Anger, like any emotion, is complicated. It is often the case that anger can be damaging if we allow it to fester, but there are also times when sustaining anger is necessary and righteous.
Right now, there are Republican officials who are working hard to diminish and dismiss the gravity and horror of last month’s violent invasion of the Capitol. They are counting on people’s anger dissipating with the passage of time. This is not a bad bet; being angry is unpleasant, after all, and the mind’s memory is vulnerable to manipulation.
And so, with the benefit of being totally liberated from any sense of shame or responsibility, the vast majority of Republican officials, both state and national, are working hard right now to ensure you forget that it was only luck that spared the lives of elected representatives, or prevented a massacre last month. They will try to convince you that it wasn’t all that terrifying. They might even try to convince themselves of that lie.
A perplexing truth about the present is that it’s impossible to know in the moment whether we are living through the end or the beginning of something. Life is mostly lived in a state of unsettled uncertainty. January 6th could be the end of this right-wing extremist moment in American life, or it could be just the beginning.
Lincoln famously said of his part in history, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”1 We should not mistake this wisdom as a confession of powerlessness. Rather, Lincoln asserts that events are mostly a matter of circumstance, and that the outcome of events is mostly up to how people in positions of power react in response2. As I’ve written before, democracy is not self-sustaining, and the examples of collapsed democracies outnumber the examples of enduring democracies. Good does not always prevail; the universe is not innately moral. It requires moral actors. People must do the work. The United States will endure in some form, but the question is in what form. There is simply no guarantee that the United States, already a damaged democracy, will emerge from this period as a full and free democracy. There are powerful people working to thwart that outcome. If there is one understanding we should have right now, one month after the insurrection at the Capitol, it might be that.
The anti-democratic orientation of the Republican Party represents the greatest threat to the United States’ continued existence as a functioning republic. This is the central political issue of our time, and it is bigger than Donald Trump.
Democracy is more than just free and fair elections—it denotes a broad tolerance for ideas, beliefs, identities—but certainly the power to choose your political representation is fundamental to it, so much so that we define it as a right. Yet across the country, Republicans are working to destroy public confidence in our elections, which will be the justification for restricting and complicating both access to voting and the tabulating of results.
Observe the recent obstruction of state Republicans in Pennsylvania in seating a Democratic senator. State GOP leaders there made a serious effort to deny hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians their democratic representation in the state senate, for no reason other than the elected representative is a Democrat (and an incumbent at that). Because Republicans refused to cooperate in this basic and perfunctory process of seating a senator for the new term, the courts had to intervene.
Elsewhere, Georgia Republicans are fighting to ensure that statewide Democratic victories—of which there were three in this election—do not happen again. In Michigan, Congressman Bill Huizenga publicly mulled an alternative system for distributing the state’s Electoral College votes, changing from a winner-take-all election to a proportional vote filtered through the state’s heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts. Had Michigan used this system in November, its Electoral College votes would have split 8-8, despite Joe Biden winning the state by more than 150,000 votes. His rationale: it would ‘remove Detroit’s outsized influence’ — I will leave it to you to decipher exactly what he means by that, and to come to your own conclusions about the current caliber of Michigan’s Republicans. We have another example in Minnesota. There are more around the country. The point is this: an anti-democratic orientation has become Republican Party orthodoxy.
This is part of the larger crisis of intolerance among this nation’s right-wingers for Americans who do not share their same beliefs. On Twitter, David Walsh, a historian at the University of Virginia who specializes in right-wing extremism in the U.S., deconstructs a recent article in the influential right-wing publication The Federalist:
We know that political democracy depends on the consent of the losers. Social democracy relies on a similar tolerance. If right-wing Americans find Democratic authority, or as Walsh notes, the mere presence of liberal and leftist-thinking Americans, intolerable, then we cannot claim a healthy, functioning democracy.
And this is when I have to confess to feeling stuck right now when it comes to discussing American politics
. The Republican Party is the problem: this is not an original idea, nor is it new. Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann’s thesis is now almost a decade old, and Chris Hayes writes about it in the Atlantic this week. The bad faith is relentless and bottomless; there is no discourse to be had. Lies, resentment, grievance, and victimization seem to be the operating principles of the party3. This is not a party that is interested in governing beyond enacting anti-democratic legislation, or writing laws that censor the teaching of American history.
We have real issues of governance in this nation, both short and long-term, that are not being fully addressed because we are paralyzed by having to deal with this problem of illiberalism from within. We have a majority in this country that wants to see real governance but whose will is being thwarted by the unrepresentative aspects of our electoral systems. What more is there to say?
I would love to live in a United States where a commitment to democracy was the secular religion of America, where people were unified in their opposition to fundamentalism and extremism, and political debates were good faith discussions on the role of government in people’s lives. But while President Joe Biden is blessedly there, a significant faction of our society is hostile to this very idea, and it’s hard to imagine us getting anywhere near that better reality anytime soon. And yet, it is so, so necessary.
I am skeptical that the Republican Party will moderate itself.
In the past few months, Adam Kinzinger has garnered much attention and praise for his blunt, unequivocal denouncements of Trump and right-wing extremism. He should be commended for speaking these truths, and I believe his convictions are genuine. But I am skeptical his new PAC, or any other similar efforts by moderate conservatives to reclaim the Republican Party, will have any real effect. This is a simple calculation of power, and right now the overwhelming majority of Republican voters want extremism. We know the leadership will not see them out of it.
And so we are left with this: only significant structural political and electoral reforms, protecting the majority and ensuring the right-wing minority can only ever be a minority, will force the Republican Party to moderate. Of these reforms, abolishing the Electoral College may be the most immediately effective. A direct national popular vote for the presidency would simply not be vulnerable to the manipulations and subversions we survived this year. But as long as it’s still in place—and it will be in 2024—the Electoral College is the proverbial ticking time bomb of our democracy4. If Kinzinger, Romney, and Cheney truly wish to save the Republican Party, their best bet is to work with Democrats. As for the rest of us, keep voting Democratic.
Can a political party be saved from itself?
It’s an interesting question and history provides some perspective. I’ve written before that a key understanding in American politics is that parties are malleable and ever-changing. I recently came across this chart illustrating the evolving nature of American parties in the first century of the nation’s history:
I highly recommend taking a closer look at it, as it supports just this point: parties change, sometimes even collapse, and anyone who offers a static version of American history where Republicans were always Republicans and Democrats were always Democrats is lying. This perhaps offers some hope for the future.
But then the question is how and why parties change. In the Federalist and Whig parties we do have examples of total collapse. The Federalist Party disintegrated when it became too detached from the rising democratic spirit of an emerging middle class; the Whig Party met a similar fate when sectional conflict over slavery could no longer be ignored as the central fault line in American society. But these are 19th Century exceptions; our modern political parties are much more entrenched, to the point where disintegration is an impossibility.
So we are left with transformation. Maybe there is some hope to be drawn from the evolution of the Democratic Party in the first half of the 20th Century. In 1900, the Democratic Party was mostly rural, mostly Southern, and mostly conservative; William Jennings Bryan was the party’s standard bearer. But circumstances changed and the party changed with them: growing working class immigrant populations in expanding cities, finding commonality in the economic populism of the party, helped shift the power base and, with it, the ideology of the party to a more liberal orientation. This transition was not seamless—the rural and urban factions of the party famously clashed at the party’s 1924 national convention, and Southern segregationists lingered in the party for another few decades. But Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 victory cemented the party’s liberal identity, one that still very much defines it today.
Of course, the Republican Party changed in this period as well. With the consolidation of corporate power within the party, progressive-minded reformers were marginalized, even exiled (that Teddy Roosevelt left the Republican Party is an underplayed fact of our partisan history). The Great Migration, and both parties’ reactions to it, had an eventually dramatic effect on a national realignment. The now-mythical liberal Republican held on for a few more decades but, like the conservative (segregationist) Democrat, he was extinct around by about 1968.
The takeaway here seems to be that times change and parties change with them. And there are examples of people standing up for what is right—take Hubert Humphrey’s speech denouncing segregation at the 1948 Democratic Convention. Maybe Kinzinger, Romney, and Cheney can similarly influence a better future direction for the Republican Party. Maybe we are in the beginning of an epochal realignment. America is going to change, in ways we can anticipate, and ways we cannot, and maybe that certainty can be our consolation.
Bookmarked Tweet:
What I’m Reading:
I’m finally getting around to reading Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Pulitzer-winning tome that is very much my bag. One aspect that is grabbing my attention is the central role epidemics played in the creation and expansion of city and state government; the first major city and state hospitals were essentially constructed as quarantine sites. Back then, too, corporate partnerships and assistance were sought, to mixed results: Aaron Burr fell into final disgrace because his company prevented the city from modernizing its waterworks, thereby prolonging the regular occurrences of outbreaks for decades beyond what should have been (i.e. Hamilton wasn’t the only person Burr killed).
Turns out we don’t have to speculate on what the founding generation thought about epidemics. They lived (and died) it. I imagine they would be insanely jealous and amazed by our modern scientific understanding of disease, and equally infuriated by our failure to fully honor that knowledge.
What I’m Watching:
Speaking of New York, I am eating up every second of Pretend It’s a City. Whatever our romanticized ideal of Woody Allen as the quintessential New Yorker (a very flawed and unrepresentative archetype), we don’t need him anymore: we have Fran.
Closing with this: It’s never a good sign when you reach for your copy of
Hannah Arendt’s
The Origins of Totalitarianism
, as I found myself doing after January 6
. Arendt qualifies as among the best of that category of writers and thinkers I’ve discussed before, who are so insightful that people read them as prophetic. As I leafed through my copy recently, knowing I’d encounter passages that would masterfully articulate the current state of affairs in these United States, this paragraph (from the essay “Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense”), about the fungible nature of truth stopped me in my proverbial tracks (emphases mine):
Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered their “universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments” had nothing to do with truth but aimed at opinions which by their very nature are changing, and which are valid only “at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts.” He also discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from “opinions comes persuasion and not from truth.” The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of the truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.
Never underestimate the capacity of people to rationalize anything.
In the next paragraph, Arendt reflects on the ascendency of totalitarianism in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere in the first half of the 20th Century: “(M)any things have been revealed as facade that only a few decades ago we thought were indestructible essences.” Indeed.
Without looking it up, I’m certain I’ve quoted this before. It’s one of the most profound statements anyone has ever said. Also: I have footnotes now. My apologies.
The measure of intellect, best articulated by the poet John Keats as ‘negative capability’, is the ability to hold two competing, opposing thoughts in mind at once, and rather than struggling for a single truth, embracing the ambiguity.
It’s inelegant, but I cannot escape the conclusion that the modern Republican platform can be reduced to No, and fuck you.
There is really nothing more to say about the Electoral College.