Last night, Professor Heather Cox Richardson ended her thought-provoking Letter from An American with this:
“Last month, six in ten Republicans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll said they believed the election was stolen. Where do Republican lawmakers think this is going to end?”
Heather Cox Richardson is the author of:
So her question comes from someone with a deep knowledge of party history.
It seems to me that the GOP leaders have no long-term plan, and no long-range ideas or visions. They have a short-term plan: Win at any cost and hold power.
Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, defines fascism as a set of tactics for seizing and maintaining power.”
The fascist wants power. They do what it takes to achieve that power. It comes from cynicism: They think everyone is out for power. That’s where Borowitz got this joke:
True cynics think all people act from self-interested motives. They don’t really believe anyone wants to use power to help people. Because they think all people act from self-interest, they think attempts to achieve equality or fairness are really power grabs: They think people lower in the hierarchy want to displace them. They don’t believe fairness is possible, and they don’t believe equality is possible. (I wrote about that here.)
If this is your outlook, your only goal becomes seizing and maintaining power. This is why Republican leaders cynically embrace what they know to be a lie. They want to “win.”
The advantage fascists have is that they are ruthless. They’re willing to lie and cheat and steal. The disadvantage is that they are a minority. That’s why Biden has about a 60% approval rating now. I don’t think you can compromise with fascists, but you can outnumber them. It isn’t easy because they always punch above their weight. But if people committed to democracy mobilize, they can be outnumbered. We have a few years now to rebuild and strengthen the institutions that Trump battered so we’re ready again.
Yup, that’s because so many of my favorite scholars (the ones I learn the most from) are experts in Putin’s regime and other fascist movements. Everyone has a list of their favorite scholars, right? 🤓 Make nerdiness cool again!
The Republican “plan” makes me think of the “push off and keep turning” theory. I remember a physics test I took in college. A guy wanted to cross the river, so he has to calculate where to aim the boat to end up in the right place, given the strength of the current. Not being a scientist (physics was not my strong subject) what jumped into my head was, “Nobody would do that, and besides, it wouldn’t even work. Any normal person would push off and keep turning.”
The Republicans pushed off when they embraced Trump, and now they have to keep turning. When corporations cut off money to Mitch McConnell and others for supporting Trump’s lie about the election, these Republican leaders figured out how to promote the lie and get donations from that.
Now, of course, they will become more radicalized as they depend on money from those who embrace the lie—their most radicalized followers.
According to another story, the Republican leaders in 2015 kept hoping someone else would take on Trump. Now, they’re still hoping someone will take on Trump. From the New York Times:
They don’t know what to do, so they just keep turning.
