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.”

Can Jeff Flake-- And Perhaps Mitt Romney-- Bring The Cult To A Grinding Halt?

Incipient tyrants and fascists always seek to destroy media and the judicial system before their authoritarian assault begins in earnest. One would have to have been in a coma for the past 19 months not to have noticed Señor Trumpanzee's attack on the mainstream media. He's also been remaking the judicial system by rushing through the worst judges every nominated in recent history. And he's still on the attack against the judiciary. This tweet was from yesterday:

I'm guessing that every Republican politician noted how effortlessly Trump disposed of Mark Sanford, a tepid congressional critic, a couple of weeks ago-- all it took was one tweet on primary day and Sanford was upended by a relatively unknown self-funder in a moderate South Carolina district. That was a warning shot across the bows of any Republicans who were thinking of separating themselves from Trump, his regime and their fascist agenda.

Over the weekend, Mitt Romney wrote an OpEd for the Salt Lake Tribune, Where I Stand On The Trump Agenda. "I will," he wrote, "support the president’s policies when I believe they are in the best interest of Utah and the nation. I have noted, the first year of his administration has exceeded my expectations; he made our corporate tax code globally competitive, worked to reduce unnecessary regulations and restored multiple use on Utah public land. In addition, I am pleased that he backed away from imposing a 35 percent tariff on all foreign goods."

But I have openly expressed my disagreement with certain of the administration decisions such as the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); I want more markets open for Utah and American goods. I also oppose broad-based tariffs, such as those proposed on steel and aluminum, particularly when they are imposed on our allies. I agree, however, with narrower penalties levied on companies or nations that employ unfair trade practices, such as China.

I have and will continue to speak out when the president says or does something which is divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions. I do not make this a daily commentary; I express contrary views only when I believe it is a matter of substantial significance.

Meanwhile, Trump can't do much to Arizona Senator Jeff Flake. Flake, who's been far more of a critic of Trump's than Sanford, decided to retire, so he won't be facing a primary, a primary that will now result in one of three Republicans who are each polling behind Kyrsten Sinema, the putative Democrat in the race.

On Sunday, Flake told ABC-TV's George Stephanopoulos that he and what he called a "number of senators" are serious about blocking Trump's lousy judicial nominees if his headlong rush into a trade war, among other things, isn't stopped. Flake: "I do think that unless we can actually exercise something other than just approving the President's executive calendar, his nominees, judges, that we have no reason to be there. So I think myself and a number of Senators, at least a few of us, will stand up and say let's not move any more judges until we get a vote, for example, on tariffs."

Flake is on the Judiciary Committee which only has an 11-10 Republican majority. If he starts voting with the Democrats on Trumpy-the-Clown nominees... the Judiciary Committee will come to a grinding halt.

No light
No people
No speak
No people
No cars
No people
No food
No people
Stopped
Short
Grinding halt
Everything's coming to a grinding halt

Flake told Stephanopoulos "The Mark Sanford loss clarified something if it wasn't clarified before. You can't, as a Republican these days, stand in-- in-- you know, in opposition to some of the president's policies or-- or not condone his behavior and expect to win a Republican primary. That's the reality and then we're seeing that played out."

Yeah, Corker was right-- it's a fucking cult! Academic cult expert and author Janja Lalich: "The people around Trump, and the Republicans in Washington, absolutely kowtow to him, either out of fear they're going to anger him, or out of adulation. That behavior is very typical of a cult... I think you have to look at the effect of Trump's behavior and language on his base. He readily ridicules and chastises people. He readily pushes people aside if they're not worshipping him. We've all seen the videos of his aides praising him to high heaven. That's the kind of adulation cult leaders expect and demand... Cult leaders constantly need to rev up their people. That's one of the challenges of being a charismatic leader. You have to keep people enchanted with you. Him holding these rallies is both a recruitment technique and a way to keep his followers happy. He's showing him in their presence-- being there for them, talking to them, relating to them. All of that helps to solidify their cult membership, so to speak. It reinforces the idea that they're a special group of people following this very special man. With Trump, it's not a religion, but there's the same kind of fervor."

Trump is happily making these pronouncements and expecting everyone to go along with him, and he's not getting much flack. Most of his followers have bought into his fear-mongering, which creates an us vs. them mentality that is typical of a cult.

...Separating the cult from the rest of the world is pretty much what all cults do. That doesn't mean you have to live in a compound. It just means that, in your thinking, you're part of this special elite, separate from the unworthy... Once you internalize that, you're done for.

Don't forget to vote tomorrow if you live in New York, Maryland, Colorado, Oklahoma or Utah. Try bringing some friends along. I doubt Flake-- or even Romney-- is going to stop Trump or turn the GOP away from their dedication to fascism and their ugly new cult. But you know who could? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DuWayne Gregory, Michael DeVito, Jeff Beals, and Dana Balter in New York, Levi Tillemann, Saira Rao and Emily Sirota in Colorado, Tom Guild in Oklahoma and Maryland's Ben Jealous.

A Hostile Takeover Of The GOP-- It Is Now The Trump Party

I looked at a poll this week that showed 75% of Republicans saying they would vote for Trump in a 2020 poll. 1% said they favored Mitt Romney. Romney's going to be the next senator from Utah but will he be the voice of a GOP resistance? He'll bide his time and see how much Trump continues to stumble. Last month he said he'll make a decision on supporting Trump in 2020 'down the road'. He told CNN that he assumed there would be Republican contenders who will challenge Trump, but underscored, "I also assume that President Trump will be the nominee of our party in 2020." Imagine that Romney is considering supporting this guy-- "recklessness in the extreme... very very not smart... dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark... the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd 3rd grade theatrics... a conman, a fake... too much to hide... a phony, a fraud; his promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University."



Friday, Alex Isenstadt wrote from from Deer Valley, Utah, Romney predicted to a group of major GOP donors that Trump easily capture the Republican Party’s 2020 nomination and will then be reelected.

He said Trump’s political fortunes would be bolstered by a pair of factors: an improving economy and the likelihood that Democrats would choose an outside-the-mainstream candidate.

“I think President Trump will be re-nominated by my party easily, and I think he’ll be reelected solidly,” Romney said.

“I think that not just because of the strong economy and because people are increasingly seeing rising wages, but I think it’s also true because I think our Democrat friends are likely to nominate someone who is really out of the mainstream of American thought and will make it easier for a president who is presiding over a growing economy,” he added.

That was a swipe at Bernie and, let's remember that, politically, Romney has been wrong about a great deal. And he's wrong about this as well. Last week, Doyle McManus, in an L.A. Times OpEd asked if the GOP will completely reshape itself in Trump's image? The GOP is now the Trump Party, not the Romney Party-- and not even remotely mainstream.

We’re full swing into primary season for the midterms, and where are the Republican voices offering any alternative to Trumpism? Traditionalist conservatives have been shuffled off the stage. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona decried Trump’s “regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals.” He’s retiring. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who called the White House “an adult day care center,” is retiring too. And Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who denounced Trump’s “half-baked, spurious nationalism,” is dying of cancer. Mitt Romney, who once called Trump a fraud, is running to be the next senator from Utah; now the harshest thing he’ll say is that the president isn’t “a role model for my grandkids.”

The collapse of other Republicans’ ability to push back against Trump is the most worrisome political development of the last year, say political scientists. That’s right, the biggest long-term threat to the health of the nation, they say, is not tax cuts favoring the wealthy, not trade wars and not radical deregulation-- but the hostile takeover of the GOP.

...The Gallup Poll reported last week that 87% of GOP voters approve of what he’s doing. As a result, Republicans who want to survive their primaries won’t say a word against the boss in public.

Trump also appears to be radicalizing Republican voters — shaping their views to follow his. The polling organization YouGov reported last month that 75% of Republican voters agree with Trump that the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt,” and 61% think the president is being framed. Those numbers have gone up as Trump has pressed his case against the FBI.

And that brings us to this year’s midterm elections, including Tuesday’s primaries in California. Long term, the outcomes will determine more than which party holds the majority in the House or Senate. The vote will also hold a message for every Republican officeholder: Was Trump a boost or a burden?

If the party holds on to its House and Senate majorities, many of its candidates, officeholders and strategists will conclude that Trump has been right all along. The GOP will continue remolding itself in the image of Trump-- populist, authoritarian, anti-immigrant.

Only if a “blue wave” of Democratic votes sweeps not just California, but also swing states, will the party open the question of whether Ohio Gov. John Kasich or someone else should run against Trump to be the GOP nominee in 2020.

These midterms will be an important signal to the GOP as it considers if it wants more Trump or less-- and whether choosing a volatile populist as its nominee turns out to be a one-time anomaly or a pattern for the future.

“I’m not so worried about Donald Trump as a threat to American democracy, because he’s not very competent,” [author of The People vs. Democracy, Yascha] Mounk said. “I’m more worried about what would happen if at some point we were to elect a more competent version.”

Would Romney Vote Against Trump In An Impeachment Trial-- Most Republicans Won't Regardless Of The Evidence

As far as Orrin Hatch goes-- good riddance to a rotten and Trumpified piece of crap. As far as Romney… any enemy of Trump’s… Look, a Bernie Sanders clone we were never going to get in Utah. If the Democrats need 67 votes to convict Trump after the House impeaches him, I bet Senator Romney will be as open to looking at the evidence than Hatch would have been-- not to mention most Republicans. Once Romney started signaling he would like to run for the Senate seat if the doddering Hatch retired, TRump moved into action trying to persuade Hatch to start in Congress, senile and out of his gourd or not. Romney noticed. As Alex Isenstadt noted in Politico Tuesday after Hatch’s announcement, “Should Romney run and win, as many expect, he will be poised to be Trump’s most prominent GOP foil, representing the wing of traditional Republicanism that the president has purposefully cast aside. While laying the groundwork for a prospective bid, Romney has made little secret that he will be unafraid of taking on the president. The 2012 GOP nominee has informed a series of Republican Party donors, senators and power brokers in recent weeks that, while he isn’t looking to pick a fight with Trump, he is more than willing to speak out against him. During the 2016 campaign, Romney derided Trump as a ‘phony’ and ‘fraud’ and implored the party to nominate someone else.” And no one think Romney has forgotten how Trump humiliated him fly to NYC and making him eat frog’s legs with a phony promise of a job as Secretary of State.

Reporting for the Washington Post, Callum Borchers was quick to speculated that Trump’s neo-fascist attack dog, Steve Bannon will be looking to stop Romney. “The race to succeed Hatch in Utah,” he wrote, “could represent an irresistible challenge for Bannon, especially if Mitt Romney runs. As I have noted before, Romney and Breitbart News were very friendly in 2012, when the former Massachusetts governor was the GOP presidential nominee. But since Romney lost to Barack Obama-- an event that roughly coincided with Bannon assuming control of Breitbart-- Romney has become a symbol of the political establishment Breitbart reviles. When Romney opposed Roy Moore, Bannon's favored candidate in last month's special election for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Bannon hit Romney with a personal attack. ‘You hid behind your religion,’ Bannon said at a rally for Moore, referring to Romney's Mormon faith. ‘You went to France to be a missionary while guys were dying in rice paddies in Vietnam.’ Just imagine what Bannon might say if Romney actually becomes a candidate for office.”

Bannon, of course, would need to find a Romney opponent to back— ideally one who won't be accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls, like Moore, or cozy up to white supremacists, like Paul Nehlen, a challenger to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) whom Breitbart supported in 2016.

The good news for Bannon is that expectations would be low for any candidate running against Romney, who is highly popular in Utah. The last candidate Bannon supported in Utah, President Trump, won the state in the 2016 general election but finished third in the Republican primary, 55 points behind Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) and just behind Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Utah is a great state for Romney and a bad one for Bannon, which means that the former White House chief strategist would be under little pressure. If he could field a candidate who could avoid embarrassment and make Romney sweat-- even a little-- Bannon might be able to use the Utah race as a big stage to take some shots at the GOP leadership.