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Tag Archives: Republican Party

The Right Wing in a Few Words

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Somebody on Twitter, Ethan Grey, who says he’s an ex-Republican, tried to summarize the basic “Republican message on everything of importance”:

1. They can tell people what to do.  2. You cannot tell them what to do.

You’ve watched the Republican Party champion the idea of “freedom” while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want and so on.

If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by “freedom” were likely too generous. Here’s what they mean:

1. The freedom to tell people what to do.  2. Freedom from being told what to do.

When Republicans talk about valuing “freedom”, they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it.

He cites Covid-19 as a recent example:

We were told by experts in infectious diseases that to control the spread of the pandemic, we had to socially distance, mask, and get vaccinated. So, in a general sense, we were being told what to do. Guess who had a big problem with that.

All Republicans saw were certain people trying to tell them what to do, which was enough of a reason to insist that they would not be told what to do. Even though what they were told to do would save lives, including their own.

Another instance:

They claim to be for “small government”, but that really means government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when [they see] an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.

My favorite example of this is how Republicans hate government spending unless it’s for the “Defense” Department, which gets an enormous percentage of the federal budget and is the part of our government best positioned to forcefully tell other people (i.e. the rest of the world) what to do. But parts of the government that can tell Republicans what to do, like the Internal Revenue Service (pay your taxes) and the Environmental Protection Agency (stop polluting), should be starved of funds whenever possible (or abolished, like the Department of Education).

Maybe a Republican could complain about Democrats in the same way — we want to tell them what to do but we don’t want them telling us — but I’m hard-pressed to think of Democratic behavior that fits.

Anyway, Frank Wilhoit, a classical music composer, once tried to summarize conservatism too. This is sometimes called “Wilhoit’s Law”:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s really the same point Mr. Grey made on Twitter. In fact, Grey offered his own, less elegantly stated, version of Wilhoit’s Law further down in his thread:

1. There are “right” human beings and there are “wrong” ones.  2. The “right” ones get to tell the “wrong” ones what to do.  3. The “wrong” ones do not tell the “right” ones what to do.

Thus, we have various ways to summarize what’s been called “the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the modern Republican Party”. Take your pick.

Yeah, There’s a Name for It

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We’re having a primary election today. The people I planned to vote for had no opposition, but I walked over and voted anyway. Voting is a ritual of democracy! (Plus our local election workers used to provide cookies.)

It was worth the trip. They have new, electronic, paper ballot machines. You put in a piece of paper, vote on the touchscreen, and then you look through a little window to see your votes printed on the paper. If it all looks ok, you press “cast your ballot” and the paper goes into a container. So there’s a paper trail if there’s a recount. Very cool. Every voter in the US should be able to use a machine like that. While voting still matters.

From Greg Sargent of The Washington Post:

“1776 motherfuckers.”

That’s what an associate texted to Enrique Tarrio, then the leader of the Proud Boys, just after members of the group stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In a new indictment that prosecutors filed against them, variations on that idea abound: Members refer to the insurrection as a glorious revival of 1776 again and again, with almost comic predictability.

… The way 1776 comes up in the indictment — combined with some surprising new details it reveals — should prompt a serious look at how far-right extremist groups genuinely think about the long struggle that they envision themselves waging.

In short, groups such as these generally are driven by a dangerous vision of popular sovereignty. It essentially holds that the will of the truly authentic “people,” a flexible category they get to define, is being suppressed, requiring periodic “resets” of the system, including via violent, extralegal means.

Such groups aren’t going away anytime soon. We should understand what drives them.

The new indictment that a grand jury returned on Monday against Tarrio and four other Proud Boys is for “seditious conspiracy.” This requires prosecutors to prove that at least two people conspired to use force to overthrow the U.S. government or subvert the execution of U.S. law.

To build this case, prosecutors have sought to present extensive evidence that the Proud Boys fully intended to use force to subvert governmental authority and relevant laws concerning the transfer of presidential power. This included arming themselves with paramilitary gear and discussing violent disruptions online in advance…. The indictment alleges that they attacked police officers, breached police lines with violence, and helped coordinate the storming of the Capitol in real time.

What’s more, in the indictment prosecutors disclose highly revealing text exchanges between Tarrio — who was not present that day — and another member later on Jan. 6. The exchanges appear to refer back to a document Tarrio possessed called “1776 returns,” which reportedly contains a detailed scheme to attack government buildings.

Those text exchanges compare Jan. 6 to both 1776 and the attack on “the Winter Palace,” which helped lead to the Russian Revolution. This seeming reference back to that document perhaps suggests they viewed Jan. 6 as the successful execution of a premeditated plan….

In this context, while all the 1776-oriented talk might seem like posturing, it points to something real and enduring on the far right.

It isn’t easy to pin down the Proud Boys, who tend to define themselves as defenders of Western civilization. Tarrio’s views appear pretty convoluted. In a 2021 interview, he admitted that the 2020 election had not been stolen from former president Donald Trump,… yet he openly celebrated the “fear” that members of Congress felt of “the people,” and helped mobilize Proud Boys to mass around the Capitol that day.

So how to make sense of that, as well as the broader tangle of ideologies on the far right?

A helpful framework comes from Joseph Lowndes, a scholar of the right wing at the University of Oregon. As Lowndes notes, a longtime strain in American political culture treats procedural democracy as itself deeply suspect, as subverting a more authentic subterranean popular will.

For such ideologues, what constitutes “the people” is itself redefined by spasmodic revolutionary acts, including violence. The people’s sovereignty, and with it the defining lines of the republic, are also effectively redrawn, or even rebirthed, by such outbursts of energy and militant action.

In this vision, Lowndes told me, the “people” and the “essence of the republic” are “made new again through acts of violent cleansing.” He noted that in this imagining, the “people” are something of a “fiction,” one that is essentially created out of the violent “act.”

“This regeneration through violence is going to be with us for a long time,” Lowndes said, “because it is fundamental to the right-wing political imagination.”

Lurking behind all the 1776 cosplay, then, is a tangle of very real radical and extreme ideologies…. They aren’t going away.

Unquote.

Journalist John Ganz sums up the current situation in response to a New York Times article by a “National Review fellow”, Nate Hochman:

Since he’s fond of Marxist categories, I’d like to introduce Hochman to another one: totality. This refers to the notion that we have to analyze a social and political situation in its entirety, and that failing to do so will give us a false or incomplete picture. While he is more frank than most, Hochman doesn’t want to look at the Right in its totality. While he seems comfortable with the portions of the right that, despite being demagogic and repressive, remain within the bounds of legal and civic behavior, like the anti-trans and anti-Critical Race Theory campaigns, he doesn’t really want to talk about January 6th, or the stolen election myth, great replacement, or the cultish worship of T____, or the Proud Boys, who now have a significant presence in [the] Miami-Dade Republican party….

But these things are as much, if not more, emblematic of the modern Republican party as young Mr. Hochman in his blazer over there at The National Review….

So now let’s recapitulate the totality of the political situation, with the help of Mr. Hochman’s fine essay. He wants to say this new right is essentially a secular [non-religious] party of the aggrieved, [a coalition that feels] the national substance has been undermined by a group of cosmopolitan elites, who have infiltrated all the institutions of power. That believes immigrants threaten to replace the traditional ethnic make up of the country. That borrows conceptions and tactics from the socialist tradition but retools them for counter-revolutionary ends. That is animated by myths of national decline and renewal. That instrumentalizes racial anxieties. That brings together dissatisfied and alienated members of the intelligentsia with the conservative families of the old bourgeoisie and futurist magnates of industry. That looks to a providential figure like T___ for leadership. That has street fighting and militia cadres. That has even attempted an illegal putsch to give their leader absolute power.

If only there was historical precedent and even a neat little word for all that.

Unquote.

Well, here’s a hint. The precedent is Nazi Germany and the neat little word is “FASCISM”.

History in the Making

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If America doesn’t succumb to right-wing authoritarianism in the relatively near future, historians will look back and say the former president’s biggest accomplishment was to undermine trust in our elections and make it popular in certain circles to try to rig the results (while all the while claiming to care deeply about majority rule).

Politico published an article today that got Democrats and democrats talking. Here’s the title and subtitle:

It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal [Republican] plan to contest elections

Placing operatives as poll workers and building a “hotline” to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states.

I didn’t want to read it, so won’t quote any more. But this summary came in tonight’s Crooked Media newsletter (which, by the way, is a good way to keep up with the day’s mostly bad news):

When Republicans don’t think anyone’s listening, they aren’t shy about their election-stealing plans. In official training meetings recorded over the course of the past year, Republicans outlined a scheme to, in effect, make the smooth administration of elections and the fair counting of votes impossible in key Democratic strongholds like Detroit, Michigan, either to create pretexts for overturning elections or even simply win on rigged initial counts. The idea is to install T____ loyalists and Big Lie conspiracy theorists—the trainees—as poll workers, and provide them a hotline to a national network of GOP lawyers and Republican district attorneys, in the hope of creating real-time chaos or even obtaining lawless orders to cease vote counting altogether. If Democrats have convened strategy sessions to discuss how to head off this kind of sabotage, I’d like someone to leak videotapes of them, too.

There was another item in the newsletter on a related topic:

Remember a few months ago when a federal judge opined that some of the materials D____ T____’s top coup lawyer, John Eastman, wanted to withhold from the January 6 committee contained evidence of felonies both men committed? Well, the main document in question is now public. It’s a memo from one of their underlings advising them against “allowing the Electoral Count Act to operate by its terms” and instead to have Vice President Mike Pence assert “the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them—including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.” By total coincidence, this is the same crew that immediately thereafter set about organizing a fraudulent slate of electors, to provide Pence the pretext for violating the law governing the peaceful transition of power. Seems pretty crime-y. By sheer coincidence, the [Republican National Committee] wants to distance itself from T____’s election lies during the public-hearing phase of the trial.

If future historians study all this, they’ll have plenty of primary sources to plow through.

What Our Leaders Need To Say

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Being vague and conciliatory isn’t cutting it anymore, according to Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post:

On Saturday — the day before he departed for Uvalde, Tex. — President Biden told University of Delaware graduates: “In the face of such destructive forces, we have to stand stronger”. . .  He also warned of the “oldest and darkest forces in America” preaching hate and “preying on hopelessness and despair.”. . .

But such language feels increasingly inadequate and, frankly, counterproductive in the face of nonstop political outrage. Now is the time for precise language. “Forces” are not the problem; one political movement encased within the Republican Party is. “Ultra-MAGA” ideas are not the problem; Republicans spouting anti-American ideas that threaten functional democracy are.

It’s not the plague of “polarization” or “distrust,” some sort of floating miasma, that has darkened our society. Bluntly put, we are in deep trouble because a major party rationalizes both intense selfishness — the refusal to undertake even minor inconveniences such as mask-wearing or gun background checks for others’ protection — and deprivation of others’ rights (to vote, to make intimate decisions about reproduction, to be treated with respect).

. . . The White-grievance industry (right-wing media, politicians, pundits, think tanks) keeps its voters in a constant state of rage over the loss of a society in which far fewer women competed with men in the workplace, White power was largely unchallenged, and diversity was less pronounced. And it has persuaded millions of White Americans that they are victims of “elites” or the media or globalism or attacks on masculinity or … something.

. . . “The nostalgic appeal of ‘again,’” [Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute] observes, “harkens back to a 1950s America, when white Christian churches were full and white Christians comprised a supermajority of the U.S. population; a period when we added ‘under God’ to the pledge of allegiance and ‘In God We Trust’ to our currency.”

Our future as a tolerant, decent society ultimately may depend on White Christian communities’ recovering their moral equilibrium and support for American democracy, and rejecting the movement to turn churches into platforms for QAnon and white nationalism. But we cannot wait for an evangelical reformation.

MAGA voters think everyone else is the problem. As perpetual victims, they feel entitled to ignore the demands of civilized society — e.g., self-restraint, care for actually vulnerable people, pluralism, acceptance of political defeat. Their irritation with mask-wearing gets elevated over the lives of those most susceptible to a deadly pandemic. Their demands to display an armory of weapons mean schoolchildren become targets for acts of mass gun violence. Their religious zealotry, fed by the myth that Christianity is under attack, means poor women cannot have access to safe, legal abortions.

Under such conditions, Democrats would do well to eschew avuncular bipartisanship and abandon the fantasy that they can reason with the unreasonable or shame the shameless into dropping their conspiracies and lies. “Lowering the temperature” or seeking unity with those intent on dividing Americans is counterproductive.

Like other toxic political movements, the MAGA crusade flourishes thanks to the collaboration of cynics, true believers and cult followers. In turn, our democracy’s salvation depends on a broad-based coalition that rejects the MAGA crowd’s reactionary aims and myths of White victimhood.

Democracy’s survival demands that mainstream media prioritize candor about the nature of today’s GOP over fake balance in political coverage. And it needs pro-democracy politicians to rise to the occasion with exacting, truth-based language — not to fuzz up the stark reality of a democracy imperiled by one political party.

Some Truth About the Constitution and Well-Regulated Militias

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Rolling Stone has a good article about the twisted reading of the 2nd Amendment we’re living under. From legal affairs journalist Jay Michaelson:

The lie at the heart of all of this insanity is the Right’s ludicrous perversion of the Second Amendment. . . . Until 2008, no federal court had held that the Second Amendment conveyed a right to own a gun. On the contrary, the Supreme Court clearly said that it didn’t.

Why? Because of the obvious language of the amendment, which reads, in full, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

For nearly two hundred years, there was widespread agreement that the Second Amendment meant what it said: that the right “of the people” meant the right to bear arms in well-regulated militias, which was how the nation protected itself prior to standing armed forces and police, and which slave-owners maintained to protect against possible uprisings.

Unquote. I interrupt the Rolling Stone article to insert more about militias from lawyer M. S. Bellows, Jr.:

What many don’t know is the Constitution’s *other* militia clauses that give the 2nd Amendment context:

Yes, “militia” is discussed OUTSIDE the 2nd Amendment. Article 1, Section 8 gives Congress power over national defense, including the army, navy – and militia. If we want to understand what the 2nd Amendment means by “well-regulated militia,” that’s where we have to start.

First, the Framers knew Caesar had led his troops across the Rubicon to crush the Republic and foresaw that a too-strong standing army could topple their nascent democracy in a military coup (as we’ve seen countless times elsewhere).

Accordingly, the Framers allowed for a permanent navy but a TEMPORARY army: “Congress shall have the power… To provide and maintain a Navy” (full stop), and “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

But how could the new nation defend itself on land without a standing (i.e., permanent) army? The militia.

The idea being that in 1787, armies weren’t hard to create quickly: just pull cannons out of a warehouse, requisition a bunch of mules/horses, and call for volunteers . . .

But there’s more to it:

By “militia,” the Framers didn’t mean the Proud Boys and similar beer-swilling yahoos acting on their own initiative. They meant volunteer professionals, soldiers who would be equipped, trained, regulated, and deployed BY CONGRESS just like other military units. Here, read it for yourself. Article I, section 8, clauses 15 and 16:

“[Congress shall have Power] To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” and “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, … reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”

So: CONGRESS is responsible for deploying, overseeing, *arming*, and *disciplining* (i.e training and regulating) the militia (with the states choosing local officers and arranging for training as Congress directs). Basically, the National Guard. . . .

Which is the point of this thread: that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t stand in isolation. It’s part of a larger scheme. After the original Constitution was adopted, the Framers immediately wrote the Bill of Rights: ten amendments designed to clearly identify and protect certain rights. One of them was the right to keep and bear arms.

Why? Some Framers feared the Constitution endangered states’ rights. Southern Framers, in particular, feared Congress might disarm the state militias that existed mainly to suppress rebellion by enslaved people. So the 2nd Amendment provides that members of the militia can’t be disarmed by the federal government.

Which basically is the same as saying that federal troops aren’t allowed to seize the Oregon National Guard armory in Salem. Which is fine. I can live with that.

Unquote. So how did we get to the point where a well-regulated militia is now interpreted as almost anybody with a credit card? Back to Rolling Stone:

What changed?

. . .  While the 1972 Republican party platform had actually supported gun control, the Reagan Revolution transformed the party.  (Ronald Reagan wrote an article praising individual gun ownership in Guns & Ammo magazine in 1975.)  Now, being pro-gun, like being anti-abortion, became a pillar of the New Right ideology.

After all, it ticked all the boxes, tapping into white fears of “crime” and “the inner cities,” populist resentment of “big government,” and male fears of losing power in the age of women’s liberation. The Right’s newfound infatuation with guns was white, male fragility projected onto firearm ownership.

And what had once been a fringe view rejected by the Supreme Court — that the Second Amendment gave individuals a right to own guns — gradually became Republican Party gospel when the fringe took over the party.  Former Chief Justice Warren Burger (a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon) described it as “a fraud on the Amer­ican public.”

Eventually, this view won out, not by persuasion but by simple politics. By 2008, there were five conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and Justice Scalia wrote an opinion in D.C. v. Heller saying that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to own guns.

There are numerous problems with Scalia’s opinion:

First, he claims that the clause about militias is just a preface, with no relevance to the meaning of the right. “The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose,” he wrote. . . .  But wait a minute – if maintaining militias is the purpose of the amendment, then why does “the people” mean not militias but individuals?  Why is a purpose not a purpose? Justice Scalia simply dismisses the first half of the amendment as merely decorative, with no function whatsoever.

Second, Scalia simply dispatches as “dubious” the drafting history of the amendment, in which James Madison deliberately did not use language of individual rights that was present in contemporaneous documents. Thomas Jefferson, for example, had once proposed “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.” That proposal was rejected.

Third, Scalia inverts the meaning of the Second Amendment itself, by saying that Congress actually can ban military-grade weapons (i.e. the kinds a militia would use) but not handguns, which are used for self-defense (which the amendment never mentions).

Of course, what’s really happening here is a social, cultural phenomenon, using the constitution as an excuse. . . .

The tragic irony . . . is that we know how to stop this from happening. . . . The advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety lists 37 solutions on its website, from background checks to waiting periods, prohibiting ‘open carry’ to repealing ‘stand your ground’ laws, banning high-capacity magazines and assault weapons to holding the gun industry accountable.

. . .  But God help any Republican who has the courage to stand up to the NRA, gun manufacturers, and the rage of the populist Right. . . . Our [inability] to do anything about these horrifying mass shootings is not the Second Amendment’s fault. . . .It’s Republicans’ fault. It is that simple.

Unquote. Today it’s also the fault of a few rogue Democrats in the Senate who love the filibuster and fear doing anything about guns. But the point remains: almost all Republican politicians oppose gun control and almost all Democratic politicians support it.