You’ve got to see both sides: In 2021, the United States has one major political party and one authoritarian, white nationalist cult cosplaying as a political party.
If we want to preserve this fragile but vital experiment called democracy, it’s time to acknowledge, confront and call out this obvious, painful truth. One side, regardless of its flaws, is still committed to the democratic project. The other side—the one whose leader just encouraged a failed, violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and whose other leaders don’t think he should be held to any account for that—has mutated into a counter-majoritarian extremist force stuffed with kooks, cranks, crazies, and racists.
Don’t take my word for it. A recent study to measure the health of the world’s democracies found the Republican Party to be “far more illiberal than almost all other governing parties in democracies.” And that was in 2018—before Donald Trump and a majority of elected Republicans promoted the big lie that led to the siege of our Capitol and before the party sent a gun-toting, mouth-breathing, openly QAnon-promoting and Jew- and Muslim-loathing representative to Washington.
The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that the GOP now resembles ruling nationalist parties in autocratic societies open to demonizing and encouraging violence against their opponents. Comparisons are made to Hungary, where leader Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party have created the first non-democracy in the European Union. Orban is an authoritarian leader heading towards single-party rule. However, the GOP is different from Fidesz—experts say the GOP is actually more hostile to minority rights, no small feat considering Orban’s obsessive anti-Muslim bigotry and immigrant fearmongering.
If Republicans in their current form were to gain power again, does anyone doubt that they would make more overt attempts at establishing authoritarian, minority rule? They have already committed to gerrymandering, packing the courts, rewriting electoral rules, and shameless voter suppression, and now many are down with violent insurrections.
Some will say I’m being reactionary and melodramatic in my fears and point to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Mitt Romney as admittedly flawed but sober guardrails willing to keep the crazy in check. Well, if that’s what they are, they have failed magnificently.
I present to you the ascension of congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hatemonger and conspiracy amplifier who has spent the last several years mocking and harassing survivors of shooting massacres, promoting dangerous conspiracy theories, trafficking in casual anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry and once serving as a moderator of a Facebook page for the right-wing Family America Project where she provided a forum for death threats against Democrats. She’s kept busy!
Recently, she was interviewed and praised by another bigot, Katie Hopkins, who once called for a final solution for Muslims. Hopkins tearfully thanked Greene for her role in the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, saying, “We’d love to trade you for some of our own white people.”
Donald Trump has supported and praised both women, and Republicans gave Greene a seat on the House Education Committee. She’s obviously the perfect choice because she evidently believes that Jewish space lasers caused California’s wildfires and repeatedly suggested that the Sandy Hook, Parkland and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings were staged events to help Democrats confiscate guns.
As outrage built up this week about things she’d said over the last several years, Republicans finally got around this week to saying that maybe the Republican representative’s beliefs didn’t represent the party, while stopping short of doing much about it. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, just back from kissing Trump’s ring in Florida, said, “I condemn those comments unequivocally” but didn’t take any sort of action to police his own House member ahead of a floor vote on Wednesday when Democrats can remove her from the Education Committee without the need for any Republican votes. McConnell declared that “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” Even Senator Romney said, “Our big tent is not large enough to both accommodate conservatives and kooks.”
Have Republicans looked inside their tent lately? If they removed the kooks, they’d have a lot of empty space. The truth is that Greene is no outlier. She’s at the party’s center, which is why its members are reportedly more concerned about having to vote to remove Greene than they are about the vile, wild things that Greene has said for years.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 52 percent of Republicans recently believe Trump won the 2020 election. (He lost by nearly 7 million votes.) According to a YouGov poll, nearly 30 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of the QAnon conspiracy theories which Greene has helped spread. The QAnon movement, considered a domestic terror threat by the FBI, posits that Democrats are part of an international cabal of Satan-worshippers and child pedophiles who seek to control societies and maintain power. The Texas GOP recently used its motto “We are the storm'' in the wake of the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. Because that’s what “moderate” parties do, right? Allen West, the Texas GOP chairman denied the connection, but he still hasn’t denied his role in promoting insane anti-Muslim conspiracies.
While McCarthy is resisting any punishment for Greene, his Trumpist members spent weeks attacking congresswoman Liz Cheney for voting to impeach Trump, and trying unsuccessfully to strip her of her leadership position. When Greene spoke Wednesday night, by contrast, half of the House Republican conference gave her a standing ovation.
I remember the Republican Party and the conservative movement of my childhood, which was allegedly committed to limited government, family values, individual liberties, law and order, a robust defense of democracy abroad, and racism through dog whistles.
Now you might know them as the cult of Donald Trump and party of overt white nationalism. If you think I’m being partisan, just listen to Jimmy Gurulé, the former undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence who recently admitted that “The Republian Party as I knew it no longer exists. I’d call it the cult of Trump,” and the dozens of other veterans of the George W. Bush White House who’ve just left the party.
Its big tent now includes the Proud Boys, newly designated as a terrorist group by Canada; right-wing pundits like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, who said on his Fox show that white supremacy is a hoax; and angry, violent kooks like Greene. This is an extremist movement posing as a political party, one that publicly celebrates murderous cops like Derek Chauvin, lethal vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse, and people menacing peaceful protesters with assault rifles like Mark and Patricia McCloskey.
Democrats must take this brief window where they have been given a mandate to use every means at their disposal to confront this threat. They can start by killing the filibuster; packing the lower courts; rubber-stamping appointments; promoting statehood for D.C., which would lead to two more Democratic senators; playing procedural hardball to confront and punish Republican obstructionism; cracking down against violent white power movements; and engaging in a messaging blitz tying the Republican Party directly to its many lunatics and extremists, very much including Marjorie Taylor Greene.
When you peer into the Republican tent nowadays, what else do you see? Certainly not a party committed to democracy, rule of law, and the will of the majority.
