to motivate a “lesser evil” vote against the GOP. But when Democrats are in a position to protect those rights once and for all, they often act as if they don’t have the power or level of support to be able to do it.

Despite its rhetoric about aspiring to pass a “transformational” agenda in the wake of the COVID disaster, the Biden administration has from the start prioritized vaccination as the means to business and school “opening”while rejecting other initiatives in support of public health, as this excellent analysis by Justin Feldman documented. While the Biden administration didn’t truck with the Trump administration anti-science fantasies, its actual approach to the virus hasn’t been as different from Trump’s as Biden’s supporters thought they would be. But with a Democrat in the White House, many who protested Trump have been silent. As Feldman pointed out:

There has been a failure of various social institutions — the media, the political left, scientists, and unions, to pressure the Biden administration into a course of action that would better prevent mass death. In some other countries, scientists banded together to form organizations like the UK’s Independent SAGE that counters government policy with its own, more precautionary policy recommendations. This has not happened in any substantial way in the US, where scientists have made statements only as individuals or in informal, ad-hoc groups. To the extent they have weighed in, American unions have been narrow in their demands for the pandemic response and have not called major strikes over it. Progressive members of the Democratic Party have not put pressure on Biden over pandemic measures except in narrow ways, such as Bernie Sanders calling for an extension to unemployment programs or Cori Bush demanding the Biden administration fight for an extension of the eviction moratorium. Leftist groups like the Democratic Socialists of America have not developed a pandemic response platform, and to the extent they have politicized the pandemic, it has been to talk about long-standing policy goals like Medicare For All.

This abdication wasn’t a foregone conclusion. In the spring of 2020, thousands of workers protested for workplace protections from COVID-19, and in the summer of 2020, millions protested against racism and police murder. But, by and large, the labor movement and liberal NGOs channeled these examples of resistance into Democratic Party electoral channels. And now with the Biden administration in charge, labor actions for workplace safety from COVID, like those the Chicago Teachers Union recently undertook, have resulted in the supposed “pro-labor” White House joining with the political right to oppose them.

At the same time, the political right has skillfully managed to exploit the pandemic’s social dislocation and discontent to advance its standing in the run-up to the 2022 midterm election. One measure of the right’s success in this area is the increasingly shrill cries from Democratic Party consultants and liberal pundits for the Democrats to abandon pandemic mitigations, “wokeness” and social spending. So, unless something drastically changes, the Democrats are in for a 2022 defeat and a knee-capped administration following it.

No doubt, Democrats will raise the alarm about what a Republican victory will mean. But they used the same apocalyptic tones to warn of the danger of a Trump victory in 2020. Today, after more than a year of the Democrats being in charge in Washington,those warnings won’t pack the same punch.