This piece by Tim Alberta in the Atlantic about Peter Meijer, freshman Republican congressman from Michigan is nothing less that depressing. It tracks Meijers descent from romantic optimist to cynical survivor and it’s sad.
This is just an excerpt that picks up on the story after the insurrection on January 6th:
When the Capitol was finally secured and members returned to the House chamber, Meijer expected an outraged, defiant House of Representatives to vote in overwhelming numbers to certify the election results, sending a message to the mob that Congress would not be scared away from fulfilling its constitutional obligations. But as he began talking with his colleagues, he was shocked to realize that more of them—perhaps far more of them—were now preparing to object to the election results than before the riot.
On the House floor, moments before the vote, Meijer approached a member who appeared on the verge of a breakdown. He asked his new colleague if he was okay. The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. “Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,” Meijer says. “If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?”
Meijer glanced down at his phone. It was crackling with messages from people in his district—some checking on his well-being; others warning him not to blow the insurrection out of proportion, arguing that it was little more than a spontaneous tour of the Capitol. He swiped past most of the missives. But one, from a longtime activist he’d gotten to know, caught his eye. “You better not buckle and wimp out to the liberals,” the man wrote. “Those who stormed the Capital today are True American Heroes. This election was a fraud and you know that’s true. Peter, don’t sell us out!!!”
“Those who stormed the Capitol attacked our republic today,” Meijer replied. “They trampled on the Constitution. We have a rule of law, courts, and peaceful means of resolving disputes.”
“No Sir. They are showing their God Given America Right,” the man texted back. “When the truth is being hidden, the Second Amendment gives every one of those people the right to do what they did today.”
Meijer silenced his phone and cast his vote to certify the election.
For all the negatives that defined Meijer’s first weeks on the job—the incompetence and the cravenness, the violence and the threats—he emerged from the gantlet relieved that at least now he was liberated to speak his mind about the GOP’s decay.
Meijer had never been a Trump guy. Like so many Republican candidates seeking to pass muster with the president’s base, he had been careful to say the right things. He’d touted Trump’s economic record. He’d ignored, or downplayed, much of his extreme rhetoric. But all the while, Meijer had studied Trump with trepidation. He viewed the 45th president as a manifestation of America’s psychological imbalance, someone who reflected our anger and insecurities instead of our confidence and aspirations. He feared Trump’s authoritarian instincts, but clung to a belief that the president’s grip on the American right would soon loosen.
After the impeachment vote, Meijer felt he was positioned to advocate for what he believed would be an imminent, sweeping overhaul of the party. He threw himself into the public debate surrounding January 6. He became a fixture on national news programs. He accepted every invitation—especially those that seemed hostile—to address local party chapters. At every stop, in every setting, Meijer forced the issue, believing that he was on the right side of history, and that an awakening was at hand.
“As of late January,” he says, “I thought there was the opportunity to have a harsh confrontation with reality. It was going to be a very unpleasant 18 months, 24 months, but maybe we would do the necessary soul-searching and reconstruction.”
His optimism didn’t last long. In February, two of the county-level Republican Parties in Meijer’s district—Calhoun and Barry—voted to formally censure him. (Calhoun’s leaders accused Meijer of having “betrayed the trust of so many who supported you and violate[d] our faith in our most basic constitutional values and protections.”) The next month, as other local parties across Michigan were debating similar reprimands of both Meijer and Fred Upton, the state GOP chair joked with party activists that “assassination” was one remedy for dealing with the two of them.
By April, Meijer had a primary challenger. The criticism back home was unceasing; the only praise he received was whispered. National polls showed that tens of millions of Republican voters still believed the election had been stolen. Looking around, Meijer saw that he was a leader without any following and realized how Pollyannaish he’d been. “It’s like, ‘All right, this is going to be a longer, deeper project than I thought,’ ” he says.
Meijer’s sense of urgency gradually gave way to self-doubt. He began to wonder whether his appeals to decency and democracy came across as “pearl clutching.” He could tell he was rubbing some of his constituents the wrong way—they could stomach a disagreement with their congressman; what they couldn’t tolerate was the lecturing and the finger-wagging. He sensed that he might be doing more harm than good with his high-minded rhetoric. “I’ve come to realize the limitations of performative outrage,” he says.
So he backed off. He took voters’ earfuls in stride. He says he decided that “by actively trying to correct them, I may have been inadvertently postponing the self-correction” that would come with some distance from Trump’s presidency.
Over time, the threats ebbed, the antagonistic encounters subsided, and Meijer got some semblance of his life back. He was able to spend more time on the policy issues he cared about. For most of his constituents, discussions of election integrity and January 6 and Meijer’s vote for impeachment had become redundant—and boring. “We had a moment in one of our town halls [when] there were all these people who said, ‘Can we talk about something else now?’ ” Meijer recalls.
In August, when I accompanied Meijer on a swing through his district during the congressional recess, something strange happened. A woman raised her hand, after Meijer’s luncheon talk at a Grand Rapids country club, and asked him about “the insurrection” on January 6. Everyone fell still; the room full of old friends who’d been buying raffle tickets and cracking jokes was suddenly on edge. Meijer had once offered lively commentary on the matter. But on this day, he was restrained, giving a brief synopsis of his whereabouts when the Capitol was overrun.
In the parking lot a few minutes later, Meijer turned to me. “I haven’t gotten that question in a long time,” he said. Sure enough, in more than a dozen stops across his district over the summer and fall, this was the only one where I saw anyone ask Meijer about the madness of January. Most of the questions he got were about the “socialist” Democratic agenda, the GOP’s prospects for taking back control of Congress in 2022, and President Joe Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan. (This last topic allowed Meijer numerous victory laps for the unauthorized trip he took to Kabul during the U.S. evacuation. Having been in the crosshairs of his own party for so long, Meijer was delighted to be rebuked by the White House.)
Alberta says Meijer now believes the worst is over and the storm has passed. He is fooling himself. The article reveals that his own sister is a QAnon believer. Alberta writes:
In our many hours of conversation, Meijer had declined to call out any of his colleagues by name. (Watching him contort himself to avoid criticizing Kevin McCarthy was the closest I’ve come to seeing a man tortured.) This reticence, he explained, is his way of trying to bring down the temperature. Meijer is convinced that there are more Republicans like him—rational, pragmatic, disgusted by the turn the party has taken—than there are like Gosar. Because they have the numbers, he says, there’s no need to engage in guerrilla tactics. They can reason and debate like adults. They can take the high road. They can play the long game.
Maybe he’s right. Or maybe this will prove a ruinous miscalculation. Whatever the numbers, the reality is that Meijer’s side is getting quieter while the other side is getting louder. His side is letting go while the other side is digging in. His side is unilaterally disarming while the other side is escalating every day.
Counting on “lowering the temperature” by ignoring what’s going on is a ruinous miscalculation. He’s chosen the path of least resistance.
In the days after January 6, Meijer believed he was part of a mission to rescue the Republican Party from itself. Now he laughs at his own naïveté. Ten people isn’t a popular movement. And in truth, only two of them—Cheney and Kinzinger—have shown the stomach for the sort of sustained offensive that would be required to rehabilitate the GOP. The other eight, having glanced over their shoulders and seen no reinforcements on the way, chose varying degrees of retreat.
Read the whole thing when you get the chance. This man seems like a decent sort. But he’s slowly but surely being assimilated into the Borg. Power does that to people.