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“The greatest danger is to not realize the greatest danger”

I urge you to watch this discussion between Chris Hayes and Stuart Stevens from last night:

Chris Hayes: Ask yourself this, what happens when that faction takes over the Republican party and they have a majority in the House during the next presidential election. What happens when the House of Representatives, maybe under Speaker Kevin McCarthy, refuses to simply pro-forma ratify the election on January 6, 2025?

That’s where this is headed. Make no mistake. Stuart Stevens wrote a whole book about his former party’s slide into Trumpism called “It Was All a Lie, How the Republicans Party became Donald Trump” and Stuart Stevens joins me now.

The stakes here really do seem colossal to me. I think the battle has already been lost by one side. What do you think?

Stuart Stevens: Look, I don’t think this is a tipping point for the Republican Party, I think the Republican Party has tipped. I think it’s a tipping point for America. The greatest danger is to not realize the greatest danger. And what we have here is a moment that appears normal in many ways. We have a normal president who is going about the business of running a normal very functional government. But this is an extraordinary moment.

And we shouldn’t look to the past and ask is this like 1964, is it like 1968, is it like 52? Because this never really happens in America, at least not since 1860. We should look abroad like Hungary. This is a Viktor orban moment. And what the Republican Party has become, and it’s painful for me to admit this because I spent decades working in it, it has become a major anti-democratic force, little d democratic force, in America.

It is a dangerous organization that wants to end the American experiment. And the sooner we get about realizing that and understanding it, and quit trying to pretend that it’s not, the safer we’ll be and the more we’ll be equipped to deal with it. Because our society is not really ready to deal with what we’re forced to deal with now, not by our choosing.

Hayes: I agree. It’s very well said. One thing I think bears investigation here, and I’d like to get our thoughts. There’s always a theory about Donald Trump that his power fundamentally derives from media attention. That he had hacked the media economy, he was a creature of the media. And that’s how he got his power. There’s a lot to that and I think it’s right.

But what we’re seeing here is that that’s not the whole story. You know, Facebook today, they’re going to keep him off the platform, no one reads his tweets, he gives interviews and no one cares, he doesn’t drive the news cycle. The power is still there for some other elemental reason. There is something else going on that is making grown individuals act in a way that would be embarrassing in normal circumstances. Like Kevin McCarthy.

Stevens: Well, we assume that Kevin McCarthy has shame. I think that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt.I think Kevin McCarthy is quite happy. I don’t think he feels debased, I think he feels power. These are people who are different from us. They are people who have decided that they are defined by power — power to no purpose. And it’s a very dangerous reality.

Look we’ve seen this before in America in the 30s, there was a fascist movement in America. But we didn’t become fascist, why? Probably because Roosevelt was president and not Henry Ford or Lindbergh. So we elected someone who does not believe in American norms, who has strong autocratic tendencies and what we’ve discovered is what we used to study in civics when we still is that leadership matters. And when you say that it’s ok to embrace the worst part of yourself. The self that doesn’t want to admit that the other side won, you are on the road to autocracy.

Democracy doesn’t work when you’re for democracy when you win and not for it when you lose. That’s a different system of government and the threat out there.

Hayes: You know I’m glad you raise that because something that’s gone somewhat unremarked on and the landing point of that monologue and that is that something really dangerous, aside from the violent insurrection that happened on january 6th, is the introduction of the notion of essentially a congressional veto on the peoples vote for presicentRight?

Like you’ve got this big thing on January 6th that was seen as proform. They’re just there to move the paper around and make it official. The idea that maybe you’ll lose the presidential election people spend a billion dollars you go around you campaign you lose, but if you hold both houses and you can whip the vote, who knows? That is a genuine fear of mine that now looms and to me the Liz Cheney thing is a kind of microcosm of that bigger fight.

Stevens: Look, We shouldn’t kid ourselves. This is the plan. It is to be able to take the House in 2022 go about impeaching at least Harris, maybe Biden. Take the Senate they’ll try to remove him. and look when you have something that happened as it did on January 6th and it goes unpunished it becomes a practice. And what happened when those Republican senators voted not to hold Trump responsible is I think will be recorded as the equivalent of the Munich Accord of our time.

It is when you attempt to appease something that you know is evil to gain power and to gain this. Now, Chamberlain was a much more noble figure than anyone involved in the Senate. At least he was anti-war in a very legitimate way with dreadful consequences.

We should not grant them the privilege of assuming they will revert to normality. This is normal to them, this is what they want. They do not want to believe in a system in which they can lose. And look when you read books like “How Democracies Die” by the two Harvard professors or “Twilight of Democracy” by Anne Applebaum, it makes it clear that most modern democracies die not because of tanks and coups. It’s not like Allende in Chile. It’s more like Orban. The Philippines had a beautiful constitution modeled after the American constitution and Marcos trampled all over it.

It’s through the ballot box and through judicial fiat that democracies die. And that really is what we’re about now. And I can’t tell you which side is going to win. I would like to say, of course, these people are going to lose. But we’ve kind of done that and we’ve proven it wrong. So I think we have to assume that we’re really in a battle for democracy.

I found this to be a very bracing is somewhat frightening discussion. He’s right, but he isn’t fatalistic about it:

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