democratic impasse.com

The collective decision of conservative activists and Republican elected officials to stay on the anti-democratic, racist trajectory that the GOP had been on before Trump — but that he accelerated — is perhaps the most important story in American politics right now. At this moment, it’s unclear whether one of America’s two major political parties truly believes in democracy. 

Perry Bacon Jr., "Why The Republican Party Isn’t Rebranding After 2020"

In Georgia, the state legislature rushed through in a single day a 98-page bill introducing a torrent of changes in election law, many that restricted voting (creating obstacles that deliberately make voting more cumbersome, inconvenient, and -- with the provision making it illegal for volunteers to give voters waiting in line food or drink -- more uncomfortable). A couple of provisions (regarding the Secretary of State, currently Trump nemesis Brad Raffensperger, and the State Election Board) empower the state legislature at the expense of local election officials to make it easier to overturn an election (which Trump tried and failed to do in the aftermath of the 2020 election he lost by 11,780 votes).

Since the law sanctions neither violence, nor guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, this is probably best described as Jim Crow Lite, rather than 'Jim Crow on steroids,' but it's plainly voter suppression (regardless of whether or not it succeeds). All credible evidence points to the November 2020 presidential election and the January 2021 senate run-off election in Georgia as free and fair. There was no fraud, no cheating, and no irregularities to speak of. There was no failure of election integrity. The count was accurate and the result clear in each case. Ballots cast for Democratic candidates surpassed ballots for the Republicans in the three races in Georgia that Trump and company dispute.

The Georgia law is a direct response to these three defeats, to Trump’s big lie (that he won the election in Georgia and nationally) but was denied the victory by fraud, and to the subsequent subterfuge that Republicans across the country have engaged in. (Ed Kilgore points to Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, and Texas as the most significant states -- because of GOP control and increasingly competitive elections -- poised to follow Georgia's example.)

Jamelle Bouie comments ("The G.O.P Has Some Voters It Likes and Some It Doesn't"):

This is what it looks like when a political party turns against democracy. It doesn’t just try to restrict the vote; it creates mechanisms to subvert the vote and attempts to purge officials who might stand in the way. Georgia is in the spotlight, for reasons past and present, but it is happening across the country wherever Republicans are in control.

Again (while this law, contra Rich Lowry, will prevent actual voters from casting ballots), it may or may not succeed in suppressing the total vote of Democratic constituencies, since Democrats will be especially determined to organize and get to the polls. Voter suppression is still wrong. It constitutes an assault on democratic norms. Such laws show contempt for the Democratic constituencies they seek to disenfranchise. They represent an ideological, and anti-democratic, strand that has long been present in the Republican Party.

A year ago this month, President Trump expressed concern with efforts to make voting easier. "The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." The Georgia Speaker of the House, in opposing widespread mail-in voting, remarked that “the president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.” Why? Because "This will certainly drive up turnout."

At the beginning of the Reagan era, the late New Right activist, co-founder of both the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, Paul Weyrich put it this way:

I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

In spite of these examples, Republicans generally avoid saying the quiet part loud. Instead, they advocate disqualifying voters on grounds other than partisan advantage, as Arizona state house member John Kavanaugh did:

“Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues,” Kavanagh said .... “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”

In 2007, Jonah Goldberg struck this theme, arguing that we risked "cheapening the vote" and "dumbed-down" democracy when we permitted everyone (including poorly informed Americans) to cast ballots.

In 1960, William Buckley expressed this view: "I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough Negroes are voting but that too many white people are voting." (Recall that white folks were part of the Democratic Solid South in 1960.)

Jim Crow still reigned when Buckley spoke -- five years before passage of the Voting Rights Act and more than half a century before Chief Justice John Roberts' decades-long quest to gut the law finally succeeded in the Shelby County v. Holder decision.

Twenty-first century voter suppression may not be Jim Crow, but it's close enough to reveal a contempt for democracy.

Several themes struck by President Biden resonated with me, especially:

• His pragmatism, doing one thing at a time, one step at a time. He intends to do all he can to keep his campaign promises, and he invoked the dictum, Politics is the art of the possible. He is prepared, if necessary, to dump the filibuster (though that's not up to him).
• His bipartisan appeal to voters (as opposed to elected Republicans), especially on economic issues. Reminded of Mitch McConnell's criticism of Biden's program ("hard left," according to the minority leader), the president responded that Republican voters were with him on his first legislative victory.
• His commitment to voting rights and outrage at Republicans' nationwide efforts to restrict voting. He surely knows what's at stake.
• His intention (after 4 decades of Reaganomics, though the 40th president went unmentioned) to change the economic paradigm. He contrasted congressional Republicans' fealty to the richest Americans with Democratic commitments to middle- and working-class Americans, and even gave a shout-out to labor unions.
• His view that the U.S.-China competition includes a global battle of democracy vs. autocracy. After four years of open, servile admiration of Putin and other strongmen, even a "love affair" with Kim Jong-un, this marked perhaps the starkest contrast between President Biden and Donald Trump.

The first question for Biden began by noting that the President had touted his progress on COVID-19, but not the country’s other “defining challenges.” Biden responded:

[L]ook, when I took office, I decided that it was a fairly basic, simple proposition, and that is: I got elected to solve problems. And the most urgent problem facing the American people, I stated from the outset, was COVID-19 and the economic dislocation for millions and millions of Americans.

He pledged to take action on problems “one at a time, … as many simultaneously as we can.” Later (when asked about addressing gun control) he again invoked timing:

As you’ve all observed, successful presidents — better than me — have been successful, in large part, because they know how to time what they’re doing — order it, decide and prioritize what needs to be done.
The next major initiative is — and I’ll be announcing it Friday in Pittsburgh, in detail — is to rebuild the infrastructure — both physical and technological infrastructure in this country — so that we can compete and create significant numbers of really good-paying jobs. Really good-paying jobs.

On the filibuster, Biden asked (referencing a suggestion by Jim Clyburn), “Why not back a filibuster rule that at least gets around issues including voting rights or immigration?”

Among his remarks regarding changes to the filibuster rule, Biden again mentioned his pragmatism:

But here’s the deal: As you observed, I’m a fairly practical guy. I want to get things done. I want to get them done, consistent with what we promised the American people.
. . .
I — we’re going to get a lot done. And if we have to — if there’s complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about.

Asked specifically about a possible failure to pass voting rights legislation leading to Democratic losses in 2022, Biden responded:

What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick. Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line, waiting to vote; deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work; deciding that there will be no absentee ballots under the most rigid circumstances.

Again drawing a distinction between elected officials and voters, he expressed the conviction that Republican voters would (when they learned what was happening, which he characterized as amped up “Jim Crow”) oppose voter suppression activities as “despicable.”

I mean, this is gigantic what they’re trying to do, and it cannot be sustained.
I’m going to do everything in my power, along with my friends in the House and the Senate, to keep that from — from becoming the law.

In response to questions about his running for reelection with Kamala Harris in 2024, he said he wasn’t thinking that far ahead. In fact, his eye was on a fundamental democratic goal for the economy:

I mean, look, this is — the way I view things — I’ve become a great respecter of fate in my life. I set a goal that’s in front of me to get things done for the people I care most about, which are hardworking, decent American people who are getting — really having it stuck to them.
I want to change the paradigm. I want to change the paradigm. We start to reward work, not just wealth. I want to change the paradigm.

Biden contrasted Congressional Republicans unworried about the fiscal effects of multi-trillion dollar tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefitted the top 1%, while being unwilling to support an economic package aimed at Americans who work for a living and stretch to make ends meet:

[L]ook, I meant what I said when I ran. And a lot of you still think I’m wrong, and I respect that. I said, “I’m running for three reasons: to restore the soul, dignity, honor, honesty, transparency to the American political system; two, to rebuild the backbone of this country — the middle class, hardworking people, and people struggling to get in the middle class. They built America, and unions built them.” The third reason I said I was running was to unite the country. And, generically speaking, all of you said, “No, you can’t do that.” Well, I’ve not been able to unite the Congress, but I’ve been uniting the country, based on the polling data. We have to come together. We have to.

Again, he remained pragmatic:

So, from my perspective, you know, it’s a — to me, it’s about just, you know, getting out there, putting one foot in front of the other and just trying to make things better for people — just hardworking people. People get up every morning and just want to figure out how to put food on the table for their kids, to be able have a little bit of breathing room, being able to have — make sure that they go to bed not staring at the ceiling, like my dad, wondering whether — since he didn’t have health insurance, what happens if mom gets sick or he got sick. These are basic things. Basic things.
And I’m of the view that the vast majority of people, including registered Republicans, by and large, share that — that same — that same view, that same sense of what is — you know, what’s appropriate.

Biden spoke at length about the U.S. relationship with China. He mentioned his relationship with Xi Jinping,  the “strong competition” between the two countries, and his commitment to rebuild U.S. alliances to hold China accountable.

In addition, he justified the next legislative focus of his administration – on infrastructure, Build Back Better – not only on the jobs it would create, but on the imperative to compete effectively with our nation’s greatest international rival. He pointed out that China’s investment in infrastructure exceeded by more than three times that of the United States. There was a time when such a challenge would yield strong bipartisan support. I don’t expect it this time, at least not from the Congressional GOP.

Strikingly, Biden’s remarks highlighted the international competition between democracy and autocracy, which pits the U.S. and other democratic countries in opposition to China, Russia, and much of the world.

Look around the world. We’re in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution of enormous consequence. Will there be middle class? How will people adjust to these significant changes in science and technology and the environment? How will they do that? And are democracies equipped — because all the people get to speak — to compete?
It is clear, absolutely clear — and most of the scholars I dealt with at Penn agree with me around the country — that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.
If you notice, you don’t have Russia talking about communism anymore. It’s about an autocracy. Demand decisions made by a leader of a country — that’s what’s at stake here. We’ve got to prove democracy works.

At one time, much of the GOP would rally around this crusade. Sadly, the Republican Party is more committed to extinguishing democracy at home than bolstering it in the international community.

In my view, Joe Biden, thus far, has met the moment. He has a plan and he has stuck with it in a disciplined and focused way. He has kept most of the country with him.

At some point, sooner rather than later, he is going to hit a brick wall and then we'll see how he maneuvers to go over it, around it, or through it -- and how his congressional allies respond. He can't afford to lose, not if he expects Democrats to have any chance in 2022 of holding onto their majorities in the House and the Senate. There won't be many victories with Republicans in charge of either chamber.

Jonathan Cohn, who was exploring the shortcomings of the American health care system long before the Affordable Care Act -- designed to address those failings -- was signed into law, explains:

Passing big pieces of legislation is a lot harder than it looks.

It demands unglamorous, grinding work to figure out the precise contours of rules, spending, and revenue necessary to accomplish your goal. It requires methodical building of alliances, endless negotiations among hostile factions, and making painful compromises on cherished ideals. Most of all, it requires seriousness of purpose—a deep belief that you are working toward some kind of better world—in order to sustain those efforts when the task seems hopeless.

Democrats envisaged a nation with universal healthcare and had spent decades focused on making it a reality. The issue was on the Democratic agenda. They worked to make it happen for millions of folks who, without the ACA, would lack affordable health coverage.

Republicans, indifferent to uninsured Americans and  wedded to the idea of free-markets, had no interest in crafting public policies to expand access to health care. The GOP appears hazily nostalgic for 1950s-era medicine. In spite of Medicare’s enormous popularity, Ronald Reagan’s 1961 warning against "socialized medicine," still resonates.

Ensuring health care for Americans was not on the Republican agenda. In spite of campaigning for repeal and replace election cycle after election cycle, the Republican Party never bothered to come up with a replacement. Cohn again:

The incentive structure in conservative politics didn’t help, because it rewarded the ability to generate outrage rather than the ability to deliver changes in policy. Power had been shifting more and more to the party’s most extreme and incendiary voices, whose great skill was in landing appearances on Hannity, not providing for their constituents. Never was that more apparent than in 2013, when DeMint, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and some House conservatives pushed Republicans into shutting down the government in an attempt to “defund” the Affordable Care Act that even many conservative Republicans understood had no chance of succeeding.

. . .

Republicans remain focused on, and quite skilled at, delivering outrage to their supporters. They continue to show no enthusiasm for passing laws, on health care or anything else for that matter. Over the past few weeks, as Democrats passed that groundbreaking COVID-19 relief initiative, Republicans have put most of their energy into making arguments about “cancel culture.” And although Democrats are already moving on to other pieces of legislation, including plans for infrastructure, a minimum-wage increase, and immigration reform, the most concrete thing on the Republican agenda is talk of reviving a half-dozen Dr. Seuss books that the late children’s author’s estate stopped printing because they contained racist imagery.

Apart from tax cuts for corporations and the one-percent at the national level, and voter suppression and gerrymandering to ensure minority rule at the state level, Republicans don't have much to offer by way of an agenda. They don't have a solution for the uninsured. They don’t have a plan to prevent catastrophic medical costs from bankrupting middle and working class families. Truth be told, apart from angry rhetoric, Republicans have nothing to offer regarding Dr. Seuss's oeuvre. There is no public policy agenda to solve the 'problem' Republicans are railing about.

Outrage may win elections. It won't pass laws. It won't create public policy. It won't offer solutions for the American people.

This week Joe Biden signed the CARES Act, which passed with near-unanimous support from Democrats in each house.  (Maine Congressman Jared Golden was the only Democrat opposing the measure.)

And the Republicans? Although they will tout the benefits to their constituents of this popular bill, every single Republican member of both chambers voted in opposition, because they think blanket opposition is the most reliable way to make gains in the 2022 midterms. As Perry Bacon put it:

All indications are that Republicans think that the way to win back control of the House and/or Senate next year is to repeat their strategy from the Obama years: intense and total opposition to the agenda of the sitting Democratic president. 

Jonathan Bernstein recognizes that the pattern of absolute Republican opposition goes even further back:

It’s … the logical consequence of their long-term strategy for dealing with new Democratic presidents: Oppose everything and regard losing as better than cutting a deal.

That was bound to be the Republican congressional reaction to Biden because it was their reaction to Presidents Bill Clinton in 1993 and Barack Obama in 2009, and in both cases they considered the strategy to have been successful.

The strategy is consistent with the “post-policy Republican Party” (in Bernstein’s assessment circa 2017) that had come to dominate the GOP by the Gingrich era. Republicans offer a “nihilist message of unfocused resentment,” rather than public policy proposals. While this tact may win elections, it is a recipe for dysfunctional governance. It will not solve any problems that Americans experience. It creates frustration and anger.

The Republican playbook, focused on the next election cycle, shrugs off the legislative defeat. From the vantagepoint of the first 50 days of the Biden presidency, the public policy loss appears to be highly significant. The bill (made possible because Democrats understood what President Obama was painfully slow to grasp about Republicans’ strategic refusal to engage constructively) is both larger and more far reaching than it would have been had the minority party been willing to meet Democrats halfway. With broadened eligibility for a generous child tax credit and expanded subsidies for Obamacare, the act in one fell swoop is poised to cut childhood poverty nearly in half (though the provisions must be made permanent at some point in the future). It also protects the pensions of about a million Americans whose multi-employer plans were threatened with insolvency.

Senator Sherrod Brown remarked gleefully on passing this legislation: "This is the best day of my career because we did so many things."

Among the "so many things" are provisions that benefit not just the poor, but the middle class. This act will touch many Americans who work for a living, among them a fraction of Trump voters who might be persuaded to vote Democratic in the future.

Jeff Greenfield suggests that the act is "the most audaciously ambitious social welfare legislation since the New Deal," and goes on to say, "From a political perspective, the potential impact of the rescue plan is hard to overstate; what it represents is the possibility that the Democratic Party has found a tool to reconnect it to a working and middle class whose loyalty has been threatened for well over half a century."

Paul Krugman pronounced, 'The era of “the era of big government is over” is over.'

Well, maybe. But Joe Biden isn't FDR yet. While significant, the CARES Act is only Act 1. Democrats are striving to show that government can have a constructive role in Americans' lives. If they succeed, the Reagan era -- and the belief that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." -- may be coming to an end.

What is clear is that there aren't many Reagan Republicans left in Washington. The optimism is gone. The old bromides, now stale, have been replaced by grievances and conspiracy theories. And the economic solutions that Reagan offered to a 1980s America (while the country was suffering from stagflation and a loss of confidence in government following the Vietnam War and Watergate), haven't worked all that well for most working Americans. (Nor did Donald Trump's only legislative victory, the tax cuts aimed at corporations and the rich.) In 2021, a time of crisis, the Republican Party isn't even trying to provide an answer. Instead, it has set out on a different crusade.

In the words of Richard Yeselson:

The country’s political and economic order is experiencing acute and chronic crises. One of the two major parties has given up hope of winning over a majority of the country’s voters. To achieve and maintain power, the Republicans rely on voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and anachronistic structural features of American governance—federalism, the Electoral College, the Senate, and, within the Senate, an antidemocratic requirement for a supermajority.

Joe Biden, remarkably, has hit all the right notes up till now. Democratic unity has been a thing to behold. But it's early and historical patterns represent a steep climb. It is hardly clear how this turns out.

From NPR yesterday at the White House:

President Biden and Vice President Harris acknowledged a grim milestone Monday: the deaths of more than 500,000 Americans from COVID-19.

Biden and Harris, along with first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, emerged from the White House at sundown. They stood at the foot of the South Portico, covered in 500 candles honoring the dead, and listened to a Marine Corps band play "Amazing Grace" as they held a moment of silence.

Before the brief ceremony, Biden spoke, emotionally and somberly, from the White House. As he often does in moments of tragedy, Biden spoke directly to people who have lost friends and family members. "I know all too well," Biden said, "that black hole in your chest. You feel like you're being sucked into it. The survivor's remorse. The anger. The questions of faith in your soul."

Jamelle Bouie reviews the disastrous failure of the Texas power system and Governor Abbott’s dodge of responsibility by lashing out at the Green New Deal:

Faced with one of the worst crises in the recent history of the state, Republicans have turned their attention away from conditions on the ground and toward the objects of their ideological ire. The issue isn’t energy policy; it is liberals and environmentalists, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a New York congresswoman who was a child when Texas built its first wind farms — and climate activists.

Amid awful suffering and deteriorating conditions, Texas Republicans decided to fight a culture war. In doing so, they are emblematic of the national party, which has abandoned even the pretense of governance in favor of the celebration of endless grievance.

Bouie suggests that, “this is just what it means to be a Republican politician now. Accountability is out, distraction is in. You don’t deal with problems, you make them fodder for zero-sum partisan conflict.”

This pattern is deeply entrenched in the Republican Party. Eight and a half months into Donald Trump’s first year, Jonathan Bernstein, observing a dysfunctional GOP, base voters in revolt, and the disarray of the party’s legislative agenda, placed the blame squarely on the party, not the president.

The hallmark of all this dysfunction is a political party that is rarely interested in, and increasingly unable, to articulate and enact public policy — a post-policy Republican Party.

Reflecting on “the nihilist message of unfocused resentment,” Bernstein saw the pattern in the Tea Party protests beginning in 2009, and earlier as Newt Gingrich and conservative media (“most notably Rush Limbaugh”) became nationally prominent, but he noted that it “dates back to at least Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.”

Governing is hard. Republicans ran on Repeal and Replace for four election cycles: 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. It was effective as a political strategy, but when push came to shove in 2017 (after winning the White House with control of both chambers of Congress), the party had no plan to replace ACA with and the push to repeal failed.

By 2020, the GOP – by now more of a personality cult, than a group committed to conservatism – did not even adopt a party platform, though it approved a resolution affirming, “The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020,would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration.”

In a January 2016 broadcast, Rush Limbaugh talked about Trump’s campaign, his support from the GOP base, and the disconnect with “the so-called conservative movement.”

I think the best way to explain it is that there are a lot of people in this country who are conservative. . . . But that’s not the glue that unites them all. If it were, if conservatism — this is the big shock — if conservatism were the glue, the belief and understanding of deep but commonly understood conservative principles, if that’s what defined people as conservative and was the glue that made the conservative movement a big movement, then Trump would have no chance.

He literally would have no chance. Because, whatever he is he’s not and never has been known as a doctrinaire conservative. . . .

The thing that’s in front of everybody’s face and it’s apparently so hard to believe, it’s this united, virulent opposition to the left and the Democrat Party and Barack Obama. And I, for the life of me, don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that.

Resentment. Grievance. Culture war. Opposing Americans on the other side of the political spectrum. Even when that’s a winning campaign strategy, it’s not a recipe for governing or making policy or resolving practical problems that Americans experience. Or even keeping the power on, so folks can warm their homes and access potable water from the tap.

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify two governing norms that safeguard democracy, which they revisited last fall:

Two basic norms are essential to democracy. One is mutual toleration, or the norm of accepting the legitimacy of one’s partisan rivals. This means that no matter how much we may disagree with—and even dislike—our opponents, we recognize that they are loyal citizens who love the country just as we do and who have an equal and legitimate right to govern. In other words, we do not treat our rivals as enemies.

The second norm is institutional forbearance. Forbearance means refraining from exercising one’s legal right. It is an act of deliberate self-restraint—an underutilization of power that is legally available to us. Forbearance is essential to democracy. . . .

In a previous post I wrote that "Mitch McConnell has distinguished himself as a champion serial violator of forbearance." Both as minority leader and majority leader, the Kentucky senator's machinations set him apart from virtually all his predecessors -- at least in the past half century. (I'm in no position to render a judgment deeper into American history than that.) As a leader in the Senate, McConnell has been a master without peer at violating the spirit of parliamentary rules (for instance, the filibuster) and trampling on institutional norms (the Merrick Garland nomination) to achieve partisan advantage.

The death of Rush Limbaugh offers an occasion to remark on the political shock jock's record as a preeminent violator of the norm of mutual toleration. This exchange regarding Limbaugh's role as a cultural warrior, in an interview in The 19th, illustrates the point:

The 19th: Limbaugh coined the term “feminazi.” What does that mean? How did people respond to it? Is the term still used today? 
To say that feminism is like Nazism is to say feminism is murderous, is ethnocentric violence. When you use phrases like that, it becomes harder to say, “All right, more women in this society are going to work. What are the right policies to support women? How should we think about that?” That’s a conversation we can sit down and have, but one does not sit down and rationally discuss things with a group that you’ve called Nazis. They have no right to be a part of the conversation.
I think those basic ideas that feminism is an attack on traditional masculinity, that feminism is an attempt to control how people live their lives, remain a powerful argument against feminism. I don’t think it’s too far to go to link that then to the sexism that we see in the sort of extreme MAGA right in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. I think [Limbaugh] was an incredibly powerful and important voice in spreading that idea. I think it has been taken up by lots of other people and in lots of other ways that have continued to make that idea, the “feminazi” idea — even if we don’t use that phrase — a force in politics. 
The 19th: How did Limbaugh shape the public’s perception of women? 
He provided a very prominent space for articulating views that, some would have argued, were supposed to have been antiquated or sort of pushed out of polite company. You don’t have to agree with Limbaugh, that, you know, a woman who wants access to birth control is a slut. But you can still think, “Why should the government subsidize immoral women who are having sex outside of prescribed heterosexual committed relationships?”
I think the way to think about his impact is those sorts of outrageous over-the-top statements don’t necessarily mean that all of his listeners agree, but they opened up a lot of space for less extreme but still very dangerous and harmful rhetoric. 

Limbaugh, and of course Newt Gingrich, were pioneers in mainstreaming poisonous, hateful rhetoric into our national political discourse: demonizing the other side. It is impossible to understand how the Republican Party circa 1965 turned into the Trumpian GOP of 2021 without acknowledging the role of these two political actors.

After Limbaugh and Gingrich, political disagreements are as likely to result in tribal warfare, as in civil discussion. We are apt to confront deliberate dysfunction and gridlock, rather than reach agreements (which would require us to meet each other halfway) to resolve our differences and move forward.

It's a sad legacy.

A week ago the Senate voted 57-43 to convict Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial. The House managers made a persuasive case, and the vote -- while falling ten votes short of the two-thirds required for conviction -- constituted a damning, historic rebuke of the former president.

Seven Republicans joined all fifty Democrats in an effort to hold Trump accountable. Then, immediately after that vote, Mitch McConnell denounced Trump's big lie and incitement of a violent insurrection. It was remarkable, and not just because it followed McConnell's vote to acquit or his lame excuse for casting that vote. McConnell spoke truthfully about Trump's sedition, and thus affirmed the House managers' case against Trump.

Of course McConnell was trying to have it both ways with his statement. Huddle with the majority of Republican Senators in refusing to convict Trump, while attempting to diminish Trump's domination of the GOP going forward. It is an awkward maneuver, unsurprisingly, since McConnell is trying to push Trump out of what is still Trump's GOP without alienating Trump-Republicans.

The senior senator from Kentucky, always focused on the next election cycle, doesn't act out of principle. McConnell watched the GOP lose the House, the Senate (with two races in Georgia while Trump refused to let go of the big lie), and the White House under Trump. Motivated by cold, hard political calculation, McConnell is trying to wrest leadership of the party from Trump, because he is convinced that is the most reliable path to reclaiming a Republican majority in the Senate.

"He has," in George Will's words, "his eyes on the prize: 2022, perhaps the most crucial nonpresidential election year in U.S. history. It might determine whether the Republican Party can be a plausible participant in the healthy oscillations of a temperate two-party system."

McConnell is savvier than Trump, and more capable of acting strategically, but he may well lose to the Florida strongman. Other Senate Republicans are pushing back against McConnell's gambit.

Ron Johnson, in a media blitz from Fox to conservative talk radio, has been at the head of the pack among Trump defenders. At least his outlandishness is consistent. Not so with Lindsey Graham ("Count me out. Enough is enough"), though he has returned to Trump's fold in the safe confines of Fox News (from Chris Wallace to Sean Hannity) and plans a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago soon.

And then there are Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, John Kennedy, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, and Tommy Tuberville – all of whom cast votes to support at least one objection to confirming Biden’s Electoral College victory. They would appear to be in Trump's camp.

George Will, who left the Republican Party in June 2016, and almost certainly hopes to rejoin a post-Trump Republican Party, observes:

I do not think anyone should feel confident about the outcome of this ... But there's no one, I think, more long-headed, more meticulous in planning and more steeped in the realities of electoral politics on the Republican side than Mitch McConnell. If I had to bet, I would bet that Mitch McConnell more than holds his own against a man who is a dilettante in the ring against a professional politician.

The outcome of this factional battle, which may play out over multiple election cycles, will be highly consequential for the party and the country. But purging Trump will hardly ensure ridding the Republican Party of authoritarian patterns and practices. The GOP, post-Gingrich, has become increasingly anti-democratic, more than willing to trash governing norms that serve as the guardrails of democracy, and as we have seen, prepared even to countenance violence.

The Democratic Party is the small-d democratic alternative. Looking forward to 2022, 2024, and beyond, the most consequential battles will be Democratic vs. Republican.

At some point on Saturday, while watching the impeachment trial on cable TV, I heard (on either CNN or MSNBC, as I was switching back and forth) that Democrats on the left were erupting on Twitter because the House managers had withdrawn their request to call a witness.

I’m not on Twitter, but it has been easy enough to find objections along these lines on the web. I'll weigh in on the comments of a couple of journalists.

After acknowledging that Jamie Raskin et al. did a "fantastic job" for the most part, Andrew Prokop transitions to the conclusion that they "ended the trial with a surrender." He designates (in "1 winner and 5 losers from Trump's second impeachment trial") the House managers as losers because after demanding and winning a vote to grant witnesses, they dropped their demand.

Walter Shapiro’s assessment is also damning. In a piece titled, “The Botched Democratic Effort to Convict Donald Trump,” he suggests that “what the last day of the impeachment trial will mostly be remembered for is Democratic disarray on the vital question of calling witnesses.”

In my view both of these critiques are wrongheaded. Prokop’s assessment suggests that "it’s unclear why Raskin pushed forward if he was just going to quickly back down. All it ended up doing was raising the hopes of the Democratic base, and then dashing them, politically botching the end of what had been an overall strong performance."

I hope folks in the Democratic base (among millions of others who might be persuaded to vote Democratic in the future) were watching, or (for most of them, who haven’t been watching) will learn what happened in the Senate this past week. Their understanding is critical for our future. The words and exhibits of the House managers comprised a devastating judgment of Trump (no matter that he escaped conviction).

The comment about hopes raised and dashed, however, sounds like a concern, not of the broad Democratic base, but of a smaller group of Twitter fans, avid spectators of political theater (including journalists), and partisans itching for a fight with Republicans at every opportunity (even when the fight lacks strategic import beyond proving that our side is ready for a fight).

Shapiro objects that “the Democrats never asked themselves the obvious strategic question: Why were Republicans so afraid of witnesses, particularly GOP witnesses?” In my view, it's unlikely that Democrats have overlooked any obvious strategic questions; furthermore, riled up Republicans expressing outrage, angry at losing a vote (and watching a handful of Republicans contribute to their loss), making threats, and ready for a fight may not actually be “afraid.” And, even if they were, it is not a tautology that Republicans are afraid of witnesses, therefore, Democrats should insist on witnesses.

Both Prokop and Shapiro express puzzlement at the back and forth: demand witnesses, win the demand, then drop the demand. I’m prepared, in this instance, to accept the most straightforward answer, which also happens to be the one the House managers offered: Congressman Raskin asked to call witnesses because he sought to elicit the testimony of Jaime Herrera Beutler; he succeeded in getting her statement entered into the record. He withdrew the request.

Unlike Shapiro, I’m hardly convinced that, “Just a three-minute news clip of Herrera Beutler telling the Kevin McCarthy story to the Senate would have had more emotional wallop than all the eloquence of the impeachment managers.” Nor am I convinced that the downsides of insisting (without assurance of victory) on getting her on tape would have outweighed whatever was gained by that three-minute clip.

And perhaps I was more impressed by the House managers’ eloquence than Shapiro was.

These folks stepped up, making a vivid, persuasive case against Trump. They weren’t losers. The deal they made behind the scenes on Saturday didn’t eclipse their achievement.

Although the House managers lost a vote in the Senate 57 to 43 (ten short of two-thirds), that vote constituted an indelible, historic rebuke of the former president. Donald Trump must live (and die) with this disgrace. So too the Senators who refused to hold him to account. For that, we can applaud the powerful, moving presentations of the House impeachment managers.

This is cause for celebration, though tinged with disappointment in the Senate's failure to convict and with trepidation for the future because the GOP is still under Trump's thumb. Not every victory is comprehensive. Other battles lie ahead. This was a significant victory nonetheless.

And if Shapiro wants a clip with a wallop for TV, we’ve got -- as a start -- Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, and Kevin McCarthy on tape clearly condemning Trump.

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:

Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

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.