January 6 is going to leave a scar. For two hundred and twenty years one of the most beautiful things about America has been our peaceful transfer of power.
But what Americans saw three weeks ago was ugly: shameful mob violence to disrupt a constitutionally-mandated meeting of the Congress to affirm that peaceful transfer of power. It happened because the President lied to you. He lied about the election results for sixty days. Despite losing sixty straight court challenges, many of them handed down by wonderful Trump-appointed judges. He lied by saying that the Vice President could just violate his constitutional oath and declare a new winner. That wasn’t true.
He then riled a mob that attacked the Capitol – many chanting, “Hang Pence.” If that president were a Democrat, we both know how you’d respond. But, because he has Republican behind his name, you’re defending him.
Something has definitely changed over the last for years, but it’s not me.
Personality cults aren’t conservative. Conspiracy theories aren’t conservative. Lying that an election has been stolen is not conservative. Acting like politics is a religion – it isn’t conservative. -- Senator Ben Sasse, Message to Nebraska Republican Party State Central Committee
I don't find much to dispute in the Nebraska senator's statement. Either his Republican critics subscribe to alternate facts, or they value loyalty to Donald Trump more highly than any appeals Sasse makes either to conservative values or to traditions that serve as democracy's guardrails.
Sasse's vision is not at this moment in the Grand Old Party a popular view, at least one not often expressed openly. This is:
And when I tell you Republican voters support him still, the party is his. It doesn't belong to anybody else. -- Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Donald Trump
Is the Republican Party a personality cult, embracing conspiracy theories and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and above all else exhibiting obeisance to a revered leader? Based on the ascendancy of Marjorie Taylor Greene, her defenders, and her reticent enablers in the party, the answer is, Yes, on all counts.
Certainly few Republican leaders in Washington are willing to say aloud what Sasse has said. Since they fear repudiation by Trump-Republicans (as Sasse is experiencing and Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger), their messages are feeble or inconsistent, if they speak out at all. Most hide behind silence or words that, while failing to articulate the lies, do not refute them.
That's the tact Mitch McConnell has taken. He refrained until December 15 from contradicting Trump's big lie that he had won the election in a landslide, abruptly changing course as the then-president's unflagging disinformation campaign threatened the reelection of two Georgia Republicans. Since then, McConnell has found occasion to push back against the view that the GOP is still Trump's and "doesn't belong to anybody else."
On February 1, the Minority Leader criticized MTG's "loony lies and conspiracy theories" as a "cancer for the Republican Party." Bill Kristol noted: "Classic McConnell—at once true and disingenuous, a clever way to please donors while paying no price, avoids taking on Trump but tough on a first-termer. But most amusing is that it’s such a knifing of McCarthy." McConnell, scurrying to get behind 44 other GOP Senators, had already cast a vote against moving forward with impeachment.
Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy embraced the big lie more wholeheartedly than McConnell; voted with 137 other GOP Congressman to overturn the election; said, "The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters"; took it back, after a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago; and declined to sanction Marjorie Taylor Greene for her nutty conspiracy theories, racist and anti-Semitic videos, and allusions of violent retribution against political opponents.
The Republican Party has confronted extremism before, as Ronald Brownstein reminds us, after the John Birch Society -- founded and led by Robert Welch -- had become embedded in the party in the early '60s. William F. Buckley regarded Welch's views as a threat to the conservative movement.
Compared with the Birch era, thinkers on the right are doing “less policing of the borders” between conservatism and extremism, as Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative political strategist, put it succinctly. Buckley’s successors at National Review have condemned QAnon and Greene (even if they’ve blunted that message by relentlessly insisting that conservatives are being unfairly persecuted for their views, as Kabaservice notes). Right-leaning anti-Trump outlets such as The Bulwark have been unequivocal. But the most powerful voices on the right—Fox News and talk-radio hosts—have done backflips to avoid disowning Greene and other radical voices. Tucker Carlson has suggested that criticism of QAnon’s bizarre beliefs represents a step toward “tyranny … and dictatorship.”
Of course, the biggest difference between now and the Birch era is that today’s far-right extremists are operating under an umbrella of protection from a former president who remains the most popular figure to the GOP’s base.
The GOP continues to be in thrall to Donald Trump. The most powerful voices in the party are all-in with radical figures and noxious fables. This political extremism, which continues to thrive in the Republican Party, poses a threat to democracy.
Political parties and their leaders have a special role to play in safeguarding democratic institutions.
Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers. -- Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
After the chaos and corruption of the past five years, the sixty days of POTUS's big lie following the election, and the January 6 assault on the Capitol, the leaders of the Republican Party continue to defer to Donald Trump. Their path of least resistance is to evade the truth and suppress all better angels, rather than to take a principled stand for democracy.
A concluding observation from How Democracies Die:
The Republican Party is awash in fear, opportunism, and miscalculation, whereas, political courage is virtually always in short supply (in any party at any time). It is not the coin of the political realm.
Ben Sasse, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and a number of other Republicans have rejected the authoritarian turn their party has taken. Instead of drifting away with a whimper, they have taken a stand for our democratic institutions.
These commitments, while representing small steps in a long, uncertain journey, are commendable. They also bring a welcome unity of purpose to Democrats, Republicans, and independents willing to defend democracy.