That’s from Dan Drezner comparing it to Hezbollah. Sounds about right.
Doyle McManus in the LA Times writes:
In a survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute after the riot in January, 56% of Republicans agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
In the same poll, 79% of Republicans said they still had a favorable view of Trump — and 36% said “very favorable.”
That consensus has made GOP politicians fearful of crossing Trump or questioning the actions of his most zealous supporters, including the Jan. 6 revolutionaries.
Republican officials in both Georgia and Arizona, where Trump is still agitating to reverse the election results, say their families have been physically threatened by the former president’s supporters.
When the House voted to impeach Trump in January, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told CNN, “There were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.”
The result, says Tufts University political scholar Daniel Drezner, is a GOP that has begun to resemble Lebanon’s Hezbollah, “a political party that also has an armed wing to coerce other political actors through violence.”
“The comparison is stronger now than before,” Drezner told me last week. “The Republicans who wanted to impeach Trump have been marginalized, and the state parties sound more and more secessionist with each passing day.”
Daniel Drezner is not a left wing liberal symp. In years gone by, we would have considered him a conservative. This is the kind of inflammatory comparison that would normally garner a shrill, shrieking pushback from the right wing but so far, it seems to have been overlooked. (Good luck Drezner…)
But he certainly has a point. The essay addresses the left as well:
At this point, some readers may ask: But what about the Democrats? Don’t they have a violent fringe, too?
Not really. The antifa movement, which conservatives point to as an example of left-wing violence, isn’t part of the Democratic Party; its militants don’t wave Biden flags, show up at Biden rallies or, in most cases, support Biden at all. And while Republicans have attacked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) for urging demonstrators to “get more confrontational,” that comparison doesn’t hold, either; whatever Waters meant by those words, she isn’t her party’s two-time presidential nominee and leader-in-exile.
This is the Republican Party’s problem, and Republicans need to solve it.
Thank you. I am watching conservative David French on CNN right now make the case that both sides are driven by negative partisanship and the nationalization of outrage and he has a point, sort of. We’re all kind of addicted to the outrage of the day and most of us are certainly drive by negative partisanship. I do believe that the Republicans are a danger to our democracy. And that’s because they are!
The difference between the two sides is that most of what the right says about the left is a lie. And they are the ones with the guns, the rhetoric of violence and the agenda to destroy the democratic process. One side is reacting to reality. The other side is reacting to bullshit and propaganda. (No, the public schools are NOT teaching Critical Race Theory — a law school curriculum — in first grade classrooms, fergawdsakes.)
They are trying to tiptoe around a fundamental problem: Their candidate lost a presidential election, but he not only refuses to accept the voters’ verdict; he wants his party to “fight” to restore him to power. They want to move past the embarrassment of Jan. 6 — but that can’t happen until they settle their internal debate: Are they a party that condones extraconstitutional violence or not?
We already know the answer to that by their refusal to vote for a bipartisan commission and ongoing genuflecting to the Dear Leader of Mar-a-lago. DC GOPers may want to move it, but he and the GOP voters do not. I don’t know what will break that fever but there’s no sign of it at the moment.