I have been writing for months that Trump would never concede and would instead fashion himself as the president-in-exile down at Mar-a-lago. I wasn’t sure whether the GOP cult would follow him, especially after January 6th, but of course they are. This piece by Politico’s Michael Kruse sees him more as a replication of the last of the Avignon popes:
The ousted leader refused to relent to reality.
Set against a backdrop of avarice and inequality and persistent sickness, distrust and misrule, the leader exploited and exacerbated societal unrest to seize and flaunt vast power—doing anything and everything he could to try to keep it in his grip. He resisted pleas for unity and calm. He tested the loyalty of even his most ardent and important establishment supporters. He was censured and then toppled. Still, though, he declined to consider even the smallest acquiescence. Besieged and increasingly isolated, he faded as he aged—but he never yielded. Some people believed he had no less than the blessing of God.
He was Benedict XIII—“the pope,” said Joëlle Rollo-Koster, a noted scholar of the Middle Ages, “who never conceded.”
Benedict, who died in 1423, was the last of the popes of Avignon, in what’s now the south of France. He was an “antipope”—in opposition, that is, to a sequence of popes presiding from the more customary hub of Rome—and insisted even as he was twice deposed that he remained the rightful pontiff. He tried to exert control from a fortress of a palace in a separate seat of power—propped up by a stubborn type of papal court, retaining sufficient political capital to pressure heads of states to pick sides, bestowing benedictions and other benefits and if nothing else gumming up earnest efforts to allay divides. Weary, irritated leaders, both religious and royal, “said, ‘You’re out, you’re out, you’re out,’” Rollo-Koster told me, “and he said, ‘No, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.’”
Six centuries later, Donald Trump, twice impeached, is finishing his first full week as a dispatched post-president ensconced in his own Florida fortalice of Mar-a-Lago—committed by almost all accounts to do from his Palm Beach perch some modern-day variant of what Benedict pulled off for decades. The calamitous, lies-laced last few months of Trump’s White House term, and in particular the last few weeks, almost certainly will make this harder—the broad corporate blowback, social media silencing and historic (and ongoing) congressional condemnation piled atop his already looming legal, financial and reputational peril.
Even so, according to dozens of interviews with Trump associates, former staffers, biographers, Washington and Florida strategists and consultants, party functionaries, Palm Beach politicos and members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is sure to try—to badger the man who beat him, to exact revenge against recalcitrant Republicans, to play a role of kingmaker and power broker, to return to his life-force rallies, to tease a 2024 comeback and to generally wreak what havoc he can on the public and body politic while enforcing fealty from his official (but contested) residence serving as his active home base and headquarters. And an early indicator of Trump’s undiminished influence: House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy—who’s gone in the span of half a month from saying Trump “bears responsibility” for the pro-Trump mob’s January 6 attack on the Capitol to saying “I don’t believe he provoked it” to asking for and receiving this week a patch-up lunchtime confab … at Mar-a-Lago.
“The new Trump Tower,” said former Trump political adviser Sam Nunberg.
“The MAGA capital,” said Christian Ziegler, the state Republican vice chair.
“He is going to essentially try to rule in exile,” said Rick Wilson, a former GOP operative in Tallahassee and a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, forecasting “a post-presidency like we’ve never seen.”
What will Trump’s post-presidency look like—and what will it do to America? There is no real precedent in the annals of the nation—and thus no real playbook for how to manage the kind of civic disruption it is likely to cause. But from history, and from people who’ve known him, it’s possible to stitch together a more-than-educated guess at what the country’s in for—a portrait of the nation’s first real anti-presidency.
The closest analog is probably the capitals of the Confederacy—and the self-evidently still unresolved aftermath of the Civil War—but Jefferson Davis never carried the legitimacy of having once been the president in the White House. And real former presidents, even the most compulsive limelight hounds, from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, historically have made themselves scarce, consciously refraining from meddling in or even commenting on the affairs of their respective successors. Trump in this regard figures to be as contemptuous of convention going forward as he was in the past five-plus years. “We’re going to see something remarkably new,” said Princeton historian Kevin Kruse. “There will be,” added Lawrence Douglas, a professor at Amherst College and the author of a book about Trump’s endgame, “this kind of shadow ex-president.”
There’s more. Oy.
He’s not going anywhere. In fact, here’s a supplicant paying a visit to Avignon: Palm Beach Annex.
It stands to reason that in a politically divided country like the U.S., presidential hopefuls would run for office promising to bridge the divide and “bring people together.” Polling always shows that if there’s one thing the people want, it’s for the two parties to stop fighting and “get things done.” They may say they want compromise and bipartisanship as well. But when you drill down to what they actually mean by that, it’s pretty clear that they really want their team to dictate the terms and by “compromise” they really mean they want the other side to capitulate. Bipartisanship is just another word for “my way or the highway.”
All of this has gotten demonstrably worse in the last few years with the rise of social media and right-wing media. For Republicans to compromise with the Democrats today it would signal to a whole lot of their constituents that they are giving in to pedophile cannibals who wear the skinned faces of dead children as masks. They’ve left themselves very little room for good faith negotiations.
On the other side of the table, you have Democrats who have a hard time finding common ground with people who call for their execution, incite insurrection and stand by as a violent mob of supporters storms the Capitol and marauds through the hallways, yelling “I’m coming for you!”
These are things that make “compromise” difficult in today’s political climate.
Still, presidential candidates continue to promise to do it. Barack Obama came to national attention four years before he ran with a famous speech at the Democratic National Convention in which he proclaimed that we are not divided by Blue states or Red states. His 2008 campaign was built on the idea of “hope and change” but a big part of that was hope that the country could change and come together in a common purpose.
He really tried to do it too.
Obama’s Grand Bargain was designed to bring the Republicans on board with some of his big ideas by getting together with them on cutting social security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for limits on carbon emissions and an agreement to raise taxes to help pay down the deficit. I think we know how that went. Rush Limbaugh came out of the box saying he didn’t want Obama to succeed and would press Republicans to oppose him every step of the way. Later, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., made it known that his primary goal was to make Obama a one-term president.
And what did all that obstruction add up to? Obama “failing” to live up to his promise to bring the country together. How convenient.
When he left office, Obama had a 57% approval rating, but only 27% saw the country as more unified. At his final State of the Union address, he admitted it was the greatest regret of his presidency. No doubt Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh felt proud as punch, however.
Obama’s so-called failure to unify the nation was followed by the election of the crude demagogue Donald Trump who ran on the most obnoxious, divisive agenda in modern memory. But even he promised unity in his own very special way. On January 15, 2017, just days before he was inaugurated he tweeted:
“For many years our country has been divided, angry and untrusting. Many say it will never change, the hatred is too deep. IT WILL CHANGE!!!!”
That was a day after he had posted that then-Congressman John Lewis, D-GA, a Civil Rights Movement icon, was all talk and no action, advising him to clean up his allegedly crime-infested district in the Atlanta suburbs. I don’t think anyone ever did anything but chortle at the idea Trump wanted to unite the country and the many ways in which he ended up exacerbating our divisions would take days to recite.
In fact, when Joe Biden announced his run for president it was explicitly based upon the idea that he wanted to “heal the soul of America” which he said Trump had wounded grievously, particularly with respect to his encouragement of white supremacy and racial division. Days after Donald Trump sicced an angry mob on Congress to try to overturn his election, Biden stood before the country and said, “It is time to end our “uncivil war.”‘
Of course, the minute he set about enacting the agenda he ran on the Republicans called for the smelling salts, shrieking that he isn’t unifying the country, presumably because he isn’t enacting their agenda instead. Take for instance the minority whip of the Senate, John Cornyn of Texas, who has apparently been assigned the role of chief GOP unity concern troll:
Another "unifying" move by the new Administration?
Actually, Donald Trump only won 46.8% of the vote, but who’s counting?
The point is that while McConnell has been holding the Senate hostage, demanding that he be allowed to have veto power over the agenda, and Republicans are planning to stage yet another Trump fealty pageant at his second impeachment trial, they have done exactly nothing to meet the new administration halfway. In fact, quite a few of them refused to accept the election results at all and most of the rest stood silent for weeks as Trump perpetrated the Big Lie that Biden had stolen the election.
As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte says, “the Republicans have become radicalized against democracy itself” and any hopes of bipartisanship are whistling past the graveyard.
That should be obvious to anyone paying attention but it didn’t stop the New York Times Editorial Board from hand wringing over Biden’s use of executive orders, most of which have been reversals of Trump’s odious attempts to destroy what was left of the country’s international reputation and make the lives of Americans as miserable as possible — a fact curiously unmentioned by the Times. They say legislation is a more durable way to make policy and they are right. But when you have to get it through people whose power depends on constituents who are now convinced Trump is going to be inaugurated on March 4th, I’m afraid it’s going to be a waste of time.
And it leads to absurd moments like this:
“Does it suggest that President Biden perhaps sees himself as a benevolent dictator?” pic.twitter.com/HKEa1K88k8
Biden will not be able to win over Trump voters or his Republican opponents in Congress who are beholden to them. But he can unify a majority of the country around an agenda that materially improves their lives and makes them feel as if they are living in a civilized country.
According to a new Crooked Media/Change Research poll, “there is an appetite for bold action, and little tolerance for obstruction” among the public and the Democrats have much more to lose by trying to appease the other side than by moving fast and going big, whether it takes Executive Orders, changing the Senate rules or passing legislation through reconciliation.
It’s a big job. We haven’t ever been truly civilized and we have some very urgent problems facing us. Worrying about the obstructionist Republicans’ unity concern trolling isn’t one of them.
Having maxed out on insanity before running out of week, I’m turning to Paul Butler’s op-ed celebrating President Biden’s initial moves on racial justice. The U.S. has gone from the first Black president to the “the first white president” to the first “woke” president, Butler writes:
No question, it took Joe Biden a while to get there. For most of his long career, as Vice President Harris once noted, Biden has not been a leader on race; on occasion, his political ambition veered him off course, as when he opposed busing to achieve school integration. Biden used to brag about his role in passing the 1994 crime bill, which now is understood as a leading cause of mass incarceration.
But if the convert sings loudest in the choir, the new woke Biden could outperform Patti LaBelle. During the Democratic primaries, Black voters rescued Biden’s candidacy. He and they understand it is payback time.
In his victory speech, Biden told African American voters, “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” Had Obama uttered those words, the likes of then-Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) might have called for his impeachment.
Moving beyond Biden’s inauguration-speech rhetoric, Butler believes Biden set off in the right direction:
Biden is off to a credible start. If an HBO series hadn’t already taken the title, the administration’s first week could have been called “The Undoing.” Biden rolled back some of the previous administration’s most egregious policies on race. He abolished Trump’s 1776 Commission, which encouraged schools to teach U.S. history discounting the role of white supremacy. Biden ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to beef up its anti-discrimination enforcement, which lagged under the Trump administration. Obama had banned private federal prisons, and Trump reinstituted them; now Biden has reimposed the ban.
These are necessary steps but modest in light of Biden’s pledge to eradicate systemic discrimination, the bias built into institutions and legal systems.
For example, the ban on private prisons does not immediately close a single prison. It says that when contracts with private prisons expire, they should not be renewed. The ban does not address the larger issue of mass incarceration, since only about 10 percent of all inmates are housed in federal prisons.
Last week, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) tweeted that if Biden wants to thank Black women for his election, he should cancel all student debt, because Black women carry more such debt than any other group. That is just one example of the kind of bold move that many civil rights advocates are not just hoping for but also expecting, based on Biden’s rhetoric.
So, for seekers of racial justice, Biden had a decent start. But people of color cannot afford a long honeymoon with the new administration. Biden has said, “We need to make equity and justice part of what we do every day — today, tomorrow and every day.” People of color must ask every week for the next four years: “What have you done for us lately?”
They had better be able to point to a lot of progress in just the next two years. Because Biden and Democrats will be asking people of color, particularly women, what they can do to help keep control of Congress for the last two years of the Biden administration.
“Violent antagonism toward democracy itself, toward the United States and its institutions,” has built among Republicans and their voting base for decades, said Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York magazine. Since the presidency of Barack Obama, she argued Thursday night on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.” Donald Trump brought that antagonism toward democracy into the White House.
A Republican Party already so inclined fell in line behind him. After one impeachment, violent insurrection, and a second impeachment passed in the House, they are still in thrall to Trumpism.
Analyst Zerlina Maxwell added that the party rejected the findings of its post-2012 autopsy that found that “the emerging the emerging demographics of a majority coalition of people of color” meant that to remain competitive in the future Republicans had to soften their racialized stances. They doubled down on racism instead and worked harder to “restrict the votes of people who are in less likely to vote for them.” This, she did not note, had been formalized with the REDMAP program of the 2010 cycle.
What is plain now, Maxwell said, is that Republicans are no longer pursuing any political strategy. “They’re not engaged in this project of democracy that the rest of us are participating in, because they don’t actually want voters to make decisions and elect people.”
Republicans as a party and their conservative base have rejected democracy, as David Frum predicted not-so-presciently in 2018. Trump simply gave a face and a name to white supremacist resentment, violent misogyny, and delegitimization of democracy. Trumpism is less of a mouthful.
Even as Maxwell spoke, Republicans were doubling (or tripling, quadrupling?) down on turning American democracy into a Potemkin village.
The Brennan Center for Justice reports that over 100 bills are pending in 28 states that would restrict access to the ballot. Among its findings:
More than a third of the bills would place new restrictions on voting by mail
Pennsylvania has 14 pending proposals for new voter restrictions, the most in the country. It’s followed by New Hampshire (11), Missouri (9), and Mississippi, New Jersey and Texas (8)
There are seven bills across four states that would limit opportunities for election day registration
There are also 406 bills that would expand voting access pending across 35 states, including in New York (56), Texas (53), New Jersey (37), Mississippi (39) and Missouri (21)
“It was only a matter of time before Republicans in the state of Georgia, bruised by their losses in the 2020 and 2021 elections, used the defeats to try make it harder to vote,” Elliot Hannon writes at Slate. “The other alternative would be to try to win over new voters, but that’s not how the Georgia GOP operates.” Nor does the home office.
Senate Bill 29 would make absentee voters provide copies of their IDs when they first apply for ballots and again when they return them. Now absentee ballots are no longer a predominantly Republican voting method, Republicans see a need to erect barriers to using them. Democrats nearly doubled the number of Republican requests in 2020.
THREAD: Republicans are trying to change the rules of GA elections – rules that they wrote – because they were humiliated on November 3 and again on January 5, and they know their only chance at winning future elections is to prevent eligible Georgians from casting their ballots.
In Florida, Republicans continue their tradition of thwarting direct democracy. Residents passed “Amendment 2” months ago to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by September 2026. So Republican State Senator Jeffrey Brandes of St. Petersburg on Wednesday filed SJR 854. The bill would “reduce the Minimum Wage rate for prisoners in the state correctional system, reduce the Minimum Wage rate for employees convicted of a felony, reduce the Minimum Wage rate for employees younger than 21 years of age, [and] reduce the Minimum Wage rate for other hard-to-hire employees…” reports The Appeal:
The Florida legislature has long treated grassroots ballot initiatives with open contempt. In 2017, after more than 70 percent of state voters elected to legalize medical marijuana, state lawmakers responded by temporarily making it illegal to smoke medicinal weed. In 2018, when a supermajority of Floridians voted to return voting rights to at least 1.4 million formerly incarcerated people, the GOP-dominated legislature passed a glorified poll-tax that made sure that 800,000 of those people remained ineligible to vote. This week, like clockwork, the state Republican Party—dominated by pro-Trump apparatchiks and a smaller Libertarian-minded wing—has launched its plan to kneecap the minimum wage increase, which passed with over 60 percent approval.
“Currently, there are two bills in the State House and one bill in the State Senate that targets elections. One bill sponsored by State Rep. Kevin Payne of Peoria would require voters to get their signatures notarized before mailing their ballots in.”
Another measure would purge voters from the rolls “if they have not voted in both the primary and general elections for two straight cycles.”
This is breathtaking: Arizona GOP Rep Shawnna Bolick wants to give Leg power to toss out Secretary of State's certification of electors 'at any time before inauguration.' (And then do ???) Also wants to rewrite court procedure for challenges. https://t.co/GhjafOTkn9#HB2720pic.twitter.com/W5yVE5bwWh
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy traveled to Florida on Thursday to make supplication before Trump after failing to overthrow the government for him on Jan. 6. Republicans still want Trump’s help retaking the majority in 2022 under the guise of free and fair elections in which they have long since ceased to believe. State affiliates will gerrymander and block votes any way they can. They do not want to govern. They want to rule.
How do we undo the unraveling? Right now I have no idea.
While addressing members' security concerns, Pelosi says that they'll need additional protective measures when "the enemy is inside the House of Representatives." pic.twitter.com/M6MkKPXOqM
When asked to clarify, Pelosi added that “we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.”
A bipartisan group of representatives wrote a letter to House leadership Thursday requesting enhanced security at their district offices and homes.
Citing an increase in threats to members, they emphasized the lack of protection back in their district offices as opposed to the Capitol. At the moment, only House leadership gets a security detail.
“Protecting Members in their District is much harder because local law enforcement agencies are stretched and limited, and often don’t have sufficient staffing or money to provide regular protection to Members,” they wrote.
They emphasized that the problem is exacerbated by the readily available trove of personal information online, like addresses, family details and social media updates of the members’ whereabouts.
Members of Congress aren’t the only ones who have dealt with threats of that nature over the last year. Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, who has been assigned a security detail, told the New York Times that his harassers found their way directly to his wife and children.
“It was the harassment of my wife, and particularly my children, that upset me more than anything else,” he said. “They knew where my kids work, where they live. The threats would come directly to my children’s phones, directly to my children’s homes.”
Fauci even reported opening an envelope of white power that had been mailed to him, the contents of which got all over his hands and body. Luckily, it was just a hoax.
It’s a sign of the times that House members are asking for money to beef up security at their district offices, and a crackdown of their publicly accessible information.
When the mob invaded and ransacked the Capitol, its members chanted “hang Mike Pence!” as the Vice President and his family fled. One rioter who has since been arrested posted death threats against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) while he was storming the building.
Democratic members have also expressed fear of their Republican peers, especially after a contingent of House Republicans responded with indignant fury at having to go through metal detectors to get to the House floor after the insurrection. Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) reportedly tried to bring a gun to the floor, prompting calls for investigation and his resignation.
But the bloodlust of the Trump era goes deeper than recent events.
Much of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which gained steam towards the beginning of President Donald Trump’s term, centers on the coming execution of Democratic politicians. Rep. Marjorie Greene (R-GA) was found this week to have participated in that violent fantasizing before she took office.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about the Gamestop brouhaha this morning:
This is unacceptable.
We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.
As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary. https://t.co/4Qyrolgzyt
You haven’t even apologized for the serious physical + mental harm you contributed to from Capitol Police & custodial workers to your own fellow members of Congress.
In the meantime, you can get off my timeline & stop clout-chasing. Thanks.
Here’s slimy Ted, the unctuous Troll, in response:
“There’s a lot of partisan anger and rage on the Democratic side. It’s, it’s not healthy for our country, it’s certainly not conducive of healing or unity, but everyone has to decide how they want to interact with others.”
Yeah Ted. Whatever.
.@townhallcom: Cruz is leading a coalition to challenge the results of the 2020 election. The group is calling for a '10-day audit' after 'unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations & lax enforcement of election law & voting irregularities.'" https://t.co/1y0DIF43vH
By now you’ve probably seen the footage of Marjorie Taylor Greene stalking Parkland student David Hogg, screaming about being a gun owner and demanding that he explain himself.
In the middle of a street in downtown DC.
Anyway, that’s the tip of the iceberg. I posted some of her social media lunacy a couple of days ago. More has surfaced. Now she’s deleting it all but it’s a little late. It’s all been saved. Here’s some more of it:
Marjorie Taylor Greene has also removed this Facebook video where she suggests Pelosi can be executed for treason.
"It's a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason," she says. pic.twitter.com/cUVT4Bcr06
Marjorie Taylor Greene invites people to DC for January 6th and says this: "We aren't a people that are going to go quietly into the night. We are not a people that are going to be thrust into socialism, without stopping it." Greene needs to be expelled from Congress immediately. pic.twitter.com/abBePo4f3N
"You can't allow it to just transfer power 'peacefully' like Joe Biden wants, and allow him to become our president. Because he did not win this election. It's being stolen and the evidence is there," Marjorie Taylor Greene. Note how Greene puts "peacefully" in quotes. Grotesque. pic.twitter.com/nbNR1kzZeN
She also won 75% of the vote in her northern Georgia district. I saw a couple of her voters, an older white man and an older white woman, on TV this morning. The woman said she likes that she speaks her mind and doesn’t back down from what she says. The man said that everyone says what she says at one time or another. Both are big fans.
Barry Goldwater at a rally in Madison Square Garden.
It’s impossible to understand the rise of figures like Greene — and of course Trump before her — without understanding this darker history of the modern American right. A transcript of my conversation with Perlstein, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Zack Beauchamp
So QAnon seems utterly bizarre to a lot of people. But the truth, as documented in your work, is that conspiracy theories have been a major part of the American right forever.
So let’s go back in time to the founding of the American conservative movement.
Rick Perlstein
How about the founding of the republic? There’s a historian named Gordon Wood who points out that the founding generation was just completely saturated with conspiratorial thinking. It’s part of our national patrimony.
The slavocracy, and the segregationist outlook of the 20th century, was that “Negroes” were perfectly content with their lot, so they were stirred up by outside agitators.
The 1920s Ku Klux Klan could not have had its strong presence — we’re talking about millions of members and mass marches down Pennsylvania Avenue, controlling the statehouses in a couple of states — without the conspiracy theory that Catholicism was a plot to take over the United States, and that America’s priests and nuns striated every community, were ready to turn into these ninja operatives at the pope’s command. You can see all kinds of crazy stuff like that in the 1920s: Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example.
The conspiracy theory that Franklin Roosevelt either made Pearl Harbor happen on purpose or knew it would happen and did nothing was definitely part of the generation of isolationist conservatives during World War II.
This robust conservative history of right-wing reactionary conspiracy theories is what the modern Republican Party, driven by the conservative wing, fall heir to.
Zack Beauchamp
So if conspiracy theories are something completely normal in the long arc of American politics, is there anything different about the modern conservative movement — meaning roughly the 1950s forward — versus what came before?
Rick Perlstein
The conservative movement has less conspiratorial and more conspiratorial strains: William F. Buckley wasn’t particularly conspiratorial. But in a lot of ways, [the conspiracists] were the vanguard or the point of the spear, the activists who really drove the party’s grassroots success.
Those people just got closer and closer to the centers of power. I argue in Reaganland that a huge driver of this was the religious right. Remember, Jerry Falwell — who was also, by the way, one of those conspiracy theorists who believed the civil rights movement was all directed by Moscow — gave a famous sermon in 1955 saying your preachers are called to be the soul winners, not politicians. He was speaking about Martin Luther King.
Historians point out that people like Jerry Falwell explicitly getting involved in partisan politics, endorsing candidates, turning their churches into precinct houses: that could not have happened in precisely the way it did absent this theory that gays were involved in an organized conspiracy to recruit American youth, and not only recruit American youth, but recruit them in order to murder them.
That kind of conspiratorial thinking drove Reagan’s rise. One of the reasons George H.W. Bush came in second place in the Republican nomination contest in 1980 was the belief that because he belonged to the Trilateral Commission, he was part of the Eastern “deep state” conspiracy.
So it definitely plays a role in the rise of Reagan, but not nearly so clear a role as it does in the rise of Trump. This is a party surrendering more and more to the more absurd, gothic elements in its constituency.
This stuff metastasizes in a way that’s harder to control and has greater and greater influence because of the change in media: the rise of social media, Fox News, and the weaponization of algorithms by bad actors and cynics and strategists.
Zack Beauchamp
Let’s deal with the mythology that has surrounded this. If you talk to a conservative intellectual about this, the story you’ll get is, “Well, of course there were fringe wackos in the ’50s and ’60s in the John Birch Society. They were part of the conservative movement, but William F. Buckley, in his brilliance, purged them. He pushed them out of the movement.”
But that’s more than a little incomplete, right?
Rick Perlstein
It’s very interesting: That was the way conservatives told their own story, right? The first generation of historians who wrote about the postwar conservative movement’s rise in the 1990s, myself included, largely repeated this narrative.
More recent scholarship from people like David Walsh at Princeton University, a guy named John Huntington who has a new book coming out, and some others point out that the line between the fringe and the mainstream right was always fluid. The old story is pretty much collapsing under the weight of new evidence and new research.
There was a certain element of cynicism, of opportunism: realization [among elites] that even though these are not the kinds of people that we can put in front of the camera, these are people who actually are the boots on the ground, the “firebugs” who really won the California primary for Barry Goldwater.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the John Birch Society — the most prominent conspiracy theory group who believed that Eisenhower was behind the communist conspiracy against America — was quite nimble and brilliant in finding grassroots discontent and creating platforms that advance their cause in a way that gives [the mainstream] plausible deniability.
Things like sex education in schools or the Equal Rights Amendment or a kind of anti-anti stance toward the 1960s and ’70s version of movements against police brutality: These things were brilliantly exploited as organizing opportunities by the John Birch Society.
Zack Beauchamp
The next part of the traditional mythology is that Goldwater’s 1964 primary victory not only captured the party and set the stage for Reagan to win in 1980, but also brought ideas back to a Washington that had been stifled by a boring and unimaginative liberalism. It was a triumph not just of conservatism, but of virtuous, principled, intellectual conservatism.
But in your work, you show that narrative obscures the way in which the things we’ve been talking about — the John Birch Society and evangelical conspiracy theories about gay recruiting — were as important in the Reaganite ascendance as the alleged appeal of conservative ideas.
Rick Perlstein
Obviously, Reagan wins by a coalition. His coalition includes both Christians who believe that the IRS is going to force them to hire gay teachers at Christian schools and deeply learned men like [neoconservative thinker] Irving Kristol.
[In general], right-wing epistemology starts with the conclusion and then you fill in stuff, things that sound like logic and facts to support the conclusion you’ve already drawn.
That, going backward, has a foundation in traditional Christian apologetics: Faith is defined as evidence of things unseen, because you know revelation to be true. You can start with this ironclad source of authority in your reading of the Bible or the Constitution, and you create an intellectual infrastructure around that foundation that’s accepted on faith.
One of my favorite historians to write about conspiracy theories is the historian Kathryn Olmsted, who writes a book called Real Enemies. It has a wonderful chapter on the susceptibility of the left to Kennedy conspiracy theories, all sorts of stuff. [But] liberals are liberal. Though we sometimes honor it in the breach, Democrats both of the left and center are heir to an enlightenment tradition of empiricism. And we are pluralists. It is why we aren’t conservatives — who fundamentally believe they know what the world is, and what it demands of us, in advance, then use their intellect to justify conclusions, not arrive at them.
Take the guy who’s the alpha and omega of the supposed mainstream, respectable conservatism, William F. Buckley. In his 1951 book God and Man at Yale, his whole criticism of what goes on in Yale is that they believe in intellectual laissez-faire: that the ideas that should survive and the ones that should thrive are the ones that can be supported by arguments. It’s saying that the problem with Yale is it’s an Enlightenment institution. Their values are based on these traditions of evidence and logic rather than revealed truth.
William F. Buckley.
[Now], I think there’s more to life than sound scholarship which uses evidence and logic. Some of the things that bind people together are based on values that are not easily quantified, and basically play legitimate roles, as far as I’m concerned, for human life and political life.
But the entire realm of conservative politics and political thought is very suggestible to creating brand narratives that represent the world in the way one believes it should be or fears that it is rather than the way it is.
That’s another way of defining conspiracy theories.
Zack Beauchamp
You could take that one step further. In order to win power on a platform of intellectually flimsy and unpopular ideas, like the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy help the poor, conservatives needed to build up an alternative media ecosystem and intellectual ecosystem.
Obviously, this is a major story in the Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan era, with the creation of institutions like the Heritage Foundation in 1973 — and an even more important part of what’s happening right now.
Rick Perlstein
It’s one of these things where this has always existed but got turned up to 11 in the Trump era, right?
Zack Beauchamp
Yeah, I mean it was obviously really bad during the Obama era, too, with Glenn Beck’s chalkboard and birtherism.
Rick Perlstein
Also, I remember when Bill Clinton was “responsible” for dozens of political assassinations. There was a [conspiracy] videotape circulated by our friend Jerry Falwell, The Clinton Chronicles. That had probably millions of copies that were circulating.
You had Newt Gingrich teaching his congressional class of 1994 the kind of language they needed to perfect in order to dehumanize Democrats, and you had talk radio superstars like G. Gordon Liddy at the exact same time saying that if you run into an ATF agent, you should make sure to take a headshot because they’ll be wearing body armor. A month after that, you get Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City.
Zack Beauchamp
And then, as you point out, Trump made this preexisting problem a lot worse. It just makes me think a lot of about questions of structural versus contingent theories of history: was someone like Trump an inevitable product of the way the conservative movement is structured, or was he uniquely positioned to bring us to where we are?
It seems like Trump, he’s this contingency. He didn’t have to go down that escalator. Nothing was predetermined about it.
Rick Perlstein
Modern Republican politics seeks out and always involves careful negotiation between opening Pandora’s box and a kind of respectability politics, understanding that they’re playing with fire. The example I always give is George W. Bush simultaneously exploiting anger and rage at Muslims after 9/11 to get the Iraq War, but also describing Islam as a religion of peace.
Previous generations of Republicans would kind of pull out the [conspiratorial] Ring of Power, and put it back in their pockets or in a carrying case. Donald Trump puts the damn thing on and never takes it off.
Zack Beauchamp
Now we’re in a post-Trump presidency era — but for who knows how long, maybe he’s going to run again in 2024. Does the party have any internal capacities left to get back to the dance that you were describing? Or has it been so thoroughly corrupted — turned into Gollum, to extend your Lord of the Rings metaphor — that the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world are its future?
Rick Perlstein
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I remember traveling around with John Kasich before his presidential run in 2016, and [the people around him] were strains out of something like the 1950s GOP.
This guy who has sold his business to become a philanthropist to support the arts in his small town. This state senator who has a preoccupation with fighting to end the death penalty because it’s racially applied but also wants lower taxes. They walk among us, these strange archaic creatures!
And there’s a couple of hopeful signs. Capitalists are terrified that they’re going to be dragged into a climate of political instability, which they can’t stand. That’s a very powerful variable.
These wingnuts shouldn’t be allowed to co-opt every patriotic symbol for white supremacy. I realize that’s always been a part of our history but it does no one any good, and isn’t historically accurate, to allow these proto-fascist types to erase everything else.
These flag-wavers are nuts. Here’s an excerpt from an article about one of the people arrested for January 6th. They have worked themselves up into a frenzy:
In their planning, according to prosecutors, the group cited the perceived direction of President Donald Trump, embracing his false claims of election fraud and readying for a fight in apocalyptic terms.
“Trump wants all able-bodied Patriots to come” to the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, Watkins is quoted as saying on Dec. 29.
“If Trump activates the Insurrection Act, I’d hate to miss it,” she added, according to the indictment.
Asked earlier by a recruit what to prepare for, Watkins allegedly wrote in November that if Biden became president, “our way of life as we know it is over. Our Republic would be over. Then it is our duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights.”
“If Biden get the steal, none of us have a chance in my mind. We already have our neck in the noose. They just haven’t kicked the chair yet,” she said, according to the indictment.
They’re talking about the man Trump called “Sleepy Joe.” Apparently, having the freedom to refuse to wear a mask really is worth dying over. And they want to take some people with them, whether by spreading the deadly virus or some kind of violence.
Change Research did some polling on the Biden agenda:
For the last week, Republicans have been shedding crocodile tears to every overly credulous reporter in town about how Biden is violating his unity pledge by pushing his agenda. They called his executive orders “divisive” and his COVID Relief proposal “Radical Left.” The Republicans are wrong. Biden’s agenda is very popular. Our poll found that most of Biden’s top priorities are supported by at least 60 percent of registered voters. Levels of support above 60 percent are almost unheard of in such a highly polarized political environment. Biden’s agenda is supported by some voters who don’t even believe he is the legitimate winner of the election.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief package is supported by 69 percent of voters. Even 39 percent of Trump voters support it.
Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 is supported by 55 percent of voters — including 17 percent of Trump voters.
The For the People Act, a political reform and democracy reform proposal, is backed by 65 percent of all voters and more than a third of Trump voters (irony is dead!).
Biden’s proposal to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt per person polls at 55-40. Notably, a plan pushed by some progressives to cancel up to $50,000 is almost as popular at 52-43.
The poll asked respondents to identify their priorities from a list of issues. The results were clear. Voters are laser focused on the current crisis. The top three issues were all COVID related – vaccine distribution, economic relief, and stopping the spread of the virus.
They also asked about costs. Dan Pfeiffer comments on that in his newsletter:
Republicans rediscovering their totally sincere concern for debt and deficits the minute Biden was sworn in as President was as predictable as the sunrise. After spending trillions on phenomenally ineffective corporate tax cuts and massive and unnecessary increases in defense spending, Republicans are now talking about pinching pennies on vaccine funding, unemployment benefits, relief checks, and money to keep firefighters and teachers on the job. Republican success in 2010 was fueled in part by a revolt over spending after a stimulus bill, a bank bailout, and the Affordable Care Act (which actually reduced the deficit despite what Republicans claimed). In this poll, we tested the Republican austerity arguments and found them to be relatively ineffective. Framing Biden’s policies with Right Wing language about debt and deficits reduced support, but only by about 10 points.
In other words, a majority of voters still support Biden’s plans even though they add to the deficit. The finding should embolden Democrats to push for the policies that do the most good and dismiss bad faith complaints from Republicans and others. Given the immense desire for action on COVID and the economy, trimming the sails to appease faux deficit hawks would a monumental political mistake.
I found the way that chart is organized to be a little bit awkward. What it means is when they asked “do you support Joe Biden’s American Rescue plan?” and even when they frame it with right wing talking points, a majority still support it, which is a nice surprise.
Pfeiffer writes:
While this poll is very good news for President Biden and the Democrats, it also demonstrates the challenges of governing with such narrow majorities. The ability of Democrats to deliver on their agenda is hampered by the potentially unanimous Republican opposition and legislative loopholes like the filibuster. Voters are demanding results regardless of how they get them.
Voters want compromise, but not at the expense of needed progress. By a margin of 64-27 voters would prefer that Democrats win the support of members of both parties, even if Democrats have to compromise on some of their priorities. However, given a choice between as much relief as possible with no Republican support or less relief with Republican support, voters prefer as much relief as possible 46 percent to 38 percent. Compromise is nice, but the voters prioritize relief.
Despite the affinity for the filibuster by Senators Manchin, Synema, and others, the public is willing to throw it overboard to make progress. Voters favor eliminating the filibuster by an 8-point margin, and if Republicans used the filibuster to block a $15 minimum wage, they’d support ending it by a 14-point margin.
The poll asked voters how they would feel if “Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans in Congress do everything in their power to block Democrats from passing any laws, regardless of what the laws might do.” Nearly 9 in 10 Biden voters would feel negatively if that happened.
Allowing McConnell to block progress is going to diminish Democratic enthusiasm making the sky-high turnout that Democrats need to hold the House and the Senate nearly impossible to achieve. Given a choice between passing a big agenda through Budget Reconciliation or by eliminating the filibuster or passing something smaller with bipartisan cooperation, this poll makes it clear that voters very much prefer the former.
I understand that Democrats look back at the 2010 “shellacking” and worry about a backlash in two years. It’s true that was also a time of major crisis after a Republican administration left the country in shambles but the pandemic is a different kind of crisis and the violence from the MAGA cult has taken the right to a new level of threat.
And anyway, they have no choice. Politically risky or not, people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake. They have to do it and let the chips fall where they may.
The GOP has made it clear in recent days that they are all ion on Trump and his cult. And yet:
Tens of thousands of Republican voters have changed their party registrations in the aftermath of the deadly riot on Jan. 6 during which supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol.
Republican voters have defected in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona and Florida, in addition to North Carolina, Colorado and Maryland. The exodus from the GOP could mean trouble for a party that just lost the presidential election and its majority in the Senate.
Yeah. That could be a problem.
The media is fascinated with the Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green voter and they are interesting because they are so nuts. But it would be nice if more of them looked into what’s really going on as McClatchy did here. They may be missing the real story.
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