So, the Republican House Caucus, along with the Party as broadly conceived, is considering turfing Liz Cheney from her position as chair because she maintains that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and that Our Previous President is lying about it. The top candidate for that position appears to be Elise Stefanik.
Let’s be clear: it’s not my Party. I am convinced that it is important for the health of American democracy that there be a functional Conservative Party, so yes, I am concerned about the spiral of dysfunction, but there’s no reason for Conservatives to care what I think. I don’t have any ‘advice’ for Conservatives, and they shouldn’t take ‘advice’ from people who aren’t Conservatives.
But.
The position that the 2020 election miscarried is not, I don’t think, an inherently Conservative position. The position that Our Previous President is a bad man who misused his office is not, I think, a violation of Conservative principles. Not as I understand them, of course; it’s up to the Conservatives to decide what their positions and principles might be.
If it does turn out that Conservatism, as a political force and a tribe of Americans, decides that in order to call yourself a Conservative you must believe that Donald Trump was a good President who did nothing wrong, and that he won the 2020 election and that the current Administration is illegitimate, then… then I don’t know the way forward for this country. If the only way to do anything within their Party is to publicly claim those things, then I honestly fear that our democracy is in immediate danger. Like, we may not last the decade danger. More so, I am afraid, than we were five months ago or a year ago.
We’re still in the ‘if’ stage, of course. And maybe the caucus chair decision isn’t a tipping point. But maybe it is—if what Liz Cheney believes and promotes as her ideology is no longer what Conservatism is, and what Elise Stefanik is on about is what Conservatism is, and if (as it seems) more than a third of the country identifies themselves with that kind of Conservatism… well, as I say, it’s not my Party but it is my country, and I am concerned.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
You know all those “never before has the country been so divided” takes that just kind of… forgot… the Civil War? Completely aside from the very serious danger you describe, I feel like this is a “never before has this country been so stupid” moment, and I would welcome counter-examples.
Well, insofar as the current evil stupidity is an outgrowth of the original evil stupidity of white supremacy and imperialism that has plagued the American Settler Project from its early days to now, I would propose that the country is no more stupid than it has ever been, and is probably less stupid in the aggregate, because a clear majority sees through a good part of this nonsense.
To put it another way,: The evil Stupids has never been more obviously evil Stupids, so it seems like stupidity is increasing, but as the percentage of country suffering from evil Stupidity is dropping, evil Stupidity is actually on the decline. The obviousness of the evil Stupidity is partly a decompensating action by the evil Stupids in response to the fact that they are weak as well as being evil and stupid.
The declining base for evil Stupidity is cause for hope, but the belated recognition by the evil Stupids that they are not IN CONTROL has led them to break the detente between evil Stupidity and pluralistic democracy that has held for the last 50 years since the end of the Civil Rights era. The Big Lie is a direct FU to democracy and an embrace of fascism and the active political violence that fascism wields to secure minority control of state power. It’s tremendously dangerous.
I am not in agreement with our kind host about the need for a Conservative Party. I believe that a multi-party system is indeed important, but I don’t think that there is any reason why the ideological position of “conservatism” has to be present in the mix for democracy to work. As I review United States history, it seems like the primary value of a healthy Conservative Party has been its capacity, when healthy, to keep the fascists in a subordinate position within the Conservative coalition. Now that the fascists have taken control of the Conservative Party, it no longer has any value for democracy, being in active hostility to it. If, as I hope, the outcome of the struggle to preserve democracy in the United States is an eventual, decisive rejection of fascism, there will be no need for a Conservative Party to continue to serve the function of civilizing fascism, so we will see a new kind of political alignment in the United States, with divisions falling along other lines. For a Conservative Party to continue, it would have to re-civilize the fascists, and it appears to have rejected its last opportunity to do so before being devoured when it failed to reject Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection. The United States government did not fall that day, but the Republican Party did.
I find a lot to agree with, disagree with, and chew on in your comment, Chris. I hope to return to it when my thoughts settle somewhat. But your arresting sentence: The United States government did not fall that day, but the Republican Party did is absolutely at the core of it. I don’t know that it’s true! But surely that is the question at stake in whether Liz Cheney or Elise Stefanik is conference chair: whether the Party and the Conservative moment, however it broadly defines itself, chooses to align itself with the people who trespassed in the Capital and attempted an insurrection, or whether it chooses to align itself against them.
And it is in this situation, in my view, because if the mainstream position of the party is that the election was stolen, and also that the Previous President did nothing wrong but was impeached in an attempt by the Deep State to overthrow the government, and further that the courts have colluded with traitors in the legislature to do all of this, then I don’t see how they can align themselves against the attempted insurrection of January 6! That insurrection was an absolutely commensurate reaction to those sorts of allegations (and worse). Which is where we get the Stupidity question—how historically Stupid is it to believe that crap? Versus believing, say, that McCarthy had a list of Communists in the State Department, or that a Federal Bank would be the death knell of state sovereignty?
It is also an open question whether, as Francis Wilkinson puts it: “support for Trump is not the key to GOP politics. Opposition to democracy is the key to GOP politics” or whether as suggested by Dan Hopkins “if we want to understand 1/6 or anti-democratic efforts, we can’t just look at general population polls. We’ve got to focus on the much smaller group of elites who mobilize people & the activists who answer those calls.” That is, it’s not clear to me whether Conservative Party leaders in this country are the root of the problem, or if the problem is that a large minority of people including almost all Conservatives prefer autocracy to democracy, or rather, prefer autocratic victory to pluralistic compromise.
Because if the problem is the Party elite putting one over on the rubes, well, it’s a big problem but it seems like it could yield to democratic pressures. But if the problem is that America really is, as I have long feared, falling out of love with democracy, then chaos really is coming.
Thanks,
-V.