The Tyranny of the Minority and The Extremism of the Republican Party

Part One: The Tyranny of the Minority

Two government professors at Harvard have a new book out called The Tyranny of the Minority, which accurately warns that the Republican Party has been increasingly anti-democratic and right-wing, despite or because of losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. The book, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, is a follow-up to their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. The PBS NewsHour broadcast a decent interview with the authors on 9/14/23. You can view or listen to the 7:25 video or audio at the link above, or read a full transcript, or play the YouTube version below:



Some key excerpts, starting with Ziblatt:

To be a party committed to democracy, you have to do three very simple things. Number one, you have to accept election losses, win or lose. Number two, you have to not use violence to gain or to hold onto power. And then, number three, most critically, in some sense, for mainstream political parties, is you have to distance yourself and be explicit and open about condemning anybody who's an ally of your party that commits any of those first two types of acts.

To be a party committed to democracy, in order for democracy to survive, the political parties in a political system have to ascribe to all three of those principles. This applies to parties of the right and of the left.

And I think what is so concerning, as Steve described, is that over the last four years, we have seen a process of decay within the Republican Party where all three of those principles are violated, but, in particular, most recently among mainstream members of the Senate.

Levitsky:

So, semi-loyal democrats are tricky, because they look like regular politicians. They look like mainstream politicians. They are, in fact, mainstream politicians.

They are in the halls of Congress. They are wearing suits. They look and talk and act like regular small-D democrats. But the key difference is their willingness to tolerate, to condone, to justify, sometimes to protect antidemocratic extremists.

And we have seen throughout history that when mainstream politicians of the left or the right tolerate, condone, protect extremists on the right or the left, democracies get into trouble. And so who are we talking about in the Republican Party today? Mainstream Republican Party leaders, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, leading senators, leading governors.

Both this book and their previous one offer some welcome international context on democracies in other countries and compare them to the United States – challenges, failures and better systems. Ziblatt touches on this briefly in the interview:

One big difference between the United States and a country like Hungary or other countries where democratic backsliding has really established single-party rule, we have constraints and there's a strong opposition to these forces.

That's certainly the case at the national level. What's so striking, though, because we have a federal system, that there are states in the United States where there are assaults on voting rights taking place, where there's extreme levels of gerrymandering, so that it makes it possible for a party that doesn't win the most votes to actually win control of state legislatures, where courts are then packed at the local — at the state level as well.

So what we see across the United States is increasingly a divide between states where you continue to have voting rights and democracy and states where democracy is really under assault.

Ziblatt closes by listing some concrete steps and perhaps some hopeful notes:

Some of the things that we discussed in the book and we propose, we have a 15-point set of suggestions in our last chapter, including things such as eliminating the Electoral College — we're the only democracy in the world with an Electoral College — introducing term limits and retirement ages for the Supreme Court.

We're the only democracy in the world that doesn't have retirement ages or term limits for national judges. We also propose some reforms that don't require constitutional reforms, such as eliminating or at least weakening the filibuster, the filibuster in the United States, since we're the only democracy in the world that has such a strong tool of obstruction in one of our chambers of Congress.

This tool of obstruction blocks very often majority-supported policies, gun control, efforts to address climate change, the minimum wage. Things get held up in the national Congress, which frustrates citizens. So we think there needs to be a kind of a sweeping reform agenda.

And one of the things we have discovered looking at other democracies, I should add, is that, when constitutional reforms come, they tend to cluster together. Momentum is gained. People get – regain faith in their political system. And we think this is very much part of the American tradition.

Where we are operating today without this is outside of the American tradition. And this is something we need to get back to.

This is all on point, and it's heartening to see more people considered mainstream and respectable sound the alarm about U.S. conservatism and the Republican Party. The phrase "tyranny of the minority" is nothing new; Rebecca Solnit and Michelle Goldberg both wrote good pieces with that title in 2017, and similar critiques go back further. Liberals and progressives have been accurately pointing out these dangers for over two decades now at least, but we're often not heeded, which remains a big problem, but nonetheless any truth that breaks through is welcome.

For more on the book, The Harvard Gazette did an interview, Steven Levitsky gave a lectue at Brown University, and the New York Journal of Books and Vox both have reviews.

Part Two: The Extremism of the Republican Party

Most mainstream media outlets remain reluctant to call out the extremism of U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party, and by their reticence help normalize that extremism, however inadvertently. Politeness takes precedence over accuracy. The Republican Party has become increasingly conservative and increasingly right-wing, and as a result, in mainstream media labeling, the actual political positions held by political figures called "centrists" or "moderates" have moved further to the right as well. (Classic Overton window dynamics.)

The PBS NewsHour is a good program overall, but its team seems to have made an editorial decision that any conservative or Republican who isn't far right should be called a "moderate." I've noticed it for several years, and PBS is hardly alone in this approach. Although PBS' Laura Barrón-López is a pretty good reporter and interviewer, she did exactly this early in the interview featured above:

Do you see Senator Romney's retirement as a sign that, rather than weed out the extremists in their party, Republicans are weeding out moderate Republicans like Romney and Liz Cheney?

I'd let this go if other reporters didn't use similar, misleading terminology so consistently. This approach is an ongoing problem in U.S. political coverage – normalizing conservative and Republican extremism, and not just by hacks, but even by people who presumably are trying to provide good reporting. It would be accurate to call Romney more moderate than other members of his party on at least some issues, and Liz Cheney did comport herself well during the January 6th committee hearings. It is fair to say they're being weeded out. But both Romney and Cheney are conservative, in many ways extremely so, with some horrible positions, which not incidentally are common in the Republican Party. As of a 2021 analysis by FiveThirtyEight, Romney voted with the Donald Trump agenda 75.0% of the time (which was less than many of his Republican colleagues) and Cheney voted with the Trump agenda 92.9% of the time.

Romney does deserve some credit for voting to convict Trump in both his impeachment trials (even if his vote "no" that Trump didn't obstruct Congress remains ridiculous), and Romney did put common sense and by his own account conscience above significant political and social pressure. It's technically true but a bit misleading, however, to say that Romney is "the first senator who has ever voted to remove a president of his own party"; Richard Nixon would have been both impeached and convicted by members of his party as well, but he resigned before it could happen. (The House impeaches, and the Senate convicts.) Liz Cheney, meanwhile, voted to impeach Trump in 2021 for the January 6th insurrection, but voted against impeaching him in 2020 for "withholding military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to extract dirt on rivals including Joe Biden," and said in 2022 she does not regret that vote. Her defense that the "evidence that was put on didn’t make the case" strains credulity, given the evidence presented. The Republican votes in favor of Trump in both cases were pure political loyalty and sheer political corruption.

It's worth considering Cheney and Romney's histories in a little more depth. It is nice that Liz Cheney respects election results, low bar though that may be, but she's always been pretty authoritarian herself. Liz Cheney has supported torture, opposed due process, and opposed investigating and holding accountable the Bush administration torture team, notably including her own father, Dick Cheney. This 2010 post covers some of that territory and includes a roundup of links on a disgusting attack ad run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's Orwellian-named group, "Keep America Safe." This 2009 post focuses more on Dick Cheney trying to whitewash his torture record, but also touches on Liz Cheney's efforts to cover for him and the corporate media enabling it. There's also Liz Cheney in 2009 echoing her father's attacks on then-President Barack Obama for proposing to shut down Guantanamo, and arguing for torture to Anderson Cooper, including brazenly lying to his face about the key findings of the Schlesinger report on torture, and shamelessly accusing Obama of covering up the truth of the torture program (she and her cohorts prefer the Orwellian term "enhanced interrogation techniques"). In no world are supporting torture and defending torturers "moderate" positions.

Liz Cheney also can be fairly called a plutocrat, like most of her Republican colleagues, having voted for the Trump tax cuts in 2017, which like the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, were (to quote a 2022 post):

. . . plutocratic, funneling even more money to the wealthiest Americans to please rich donors. Contrary to Republican claims, the corporate tax cuts did not trickle down and the tax plan did not pay for itself; they just gave rich people more money.

As the Council on Foreign Relations summarized in 2022, "income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising." That post, and the website Inequality.org, have some helpful charts. (My most in-depth post on income and wealth inequality was this 2010 one, with several other posts in the category.) Given how extreme income and wealth inequality already is in the United States, especially compared to other developed countries, and the increasing economic pressures on the majority of Americans, I consider it unconscionable (or just evil) to actively work to support more inequality, favoring the rich and powerful. That unconscionable mindset is unfortunately a common one among conservative politicians, but I don't think it can fairly be called "moderate." (I'll add that many political figures labeled "centrist" by the mainstream media are really conservatives in their actual positions, or at the very least establishmentarians.)

Romney was not in the Senate for the Trump tax cut vote, but states on his Senate website that he would have supported it – while simultaneously claiming he "fought against both tax cuts for the wealthy and tax hikes on the middle class"! Romney is counting on readers not knowing his record or details of the law, and not spotting the direct contradiction (or simply believes in his powers of bullshitting). Romney, like many conservatives, isn't merely plutocratic but downright neofeudalistic – when he ran for president in the 2012 election, he adopted his running mate Paul Ryan's extreme policies to give a massive tax cut to the rich but also to gut the social safety net, including ending Medicare as it existed. Romney didn't get the flack an honest assessment of his policies should have received, because voters "simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing." (Much more analysis and links in the stealthy extremist section of this 2012 post.) The same dynamics often play out for conservative political positions – mainstream media outlets seem reluctant to describe them accurately in terms of their likely effects or their extremism, which gives cover for their mostly Republican proponents.

As with almost every Republican presidential nominee since Nixon, Romney used racist dogwhistles. In August 2012, he boasted that "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate," feeding into the racist, bullshit "birther" conspiracies about Barack Obama. He also ran a number of ads with racist dogwhistles about welfare and Medicare, continuing, as Chauncey DeVega pointed out, "the Southern Strategy, and the politics of white racial resentment." Similar dynamics were at play with Romney's infamous remarks in 2012 that 47 percent of Americans would back Obama "no matter what" because they "believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them," and who "pay no income tax." Romney's claims were at best grossly misleading, and taken in larger context were outright false (as I covered in more depth in one section of a broader 2014 post, which did also cover Romney's multiple, contradictory revisions about his remarks).

Donald Trump lies almost constantly, and may be unbeatable in that category. But during his presidential campaign in 2011–2012, Mitt Romney told at least 917 falsehoods that Steve Benen diligently chronicled and fact-checked, and many were substantial lies at that. This wasn't a new trait, either; Romney was lying and bullshitting at least as far back as his 2007–2008 presidential run. (I have posts from 2007 on some Romney "hogwash" and the sophistry of his anti-JFK speech.)

Mitt Romney has often acted as other people are beneath him and lack the capacity to see through obvious bullshit, as when he argued opposite positions to different audiences in subsequent weeks. (The same trend comes up in Steve Benen's exhaustive series.) The most infamous example is probably from 2011, when at the Iowa State Fair Romney argued against increasing taxes on corporations by condescendingly telling a man that "Corporations are people, my friend." When the crowd responded by yelling out the obvious point, "No, they're not!" Romney replied with a straw man, "Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?" Besides these arguments being ridiculous on the merits, it's interesting that Romney believed they would be effective politically. Faced with a crowd who wanted to protect the social safety net, raise taxes on the rich and corporations, and presumably overturn the Citizens United decision – all for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans – Romney essentially argued that corporate profits benefit stockholders (who are, technically, "people") and thus critiques of economic inequality and unequal power were invalid. Romney did express (smugly) what and who he actually values in society, as he did with his 47 percent remarks, and also betrayed an entitled, privileged narcissism that seems extremely prone to bullshitting audiences he holds in slight to significant contempt. Although Trump remains much worse in this arena, Romney shares some of Trump's worst traits.

For much more on Romney, see Jon Perr's comprehensive 7/4/22 post, "Mitt Romney Is in Denial," which superbly shows how Romney is no elder statesman, and is in fact a raging hypocrite who shares much of the blame for the current problems in American politics, which Romney instead tries to blame on 'both sides.'

So it's fine to give Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney credit for their pro-democracy moments. And it's sadly probably accurate that Romney's replacement will be worse, and his departure means that congressional Republicans as a whole will become more extreme. But let's not ignore Romney and Cheney's records and other positions. Every time conservatives and Republicans get worse, there's a tendency to look back at some earlier time with rose-colored glasses and laud an earlier generation of conservatives and Republicans, who might have a bit better in some respects, but were honestly still pretty awful. It's both possible and necessary to acknowledge both realities.

And how awful are their fellow conservatives and Republicans? The vast majority of congressional Republicans voted to defend Trump's attempted coup on January 6th, 2021 and have fought against any accountability for Trump and his cohorts. Most of the Republican presidential candidates (or vice-presidential candidates) would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted felon. Republican legislators in at least 11 states have been working to make it harder to vote. Conservatism has always had an antidemocratic strain, but the Republican Party has become increasingly, overtly anti-democratic and extreme.

Conservatives and Republicans are fighting hard against LGBT rights. They're also fighting against accurate discussions of racial issues and history, with a particularly egregious Florida teaching standard claiming that slavery benefited some black people (a view that Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has promoted several times). Republicans are still both trying to gut the social safety net and lying about it. And as has been observed before, the Republican Party is really the only major political party in a developed nation that both denies climate change and opposes universal health care. Unfortunately, conservatives and Republicans have chosen to be bad on almost every issue. (A 2018 post surveys their policies in the most depth.)

As of the writing of this post, Congress has narrowly averted yet another Republican-led attempt to shut down the government. As the BBC points out, this doesn't happen in other developed countries. And as many folks have pointed out, the shutdowns are Republican attempts to enforce agendas that they cannot achieve democratically. (Conservative and Republican policies tend to be both bad on the merits and unpopular.)

Media coverage has occasionally correctly blamed the Republican Party for this latest shutdown attempt, but as Dan Froomkin, Ian Milhiser and James Fallows via driftglass have pointed out, there's still a strong media tendency to blame 'both sides.' This is inaccurate, irresponsible and dangerous. (It's also nothing new. I haven't covered every shutdown attempt in depth, but covered the same dynamics in 2011's "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" and " 'Serious' Culpability on the Debt Ceiling Hostage Situation" and 2012's "Why We Can't Have Nice Things." See also the more general false equivalencies category.)

Defeating the tyranny of the minority depends on conscientious lawmakers, civil servants, activists and citizens. But it also depends on more accurate and honest reporting. Extremism should not be normalized, blame and credit should be justly and proportionally assigned, and anti-democratic rhetoric and actions must be called out.

Conservatives Are Still Awful (Feb. 2023 Edition)

The state of the union and its responses earlier this month were revealing for both rhetoric and policy. President Joe Biden started his state of the union speech on a collegial tone, saying nice things to the conservative Republicans in Congress. He did draw distinctions between their policies, and Republicans booed and yelled at him at times, but that said more about them than Biden. He repeatedly spoke about working together, and in at least one poll, 72 percent of viewers had a positive reaction to the speech.

In sharp contrast, in the official Republican response, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders quickly shifted to a right-wing, hyperbolic, cultural war speech designed to rile up Fox News viewers and the conservative base, not to persuade anyone else. A few sentences in, she claimed that "Democrats want to rule us with more government control," and the core of her speech consisted of even more straw men and bullshit:

[Biden's] the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is. In the radical left's America, Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race, but not to love one another or our great country. Whether Joe Biden believes this madness or is simply too weak to resist it, his administration has been completely hijacked by the radical left. The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy. 

She was correct about the last part, but not in the way she meant. The rest of her speech featured plenty of other charged and ridiculous rhetoric:

Upon taking office just a few weeks ago I signed Executive Orders to ban CRT, racism, and indoctrination in our schools, eliminate the use of the derogatory term 'Latinx' in our government, repealed COVID orders and said never again to authoritarian mandates and shutdowns. . . .

After years of Democrat attacks on law enforcement and calls to defund the police, violent criminals roam free, while law-abiding families live in fear. . . .

We are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn't start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is, your freedom of speech.

Perhaps her most outrageous moment was invoking the Little Rock Nine, the black students who faced harassment in 1957 for attending the previously segregated, whites-only Little Rock Central High School. On PBS the night of the speeches, Jonathan Capehart reacted strongly to the hypocrisy and gall of Huckabee Sanders:

Regarding Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sander's offensive speech... "I'm trying not to levitate from my chair, because she leaned so hard into the culture wars, that she slid right into ignorance." @NewsHour #sotu2023 pic.twitter.com/DCDTBYsmdZ

— Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) February 8, 2023

This speech, I'm, I'm, trying not to levitate from my chair, because there were so many, she leaned so hard into the culture wars that she just slid right into ignorance. And for her to say, to revel in the fact that an alum of Little Rock Central High School, and lauding the Little Rock Nine, and their stature, they're memorialized – when the Republicans, particularly in Florida, but I guess now in Arkansas, are going to make it illegal for students to learn about why the Little Rock Nine are significant and in bronze, in Little Rock. This speech was entirely offensive.

Another poll reported that viewers found Huckabee Sanders' speech more extreme and divisive than Biden's. It's hard to imagine that many people outside the conservative base found her compelling.

The most striking moment for policy – and issues of accuracy – in the state of the union was Biden saying, "Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans – some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I'm not saying it's a majority…" He was shouted down by Republicans, most notably Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who yelled "Liar!" But of course, Biden was telling the truth. As political historian Heather Cox described the scene the next day:

Biden did something astonishing. He tricked the Republicans into a public declaration of support for protecting Social Security and Medicare. He noted that a number of Republicans have called for cutting, or even getting rid of, Social Security and Medicare. This is simply a fact—it is in Senator Rick Scott's (R-FL) pre-election plan; the Republican Study Committee's budget; statements by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Ron Johnson (R-WI); and so on—but Republicans booed Biden and called him a liar for suggesting they would make those cuts, and they did so in public.

Seeming to enjoy himself, Biden jumped on their assertion, forcing them to agree that there would be no cuts to Social Security or Medicare. It was budget negotiation in real time, and it left Biden holding all the cards.

The Hill provided a nice roundup of specific statement from conservative Republicans in support of cutting Social Security and Medicare, and Chris Hayes and Seth Meyers presented good video segments. (The most striking may be Senator Mike Lee of Utah saying, "It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.")

Wanting to gut the social safety net, and Social Security and Medicare in particular, are nothing new for conservatives and Republicans. Sticking just to this century, in 2005, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but failed because his plan was wildly unpopular, not to mention awful policy that would have shifted the program from a social guarantee to gambling on the market.

Former Speaker of the House, Republican Paul Ryan, proposing cutting both programs for years. In 2012, Ryan became Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's vice presidential running mate, and Romney adopted Ryan's polices for his campaign. The "Stealthy Extremist" section of a 2012 post, "The Four Types of Conservatives," provides a bevy of links and passages analyzing Paul Ryan's policies attacking the social safety net. Read it for far more detail, but the key point may be Paul Krugman's: the objections to Ryan's plans weren't solely that they were cruel; Ryan's plans were "disingenuous and fraudulent." Not only were his goals immoral, Ryan constantly lied about the numbers. Of course, that's a feature, not a bug, of many conservative policies. They're awful on the merits, and don't fare well when discussed honestly and accurately.

On the PBS News Hour this month, conservative Representative Tom Cole (R-OK), spoke about the federal budget and cutting "entitlements," meaning Social Security and Medicare, and insisted that cutting military spending was not the answer. Cole managed to sound more reasonable than many of his fellow conservatives to casual viewers, even agreeing to a question about raising taxes that "revenue would have to be on the table." Cole omitted plenty, though, and it's one thing to pretend to be a reasonable conservative to the PBS and NPR crowds and another thing to act accordingly. In 2017, Cole voted for the Trump tax cuts, which were a budget-busting, funneling of more money to the wealthy. And the best way to lower the costs of Medicare and Medicaid would be to join the civilized nations of the world and pass universal health care. Cole was practicing the classic conservative starve the beast strategy – run up the debt with tax cuts for the rich and military spending, and then claim the debt requires gutting the social safety net.

It's worth pointing out that the problem is not solely Republicans, but conservatives, a group that includes many political figures the mainstream press calls "centrists" and "moderates." In 2010, Barack Obama asked Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles to head up a commission to look at fiscal reform. The commission never managed to agree on official recommendations, but that didn't stop Simpson in particular from publicly advocating for particular policies, most notably cutting taxes on the wealthy and cutting the social safety net. This is the same crap peddled since at least the Reagan era, whether it's called supply-side economics, voodoo economics, trickle-down economics, or just conservative economics. Strangely enough, for Simpson and many other "very sensible centrists," giving more money to the rich and powerful is never a problem – plutocracy and oligarchy are just fine – but social programs that will help the vast majority of Americans are somehow clearly unsustainable. (Digby wrote quite a bit about the Simpson and Bowles gambits at the time, and has since written about their successors.)

On February 18th, Heather Cox Richardson followed up her initial take on the state of the union with a great summary of conservative and Republican policies – their paucity, their unpopularity, and their history. Here's a lengthy quotation, but you should be reading Richardson regularly anyway and it's an excellent primer:

Republican leaders are recognizing that the sight of Republican lawmakers heckling the president of the United States didn't do their party any favors.

It not only called attention to their behavior, it prompted many news outlets to fact-check President Biden's claim that Republicans had called for cuts to Social Security and Medicare or even called to get rid of them. Those outlets noted that while Republicans have repeatedly said they have no intention of cutting those programs, what Biden said was true: Republican leaders have repeatedly suggested such cuts, or even the elimination of those programs, in speeches, news interviews, and written proposals.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Alexander Bolton of The Hill that Republicans should stick to "reasonable and enduring policy" proposals. "I think we're missing an opportunity to differentiate," he said. "Focus on policy. If you get that done, it will age well."

But therein lies the Republican Party's problem. What ARE its reasonable and enduring policies? One of the reasons Biden keeps pressuring the party to release its budget is that it's not at all clear what the party stands for.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to issue any plans before the 2022 midterm election, and in 2020, for the first time in its history, the party refused to write a party platform. The Republican National Committee simply resolved that if its party platform committee had met, it "would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration." So, it resolved that "the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda."

Cutting Social Security is a centerpiece of the ideology the party adopted in the 1980s: that the government in place since 1933 was stunting the economy and should be privatized as much as possible.

In place of using the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Reagan Republicans promised that cutting taxes and regulation would free up capital, which investors would then plow into new businesses, creating new jobs and moving everybody upward. Americans could have low taxes and services both, they promised, for "supply-side economics" would create such economic growth that lower tax rates would still produce high enough revenues to keep the debt low and maintain services.

But constructing an economy that favored the "supply side" rather than the "demand side"—those ordinary Americans who would spend more money in their daily lives—did not, in fact, produce great economic growth or produce tax revenues high enough to keep paying expenses. In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan called the federal deficit, then almost $74 billion, "out of control." Within two years, he had increased it to $208 billion. The debt, too, nearly tripled during Reagan's term, from $930 billion to $2.6 trillion. The Republican solution was to cut taxes and slash the government even further.

As early as his 1978 congressional race, George W. Bush called for fixing Social Security's finances by permitting people to invest their payroll tax themselves. In his second term as president in 2005, he called for it again. When Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida proposed an 11-point (which he later changed to a 12 points) "Plan to Rescue America" last year, vowing to "sunset" all laws automatically after five years, the idea reflected that Republican vision. It permitted the cutting of Social Security without attaching those cuts to any one person or party.

But American voters like Social Security and Medicare and, just as they refused Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security, recoiled from Scott's plan. Yesterday, under pressure from voters and from other Republicans who recognized the political damage being done, Scott wrote an op-ed saying his plan was "obviously not intended to include entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security—programs that hard-working people have paid into their entire lives—or the funds dedicated to our national security." (The online version of the plan remains unchanged as of Saturday morning.)

Scott attacked Biden for suggesting otherwise, but he also attacked Mitch McConnell, who also condemned Scott's plan, accusing them of engaging in "shallow gotcha politics, which is what Washington does." He also accused "Washington politicians" for "lying to you every chance they get." Scott's venom illustrated the growing rift in the Republican Party.

Since the 1990s, Republicans have had an ideological problem: voters don't actually like their economic vision, which has cut services and neglected infrastructure even as it has dramatically moved wealth upward. So to keep voters behind them, Republicans hammered on social and cultural issues, portraying those who liked the active government as godless socialists who were catering to minorities and women. "There is a religious war going on in this country," Republican Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention in 1992. "It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America."

A generation later, that culture war has joined with the economic vision of the older party to create a new ideology. More than half of Republicans now reject the idea of a democracy based in the rule of law and instead support Christian nationalism, insisting that the United States is a Christian nation and that our society and our laws should be based in evangelical Christian values. Forty percent of the strongest adherents of Christian nationalism think "true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country," while 22% of sympathizers agree with that position.

Scott released his 11-point plan because, he said, "Americans deserve to know what we will do when given the chance," and his plan reflected the new Republicans. Sunsetting laws and tax cuts were only part of the plan. He promised to cut government jobs by 25% over the next five years, "sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt," get rid of all federal programs that local governments can take over, cut taxes, "grow America's economy," and "stop Socialism."

But it also reflected the turn toward Christian nationalism, centering Christianity and "Judeo-Christian values" by investing in religious schools, adoption agencies, and social services and calling for an end to abortion, gender-affirming care, and diversity training. It explicitly puts religion above the law, saying "Americans will not be required to go against their core values and beliefs in order to conform to culture or government."

The document warned that "[a]n infestation of old, corrupt Washington insiders and immature radical socialists is tearing America apart. Their bizarre policies are intentionally destroying our values, our culture, and the beliefs that hold us together as a nation." "Is this the beginning of the end of America?" it asks. "Only if we allow it to be."

That new worldview overlaps with the extremist wing that is trying to take over the Republican Party. It was at the heart of the far-right challenge to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). It informs Florida governor Ron DeSantis's abandonment of small-government Republicanism in favor of using the power of the state government to enforce a "Christian" vision, including on businesses.

Conservative economic policies don't need to overlap with authoritarianism and (in America and some other countries) Christian nationalism, but they do so quite easily, and Richardson is wise not to look at efforts to gut the social safety net in isolation. Put another way, to quote a post from last December, "U.S. conservatism focuses on fighting for power and privilege; it believes in bullying to defeat merit, and sometimes democracy itself. It is almost always plutocratic, often bigoted, and sometimes authoritarian (which intertwines quite naturally and toxically with the first two)." (The same post looked at how many conservatives and Republicans supported the January 6th, 2021, insurrection and support similar efforts in the future.)

As has been the case for decades, all that U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party can seem to offer the American people are spite, fear, lies, and awful policies that hurt the middle class and the poor. But the unequal, unfair, oppressive power structure they're fighting for is even more dangerous than their policies themselves.

The Worse Demons of Our Nature

In calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act, LBJ was summoning what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. He was asking – no, he was demanding – that we transcend bigotry and make good at last upon the promises we made to each other in declaring our nationhood and professing our love of liberty. The political process responded, as it should when big ideas come along, to ride the current of history.
– Gerald Ford, speaking at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in 1997.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
– Donald Trump, announcing his run for president in 2015.

If progress sometimes depends on successfully appealing to "the better angels of our nature" of kindness, compassion and a sense of equality to extend rights, respect and aid to those less privileged, then regressive and oppressive forces often rely on the worse demons of our nature, appealing to fear, anxiety, greed, bigotry, jealousy, spite and the urge to domineer others. Unfortunately, for decades, U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party have stood for plutocracy and bigotry. Meanwhile, their authoritarian strain has grown stronger, to the point that a significant faction is threatening democracy itself in the United States. The most popular political figures for the conservative base are those who give them permission to deny reality and to behave awfully toward their fellow Americans.

Donald Trump remains a prime example. Although some conservatives and Republicans have tried to disown him, he's no aberration, and instead acts firmly in the conservative tradition. (See the post linked above for more, and also for "conservative" versus "Republican"; this post will treat the terms pretty interchangeably unless the distinction matters.) Trump is just less stealthy and more likely to say the quiet parts out loud, lumbering and lashing out as the monster from the conservative id. A bully and a bullshitter, he heavily traffics in spite, and the conservative base loves him for it. He stands for power and privilege over merit, in many noxious flavors – plutocracy, bigotry, self-aggrandizement, political party over country, and authoritarianism over empiricism. He wants to be praised even when he does a poor job, wants his ass kissed at all times, and denies any reality he doesn't like. A few key incidents exemplify his rotten character and the destructive traits he's encouraged in his supporters, from the rabid fans to the more quietly complicit.

Trump's 2015 announcement of his presidential run put his bigotry front and center, a longstanding personal trait and a central part of his appeal to his voters. Sean Spicer's first press conference for Trump occurred shortly after Trump's inauguration, which drew a much smaller crowd than Obama's. Spicer aggressively lied to please Trump's ego, falsely claiming that "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe." It was a bizarre performance. Trump wanted everyone to accept and repeat his obvious lie, kissing his ass as he was used to, and like other sycophants, Spicer was happy to feed Trump's vanity. That spectacle was appalling enough on its own, but it's particularly remarkable that Trump and Spicer apparently, delusionally, thought they could bully the press into playing along. (Afterward, Trump campaign strategist Kellyanne Conway infamously denied that Spicer was lying, but was instead offering "alternative facts.") Anyone who wasn't already alarmed by Trump and his cronies should have been by that incident. (Anyone who cheered it was troubling.)

In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, causing billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration's response was underwhelming, but Trump bragged about what a "great job" he had done, sought praise, blithely compared the disaster's death count to other disasters, and complained about any criticism. In 2019, Trump tweeted about Puerto Rico as if was another country instead of a territory of the United States, lied about the aid given to it, and fought against giving any more aid, even though it was sorely needed. In this case, Trump's fixation on vanity over reality had more dire consequences than the Spicer press conference. The same was certainly true about the Trump administration's abysmal response to the global COVID-19 pandemic; a Lancet study released in February 2021 concluded that the U.S. could have avoided a staggering 40% of its COVID-19 deaths.

Conservatives and Republicans largely haven't cared about Trump's broken promises and lack of accomplishments, and signaled this attitude even before the election. A June 2016 article in The Washington Post found that "Many of Trump’s fans don’t actually think he will build a wall — and they don’t care if he doesn’t." Trump's aspirations, and anger directed at people they hated, were enough for them. Trump himself might have wanted a wall, but was too lazy to actually do the work to get one. (One that didn't fall over or wasn't easily scalable, anyway.) His supporters apparently – shockingly – haven't even cared if Trump's negligence and the conservative noise machine's persistently anti-science, anti-vaccine messages have made them sick or even killed them. The data show that "pro-Trump counties continue to suffer far higher COVID death tolls." When the Republican Party was first being called an "authoritarian death cult," it might have been slight hyperbole, but sadly, the pandemic showed the label was dismayingly accurate. After seeing everything Trump and his administration did and failed to do, more Americans voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. The most accurate statement Trump has probably ever made was him bragging in 2016 that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters."

One of the most telling incidents about Trump, conservatives and the Republican Party was the October 2016 leaking of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape with Trump bragging about his fame allowing him to sexually assault women and get away with it. ("When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.") The tape should have sunk his campaign, and some conservatives and Republicans condemned Trump, but the majority of them (including some critics) still voted for him in 2016. (Conservative claims of higher moral values than their political opponents have always been bullshit, of course.) Trump apologized when the tape came out, but by November 2017, he started pretending that the tape was a fake and it wasn't him. This is batshit crazy stuff (as several people pointed out), or more to the point, it's authoritarian behavior – Trump once again telling those surrounding him that he wants them to kiss his ass, deny objective reality, and agree with a lie favoring him.

One of Trump's favorite terms is "fake news" – which, of course, means true stories that Trump doesn't like. It's hard to quantify to what degree Trump's fans believe him when he claims news is "fake," just as it was hard to tell how many of Rush Limbaugh's listeners believed the constant lies he told, or to what degree Fox News viewers or other heavy consumers of conservative media believe its coordinated propaganda. Many obviously do believe whatever lies they're told, including lies about accurate reporting. But Trump, Limbaugh, and many other conservative figures have always sold both a sense of superiority and one of persecution to their followers; their pitch is that they're much better than their chosen political opponents, who not only treat them terribly unfairly but are a grave threat to the righteous conservative faithful and thus the country. Limbaugh's legacy wasn't just lies, it was his nastiness, an approach that Ann Coulter, Trump, Tucker Carlson and countless conservative commentators and grifters have used for decades. When Trump calls something "fake news," it's not an empirical assessment of accuracy; it's the assertion of an authoritarian leader. He's not simply lying or bullshitting; he's essentially saying "I know you hate these people and I do, too." He's giving his followers permission to hate others, and to reject reality. The professional conservative operatives know that Trump's "fake news" attacks are bullshit, but view them as useful. Within the conservative base, some of them likely know deep down if not consciously that Trump is lying but don't really care. He lets them pretend; he lets them wallow in gleeful spite. To quote a 2020 post:

The conservative base does not hate many of their fellow Americans because they believe false things. They believe false things because they hate many of their fellow Americans. This is one of many reasons conventional fact-checking does not work on them.

The white supremacist group the Proud Boys was excited after the first 2020 presidential debate when Trump wouldn't outright condemn them and instead told them to "stand back and stand by." They viewed it as an endorsement and encouragement. More mainstream Trump supporters hold less extreme views, but the core dynamic and Trump's primary appeal remains similar: he encourages the worse demons of their nature, giving them permission to behave horribly toward their fellow Americans and to deny any realities they don't like.

These dynamics became the most dangerous to date with Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, and with the resulting insurrection attempt on January 6th, 2021. It's not possible to discuss the insurrection in depth here (check out Digby's extensive archives on the subject), but the House select committee hearings and other reports have established (among other things) that Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the election outcome long before his actual loss, plotted ways to overturn the election, knew that he had lost, collected roughly a quarter of billion dollars to fight the election results, encouraged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, approved of their violence, and didn't care if people died, including his own vice president. (Of course, people did die as a result of the insurrection.) If ever the actions of a president were cause for removal from office and other consequences, this was it – trying by multiple means, including violence, to overturn a fair election. Likewise, if ever there was a political morality test "gimme," this was it – condemn the insurrection, stand for democracy, put the country's well-being above other interests, and hold the transgressors responsible. This was a moment for even hyperpartisan hacks to drop their habitual bullshit and heed the better angels of their nature.

Americans as a whole responded better than Republicans. A 2021 Monmouth poll found that 72% of respondents thought "riot" was an appropriate description of the January 6th events, and 56% thought that "insurrection" was appropriate. But 33% also felt it was a "legitimate protest." That's a minority, thankfully, but a significant, disturbing minority. Many conservative commentators have tried to downplay the extremism and danger of the insurrection. A December 2021 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll showed that Republicans as a whole likewise downplayed the violence and danger of the insurrection compared to their fellow Americans. Congressional Democrats impeached Donald Trump for a second time for his "incitement of insurrection," but despite all the evidence, only 10 House Republicans voted for impeachment and 197 voted against. In the Senate, only 7 Republicans voted for conviction and 43 voted for acquittal, so the two-thirds majority required for conviction was not reached. As they often have for decades, Republicans put their party before their country. Adding to those damning actions, in early 2022, the Republican National Committee censured Republican U.S. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House's January 6th committee, claiming that they had (emphasis added) "been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic." (Some Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, did object to the censure.) Not content with that degree of Orwellian doublespeak, the RNC also declared that the January 6th insurrection represented "legitimate political discourse." Trump loyalist and Republican Senator Josh Hawley defended the RNC, saying, "Listen, whatever you think about the RNC vote, it reflects the view of most Republican voters." If so, we need to question if the majority of Republican voters support democracy and accountability for trying to overthrow it – and if the answer to the second part is "no," then the answer to the first part is realistically "no" as well, despite any lip service to the contrary. The overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans have failed their country on both counts.

The recent midterm elections offered concerning developments, but also some bright spots. It bears mentioning that good people do exist who identify as conservatives, whether we call them due process conservatives or something else, even if they're significantly outnumbered in the U.S. conservative movement and in the Republican Party. It's heartening that in the midterm elections, Republican candidates who were election deniers, touting Donald Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen from him, often did not do well. 'Election deniers running for secretary of state were the election's biggest losers,' and election denial hurt the Republican Party overall. Those losses were aided by self-described conservatives and Republicans.

Still, it's very troubling that the Republicans ran 291 election deniers, and 170 of them won. And roughly 70% or Republicans believe Trump's Big Lie. A huge portion of one of America's two major political parties believes a significant, dangerous falsehood (or pretends to). Republicans were building an "army" to overturn election results by "challeng[ing] voters at Democratic-majority polling places," which in actual practice has often meant harassment. In Cochise County, Arizona, Republican officials refused to certify the 2022 midterm election results "despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count" simply because they didn't like Democrats winning some top races. Interestingly, holding out had the potential to backfire on them, because if all 47,000 plus county votes were thrown out, some elections would flip to Democrats. Weeks later, the officials finally complied with a court order and certified the election. (The Republicans might still face criminal charges for their breach of duty.) This is sore loser behavior, childish, petulant, entitled and dangerous.

More alarming, as of May 2022, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, "nearly 400 [voter-]restrictive bills had been introduced in legislatures nationwide," and the chief cause seems to be "white racial resentment." And the conservative-dominated Supreme Court recently heard arguments for Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina gerrymandering case. Conservatives – backed by plenty of dark money – are pushing an "independent state legislature theory,” which means state legislatures could ignore state courts and their own state constitutions, allowing them to rig elections in their favor. It's a batshit theory with "exceedingly thin" evidence, but the North Carolina state legislature is controlled by Republicans, so they think this will solidify their domination even further. They're far from alone; Pennsylvania Republicans have worked to rig the courts to bypass judges who might uphold fair elections instead of favoring Republicans. Similarly, Republican candidate for Wisconsin governor, Tim Michels, vowed that if he won in the 2022 midterms, Republicans would "never lose another election." Michels thankfully lost, but democracy itself shouldn't be imperiled every election.

Conservative opposition to fair play is nothing new. To look just at this past decade, after Barack Obama's re-election in 2012, some Republicans discussed changing their approach, given that demographic trends did not favor them. Any such renouncing of the evils of plutocracy, bigotry or unfair play was thrown out, however, when a perfect storm of factors and an outdated, idiotic electoral system allowed Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016 over Hillary Clinton despite losing the popular vote. Republicans, who had engaged in unprecedented obstructionism in blocking judicial nominees under Obama, were happy to turn around and appoint as many conservative and far-right judges as they could, including stealing two supreme court seats. (They also came up with self-congratulatory, alternative realities of those events to justify their actions.)

This general, dishonorable approach is not likely to change, regardless of the Republican leadership. Now that Trump apparently cost Republicans victories in the midterms, some Republicans have suggested moving past him, but we've seen this dance before; they're sure to embrace him again if he wins the nomination for 2024, or happily go with Ron DeSantis and his similarly awful policies and comparable cult of personality. (On the PBS NewsHour on 12/16/22, conservative commentator David Brooks cited a USA Today poll saying that, "by 2-1 margins, [Republican voters] want Trumpism, his approach, but they don't want Donald Trump." Notice Brooks trying to distance Trump from conservatism, too.) Trump is horrible, but he's symptomatic of a much deeper rot in American conservatism and the Republican Party. If current trends continue, any candidate who promises power and sells spite is likely to do well.

If major Republican nominees for the 2024 elections aren't reality-deniers, bigots or authoritarians, it'll be a relief, albeit clearing an awfully low bar. Even when conservatives and Republicans don't directly imperil democracy, when they get in power, unfortunately, things typically get much worse for the vast majority of Americans; the system is increasingly rigged against them. The George W. Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 primarily benefitted the most wealthy Americans, as intended, just as Ronald Reagan's tax cuts in the 1980s were. The Trump tax cuts were similarly plutocratic, funneling even more money to the wealthiest Americans to please rich donors. Contrary to Republican claims, the corporate tax cuts did not trickle down and the tax plan did not pay for itself; they just gave rich people more money. Conservative economic policies, whether they're called supply-side, trickle-down, Reaganomics or something else, have never delivered, as decades of evidence show. It strains credulity to pretend that conservatives actually believe that their policies work for anyone other than the rich. (It also would be nice if mainstream political coverage more prominently covered the actual consequences of policies, considered the corruption angle, and didn't pretend that conservatives really believe the bullshit they spout.) But on this subject and many others, conservatives and Republicans publicly deny reality. It's rarely as blatant as denying an election, but it's still harmful.

It's not as if conservatives' awful economic and fiscal policies are an outlier, either, or that their echo chamber is something new. In 2010, self-described libertarian Julian Sanchez wrote several posts bemoaning "epistemic closure" in conservative discourse, for example, sticking with Fox News and rejecting information from mainstream, credible outlets like The New York Times, even among supposed conservative elites. A few conservatives agreed with Sanchez whereas many others didn't, and either didn't really understand or truly engage with the critique. Sanchez' take was welcome but utterly unsurprising for anyone who followed conservative media (including the blogosphere) in previous years. (For a more detailed look at conservative policies, see a 2018 post, "What's to Be Done About Conservatives?") Trump supporters merely continued the epistemic closure trend, living in "an alternative universe" and loving his rage and rejection of any media outlet he didn't like.

So where do we go from here? Although it's heartening that American democracy has survived the 2020 elections, the 2021 insurrection, and the 2022 midterm elections, it shouldn't be at risk in every election. And the country's well-being shouldn't be imperiled every time conservatives gain power, even if they abide by election results. We can always expect conservatives to try to rebrand themselves as they've done frequently, and trying to call mainstream American conservatism "Trumpism" as if it's some new aberration and not the continuation of past awfulness is just the latest example. The Democratic Party has plenty of problems we've discussed before and will again, but the Republican Party is almost completely toxic and corrupt, and now often explicitly antidemocratic. It needs to lose for about 20 years before its leaders consider changing their approach. Unfortunately, even that won't be sufficient, because conservative billionaires, think tanks and dark money organizations are always playing a long game to make the U.S. more conservative, including overturning laws and principles that most citizens quite reasonably believe long settled. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court's decision to ignore precedent and sound medical practice to overturn Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years is the most glaring recent example, but it's hardly the only one, nor is it likely to be the last one.

I'm not sure a conservatism exists that is truly beneficent, helping the majority of people, and better than other political philosophies, but it does seem that as an ideology, or as actually practiced by real people, conservatism has less harmful strains than the current ascendant one. The people critiqued in this post don't need to be this horrible; it's a choice. U.S. conservatism focuses on fighting for power and privilege; it believes in bullying to defeat merit, and sometimes democracy itself. It is almost always plutocratic, often bigoted, and sometimes authoritarian (which intertwines quite naturally and toxically with the first two). To reference two older posts, in terms of "The Four Types of Conservatives," the Sober Adults are in ever shorter supply, and the Reckless Addicts, Proud Zealots, and Stealthy Extremists have even more power. Conjunctions of stupid, evil and crazy have become increasingly common. Meanwhile, liberals and other nonconservatives cannot directly fix conservatism or the Republican Party, either (despite occasional pundit whining that somehow they should). Conservatives have to do that themselves. In the meantime, it's the job of everyone else to hold conservatives accountable, keep them out of power (through democratic means, naturally), and work for a fairer and more functional system.

This isn't the cheeriest post, but hope still exists. The midterm election presented some encouraging results. And in August in conservative Kansas, 59% of voters "rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment . . . that would have said there was no right to an abortion in the state," in a sharp rebuke of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The pandemic exposed how many workplace practices and other rules are bullshit, even if many labor and human rights fights still need to be won. It's also easy to forget about some lasting social progress. Support for same-sex marriage now stands at 71%, up from a mere 27% in 1996. That is truly extraordinary. Some of that is the result of positive peer pressure, but it also shows how people's fears can evaporate when they're shown to be ridiculous, and how powerful it can be to recognize others' humanity. Conservatives are attacking LGBTQ rights and need to be defeated, but U.S. society as a whole is increasingly not with them.

Abraham Lincoln ended his 1861 first inaugural address, after several states had seceded from the Union but before the Civil War officially started, on a conciliatory, optimistic note. He soon faced a more open and much more deadly conflict than we currently do. But it still seems that the best way to fight our worse demons as a nation is by investing in our better angels.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

Punishment Conservatives

As far as this problem of law and order is concerned, I am for law and order.
– Richard Nixon, accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1968.

"He got hit on the knee with a canister of tear gas," President Trump says, of @AliVelshi, who was actually hit by a rubber bullet. "Wasn't it really a beautiful sight? It's called law and order." pic.twitter.com/sVvnZUft5B

— David Gura (@davidgura) September 19, 2020

I remember this guy, [reporter Ali] Velshi, he got hit on the knee with a canister of tear gas, and he went down. He didn't, he was down. 'My knee, my knee.' [Crowd laughter] Nobody cared, these guys didn't care. They moved him aside. [Crowd laughter] And they just walk right through. It was like, it was the most beautiful thing. [Crowd hooting] No, because after we take all that crap, for weeks and weeks, they would take this crap, and then you finally see men get up there and go right to, didn't, wasn't it really a beautiful sight? [Crowd cheers] It's called law and order, law and order.
– Donald Trump, at a September 19th, 2020 rally.

Conservative claims often can't be taken at face value. Almost all of the time, when they say "freedom," they really mean privilege. And when they say "law and order," they likewise mean something else. They don't really support the law, because they don't support due process, and they certainly don't support the First Amendment rights of peaceful protesters or reporters or anyone else they view as Other. They do care about "order," not in the sense of a fair, equal, just system, but meaning their preferred hierarchy, with themselves on top, and punishment enforced against anyone uppity enough to step out of line.

Possibly the only good thing about Donald Trump is that he sometimes says the quiet parts out loud. Digby covered the September Trump rally in more depth – including its blatant racism – but Velshi responded, "So, @realDonaldTrump, you call my getting hit by authorities in Minneapolis on 5/30/20 (by a rubber bullet, btw, not a tear gas cannister) a "beautiful thing" called "law and order". What law did I break while covering an entirely peaceful (yes, entirely peaceful) march?" The footage of cops using tear gas and then rubber bullets on Velshi and others for no good reason is chilling. Velshi reflected, "I’ve since said to colleagues, if we were covering this somewhere else, we’d be saying, 'An authoritarian regime was silencing opposition and targeting media.' That’s what it felt like. That’s not the way it’s supposed to go here." Police brutality remains a serious problem on its own, but it also reveals a significant problem about the conservative base. The violence against Velshi and others was unnecessary and arguably unlawful. And Trump was reveling in it, as was the crowd, who he egged on. The conservative base views journalists reporting the news factually and doing their jobs as one of their many enemies. They might approve of Velshi or other being arrested, but what they really want to see is violence inflicted on the people they dislike. Whether that's legal or a good, sustainable system doesn't matter to them; they just want to know that the right people are being hurt and pushed around. Instead of being "law and order" conservatives, they can be more accurately described as punishment conservatives.

Punishment conservatives contrast strongly with the people who believe in due process, which does include some self-described conservatives, such as Alberto Mora and others who opposed the Bush torture regime. Due process conservatives stand with plenty of liberals and self-identified independents in believing in due process, the social contract, the Commons, voting rights, civilization in general, and respecting that representative government can make decisions even if they don't approve of all the actual decisions. But such people are a minority in the conservative movement and the Republican Party and have no real power in them. Many have fled and changed their political party or self-identification.

Conscientious citizens are left with the growing problem of what to do about the conservative base – movement conservatives – punishment conservatives – or whatever they should be called. Perhaps "punishment conservatives" is just another name for authoritarian conservatives or is a subset. But what they believe is more important than their label. They support violence against those they don't like, regardless of its legality. They oppose a free and accurate press. They oppose democracy and universal voting rights. They view any election result they don't like as inherently illegitimate and believe they get to veto any decision by a representative government they don't like. They believe in entrenched inequality and a hierarchy with themselves on top, and have an undying (and unjustified) faith in their own inherent superiority. They dogmatically believe in significant falsehoods and seek to make reality bend to their warped views. Trump is the most prominent and powerful current example of these punishment/authoritarian conservatives, but he's also just one part of a long and dangerous movement.

Consider the conservative response to Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year old who traveled from Illinois to Wisconsin with guns to confront protestors for racial justice and is "accused of fatally shooting two demonstrators and injuring a third"; he has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide. He acted as a vigilante, but quickly became a martyr figure for some conservatives. His mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, received a standing ovation in Wisconsin at a Waukesha County Republican Party event, as relayed by conservative Michelle Malkin, who added that she "was able to talk to Kyle by phone & THANK HIM for his courage!" Other conservatives started fundraisers for Kyle Rittenhouse, and some conservative politicians praised or defended him, including Donald Trump, who could muster condemnation for an anti-fascist accused of a shooting but none for Rittenhouse. Worse than that, "federal law enforcement officials were directed to make public comments sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse." Rittenhouse might not have acted lawfully, but that hasn't mattered to his conservatives fans, because he inflicted violence on people they fear and hate.

Consider as well the case of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who, like many other governors, issued stay-at-home guidelines earlier in the year to help minimize the spread of COVID-19. In response, angry conservative activists, overwhelmingly white and many of them with guns, swarmed the state capitol on multiple occasions. Many conservatives have refused to wear masks or follow other safety guidelines to help halt the pandemic, continuing a conservative trend of denying science and fighting ferociously for the bedrock conservative principle that anything I don't like is unconstitutional. Trump, as always making things worse, tweeted in all caps, "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" and repeated the pattern for other states.

In early October, the FBI announced that it had prevented a frightening plot by conservative "militia" groups to kidnap Whitmer, put her on "trial," and murder her. The general national reaction was shock, but conservative media outlets tried to deny that the criminals were conservative, and Michigan Republican candidate Paul M Smith claimed the plot was a "totally bogus sham," a "pre-election stunt" and that "these citizens never did anything illegal." (To its credit, the state party disowned Smith.) Other conservative conspiracy theorists, including Alex Jones, claimed the plot was a false flag operation to make conservatives look bad yet simultaneously approved of the terrorists' alleged actions. Conservative Rick Wiles similarly blamed Whitmer for provoking the plot.

In Whitmer's address on the plot and the crazy situation in Michigan, she condemned "hatred, bigotry and violence" and also public figures who didn't call it out or even encouraged it, including Trump. Rather than tamping things down, Trump responded with another set of angry tweets and then attacked Whitmer again at a Michigan rally. At a subsequent Michigan rally, petulant manchild Trump mused that maybe the kidnapping and murder plot against Whitmer wasn't a bad thing. As usual, the crowd approved of Trump's irresponsible, vindictive attitude. As Digby observed, Trump is openly excusing terrorism now, and she further quipped, "Very fine people can disagree whether it’s a problem to kidnap and execute a sitting Governor because she closed gyms for a couple of weeks and asked people to wear masks. I mean, she probably deserves it, amirite?" The problem is not just Trump, because his many supporters agree. And Trump and his supporters have shown that they approve of cops assaulting protesters, cops assaulting journalists, vigilantes killing protesters, and vigilantes kidnapping and killing duly elected officials doing their jobs trying to protect the public. (On a related note, Dr. Fauci and other health officials have unconscionably received death threats merely for advocating for public health.) We shouldn't make excuses for Trump and his supporters and should assume that they're completely serious about all their authoritarian, violent rhetoric. They should be held to account.

Conservative hostility toward the press goes back decades, at least. Trump has put the press in pens at his rallies and verbally attacked them, leading the conservative faithful in booing the press or otherwise harassing them. It brings to mind the less dangerous but still troubling and illegal "free speech zones" used by the George W. Bush administration for protesters. Timothy McVeigh, 1995's Oklahoma City bomber, killed 168 people and injured at least 680 others, yet in 2002, Ann Coulter said, "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to The New York Times building." Coulter reiterated her remarks several times and also accused The New York Times of treason for coverage she didn't like. Coulter tries to be shocking, of course, but she has largely gotten a pass throughout her career, and more importantly, she expresses an entitled hatred endemic among the conservative base. At a Trump rally in 2016, a photo made the rounds due to a Trump supporter's t-shirt, which said, "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required." Such shirts date back to the Bush era at the very least. Such eliminationist rhetoric is common among conservatives, whereas it's pretty rare among liberals and other nonconservatives. As John Dickerson observed in 2006, the left-wing blogosphere wants the press to do a better job, because "when the press gets it wrong, left-wing bloggers believe, the people are ill-informed and democracy suffers." In contrast, "At some level, the right doesn't much like that the press exists. They don't want to fix it, they want to drive a stake through its heart." Authoritarian conservatives don't want the truth – they want the party line. And they'd like to see anyone who doesn't toe that line punished.

Conservatism has always had an antidemocratic strain. Authoritarian conservatives tend to view any election they lose as inherently illegitimate, and approve of conservative voter suppression efforts, other election cheating and any other tactics to undermine outcomes they don't like. (The people's will be damned, unless it happens to match their own.) In 1980, Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the so-called Moral Majority and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), told his fellow conservatives, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of 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 1994, ultraconservative, Republican North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, member of the Foreign Relations Committee, threatened President Bill Clinton, saying in the context of visiting military bases, "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard." Helms later said he didn't mean to be taken seriously, but the Secret Service felt otherwise. To their credit, other Republicans criticized Helms, but his remarks were telling; Helms went on to say Clinton was not up to the job of commander-in-chief and that he had "serious problems with his record of draft avoidance, with his stand on homosexuals in the military and with the declining defense capability of America's armed forces." Helms further complained that Clinton should not be "immune from criticism," but apparently criticizing Clinton without suggesting that military personnel would or should assault or even kill the president of another party was beyond Helms' moral capabilities.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, Republican South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson shockingly interrupted Obama, shouting "You lie!" In point of fact, Obama was telling the truth that his health care plan would not insure illegal immigrants. Wilson later called the White House to apologize, but refused to apologize on the House floor. He was admonished by the House of Representatives, but the vote was mostly along party lines, so his fellow Republicans sided with Wilson. Wilson received a huge surge in donations after the incident (as did his Democratic challenger at the time), showing that other conservatives and Republicans outside Congress also approved of Joe Wilson's actions. Wilson has had his words used against him by protesters since, but he's still in Congress and the overwhelming favorite to win reelection in 2020. Wilson's interruption was an unprecedented, stunning show of disrespect, and given the subject and speaker, there was a strong undercurrent of bigotry: a white, conservative Southerner putting an uppity black man in his place, to the approval of his party and other conservatives.

On October 7th, 2020, conservative, Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee tweeted, "We’re not a democracy" and "Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that." Vox provided the most charitable reading of Lee's comments, placing them in a conservative tradition of selective reading of the founding fathers, which still leaves Lee's claims as utter bullshit on both historical and moral grounds. Mike Lee is not an outlier, and was merely more open than usual about expressing the authoritarianism deeply woven into U.S. conservatism, a dynamic that has become increasingly troubling. The New York Times account of Mike Lee's remarks included a key passage:

The New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat called his comments an "escalation of GOP and WH rhetoric about protestors being a mob and Dems being 'too dangerous to rule,' " adding, "Such talk often precedes ‘exceptional’ and authoritarian gov’t actions. Look for more of this in future."

Mike Lee's statements should be viewed in the context of decades of voter suppression by conservatives. We should also consider Donald Trump's repeated threats about not leaving office even if he loses the election, as if he has a choice. Charles P. Pierce correctly links the Whitmer kidnapping plot to the power grabs of Wisconsin and North Carolina Republican legislators, and observes, "Republicans no longer accept the results of any election they didn't win, nor do they accept the legitimacy of any elected official except their own. That is the one abiding principle left to this listing hulk of a political party, and it's frankly terrifying." In "Trump’s Voter-Suppression Strategy Is a Crisis (Even If It Backfires)," Eric Levitz notes attempts by the Republican Party nationwide to suppress the vote, and points out that even if Biden and the Democrats win, "there is no contradiction between acknowledging that the 2020 election is likely to witness historically high turnout and believing that the election will be tainted by voter suppression. What qualifies as a historically high turnout rate in the United States is just mediocre by international standards." Conservative acceptance of elections and the basic tenets of modern democracy and representative government is conditional at best.

This hostility toward a fair system is by no means a new development – it's definitional for a major strain of conservatism if not the whole movement and ideology. As Steve Benen observed in 2010, when conservatives say "freedom," they don't mean freedom for everyone. As Matt Taibbi observed the same year, conservatives strongly support social spending for themselves but oppose it for Those Other People – in other words, conservatives are "full of shit." They believe in their own inherent superiority and that the people they hate and fear should be treated as second-class citizens, even if they do not explicitly use such language. These attitudes don't necessarily include racism, but unsurprisingly, they often do. Increasingly, American conservatives can be viewed in the European tradition of Herrenvolk republicanism, which reserves social democracy for the white majority. White conservatives have grown increasingly nasty in the belief that their political, financial and cultural power is slipping away.

Conservative policies are completely awful on the merits. But conservatives also want an unfair power structure. These two factors are deeply interwoven – conservatives lie and cheat because they're unlikely to win in an honest discussion of competing policies. But they'd be especially unlikely to succeed in convincing the general public of their core dogma that they should always win; they should always rule; they should always get their own way. Conservative arguments such as Mike Lee's ahistorical claims against democracy, Cheney and Addington's unitary executive theory, the sovereign citizen movement, Ammon Bundy's claims that he can seize public lands and not pay taxes, the theocrats claiming United States was founded as a Christian nation, Mitch McConnell's fabricated and shifting rules for judicial appointments, and hollering that it's unconstitutional to be asked to wear a mask – all of these claims are counterfactual and complete bullshit, but in addition to that, the common thread is the underlying tenet: we can do whatever the hell we want, with no accountability.

It does bear mentioning that American conservatives are constantly lied to, with decades of conservative dark money shaping political discourse, and major conservative media outlets increasingly becoming sheer propaganda. But those lies and propaganda work in large part because conservatives already firmly believe in significant falsehoods. They believe that if they succeed, it's due to their own merits, and if Those Other People succeed, it's because they were given an unfair advantage, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Liberals are concerned with fairness, whereas conservatives focus on power, so they can use the same terms yet mean radically different things. Conservatives also typically believe that life and politics are a zero-sum game, so they fight for personal or tribal group advantage, not for a fair system for everyone. This brings us to a crucial point:

The conservative base does not hate many of their fellow Americans because they believe false things. They believe false things because they hate many of their fellow Americans. This is one of many reasons conventional fact-checking does not work on them. They have no real commitment to the truth or learning. They believe they already know the truth and have little interest in changing their views.

One of the most telling statements about American conservatism was made in 2019 by a woman who was negatively affected by Trump and the Republican Party shutting down the government for political leverage: "I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this. . . . I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting." She said the quiet part out loud. The conservative base, authoritarian conservatives, punishment conservatives, are driven by spite, and this sums up their toxic mix of entitlement and resentment – they want to see their many perceived enemies hurt or put in their place.

How should we think of conservatives? Some self-identified conservatives believe in due process and democracy and civilization and all those good things, and liberals and other nonconservatives can work with them. We share a common foundation in reality and a commitment to building, maintaining and improving a system for everyone (even if some improvements lag woefully behind). Alas, such conservatives are a minority in the movement and have no meaningful power in the Republican Party.

Other conservatives can be thought of decent people with redeeming qualities in other parts of their lives, but bad citizens. Treating other Americans as second-class or being antidemocratic is simply not compatible with being a good citizen. These people may be devoted to their families, for example, but because they view politics as a zero-sum game, they will often fight for their families or insular groups at the expense of larger communities, and thus a normally positive trait fuels negative actions politically. Some of us may be friends with such people, and they can be reached, but it often takes greater life experiences, education, travel, or a labor-intensive, one-on-one approach from a trusted friend or family member.

Some conservatives are pretty awful as people in addition to being bad citizens, unfortunately. And professional political hacks and politicians are generally a lost cause.

Calling out the ills of conservatism is important, but it's been hampered for decades by conservative shouting, as well as the press giving conservatives unearned respectability and trafficking in false equivalences, or "both siderism." Likewise, people who think of themselves as moderates, or centrists, but certainly as reasonable and fair-minded, are often loath to call out their conservative family and friends for their bigotry or extremism. This problem is particularly acute for white people who, say, have fond childhood memories of their Uncle Jim, who's now raving about Pizzagate and other batshit crazy QAnon conspiracy theories. (For more on false equivalencies, check out past posts from Digby, driftglass, Roy Edroso, Balloon Juice, LGM and my own archives.)

Looking at the 2020 general election, if nothing else, it could provide some useful data. Donald Trump is clearly unfit for office. His incompetence has been deadly and glaring, and his corruption has been blatant. Supporting him requires some mix of stupid, evil and crazy.

Trump's conduct raised plenty of red flags before the 2016 election, too, yet close to 92% of self-identified Republicans voted for him anyway. At this point, no one can credibly claim ignorance of his nature or his performance. What percentage of Republicans will vote for him this time, and how many total? What percentage of self-identified conservatives will vote for him, and how many total? What percentage of the electorate will vote for him, and how many people total? Authoritarian conservatives will support almost anything– how many does America have, and how many of them regularly vote? How big is the challenge we face, not just with oligarchs and authoritarian leaders, but their supporters in the general population?

Whatever the outcome of the election, conscientious citizens are left with a significant problem: what is to done about the conservative base – authoritarian conservatives – punishment conservatives? It's important to note that conservatives seek to suppress the vote and rig the system to keep and increase power, whereas the liberal ideal is to have honest, factual discussions, increase voting rights, and provide public education. It is inclusive. None of that's to say that actual liberals are perfect or America wouldn't have a ton of challenges even if it wasn't imperiled by authoritarian conservatism, but the liberal and conservative approaches to democracy and how to make the country better remain radically different. Liberals and nonconservatives are not trying to disenfranchise conservatives, and that's all the more reason that it's critical to show up, speak out, vote, govern responsibly, and keep authoritarian conservatives out of power, regardless of how much they complain. (Characteristically, they're gleeful bullies in power and insufferable whiners out of it.) Voting is a critical tool of democracy, but even if Trump, conservatives and Republicans lose in the 2020 general election, a tremendous amount of sustained work remains to be done.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)