Two Countries-- Lots Of Antipathy-- Falling Apart

 

The U.S. reported 108,389 new cases of COVID today-- and another 1,201 deaths. Early tomorrow the U.S. will cross the 240,000 deaths mark, a memorial to the worst president in history, soon to be the ex-president. You know how sometimes the living presidents all get together for something or other? Do you think Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama would ever invite Trump to one of those?

Now, can you guess which backward hellholes were Trump's strongest bastions yesterday? These were the states where he has the biggest percentage of votes-- along with the number of COVID cases per million residents:

• Wyoming- 69.9% (25,994 cases per million residents)
• West Virginia- 68.6% (14,500 cases per million residents)
• Oklahoma- 65.4% (32,290 cases per million residents)
• North Dakota- 65.0% (63,382 cases per million residents)
• South Dakota- 64% (56,283 cases per million residents)
• Idaho- 63.1% (38,227 cases per million residents)
• Kentucky- 62.7% (25,295 cases per million residents)
• Arkansas- 62.7% (38,376 cases per million residents)
• Alabama- 62.3% (40,336 cases per million residents)
• Tennessee- 60.7% (39,507 cases per million residents)

And what about the enlightened states? These are the 5 where Trump got the fewest votes:

• Massachusetts- 31.1% (23,692 cases per million residents)
• Vermont- 31.7% (3,633 cases per million residents)
• California- 32.9% (24,112 cases per million residents)
• Hawaii- 34.3% (10,928 cases per million residents)
• Maryland- 35.1% (24,607 cases per million residents)

George Packer's Atlantic essay talked to something many of us are thinking-- "We are two countries, and neither of them is going to be conquered or disappear anytime soon." Don't you wish we weren't part of the same country they are? Last night I was so despondent-- not about Trump but about the assholes and morons who voted for him that I was considering moving back to Europe.

Packer wrote that the election outcome is "a pretty accurate reflection of the American electorate. The much-discussed Democratic majority that’s been emerging since the turn of the millennium is still in a state of emergence and probably will keep on emerging for years to come. The will of the majority is indeed blocked by undemocratic rules and unscrupulous politicians, but it’s a bare majority without enough numbers to govern. When America finally becomes the promised land dominated by tech-savvy Millennials, its political values will be far from certain."

And this is why I felt like leaving America again: "Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer-- and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere. Even as 'freedom-loving people' came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government. There is no obvious way to reverse this decline, which shows signs of infecting elements of the other side as well."

There’s no escaping who we Americans have become: This is the election’s meaning. We are stuck with one another, seeing no way out and no apparent way through, sinking deeper into a state of mutual incomprehension and loathing. The possible exits-- gradual de-escalation, majority breakthrough, clean separation, civil war-- are either unlikely or unthinkable. We have to live and govern ourselves together, but we still don’t know how. Winning in this state becomes a chimera. Whoever takes the presidency, all Americans will remain the losers.

Breaking Democracy Is A Republican Party Thing Now

 

Slimeball by Nancy Ohanian

I have no idea if George Packer knew he was comparing democracy to religion in his Atlantic essay Trump Is Trying to Trick Americans Into Giving Up on Democracy... but that's how I read it. "Democracy," he wrote "depends on belief in democracy-- on an extraordinary leap of faith by ordinary people that their rulers will abide by the rules, that their votes will count, that their compatriots won’t tear the country apart, that lies won’t become truth. When the checks and balances have all given way, the last barrier to an authoritarian regime is public opinion. It will stand or fall on November 3. According to a new poll by the international organization More in Common, the only issue that matters to Americans across the political spectrum is the integrity of the November presidential election. In the same poll, more than three-quarters of Americans-- again, from left to right-- still express a belief that citizens can change society through their actions. And yet similarly large majorities expect high levels of voter fraud or voter suppression in November; trust in government, the media, and one another is abysmally low. Another recent poll, by YouGov, finds that just 22 percent of Americans expect the election to be free and fair; when told that experts say the election cannot be rigged, only 19 percent believe it. Americans are in the desperate position of clinging to something precious that they expect to betray them."

Yesterday I was talking with western New York congressional candidate, Nate McMurray about a stunt his opponent, hereditary billionaire Chris Jacobs, pulled on Saturday. The Trumpist incumbent, speaking at a rally of extremists where an effigy of Gov. Andrew Cuomo was beaten and hung, was part of a mob. "This district has a history of political climbers like Bill Paxon, Tom Reynolds, Chris Lee and Chris Collins who used the communities and families of NY-27 for personal gain," McMurray told me. "But the hatefulness on display Saturday was a disgraceful new low. Chris Jacobs and his comrades in western New York have fully embraced the worst of Trumpism. Extreme Republicans like Chris know that if every American votes they will lose. So they traffic in conspiracies, lies and the politics of fear to destabilize the electoral process and end democracy as we know it. And their march toward authoritarianism will not end with a whimper but with the bang and butt of a gun. Chris should be ashamed of how far he has debased himself, all to try and win an election."

Packer wrote that "Democratic faith turns out to be as fragile as it is necessary, and Trump specializes in undermining it. When he repeatedly asserts massive fraud months before Election Day, announces that he won’t respect results that go against him, and refuses to promise a peaceful transfer of power-- the litmus test of democracy-- he is forcing Americans into a mental trap that can resemble madness. The president says that the election is rigged, and he also insinuates that he will rig the election. To believe him is frightening; to discount him is foolish. Either way, Trump becomes ever more powerful, while the people-- on whose consent his power entirely depends-- slip into passivity and paralysis, or are pushed into rage, even political violence.This is exactly the atmosphere of chaos in which Trump thrives. He makes it almost impossible to hold on to the idea that the election can be free and fair. But the survival of democracy, which lives and dies in our minds before anywhere else, depends on that idea. For the election to succeed, we have to think and act as if it will succeed.

Trump uses words the way Russian intelligence employs “active measures” operations: not to inform or persuade, but to poison the mental atmosphere, to confuse and agitate the public until it begins to lose faith in rational discourse and, ultimately, in democracy. Whether or not this continuous ink spray could actually lower voter turnout, Morris said, it will degrade “our belief in each other as common citizens of a republic.” Sizable numbers of Americans in both parties are now willing to tolerate political violence in the aftermath of an election, according to a Democracy Fund Voter Study survey last spring: 20 percent of Republicans in the event of alleged vote fraud, 20 percent of Democrats if Trump loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College. Americans are edging toward civil conflict.

In the coming weeks, anyone who cares about our democracy has to hold two conflicting ideas in mind while remaining sane. The first is that Trump should be taken at his word when he warns that he will do whatever is necessary to stay in power. This dark prospect requires a constant state of alertness, a refusal to seek comfort in hoping for the best or looking to Trump’s party or his judges for some glimmer of salvation. At this stage of his presidency, naivete is unforgivable.

But the second idea, even more demanding, is that our votes still matter. Not just that they’ll be counted, but that they are sacred, if anything in a secular democracy can be called by that word. This idea means refusing to give way to panic or despair or, most crippling of all, the sullen resentment into which subject populations are worn down by authoritarian rulers. The more we dwell on what Trump might do, the likelier he’ll be to get away with something. He’ll have become the omnipotent central character in the drama, occupying the place that rightfully belongs to a democratic people, who are reduced once more to watching in outrage. We have to believe that power still lies in the people, or else we’ve already surrendered it.

For weeks, Belarusians have filled the streets of their cities to insist that their votes are sacred. Beatings, grenades, flashbangs, arrests, torture, and disappearances by the state have neither deterred them nor driven them to violence. Some commentators have said that the United States is not yet Belarus. This is true enough, though we are closer than seemed imaginable just a few years ago. The real question is whether Americans have what it takes to be Belarusians.

Tuesday, Nick Ackerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, was on CNN, where he said that after reading the NY Times piece on Trump's taxes, he realized that Trump makes Nixon look like a rookie amateur. He sees Trump going to trial if he loses the election because what he's guilty of is not tax avoidance but full-blown tax fraud. "Tax evasion is a 5 year felony. It's a pretty serious crime and the more money that's stolen, the longer you go to jail for... The only thing saving him at this point is the Department of Justice’s guideline that says you can’t indict a sitting president."

Ah... yes, the Department of Justice. It's like when The Mob takes over the FBI. CREW-- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington-- made an abuse of power case for impeaching Barr. Pelosi is bound to ignore it for narrow partisan reasons but CREW made the case that Barr abused the powers of his office by engaging in a course of conduct that impaired the Special Counsel investigation of Trump, "the conduct of lawful inquiries by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the purpose of that agency, and the oversight and impeachment powers of the United States House of Representatives. These actions violate DOJ’s founding principal to maintain the independence and impartiality of federal prosecutions from political intervention." There can be little doubt that Barr is also guilty of directing federal law enforcement officers to violate the First and Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens who gathered to engage in peaceful protest outside of the White House and across the country. They want to see an impeachment inquiry by the House that focuses on whether Barr abused the powers of his office by engaging in a course of conduct that was 'seriously incompatible with our system of constitutional government.' At a minimum, that inquiry should consider whether Barr:

• Corruptly subverted the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of President Trump for obstruction of justice;
• Interfered with the lawful functions of the Department of Justice by overturning the actions of career prosecutors in the cases of Roger Stone Jr. and Michael Flynn and by firing United States Attorney Geoffrey Berman;
• Obstructed lawful investigations of the United States House of Representatives; and
• Abused and exceeded the powers of the Attorney General to violate the First and Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens.

Decades Of Conservative Dogma Has Turned Our Great Country Into A Banana Republic-- And There's No End In Sight

The GOP is making a bad bet on Vote By Mail. The public likes it, especially during the pandemic and many people see right through the Republican Party's motives. Like every other poll that's asked about Vote By Mail, the new NBC News/Washington Post poll, found that the overwhelming majority favors it, regardless of what the moron in the White House says. Yesterday, Rick Hasen, a law professor and author of Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy explained why Trump's stand against making voting easier and safer is backfiring. "If there’s one lesson the farce of conducting the April 7 Wisconsin elections in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic should have taught Republicans," wrote Hasen, "it is that the voters you hurt may be your own. Rather than play games in an effort to depress turnout among likely Democratic voters, now is the time for all officials-- both Democrat and Republican-- to think about how to make voting safe, secure and easy in November. There are signs from Wisconsin that Republican efforts to make it harder to vote in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic are backfiring in two ways. First, suppressive efforts are firing up Democrats to come out and vote. As the New York Times reported, Democrats voted in large numbers in a highly contested state Supreme Court race-- and a less contested Democratic presidential primary. Second, suppressive efforts are making it harder for some staunch Republican voters and Trump supporters, particularly in rural areas, to cast their ballots."

[S]ome Republicans still have not gotten the message.

In Kentucky, the Republican legislature just now-- in the midst of the pandemic-- overrode Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a new strict voter identification bill that will make it harder to vote during a pandemic. Among other things, Kentucky’s law, like Wisconsin’s, requires a photocopy of a valid identification or the filling out of an affidavit. I would venture that young Democratic voters in cities like Lexington will have an easier time jumping through new legislatively built voting hoops than rural voters who form the foundation of the Trump coalition.

In Texas, the state is fighting legal efforts to get the state to accept fear of contracting COVID-19 as a legitimate excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. Just before a state court indicated that it will issue a preliminary injunction requiring the state to do so, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, issued unofficial “guidance” that claiming fear of contracting the virus as an excuse to allow absentee voting could open up the voter to criminal prosecution. Paxton’s irresponsible actions may be aimed at discouraging turnout among likely Democrats, but that’s a politically risky-- and potentially deadly-- bet.

And President Trump continues his attacks on vote-by-mail as potentially rife with fraud and his opposition to U.S. Postal Service funding, which would directly affect the ability to have a successful election in October. The president has done so despite a lack of evidence that vote-by-mail leads to large-scale fraud or benefits Democratic voters.

Indeed, we have seen stories of many responsible Republican officials who have pushed back on the president’s claims, such as Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who has called Ohio’s vote by mail system safe and secure. Moreover, Republicans in places like Florida depend upon strong vote-by-mail efforts as part of their get-out-the-vote activities. In a state like Florida, with a large elderly population, such efforts are not only good politics but good for the health and safety of vulnerable populations.

It would be nice to think that all Republican leaders would agree that we should think about the remaining primaries and upcoming November election with an eye toward how to maximize the participation of eligible voters in a way that assures they can cast safe and effective votes. But even if some leaders care only about partisanship in designing election rules in the COVID-19 era, what is good for all voters may be especially good for reliable Republican voters.

Hasen's thoughts are a perfect introduction to the essay George Packer penned for The Atlantic yesterday, We Are Living in a Failed State, where he posits that it wasn't the pandemic that broke America; "it revealed what was already broken. When the the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills-- a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public-- had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity-- to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus-- like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly-- not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan-- no coherent instructions at all-- families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power-- a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president... Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and-- every day of his presidency-- political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

Moron by Chip Proser

The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981-- a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.

Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.

So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.

In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators-- then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.

To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”-- they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods-- only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

Today Is A Very Important Day In America

On Sunday, Selma "Bloody Sunday" veteran, John Lewis (D-GA) unexpectedtly showed up at the annual commemorative march and delivered an impassioned plea to voters to use the ballot box as "a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America." Is America still redeemable after just 3 years of Trump and the ascendancy of Trumpism? At around the same time, The Atlantic was preparing to published author George Packer's deeply disturbing opus, on how Trump is winning his war on American institutions, "destroying the civil service and bending the government to his will." Ironically, Trump is turning out to be not just the least progressive president in history, but also the least conservative. Oh, yeah-- and a pusillanimous GOP filled with spineless and desperate career politicians, has allowed him to redefine what conservative means in the context of American politics.

Packer began by pointing out that when Señor Trumpanzee "came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited. The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk. After three years, the adults have all left the room-- saying just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the peril-- while Trump is still there." This is exactly what many Trump voters wanted.

James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many government officials, not excluding himself, went into the administration convinced “that they are either smarter than the president, or that they can hold their own against the president, or that they can protect the institution against the president because they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be, I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And I think they are fooling themselves. They’re fooling themselves. He’s light-years ahead of them.”

The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents-- his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.

But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate themselves-- particularly in believing that other Americans saw them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high-minded commitment to the good of the nation.

When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy-- the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness-- the very qualities his supporters loved-- he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept commissars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own.

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.

And that was just the intro. May I suggest you go the The Atlantic to read the body of Packer's brilliant essay. You may not share the visions of conservatives like William Barr, Erica Newland, Andrew McCabe and Mike Pompeo but the light Packer shines on them is one you will probably find elucidating. I couldn't result including this swampy tale though:

There’s always been corruption in Washington, and everywhere that power can be found, but it became institutionalized starting in the late 1970s and early ’80s, with the rise of the lobbying industry. The corruption that overtook the capital during that time was pecuniary and mostly legal, a matter of norm-breaking-- of people’s willingness to do what wasn’t done. Robert Kaiser, a former Washington Post editor and the author of the 2010 book So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, locates an early warning sign in Gerald Ford’s readiness to “sign up for every nasty piece of work that everybody offered him to cash in on being an ex-president.” Cashing in-- once known as selling out-- became a common path out of government, and then back in and out again. “There was a taboo structure,” Kaiser told me. “You don’t go from a senior Justice Department position to a senior partner in Lloyd Cutler’s law firm and then go back. It was a one-way trip. That taboo is no more.”





Former members of Congress and their aides cashed in as lobbyists. Retired military officers cashed in with defense contractors. Justice Department officials cashed in at high-paying law firms. Former diplomats cashed in by representing foreign interests as lobbyists or public-relations strategists. A few years high up in the Justice Department could translate into tens of millions of dollars in the private sector. Obscure aides on Capitol Hill became millionaires. Trent Lott abandoned his Senate seat early in order to get ahead of new restrictions on how soon he could start his career as a lobbyist. Ex-presidents gave six-figure speeches and signed eight-figure book deals.

...The swamp had been pooling between the Potomac and the Anacostia for three or four decades when Trump arrived in Washington, vowing to drain it. The slogan became one of his most potent. Fred Wertheimer, the president of the nonprofit Democracy 21 and an activist for good government since the Nixon presidency, says of Trump: “He was ahead of a lot of national politicians when he saw that the country sees Washington as rigged against them, as corrupted by money, as a lobbyist’s game—which is a game he played his whole life, until he ran against it. People wanted someone to take this on.” By then the federal government’s immune system had been badly compromised. Trump, in the name of a radical cure, set out to spread a devastating infection.

To Trump and his supporters, the swamp was full of scheming conspirators in drab D.C. office wear, coup plotters hidden in plain sight at desks, in lunchrooms, and on jogging paths around the federal capital: the deep state. A former Republican congressional aide named Mike Lofgren had introduced the phrase into the political bloodstream with an essay in 2014 and a book two years later. Lofgren meant the nexus of corporations, banks, and defense contractors that had gained so much financial and political control—sources of Washington’s corruption. But conservatives at Breitbart News, Fox News, and elsewhere began applying the term to career officials in law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, whom they accused of being Democratic partisans in cahoots with the liberal media first to prevent and then to undo Trump’s election. Like fake news and corruption, Trump reverse-engineered deep state into a weapon against his enemies, real or perceived.

The moment Trump entered the White House, he embarked on a colossal struggle with his own bureaucracy. He had to crush it or else it would destroy him. His aggrieved and predatory cortex impelled him to look for an official to hang out in public as a warning for others who might think of crossing him. Trump found one who had been nameless and faceless throughout his career.

...In his fourth year in power, Trump has largely succeeded in making the executive branch work on his personal behalf. He hasn’t done it by figuring out how to operate the bureaucratic levers of power, or by installing leaders with a vision of policy that he shares, or by channeling a popular groundswell into government action. He’s done it by punishing perceived enemies, co‑opting craven allies, and driving out career officials of competence and integrity. The result is a thin layer of political loyalists on top of a cowed bureaucracy.

Justice and State were obvious targets for Trump, but the rest of the executive branch is being similarly, if more quietly, bent to his will. One of every 14 political appointees in the Trump administration is a lobbyist; they largely run domestic policy. Trump’s biggest donors now have easy access to agency heads and to the president himself, as they swell his reelection coffers. In the last quarter of 2019, while being impeached, Trump raised nearly $50 million. His corruption of power, unprecedented in recent American history, only compounds the money corruption that first created the swamp.

Within the federal government, career officials are weighing outside job opportunities against their pension plans and their commitment to their oaths. More than 1,000 scientists have left the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and other agencies, according to the Washington Post. Almost 80 percent of employees at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture have quit. The Labor Department has made deep cuts in the number of safety inspectors, and worker deaths nationwide have increased dramatically, while recalls of unsafe consumer products have dropped off. When passing laws and changing regulations prove onerous, the Trump administration simply guts the government of expertise so that basic functions wither away, the well-connected feed on the remains, and the survivors keep their heads down, until the day comes when they face the same choice as McCabe and Yovanovitch: do Trump’s dirty work or be destroyed.

Four years is an emergency. Eight years is a permanent condition. “Things can hold together to the end of the first term, but after that, things fall apart,” Malinowski said. “People start leaving in droves. It’s one thing to commit four years of your life to the institution in the hope that you can be there for its restoration. It’s another to commit eight years. I can’t even wrap my head around what that would be like.”

And this, my friends, is precisely why today is so important-- so important to cast a ballot for Bernie and so important to nominate candidates like Mike Siegel (TX-10), Cristina Ramirez (Sen-TX), Cenk Uygur (CA-25), Liam O'Mara (CA-42)... instead of conservatives in contested races in Texas and California so that they can go on to November and defeat Trmpist bootlickerss like Michael McCaul, John Cornyn, Steve Knight (or Mike Garcia) and Ken Calvert. Bernie can beat Trump and Bernie needs a progressive Congress so he can beat conservatives of both parties who oppose the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free state colleges, and the rest of the platform they're running on-- rather than on a platform that doesn't go beyond the kind of personal careerism that always-- not sometimes-- leads to corruption. Mike Siegel told me late yesterday that "We are in the fight of our lives, and not everyone realizes it. Conservatives in the Democratic party are punching left instead of closing ranks to defeat an authoritarian regime. Here in the Texas 10th, I'm fending off two corporate-backed challengers who only showed an interest in this race after my 2018 campaign turned it from 'safe Republican' to 'battleground district.' One challenger takes money from private prisons and the corporate forces that are starving Texas municipal governments; the other received $360,000 in outside spending from an anti-Green New Deal super PAC. We are going to beat them anyway, because this campaign is fighting for the needs of the many and has earned the love and support of the people. We need more of this, in Texas and across the country: campaigns that fight for our communities, that fight on issues that matter in people's lives. I'm honored to have the support of Blue America and progressives across the country, who see how winning this race in Texas-- and sending home one of the most powerful Republicans in DC-- would have enormous positive repercussions for the politics of this nation."

Liam O'Mara, the Riverside County, California progressive candidate and history professor, sees it much the same way. "Corruption and subservience to corporate interests is a bipartisan problem, though obviously worse on the GOP side. But if we are to get a Congress that serves the needs of the people again, we need to get that corporate money out! I'm tired of having Representatives who ought to be wearing NASCAR jackets with their sponsors' names. All those other great progressive issues-- Medicare, global warming, education, etc.-- depend on breaking the grip of the oligarchs who currently choose our leaders. We can do better. If we start by electing a clean Congress, we can pass comprehensive legislation that ends the tyranny of Big Money in American politics. But that means we all need to step up. I know you get a lot of money-asks, but if we do this right, it won't have to stay this way! A progressive Congress can pass public financing for elections, but we can only get a progressive Congress with your support. Please donate whatever you can, and know that fixing our campaign finance system will be a top priority."

The Nature Of Conservatism Explains The Profound Corruption Of The Republican Party

Posted in a MAGA/GOP corner of Reddit yesterday

Don't bet on anything more coming out of this beyond what came out of the no-follow-through-kvetching we got from Flake, Sasse and Corker but on New Year's Day the Washington Post published an OpEd by Senator-elect Mitt Romney (R-UT) reminding readers that "Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination" and that "on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office." And yet his party-- particularly Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy keep enabling every horrible notion that pops into his head. In fact, in the same Op-Ed, Romney made it clear that he'll be voting for Trump's agenda even if he speaks out "against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions."

Last month, writing for The Atlantic-- The Corruption of the Republican Party-- author George Packer asks a simple question most Americans have asked themselves-- "Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? " Unlike most of us, he actually answered the question. First though, he makes clear that he doesn't mean "the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind we’ve just seen in North Carolina-- after all, the alleged fraudster employed by the Republican candidate for Congress hired himself out to Democrats in 2010." And he even made it clear that he's not just talking about how the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration, that many of his closest advisers are facing prison time, that Donald Trump himself might have to stay in office just to avoid prosecution, that he could be exposed by the special counsel and the incoming House majority as the most corrupt president in American history."

Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality-- but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power-- power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake-- the foam is scummy with self-dealing-- but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering-- in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats-- so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change-- longer than in progressives’ dreams-- but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact.

Taking away democratic rights-- extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters-- is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders-- Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others-- were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.

Good description of Republican Party exceptionalism. He then lists 4 reactionary insurgencies-- although he calls them "conservative" insurgencies-- that shaped the modern Republican Party, starting with the Goldwater presidential campaign, which he likens to Trostsky's aborted 1905 Russian revolution. "His campaign," wrote Packer, "lit a fire of excitement that spread to millions of readers through the pages of two self-published prophesies of the apocalypse, Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo and John A. Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason. According to these mega-sellers, the political opposition wasn’t just wrong-- it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals."

William F. Buckley saw that the time wasn't right but he told young neo-fascists to "'presuppose that the fiery little body of dissenters, of which you are a shining meteor, suddenly spun off no less than a majority of all the American people, who suddenly overcome a generation’s entrenched lassitude, suddenly penetrated to the true meaning of freedom in society where the truth is occluded by the verbose mystification of thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of books, a million miles of newsprint.' Then Goldwater’s inevitable defeat would turn into 'the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future, if there is a future.' [And] the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights. Even Buckley once defended Jim Crow with the claim that black Americans were too 'backward' for self-government. Eventually he changed his views, but modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers."

It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.

Reagan commanded a revolution, but he himself didn’t have a revolutionary character. He didn’t think the public needed to be indoctrinated and organized, only heard.

But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed-- in government, business, law, media-- the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them. The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich, who had come to Congress two years before Reagan became president, with the avowed aim of overthrowing the established Republican leadership and shaping the minority party into a fighting force that could break Democratic rule by shattering what he called the “corrupt left-wing machine.” Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies? ... What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative-- from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse-- all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama-- it was the Tea Party. Eight years later, it culminated in Trump’s victory, an insurgency within the party itself-- because revolutions tend to be self-devouring... In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, liberals failed to see it coming and couldn’t grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in democracy.

The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma-- democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

Bipartisanship-- The Real Kind, Not The Kevin McCarthy Cynical Bullshit Kind

In a wave election-- with a DCCC recruiting some real garbage, dumb-as-a-brick candidates to run-- you get some really ignorant freshmen in Congress. And we do. So some of them might not know who Kevin McCarthy is... let alone what his role has been and what his likely intentions are. On Thursday he penned a letter: Dear Members of the Democratic Class of 2019, not, you'll notice, Dear Members of the Class of 2019.

McCarthy's something of a dolt, but a dolt with an extremely inflated self-image. And being a dolt doesn't mean he isn't crafty... like his pal, Trumpanzee. Democratic freshmen need to hear from Democratic sophomores, juniors and seniors, about Republican bipartisanship while they controlled the levers of power in the House. This gives little more than a hint:

"When the new Congress is sworn in," he reminded the freshmen eager to break through, "we will all bear the 'solemn responsibility' of acting on behalf of our fellow citizens, as you wrote in a letter to your party's leadership earlier this month. " And he's happy to help him undermine their leaders. "In the spirit of that responsibility," he continued in the spirit of well-known Republican comity and generosity, "I am writing to express my willingness to work with you for the good of the country-- and to extend an open invitation to meet with you int the new year."

So the idiot who led the partisan food fight of the last several years is now trolling for Democrats of the Josh Gottheimer mold who are willing to work with him against Democratic values. No more partisan food fights! Not when there are more Democrats with arms than Republicans!

There are several different ways to work across the aisle. McCarthy is hoping some of the Democratic freshmen will take guidance from Wall Street Democrats like the aforementioned Mr. Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ) and come to think, reflexively, that compromise and bipartisanship is selling out-- and there are rewards for that-- their own constituents "for the greater good," "greater" as in corporate good. Some of the most accomplished-- and respected and admired-- Democrats in Congress know how to successfully work across the aisle without selling out their constituents and without selling out their values.

McCarthy worked tirelessly this week to make sure that what Bernie accomplished yesterday with Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY)-- a bipartisan resolution to end American participation in the Yemen genocide-- would not even get a vote in the House. That's how Kevin McCarthy, when he still has any power to do anything other than lure greedy and mentally impaired freshmen across the aisle, expresses his devotion to ending the food fights!

One skilled legislator who learned how to compromise and work for her constituents' best interests with good faith efforts with her colleagues in the state legislature is Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). She passed legislation in Olympia, working with Republicans eager to also benefit their own constituents-- not shallow hypocrites like Kevin McCarthy-- that benefited both Democratic and Republican Washingtonians... and without selling out the progressive values that have propelled and energized her stellar career as an organizer, activist and political leader. This morning we asked Pramila to help us understand the art of successful, forward-looking bipartisanship, something the freshmen Democrats should pay attention to instead of McCarthy's hollow, staff-generated empty words.

Pramila is a skilled close-quarters negotiator who helped create Seattle's Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. Even before going to Congress, she worked with Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain on an immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013. She worked with them to get that bill passed.

When we first met her in January of 2016 she was helping Republicans in the state Senate to see common ground on bills she was trying to pass-- to lift the statute of limitations on rape and sexual assaults and for free community college education.

Just before we talked she has testified at a hearing in the Senate Governmental Operations committee on her bill to expand democracy through automatic voter registration (SB 6379). She worked on the bill with Washington's Republican Secretary of State, Kim Wyman.

"The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy," she explained when she introduced it. "Yet while our state is a leader in so many things, we are struggling to get Washingtonians to cast ballots and have their voices heard. It is the duty of elected officials, regardless of party, to ensure everyone has the opportunity to be heard. That is the goal of this bill. There should be no barriers between the people and voting, and with this bill one more barrier has been removed. We have worked very hard over the past several months to develop a bipartisan piece of legislation that fits Washington’s particular needs."

Secretary Wyman concurred: "I am pleased to join Senator Jayapal and a bipartisan group of legislators in proposing this welcome expansion of access to the voter rolls. We have a sizable group of people who have not chosen to register through the normal routes of online, motor-voter, mail or in-person registration. We know that some of these potential voters have already given proof of citizenship to the DOL or to health exchange, and so automatic registration should be allowed for them. Our goal in the election community is to register every eligible voter, to remove any barriers to voting, and to promote robust turnout."

Analysis shows that automatic voter registration boosts numbers of registered voters as well as turnout at elections. In addition to increasing voter rolls, SB 6379 reduces paperwork and streamlines the registration process, allowing agencies to integrate voter registration services into existing forms and online prompts. "Passing a bill like this with support from both sides of the aisle helps rebuild trust that we can break political gridlock," said Jayapal. "While voting issues can be divisive at times, we have a bipartisan mandate with this bill. Let’s get it passed through the Legislature and onto the governor’s desk for signature."

If you want to know what GOP intentions are, forget McCarthy's sirens song. Go no further than George Packer's essay early this morning for The Atlantic, The Corruption of the Republican Party. He explained that the corruption he was addressing "has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power-- power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake-- the foam is scummy with self-dealing-- but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, the defeated representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries. But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing."

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering-- in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats-- so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change-- longer than in progressives’ dreams-- but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.

Taking away democratic rights-- extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters-- is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders-- Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others-- were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.

...Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom-- unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative-- from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse-- all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

...The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma-- democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?