The Party Of Ideas

 Back around the time Reagan ascended improbably to the presidency, there was a coterie of right wing thinkers, generally lumped into the bin of neoconservatives, that provided an intellectual veneer for the broadly libertarian, nationalistic and vaguely racist policies that distinguished Reaganism. They called the Republican Party at the time, the Party of Ideas.

Jon Chait has found the similar group for Trump. I have used the term "party of ideas" ironically to describe a party with one policy idea: cut taxes and regulatory burdens on the rich. That's pretty much been the only thing that holds the Republican Party together. Trump really only accomplished one legislative goal: a massive tax break. The idea that the Chaos Caucus could actually pass legislation by compromising with the Senate and/or White House is laughable on its face. 

What's more concerning is whether Chait is right in predicting that the strain of anti-democratic, anti-liberal (as in liberty) thought on the right is poised to take over the entire Republican Party. It's certainly tempting to see the entire GOP as being the Cult of Trump and okey dokey with January 6th. The voices within the electoral arm of the GOP who opposed Trump's illegal and unconstitutional power grab have mostly been driven from office. They've either lost primaries or retired before they could. 

I guess as an optimist, my feeling is that the GOP is about 40% authoritarian, 40% traditional Republicans (still sucky) and 20% clueless partisans. I also think that a decisive repudiation of Trumpism both in the courts and at the polls would go a long way towards breaking the ascendency of naked authoritarianism on the right. 

Now, all right wing politics have a tendency towards hierarchies and authoritarianism. The hallmark of rightist politics worldwide is a contempt for democracy. The roots of the Red-Brown coalitions or horseshoe theory is the contempt the Far Left and Far Right have for the mundane and often frustrating work of electoral democracy. The most striking example of this is how American and European leftists have taken a shine to fucking Hamas. "Queers for Hamas" appears to be a real thing, not a sly piece of satire. 

This contempt for democracy is, in its own way, understandable for people who have no historical vision and perspective. Yes, democracy is frustrating. It leads to compromise, which has been accurately described as a condition by which you don't get what you want, but are assuaged by the fact that the other side didn't get what it wanted either. 

The new First World Problem is that you can generally get exactly what you want all the time. I just went to Amazon and I can get Icelandic Cod Oil delivered to my home by Sunday. I don't really know if that's usually tough to find, but I'm guessing you can get just about anything you want in a consumer experience delivered to your door. We have online leftists decrying their poverty while ordering DoorDash. 

All of this means that we have a polity that increasingly wants everything they want right now. On the right, this consumer power is directly contradicted by their increasingly irrelevant cultural power. The culture has completely turned against "traditional values," especially if those traditional values turn out to be bigoted. Since so much of conservative politics has become culture war issues, this series of defeats means that they see the culture and therefore the political landscape as irreparably lost. The idea expressed in the "Flight 93 Election"  acknowledges how the cultural and political landscape is moving away from traditional cultural conservativism, so therefore they must seize and hold power, regardless of the will of the people. Does anyone doubt what the result would be of a national plebiscite on Roe v Wade would be?

If the optimist in me is right, Biden wins reelection, Democrats hold the Senate and regain the House, precisely because the GOP has become authoritarian - Dobbs, 1/6, Trump's crimes - and the GOP has an internal reckoning. When the Democrats went into the long exile of 1968-1992, they moved to the center with Bill Clinton. The tragedy of 2016 was that Trump won such a fluke election and convinced the normie GOP that he had some secret sauce. His secret sauce was the misogyny that swirled around Hillary Clinton in Rust Belt working class communities. 

If the GOP gets whupped next November, it will be because of Dobbs and all the various issues surrounding 1/6. It will be because a majority of Republicans have decided that Trump represents their last hope against not only Democrats but democracy. Hopefully, that starts the GOP upon the road to Damascus and their redemption as a center-right party.