So the twists are not exactly stopping, are they?

In my last two entries for this blog, I recounted the startling turns that the presidential race has taken in the last four weeks, from the disaster of Biden’s debate performance, to the Supreme Court’s no-look pass that allowed Judge Aileen “Employee of the Month” Cannon to dismiss felony charges against Trump for stealing government secrets, to SCOTUS’s outrageous ranks-closing to protect Trump from prosecution on charges of trying overturn the 2020 election (and granting him the powers of a dictator should he win again), to the assassination attempt on Trump’s life that for many might as well have been a coronation, to the Leni Riefenstahl-ready informercial that was the Republican convention. I don’t have to tell you, it had been a brutal month for the prospects of democracy in the United States.

So the latest 115mph curveball—Joe Biden’s heroic, legacy-defining decision to step aside in favor of Kamala Harris—was yet another wild twist, and a very very welcome one. Oceans of ink have already been spilled on the topic which I won’t add to here.

Well, maybe a little.

THIS JUST IN: LIFE IS UNFAIR

I was among the many who were deeply relieved by Joe’s decision, and admiring of it. As Jonathan V. Last wrote in The Bulwark:

I submit to you that no other president in our lifetimes would have believed that he was replaceable. None of those guys could have even countenanced the idea that the country might be better served if he passed the torch. Biden’s humility in this act is so unique that we risk overlooking it and failing to appreciate how singular and extraordinary it is.

In other words, history is going to be kind to Joe Biden—especially if Kamala wins. So I’ll reserve my thoughts on the former while we concentrate on ensuring the latter.

When Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, it was like a dam broke on the left. I was unprepared for (but incredibly pleased by) the wave of enthusiasm and the depths of the passion, which—with all due respect to Joe—just goes to show you how desperate the American people were for a strong, exciting candidate to take on Donald Trump. That in itself was deeply cheering.

The Republicans seemed utterly shocked at Biden’s decision, which is astounding, given that it had been a strong (if unprecedented) possibility ever since the night of June 27. The consensus seems to be that Trump and the GOP could not conceive of a truly patriotic and selfless leader who would put the country before himself, and were therefore caught absolutely flat-footed. Authoritarianism has many tactical and strategic advantages when it comes to politics, but this baked-in shortsightedness born of avarice and venality is one of its major disadvantages. And boo hoo, says I.

Trump has even complained that the GOP should get its money back because it spent so much demonizing an opponent who’s not going to be the Democratic nominee. It was glorious to watch him in his familiar toddler mode, holding his breath and stamping his feet because it’s not fair, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not!!!!

Republican claims that Biden was the victim of a coup (well, they are the coup experts) and  arguments that his deferral to Kamala is anti-democratic (again: the experts) or even illegal (and a triple!) are risible. The truth, of course, is that they are simply furious at being outmaneuvered. Their whole campaign was “Biden is old.” Now they’re the ones with the mentally impaired AARP nominee, facing an opponent whom they don’t yet know how to attack, except in the most obvious and disgusting way. It was no surprise that horrific racism and misogyny immediately began pouring forth from the right wing….so much so that just three days in, Mike Johnson had to tell his members, “Hey guys, tone it down, OK?” Uh, when you have to tell them that….you can fill in the rest.

But even these despicable attacks on the new Democratic nominee might backfire when it becomes clear that that’s what the GOP is doing. And it’s clear. The racists and misogynists and anti-Semites are already on Team Trump: I suspect further attacks on that front won’t attract many new voters…..but they will alienate plenty of them. This isn’t 1988 anymore, and while the Willie Horton playbook remains very much operative in the mind of MAGA Nation, the rest of America is hip to it. But we shall see. I underestimated the scope and virulence of that kind of bigotry in the Obama years and in 2016, so I am not letting down my guard.

In short, the race has been completely transformed. For Kamala to win is still a challenging task. Trump and his campaign managers—including the architect of the Swift Boating of John Kerry—will certainly pull out all the KKK-brand stops, and I’m sure they will eventually find some footing. But we are in a whole new world. So let’s keep the passion up, and the momentum, and drive this motherfucker down to defeat once and for all. It’s glorious to see that, at long last, the sane segment of the American public is alive with passion and the belief that we can in fact do so.

EVERYDAY I WRITE THE BOOK

This week also marks the publication of my new book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, a kind of handbook for how to prevail if Trump returns to power. I wrote it over the past two years not because of some fatalistic assumption that that dark fate would come to pass. On the contrary: I have always believed that we can beat Trump, and in the wake of Joe’s withdrawal from the race, I am more convinced of that than ever. But as a matter of sheer prudence, I thought it wise to look over the horizon (as the Pentagon says) and prepare ourselves for the worst case scenario. For even if we defeat Trump in November, as I believe we will, even when his cheeseburgers-and-Diet-Coke-addled corporeal form is rotting in his grave,  the neo-fascist movement that he represents will still be with us.

The first part of the book therefore surveys how we got to this alarming state of affairs in the first place, and the long term structural changes we can make to shore up our democracy against right wing authoritarianism in the future. As we are about 100 days out from Election Day in the midst of a radically transformed presidential race, and with our hopes newly invigorated and the Republicans on their heels for a change, it’s that “nightmare prevention” aspect of the book that I’d like to focus on in the excerpt that follows.

As the American people get ready to go to the polls to vote in what is inarguably the most important election of our lifetimes (yes, I know you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s true—again), it’s worth taking a look at what the Republican Party is and stands for, as it makes the gobsmacking request that we put it back into power less than four years after it tried to overturn the last free and fair election.

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From Resisting the Right, now available from OR Books, at your local bookstore, or from the usual online retailers:

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

The contemporary Republican Party is unrecognizable from the GOP of only a few decades ago. Both Nixon and Reagan would be ostracized from the Republican Party of today. On taxes, on the environment, on foreign policy, on nuclear arms control, on wage and price controls—across a range of issues, they championed ideas that would cause the contemporary GOP to scream liberalism, or even socialism. More likely, if I may speculate, those men, operating in today’s climate, would have quickly changed their tune, as so many other contemporary Republican politicians have done, keenly aware of the melody that the right-wing piper is calling.

All political parties look for wedge issues to peel voters away from their opponents, but the GOP has made an art form of it. In his 2012 book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, Mike Lofgren, a longtime GOP congressional staffer, pulled back the curtain on this kayfabe, declaring in an interview with Truthout that same year: “The primary purpose of the GOP these days is to provide tax breaks and other financial advantages—such as not regulating pollution and other socially costly externalities—to their wealthy donor base. All the rest of their platform, all the culture wars stuff, is simply rube bait.”

That “rube bait” included guns, abortion, homosexuality, trans rights, immigration, and a whole slate of other social issues that the plutocratic wing of the party did not really care about. Trump himself—who had been a registered Democrat for almost a decade before running against Clinton—was very much on record as being pro-choice, moved comfortably in circles with gay people, and was generally live-and-let-live….appropriate for someone who was himself so libertine. But he was also happy to reverse course like a stunt car driver doing a screeching, rubber-burning one-eighty when it served his ends. Prior to that, Trump’s low-information liberalism was largely a function of the well-to-do Manhattan milieu in which he moved. It was not a world where Confederate flag decals and gun racks were often seen on Lincoln Town Cars. But as a natural-born shitbag with a long history of ignorant, incendiary, unsolicited commentary (see: the Central Park jogger case), Trump had no problem whatsoever feeding the most disgusting instincts of the GOP’s aptly named base. But like all demagogues, he also took his cues from his audience, and tailored his act to suit it. In that regard, he was simultaneously leading the mob and following it.

For example, the Republican Party of the 20th century had always had a nativist bent, but the euphemistic “family separation policy”—better described as a deliberate and openly sadistic campaign of kidnapping small children and caging them in inhuman conditions—represented a new low of almost incomprehensible depths. As Caitlin Dickerson concluded in her Pulitzer Prize-winning reportage for The Atlantic, “family separation” wasn’t an unfortunate by-product of Trump’s border policy: it was the goal, aimed purely at punishing migrants and thrilling the base. Or her Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer wrote, in what might be the single most memorable comment ever made about the Trump administration, “The cruelty is the point.”

This willingness of both casual conservatives and diehard denizens of MAGA Nation to get onboard with Trump’s worst atrocities was a worrying sign—a chilling homegrown demonstration of Arendt’s banality of evil, and the crucial complicity of the great swath of nonchalant citizenry in abetting the monstrous actions of authoritarian regimes. And it would only accelerate throughout his time in office.

This hold Trump had on his followers—and still has, for many of them—has led many observers to refer to Trumpism as a “cult-like” phenomenon. But other experts argue that the modifier is unnecessary.

In a 2018 piece for Truthdig called “The Cult of Trump,” the journalist and author Chris Hedges outlines the ways in which Trump’s followers meet the dictionary definition of a cult, and not just metaphorically, noting that the “more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.”[i] Hedges goes on at length: about the use of the language of hate and violence; of fearmongering and divisiveness; of the denial of objective reality and the malleability of facts and truth, even when it comes to the leader’s own past statements; of the leader’s bombast and grandiosity, emotional abusiveness, and insecurity; and of the fawning obedience they demand, and the psychology of their followers’ willingness to submit.

Sound familiar?

Of course, not all Republicans can be said to be in the grip of the Trumpist cult of personality the way that its most Kool-Aid-drunk adherents are. In some ways, however, the Republicans who are not Trump cultists but merely making a cynical, utilitarian calculation are worse, in that they cannot be excused by reason of mental incapacitation. They are quislings and collaborators who will one day face history’s harshest verdict. (Looking at you, J.D.)

As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes: “Would-be dictators gain crucial support from allies in the political system who may not be committed authoritarians themselves but side with a factional leader who will advance their policy goals at the expense of democracy,” a segment the Spanish political scientist Juan Linz calls “semi-loyal actors.”[ii] In The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (1978), Linz, who was born in Germany on the eve of the Nazi era, writes that in order to stop a political party that is showing autocratic tendencies, reasonable political parties that are otherwise in opposition to each other must join together—in other words, put country before party. It happened in Belgium and Finland in the early 1930s, successfully stopping the rise of homegrown authoritarian parties even as kindred spirits rose to power elsewhere in Europe. As recently as 2016 it happened in Austria, despite that nation’s chilling history of susceptibility to fascism. In the United States, it would have meant key leaders of the Republican Party breaking ranks to join with Democrats in opposing Trump, publicly announcing the threat he posed to the nation, and perhaps even declaring their support for Hillary Clinton. Precious few did, and those were all excommunicated, or left the GOP willingly before that sentence was pronounced upon them.

The question of whether or not Trumpism is a literal cult, then, is ultimately moot. Even absent Trump himself, right-wing fanaticism in the United States remains extraordinarily dangerous, such that—as Hedges points out—the mere demise of the man and the breaking of the fever of his followers will not solve our long-term problem. We must salt the earth from which it sprung.

THE DEATH OF NORMALCY

The enduring notion that Trump was an aberration in US politics, or that the GOP would return to some sort of “normalcy” if and when he is ejected from a position of power, flies in the face of history.

Trump represents the logical end state of the process that began with the Southern Strategy, carried on with Reagan’s courting of the religious right, and came to a boil with Newt Gingrich and the rise of politics as bloodsport. The GOP’s alliance with segregationist dead-enders, and then with Christian fundamentalists, and finally with outright white nationalist semi-fascists comprising both of those strains, was a deal with the devil that had finally come due. The plutocrats had imagined that they could use these allies as shock troops, and for a time they did. But now the center of gravity in the party has shifted to its openly seditionist, neo-Confederate faction. We should therefore postpone any mourning parties for the “Rockefeller wing” of the GOP, which after all, brought this fate on itself, and continues to be a willing—now junior—partner in this antidemocratic axis. The irony of its sorcerer’s apprentice-like plight in no way mitigates the danger to the entire nation, and world, that it unleashed.   

It’s true that the tension between MAGA Nation and those Republicans who merely grit their teeth as they bend the knee to Trump may help keep the party paralyzed, a case of malevolence tempered by squabbling. But as the anti-Trump conservative Jennifer Rubin notes in The Washington Post, the media rarely holds the GOP “moderates” to account and does “a disservice to the voters by characterizing them as somehow more sensible than the Freedom Caucus crazies.” Team Normal, as it likes to style itself, has thus far not shown enough courage to power a nightlight, belying its own self-flattering moniker. 

The fact is, there is little evidence that the policies that the moderates wish to pursue are much different from that of the party’s far-right wing. As Rubin writes, “it would take only a few of them to defeat radical measures. Yet time and again, they cave”—because the ends they seek are largely the same even if their methods are less aggressive.[iii] Caving, then, is almost too generous. The pattern of centrist submission suggests either cowardice or dishonesty, with these alleged moderates using the seditionists as cover to advance far-right policies with which they privately agree.

Rubin’s fellow conservative Robert Kagan goes further, arguing that these ostensibly anti-Trump Republicans, consciously or not, are actually aiding the Trumpist cause by insisting on business as usual “even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.”

Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?

Personally, I am astonished that any American gives the Republican Party even passing consideration as a viable political organization, or that any candidate can run under its banner without crippling shame. But apparently you can kidnap and cage children as a matter of deliberate policy, preside over the deaths of half a million Americans through sheer malevolence, and try to overthrow the government on your way out, and still demand to be treated like legitimate public servants. 

Why do people continue to support this openly neofascist, would-be theocratic party that is openly rife with corruption, brazenly antagonistic to the basic ideals of this nation, eager to suppress your vote, and dedicated to a long-discredited brand of reverse Robin Hood economics that hurts the very people it claims to champion? I know that just asking the question invites withering criticism for being a snotty and condescending “coastal elite.” But the Republican Party did so much damage to this country in so many different ways during the Trump years (we can go back further if need be, but that period will suffice) that no sentient American ought to give it the time of day unless and until it undergoes a radical reformation of a kind it seems unlikely to undertake.

In a 2022 interview with Al-Jazeera, Noam Chomsky noted that, in the past, he had typically described the Republican and Democratic Parties as merely two wings of the same “Business Party.” But that characterization no longer obtained. The GOP, he argued, had ceased to be “a political party in the traditional sense,” but was now “a radical insurgency that has abandoned any interest in participation in parliamentary politics.”[iv] The Party itself gleefully announces it.

So let’s be clear. The Grand Old Party has no business presenting itself as any kind of reliable steward of the public trust, and its efforts to do so ought to be dismissed out of hand. I am not astounded that Republicans are brazen enough to say and do the things they are currently saying and doing: their shamelessness is well-established. But I am astounded that we are letting them get away with it.

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Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm is out now is available from OR Books, or at your local bookstore, or from the usual online retailers.

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