Archive for the ‘Tea Party’ Category

A foreseeable fire: A steady diet of red meat turned the Tea Party into Trumpism – USA TODAY

Bob Inglis, Opinion contributor Published 5:00 a.m. ET Jan. 10, 2021

Republicans and Democrats share firsthand accounts as pro-Trump supports stormed the U.S. Capitol. USA TODAY

I could have joined my colleagues and survived, even thrived, in the Tea Party era. But instead I lost an election rather than fan the flames.

A House Republican colleague returned to Washington circa 2009 to tell us how he was going to survive the Tea Party. He was just back from holding a series of Obamacare town halls in his deep red part of Georgia. He said that he had learned how to handle the rabble-rousing crowd from ameeting that had gotten off to a bad start. The people were mad at him and mad at the world. Halfway into the meeting he found a pivot. He toldthe crowd thathegot itthat they just want him to go to Washington and 'raise some hell."

The crowd roared their approval. He became an active Tea Partier that day and, subsequently, a full-throated Trumper.

Perhaps I should have learned from my friends example. It might have saved my seat in the United StatesCongress. I had had one of those raucous meetings. A man had risen in great anger to tell me that, President Barack Obama is so unpatriotic, he doesnt put his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played or the Pledge of Allegiance is recited.(Apparently, hed been surfing on some isolated internet island.)

Standing there in front of that crowd, I knew what I could have said, What do you expect from a secret Muslim ...non-American ... socialist? Any one of those responses would have done just fine at that moment.

Thats our Bob! the deep red crowd would have said.

I couldnt do it. I thought of my five kids and wouldnt do it. I have been with President Obama, I said to the man, I have seen him put his hand over his heart. What youve just said is simply not true.

Sensing the importance of the teachable moment, I continued, President Obama is a loyal, patriotic American who loves this country, loves his wife, loves his children. I just disagree with him on most every thing.

USA TODAY editorial board: Sacking of U.S. Capitol adds to rare national security failures. Police the police.

Afterwards, a Republican operative came up to me with advice: Dont give him that.

Had I taken that advice, I suppose I might have joined my House colleague from Georgia in surviving, even thriving, in the Tea Party. As it was, I was uninvited to the party. The Tea Party didnt want to hear civility, and they sure as hell didnt want to hear my message about climate change in the 2010 cycle.(Thankfully, that latter part has changed. As thesea level rises and septic tanks stop working, even the most ardent disputer of science realizes that he or she has a problem!)

I lost an election in 2010, but I didnt lose my soul. And I didnt fan the flames that blew up into an insurrection at the U.S.Capitol on Wednesday.

That insurrection could have happened earlier.

It could have happened when there was a mob a huge mob nearthe Capitol in 2009, angrily protesting against Obamacare. Kill the bill! Kill the bill! Kill the bill! they thundered. From the members porch on the second floor of the Capitol, House Republicans egged them on, calling back to them, amping them up.

Republicans and Democrats shared firsthand accounts of pro-Trump supporters storming the Capitol.(Photo: Getty)

It could have happened on another occasion when the astroturf had been rolled out for a huge Tea Party rally on the West Front steps the steps that the Trump mob stormed on Wednesday. Our leadership had encouraged us to go out to speak to that crowd rev em up.

Trump mob attack on the Capitol: 10 urgent security questions that need answers

I remember feeling ill as I walked out toward that crowd through one of the doors that the Trump mob smashed on Wednesday. I cant remember whether I spoke and bombed with civility or whether I shrunk back into the Capitol, speechless. I remember being sick to my stomach, listening to a House colleague (now asenator) who did a particularly good job of revving up that crowd.

Either of those crowds could have stormed the Capitol. All they needed was an inciter in chief to light the fire. That inciter in chief struck the match on Wednesday, and the mob did what mobs do.

The fire rages, and as Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said so powerfully on the Senate floor on Wednesday night, only truth can extinguish it. Speaking truth, he said, is the burden, and the duty, of leadership.

Oh, that my party had taken a path illuminated by truth rather than one darkened by useless conspiracy theories. Oh, that my party had chosen more leaders of character willing to speak truth to our own people. Oh, that we might learn from our mistakes and bear the fruit of repentance.

Bob Inglis, a Republican, represented the Fourth District of South Carolina from 1993-1999 and again from 2005-2011.

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A foreseeable fire: A steady diet of red meat turned the Tea Party into Trumpism - USA TODAY

An insurrection is not a tea party – The Daily Star

It's messy, rowdy, bloody, irrational, and bewildering. Yet, it happens, and can happen anywhere when the ruler and the ruled start considering each other enemies. It happened a few days ago in the US. But isn't the US a democracy? Isn't an orderly transfer of power the norm in the so called most, democratic, powerful, and exceptional country in the world? It seems not. How to explain this anomaly? Is it a wayward incident in the otherwise peaceful, adorable, God's chosen country? That's what the political leadership across the partisan divide would want the world to believe. But they and the world were horrified and rightly abhorred by the silly but dangerous act of a disillusioned president and some of his equally crazy followers to have struck the citadel of American democracy. I am sure the French and the Russian monarchs were equally shaken and baffled to see the mob storm the Bastille and the Winter Palace. While the American rulers got away with just a few feathers ruffled, the other two were not so lucky.

But that's no comparison, while the other two were absolute monarchies America is a democracy or supposed to be. Well here comes the tricky part. While a democratically elected president is awaiting his inauguration nearly half of America believes the election was rigged in spite of no evidence at all. But perception in politics and faith is far more important than evidence. The Christians believe Christ was God's son; how can one contest with blind faith? Same goes for half of the American electorate. Well, that says a lot about them; no wonder a crude philanderer, and a known con man like Trump gets elected in the first place. Were they so desperate to replace the old order? Well it seems so! The question is why?

Here is where the story gets murky. No matter what the written constitution says or claims, America was established on the unwritten understanding of white supremacy by the Anglo-Saxon, Christian slave owning oligarchs right from day one. Even if they themselves suffered the colonial yoke, they had no qualm in following the moral and cultural dictum of the European's infamous "white man's burden" for pursuing the colonial project. This justified the mass slaughter of the natives and confiscation of their lands. Guns and duplicity were the two main weapons. But the lands needed to be farmed; slavery was the answer, and all in the name of God, democracy and the self-righteous high moral supremacy. These two crimes against humanity committed between 17-19 centuries were the two most basic foundational stones of the future wealthy America. So, the dirty faces of racism and expansionism became part of America's DNA.

But fortunately this is not the whole story. With gradual advances in material condition, growth of social consciousness and the ideas of human dignity, decency, education, and other civilizational attributes, the crudity and aggressiveness of white settler mentality slowly receded alright but didn't vanish. So long as the ruling elite could provide full employment, housing, and other basic necessities for the majority, not much grumbling was heard. In fact, most Americans went along with the governments narrative of the necessity to control/police the world to keep America safe. But what they didn't realise or couldn't care less about was that it was only an excuse, exerting global influence by waging endless wars across the world became the most lucrative enterprise. Pursuing this policy over nearly half a century became the key priority of a collective of elites in Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and Wall Street, cryptically called the military-industrial complex. They enforced a policy of neoliberalism at home and abroad that enabled massive income and wealth gains for a few at the top, but regular economic stagnation and deprivation for all else.

Rank of the middle class kept on dwindling, joblessness increased; medical care and education for the common people became unaffordable, while at the same time the endless cost for the endless wars kept on increasing by leaps and bounds as did national debt. Right after the market crash in 2008, people were disgusted with the established order and put great trust in Obama to change course, but he proved a disappointment. He gave in to the pressure of the three power centres that hold the levers of actual power in Washington. When Trump pointed out these failures and anomalies and promised to clean the mess, and stop the endless wars the disgruntled sections of the populace jumped on his bandwagon. Trump is no aberration; he is the cumulative result of long years of neglect of ordinary Americans by the elites. It will be a grave mistake to paint them all white supremacists. In the last four years constant vilification of Trump by the liberals and calling his supporters "deplorables" or "white trash" helped him to galvanise them into an organised grassroot fighting machine. America got polarised into two hostile camps boiling at the seams just beneath the surface of constitutional norms. And finally it burst open on January 6.

It delivered a stark message. No amount of civilities, constitutional talks, and empty rhetoric of healing by the elites will work. The hypocrisies, outright lies, and the widening wealth gap needs to be addressed. If America chooses it can be a wealthy, democratic, and a socially equitable welfare country like a few others in western Europe, the anger will slowly dissipate. Or it can go on acting like an imperial oligarchy dictating to the world, which can only imperil its own and the world's future. One thing is for sure; it can no longer be both. And it cannot pretend that nothing has happened and get back to business as usual. If a serious dialogue and accommodation across the divide cannot be worked out, Trumpism is here to stay with or without Trump. America needs to search for its soul.

Ali Ahmed Ziauddin is a researcher and activist. Email: aliahmedziauddin@gmail.com

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An insurrection is not a tea party - The Daily Star

Chicago-Area Billionaire Gave Millions To Patriots Group That Backed Pro-Trump Rally – WBEZ

A billionaire businessman from the Chicago area has been the primary source of political funding for an ultra-conservative group that participated in the March to Save America rally that preceded last weeks deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, documents show.

Dick Uihlein the Republican mega-donor who lives in north suburban Lake Forest and is CEO of the Uline business supplies company has contributed nearly $4.3 million in the past five years to the political action committee of the Tea Party Patriots, including $800,000 in October, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The funding sources for last Wednesdays rally against President Donald Trumps reelection loss are not publicly documented, and its unknown if the Tea Party Patriots used any money from Uihlein toward the event.

On the website for the rally, the Tea Party Patriots were among 11 groups listed as participating in the March to Save America as part of the #StopTheSteal coalition.

The marchtosaveamerica.com website was not working Monday, but archived images of the page show event organizers pressed debunked allegations of widespread voter fraud in Democrat Joe Bidens defeat of Trump.

And they urged a big show of force in Washington on Wednesday to let the establishment know we will fight back against this fraudulent election.

At 1 p.m., we will march to the U.S. Capitol building to protest the certification of the Electoral College, organizers wrote on the website, referring to the scheduled congressional vote to ratify the election results from the states.

The co-founder and leader of the Georgia-based Tea Party Patriots, Jenny Beth Martin, also heavily promoted the event. On her Twitter account, she wrote, I will be speaking at the #StopTheSteal rally in D.C. on Jan. 6. We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!

Martin urged her followers to RSVP at WildProtest.com. That website was not working Monday.

Then, on Wednesday morning, Martin tweeted a photo of herself in what appeared to be a reserved, front-row seat at the rally, saying, We will not allow them to steal this election!

But within five hours, as the protests devolved into rioting, Martin was striking a more conciliatory tone, writing, Keep it peaceful.

After Trump spoke at the rally near the White House telling supporters he will never concede and urging them to fight and to march on the Capitol a pro-Trump mob overwhelmed security to storm into the Capitol. The insurrection temporarily suspended Congress and left five dead, including a police officer.

Federal and local prosecutors in Washington have charged dozens of Trump supporters from across the country with contributing to the unprecedented scenes on Capitol Hill. The alleged rioters who were arrested included Bradley Rukstales, a 52-year-old business executive and Trump campaign contributor from northwest suburban Inverness, who was detained Wednesday afternoon on the upper level of the Capitol, court records show.

Wednesdays violent unrest has sparked heated debates over the culpability of Trump and his backers who falsely alleged that he actually won the election.

The Tea Party Patriots did not return messages, and Uihlein did not reply to questions sent by WBEZ to a spokeswoman for his company.

The Uline shipping supplies company is based in Pleasant Prairie, a Wisconsin town just over the state line from Illinois. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, have been among the biggest political donors in the country and in Illinois campaigns for years.

Dick Uihlein has shelled out more than $136 million to federal candidates and campaign committees, according to FEC records. Hes also contributed about tens of millions more to campaign in Illinois, most of that to the now-defunct Liberty Principles PAC.

In April 2016, Uihlein began to heavily support the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, a PAC started in 2013. Records show he gave it nearly $1.5 million in 2016, more than $1 million in 2017, $950,000 in 2018 and the single, $800,000 contribution last year.

Thats made Uihlein by far the single biggest donor to the Tea Party Patriots PAC in each of the last three two-year federal election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

Records show the Tea Party Patriots had contributed in recent years to Trump and to Republican lawmakers, including members of Congress who sought to overturn Bidens victories in hotly contested states. They included Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas and Mo Brooks of Alabama, whom House Democrats want to censure for his remarks at the Trump rally.

The group lent its name to a rally that led to an insurrection, said Don Wiener, a researcher with the left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wis. Donors bear some responsibility for the activity of the groups they fund.

The Tea Party Patriots touts itself as the largest and most effective national umbrella group within the Tea Party movement.

In one of Martins tweets promoting the rally, she said she would appear in Washington to support Trump with Dr. Simone Gold, who has worked with the Tea Party Patriots to urge the swift reopening of the economy since early in the coronavirus pandemic.

Gold also heavily promoted the the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 sufferers. Trump repeatedly praised the drug, which medical experts say is ineffective in helping coronavirus patients.

Gold is in one of the photos taken at the Capitol that the FBI released Sunday, when the agency called on the public to help identify individuals who actively instigated violence on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C.

She told the Washington Post she was in the Capitol for about 20 minutes on Wednesday and gave a speech in the buildings Rotunda, but she said she did not see any of the violence.

In addition to the Tea Party Patriots, the other 10 groups listed as participating in the rally before the Capitol riot included Women for America First, which applied for the permit for the event.

Another group that participated in the rally was Turning Point Action, a sister organization of the far-right Turning Point USA group. Between 2014 and 2016, Uihleins foundation donated $275,000 to Turning Point USA, which is led by Arlington Heights native Charlie Kirk, according to records.

In a tweet he later deleted, Kirk took credit for sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president last Wednesday. Kirk since has said the Trump supporters his group brought to the rally left after it and did not go to the Capitol.

He also said it was not wise for Trump supporters to enter the building, which was closed to the public. But Kirk quickly added, Not wise does not mean youre an insurrectionist, OK?

A group of Republican attorneys general also have come under strong criticism for funding robocalls promoting the Trump rally, despite the incumbent presidents long string of court defeats in his effort to challenge the November election results.

Democratic Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul lashed out at these GOP counterparts, saying, Those tasked with upholding the rule of law should be the last to engage in promoting an attack against our democracy through robocalls. Subsequently denouncing the predictable violence that grows from it does not clean hands!

Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZs Government & Politics Team.

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Chicago-Area Billionaire Gave Millions To Patriots Group That Backed Pro-Trump Rally - WBEZ

Kate Middleton Celebrated Her Birthday With a Low-Key Tea Party at Anmer Hall – Observer

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had lots to celebrate this weekend, as Kate Middleton turned 39 on January 9. This year, Prince William and Kate kept the festivities more low-key than usual, as due to the coronavirus pandemic, they marked the occasion as just a family of five, with Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.

Prince William still planned a special fte for Kate, as he organized a tea party in honor of his wifes big day at the familys Norfolk country home, Anmer Hall, with their three children, per theDaily Mail. The Cambridges have been staying at Anmer Hall since December, as its where they celebrated the Christmas holidays this year. Now that England is under a new lockdown, it seems Prince William and Kate decided to stay put at their Sandringham estate for the time being.

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Kate usually celebrates her birthday by inviting a few close friends to spend a cozy weekend at Anmer Hall, but that was out of the question this year due to the COVID-19 crisis. Kates never been into elaborate parties, though, according to Vanity Fair, and prefers quiet birthday celebrations. Catherine isnt one for lots of fuss or big partiesbeing with William and the children is her favorite way of spending her birthday, a source told the outlet.

The Duchess of Cambridge was also unable to see her parents, Carole and Michael Middleton, because of the lockdown, but Prince William organized video calls so that Kate could virtually celebrate with family and friends.

The royals also marked Kates big day with a few Instagram posts, as Queen Elizabeth as well as Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles shared photos of the Duchess on their accounts. Prince William and Kates KensingtonRoyal Instagram account posted a snap of the Duchess of Cambridge from the royal train tour in December, with Kate waving at the camera while wearing a protective face mask. Its a departure from the tradition of sharing a new picture of the Duchess on her birthday, but seems fitting for the somber time. The caption reads, Birthdays have been very different in recent months, and our thoughts continue to be with all those working on the front line at this hugely challenging time.

Prince William and Kate are expected to remain at Anmer Hall for the foreseeable future, and have taken over homeschooling duties once again. Theyre back to virtual events for the being, but they do have a big in-person celebration to look forward to. Queen Elizabeth is reportedly hoping to hold the annual Trooping the Colour parade in London this year, with all the royals in attendanceas long as the pandemic allows, that is.

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Kate Middleton Celebrated Her Birthday With a Low-Key Tea Party at Anmer Hall - Observer

Can the Republican Party be saved? – Vox

After last weeks assault on the US Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, there have been lots of calls from Republicans for unity and reconciliation.

The pleas for unity, however well-intentioned, obscure a crucial fact: This is not a bipartisan crisis. The Republican Party welcomed Trump into their ranks and indulged and excused him for four years. They nurtured the movement that led to the attack on the Capitol.

Even after the Capitol was violently sacked, even after at least five people were killed, a poll showed that 45 percent of Republicans support the invasion. That means millions upon millions of Americans see no problem in disrupting the peaceful transfer of power, a bedrock of constitutional democracy. And mere hours after the crisis at the Capitol, nearly 150 Republican lawmakers formally objected to the results of the 2020 election anyway.

So thats where we are.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center and the author of Rule and Ruin, a 2012 book that surveyed the ideological descent of the GOP from the 1950s to the rise of the Tea Party in early 2009. Its an interesting look at how conservative politics in America has always been prone to reactionary spasms, but explains how something fundamentally different happened with the Tea Party more than a decade ago.

We discussed what made the Tea Party different from previous conservative upwellings, how it was a harbinger of the MAGA movement, how the Gingrich revolution in the 90s destroyed Congress as an institution, and if he sees a viable path to de-radicalization for the Republican Party. Ultimately, hes more sanguine than I am about the possibilities, but were equally pessimistic about the consequences if there isnt a real reckoning in the GOP.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Would you say that the Republican Party, as it exists today, is a radical party?

Yes. As currently constituted, its a radical party. Its come an awful long way from the conservative precepts and principles it used to hold. And at this point, its largely the instrument of one mans will. And that man, Donald Trump, does not have a commitment to electoral democracy or the constitutional order. So yes, that makes it a radical force.

This is a hard question to answer, I get that, but what are the most significant forces or moments that brought the GOP to this dark place?

I think of American conservatism as a series of lost causes that carried on well beyond their expiration date. We can start with the William F. Buckley era of intellectual conservatism in the 50s and beyond, and that was really carrying on the lost cause of the original America First committee, which had tried to keep the United States out of World War II, as well as Joseph McCarthys anti-communist movement.

The Southern Strategy that the Republican Party and the conservative movement pursued through Richard Nixons presidency and then into Reagans administration was essentially putting forward the lost cause of those who missed the old days of Southern segregationism.

So there has always been this backward-looking, somewhat toxic component of conservatism. Its just that most of the people in charge of both the conservative movement and the Republican Party had used those energies for their own purposes to win elections, but had then controlled them, tamped them down, once the people who got to office on the strength of that grassroots movement actually took power. But under Donald Trump, they lost the balance. In fact, Trump didnt even know enough about the Republican Party to know that he had to maintain that kind of balance, but he also was able to get people who shouldve known better to go along with him.

And thats where we are now.

People talk a lot about Nixon and the Southern Strategy as well as the Tea Party (as they should), but I keep going back to the Newt Gingrich era in the early 90s. That feels like a Rubicon-crossing moment in a way that isnt quite as clear as the Southern Strategy but every bit as significant.

Am I overstating the importance of that period?

I dont think youre overstating the significance of Newt Gingrich. I recently reviewed Julian Zelizers book Burning Down the House, which is about Gingrichs rise. And it doesnt even take the story up to Gingrichs term as House speaker. But according to Zelizer, the damage was done in the mere action of bringing Gingrich to power.

That seems more clear to us in hindsight than it was to anyone in the House at that time, because Gingrich was really a kind of a chameleon. He had, after all, been Nelson Rockefellers point-man in his 1968 presidential campaign for the Southern states. Rockefeller represented a liberal Republicanism and Gingrich always claimed to have had at least one foot in that kind of progressive, civil rights-minded, moderate to liberal Republicanism.

But Gingrich also was the ultimate opportunist. And by the time youre getting into the early 1990s, the Republican Party has been kept out of the majority in the House of Representatives for close to four decades at that point. And that meant that even the comparatively moderate Republicans were willing to undertake extreme measures to get out from what they saw as a Democratic majority that had become entrenched in power and was abusing that power. So they turned to Gingrich as the only person with the charisma and ruthlessness who could bring the party back to power.

But that path back to power, for Gingrich, meant destroying Congress as an institution.

Thats a big statement, so Ill ask what you mean when you say Gingrich destroyed Congress as an institution?

Part of what Gingrich was doing was simply destroying the trust of the American people in Congress and really the government, believing that government would do the right thing. You can look at all the polls dating the decline in trust in Congress and government and really all institutions of American life and theres a noticeable dip in the Gingrich era. So Gingrich brings these nihilistic energies to bear on Congress, and people never look at it the same way again.

You could say Gingrich is the guy who put in place this image of Congress as a swamp, something Trump would later play upon. And he brought a kind of partisan polarization to the institution that didnt really exist before, or at least wasnt a dominant strain. This is the era where Gingrich really teaches the Republicans to talk about Democrats as the enemy, as corrupt people who dont have the interests of the American people in mind.

Ultimately, he changes the institution in ways that destroyed the possibility for comity and practical wisdom, and you can see that legacy in Congress today.

Lets fast-forward to the Tea Party in 2009. Initially, you thought the Tea Party would be a momentary flash of populism and that the party would quickly swing back toward the center until the next reactionary movement erupted. But instead, the Tea Party mutated and permanently altered the GOP.

What was different about that moment and that movement?

Maybe because I am on the right myself, I dont see these conservative movements as having risen from nothing, or from mere racism or other kinds of unsatisfiable grievances. I tend to see them as inflammations or infections within the body politic that need to be treated. And historically, these movements did succeed in bringing people to power who did then try to use the power of government to address some of the problems that had motivated those movements.

The Tea Party was indicative, in ways Im not sure we understood at the time, of the growing inequality in American life and the extent to which large parts of the country felt abandoned by the centers of power, the extent to which many Americans had become alienated from their fellow countrymen and their culture. And more should have been done in the Obama years, in hindsight, to address this. And this is not an original thought to me. I think Obama would say the same.

But what the Tea Party movement tended to produce was people who were against government in toto. So when they came to Congress, they werent willing to learn the system and accept their roles as junior people on the totem pole and follow the advice of their more pragmatic elders and learn wisdom. They were out to blow the place up. And when they discovered they couldnt blow the place up, they left. And the ones who stayed on really stayed on with an eye toward doing as much damage to the system as they could.

So the direct line from the Tea Party is to the House Freedom Caucus, which is the most malign element in government, I think, that weve seen since the period before the Civil War. And the stated enemy of the Freedom Caucus is not even the Democrats, not even the people they call RINOs. The enemy is bipartisanship and compromise itself. And when you have a significant faction that doesnt get expelled from a party and is allowed to keep putting this view forward, it completely undermines democracy itself.

What were seeing now may be an offshoot of the Tea Party, but its obviously much more violent and transgressive. Does that evolution surprise you?

Im surprised by the extent to which weve seen violence become almost part of the Republican mainstream, how at almost every Republican and conservative demonstration, you now expect to see people carrying weaponry, how its no longer a shocking thing when men with guns walk into a legislature and force its dissolution.

Part of this is simply the evolution over time of the Second Amendment from something that conservatives didnt really think much about to almost a kind of sacrament. And people who mightve had guns once now coming to identify themselves as gun owners in a way that they just really wouldnt in the past.

But I think this also shows how there simply arent gatekeepers anymore, either in the Republican Party or the conservative movement. And whats kind of surprising is that Donald Trump, who you would think would put such a high emphasis on his own political survival, never really thought, Can I do anything to improve my image with people who arent voting for me? It just didnt seem to occur to him.

Is there a substantial difference between, say, the conspiracy-tinged, anti-establishment conservatism of McCarthyism in the 1950s and the MAGA movement today? I mean, how different are the QAnon fantasies from the anti-communist hysteria?

One of the hallmarks of these conservative movements is the idea that the United States is being betrayed by its elites. That really remains constant from America First through the McCarthy era, and through the John Birch Society and into the present day. But Joe McCarthy was not calling his followers to arms. He was saying, Support me and Ill make things better. Barry Goldwater wasnt really calling for an armed uprising. If anything, Goldwater was overly optimistic in thinking most Americans believed what he believed.

I dont think Donald Trump conservatism is a confident conservatism in that way. Its a conservatism very much rooted in white identity. It sees the demographic decline of whites, in particular, working-class, non-college-educated whites, as a mortal threat to the countrys identity. It cant figure out any way to reach beyond this, even though we saw in this last election evidence that Republicans and conservatism actually can be quite appealing to minority Americans. And its also no longer confident, I think, that the standard processes of government and democracy can be trusted to bring about a good result.

And the feeling on the part of the most extreme Trump supporters is that you have to overthrow the government if you actually want to have the proper results. So thats really a dangerous place weve arrived at.

Whats the path to de-radicalization for the GOP? Do you even see a path?

I think were too close to the Capitol invasion to know what kind of an impact this is going to have on the image of Trumpism and the image of Republicanism. The Republicans biggest electoral vulnerability, even before Wednesday, was that it had lost the college-educated, middle-class, mostly suburban voters we talked about in 2018, who once had voted Republican fairly reliably. If Donald Trump had just shut up after losing the election, I suspect the GOP would have won those senatorial elections in Georgia pretty handily, and then Republicans would still hold a majority in the Senate.

But I think that college-educated group heard Trumps dangerous fantasies and rejected them. And I think a lot of people that dont fit that demographic, who have been Trump supporters, are going to look at the Capitol invasion and say, This is where Trumps rhetoric has got us. This is where his lies have led us. This could be the end of America. We have to do something about this.

So I really do believe that the Republican Party may split. And even if it doesnt split, it is going to divide into those members of Congress who will take the Trump oath, which is to say believing that the election was stolen from Trump, that QAnon is onto something real, and that malign forces are stealing America. And then theres going to be those others, who may be just as conservative as anyone on the other side they may be big Trump supporters, or have been in the past but they simply cant go along with that. And they see that as a dangerous course. And between those two outlets, theres actually not much room for common cause.

A Republican Party that divided, that dysfunctional, could well make the country ungovernable

I think its very possible that there could be someone who will emerge from the Republican ranks who will understand that Trumpism is leading the country into destruction and that people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are assassins of democracy rather than its saviors. And theyll understand that you actually have to make a stand here. And thatll be good for their careers, personally, but its also ultimately good for the Republican Party, because the GOP now has to live down what just happened. But having said that, clearly theres also a large segment of the party that prefers armed violence to democratic outcomes, and how you get beyond that is a very difficult question.

What becomes of the country if the GOP cant, for whatever reason, de-radicalize?

Again, I hope its not a dodge to keep going back to history, but a majority of Americans supported the America First position prior to December 7, 1941 [the day Pearl Harbor was attacked]. If a vote had been taken on December 6 as to whether we should defeat Nazism and Japanese imperialism, I think Americans would have voted overwhelmingly against it.

Once the United States got into WWII, you would have expected FDR to call for healing and unity. But in fact, Roosevelt attacked the most prominent isolationists, calling them the new copperheads. Copperhead was the term for Democrats who still supported slavery and the Southern cause in the wake of the Civil Wars outbreak. Roosevelt correctly intuited that isolationists had to be completely defeated at that moment, not made peace with.

Now is the time to say no, to take a forceful stand against Trumpian neo-fascist opposition to democracy and the constitutional order, to say that we cant permit this to go on anymore and that we have to anathematize those who believe otherwise. And that means marginalizing the QAnon followers and the people insisting the election was stolen. It means legal action against the people who invaded the Capitol and those who gave them support. And ultimately, it requires a forceful military and police response to these kinds of disorders and attempted overthrows of the government.

None of this is to say that were in for happy times. Were not. But Im enough of a Christian to remember the line about Christ bringing not peace, but a sword. And I think that probably is whats going to have to happen to get past this dark period.

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