This is a piercing essay by Finan O'Toole about how the GOP is the party of Trumpism and Trumpism represents the retreat from democracy. As the GOP becomes less and less capable of winning majorities, it will abandon any pretense of honoring democracy. It has the Irish lyricism that O'Toole has unleashed before, but it also angles to explain why Trumpism might be the future of America. This passage is painful to read because it's largely true:
One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state. This reality has to be recognized, and a crucial aspect of that recognition is to accept that the claim Ford could make in 1974—“Our Constitution works”—no longer applies. After the long national nightmare of Watergate, America could rub its eyes and awaken to a renewed confidence in its system of checks and balances.
But the Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There may be much we do not yet know, but what is known (and in most cases openly flaunted) is more than enough: the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal, the flagrant self-dealing, the tax evasion, the children stolen from their parents, the encouragement of neo-Nazis, Trump’s admission that he deliberately played down the seriousness of the coronavirus. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this. They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that they were broadly right. There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.
O'Toole concludes:
The historic question that must be addressed is: Who is the aberration? Biden and perhaps most of his voters believe that the answer could not be more obvious. It is Trump. But this has been shown to be the wrong answer. The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant, a notion that transgresses the new norms it has created. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy. As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one—the long posterity of Donald Trump.
I wonder, though, if O'Toole isn't misreading things. Incumbency is a powerful tool, and quite a few voters voted for Trump because he was the president. A strongman isn't a strongman from the golf course at Mar A Lago. Absent the trappings of the presidency, Trump's swagger and illusion of might will fade. As Digby Parton famously wrote about George W. Bush "Conservatism never fails, it can only BE failed."
As the size of Trump's defeat and the impotence of his response grows, he will lose those outside the cult. He is already losing any hold he has had over the Executive, as Josh Marshall notes here. The trappings of Trumpism are closer to Ceausescu in Romania - once the façade slips, the clown show will be laid bare.
My hope is that the exit of Trump from the White House will disenchant Cult 45 and they will sit out elections in fits of pique. O'Toole notes that the GOP has abandoned democracy and the basic tenets of democracy - mainly that the majority should select our leaders. Our 18th century vestiges of inequality in the Senate and Electoral College mean that there is a path - albeit a very narrow one - for Republicans to gain the presidency even by losing the popular vote by huge margins.
But there is another future. As the hardcore Right turns its back on the democracy, it turns its back on elections. This could be a future tinged in violence, as Rightists abandon and deny democratic legitimacy, they will reach for their arsenal of guns. Or they could simply slink away into their rural corners of America, into sovereign citizen lunacy and away from the growing and vibrant urban America.
The idea that America is doomed is an easy reflex for those who see doom, or as O'Toole calls them, those who read Yeats over Seamus Heaney.
Trump's level of support is shocking, but it could be contingent on his actually being president. Dictators require the illusion of potency. All of this makes a full and vigorous accounting of Trump's crimes a requirement of the Biden Administration and especially state courts.
Trump needs to be humiliated and chastised not out of vindictiveness or "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but because the health of our democracy depends upon it.
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