This comment on Nicolle Wallace’s show by journalist Tim Alberta, who covers the right, sends a little shudder down your spine:
Last fall before the election I traveled around the country reporting a pretty big piece about where this was taking us post election day. And for all the noise and the fury coming out of the Trump campaign, it was apparent then and it’s really apparent now that all of the really alarming activity is happening on the ground in these states.
It’s easy to forget now but we had a period of time late last year where we had multiple state parties calling for succession from the union, calling for martyrdom in the name of president Trump. People were openly saying “I’d be willing to die for President Trump, are you willing to die?”
This is really alarming stuff that was happening and that’s not even getting into all of this smaller, somewhat more conventional, battles around ballot access and everything else. And that has obviously only intensified now with Trump out of office with so many Republicans at the local and state level feeling like the defining litmus test of this era is whether or not they are willing to continue fighting on this idea that the election was stolen and that future elections will be stolen if they do not take sweeping action in the name of preventing this mystical election fraud that they were told happened in 2020.
And that is such an animating thing down to the grassroots level. I can just tell you that county Republican parties, local Republican parties, activist groups, this is all they’re talking about now. The old battles around health care and spending and even immigration to some extent, they’re virtually non-existent now or at least they pale in comparison to the amount of time and energy and money being funneled into these fights around voting.
I wrote about his the other day for Salon, noting that some of the DC Republicans are anxiously awaiting the re-emergence of the Tea Party to bolster their resistance to the Biden agenda. But they aren’t showing up and this is the reason. The right wing in this country doesn’t care about government spending or “deficits.” They care about their culture war and they care about beating Democrats. Their racist, white nationalist, xenophobic, sexist, patriarchal, throwback, autocratic worldview is all wrapped up in that.
Donald Trump tuned right into that zeitgeist and rode it to power mainly because he understood it better than the over educated GOP politicians whose agenda was about money, influence and power. They are all just as corrupt s Trump in their own way. And they are proving it with their willingness to jump on that zeitgeist too, knowing very well that it’s a dangerous slide into a chaotic autocracy run by the likes of Donald Trump, Steven Miller and Mike Pompeo. (Just imagine if they win back power in 2024 — they learned a lot the last time.)