Despicable Them: How The GOP Threatens Democracy

Introduction to a series cataloguing the deceit, corruption, and moral rot of the Republican party.

Note: While my intention is to profile individuals whose conduct is disgraceful, this piece introduces a broader framework, explaining that these individuals all function within an ecosystem in which their conduct has become accepted, normalized, weaponized — and rewarded. The result is that the will of the people is consistently thwarted and representative government is failing, both in the larger, abstract sense of a functioning democracy and in the specific sense of responding to and addressing the needs of constituents.

Writ large, the Republican Party, at least as exemplified by its modern leadership, is despicable. Its contempt for democratic process, its refusal to acknowledge and address, much less respond to, the needs and rights and concerns of most Americans, its embedded racism and misogyny, its deceit, and its hyper-partisanization have coalesced and metastasized so that the party that today controls the federal government and most state governments is almost entirely unresponsive to constituent concerns.

We see this most clearly in the health care debacle, where the GOP’s inability to govern was on full display, a product of its years of lying to its base and its disrespect for both the American people and democracy itself. But the same lying and disrespect are at play in the Republicans’ approach to taxation (giant cuts favoring their wealthy donors at the expense of their own base as well as the country at large, and a backdoor means of gutting the ACA), public education (consistent efforts to undermine it through privatization), gun safety (lockstep opposition to common-sense proposals backed by overwhelming majorities across the nation), the environment (a campaign of lies about the causes and risks of climate change, thereby stymieing urgently-needed action to address it), civil rights (denials of systemic racism, coupled with concerted efforts to violate the civil rights of people of color, women, the LGBTQIA community, and Muslims for political points), infrastructure and jobs (merely another GOP talking point trotted out to attempt to justify massive tax cuts for the wealthy and opposition to planet-saving regulations), and financial/consumer protections (opposition to regulations supported by most Americans, who remain furious over the lack of accountability for the financial crisis), among other issues. Routinely, the GOP opposes legislation that huge majorities support irrespective of party affiliation, and consistently champions the interests of the wealthiest and most privileged over the rest of the country. They pay little price at the ballot box because in addition to their voter suppression and radical gerrymandering (both of which subvert democracy), they have successfully fomented and then leveraged hyper-partisanization, distrust of expertise and “elites”, deceit, grievance, and rejection of basic democratic norms.

These trends were well underway long before Trump eked out his victory with the combined aid of Vladmir Putin, James Comey, voter suppression, and rampant misogyny and racism. They accelerated under Obama, but under Trump, they have achieved warp speed, and the result is that the GOP is now so far removed from responsive government and a commitment to the Constitution that to date it has been willing to suborn, if not actively support, this country’s slide into a nepotistic kleptocracy, and our possible conversion into a quasi-authoritarian regime that rejects the democracy and human rights platforms that the U.S. has championed (however imperfectly) and of which it was the leader and global architect for the past 70 years. It has turned a blind eye to Trump’s absolutely pathological lying, a lying that destablizes the world and undermines democracy because it assaults the very notion of a knowable truth. And the GOP has done this for the sole purpose of maintaining its power so that it can impose its will on a citizenry that overwhelmingly rejects most of its platform.

Donald Trump’s character flaws and personal vileness are so deep and so shocking and so nationally humiliating, they are so unspeakably hideous and mind-numbing, that they have the capacity, in their ubiquity and their unrelentingness, to inure and even blind us to the broader and deeper rot within the Republican Party, and, in particular, to the pervasive commitment to the lying, the absence of character, and the contempt for democracy that define a staggering number of the GOP leadership, not to mention rank-and-file Republican politicians. Trump is a steaming malignancy — but he’s the apotheosis of the GOP, not a one-off, and that is the real problem. For when he is a gone, there will be other venal actors ready to take his place who will expand on his violations of the fundamental precepts of democracy. Every norm Trump violates, whether aided actively by Republican votes and commentary, or passively as they they watch, supine and silent, from the sidelines, is a step away from democracy, a precedent-creating action that provides cover and grounds for successors looking to do the same, and worse.

Thus there are a number of ongoing, domestic threats to our ability to continue as a democracy — threats that pre-dated Trump and that will likely succeed him. In my view, the biggest threats are (i) the rejection of the concepts of truth, fact, and science; (ii) the exploitation, even celebration, of the rising grievance, ignorance, and fear that go with that rejection; and (iii) the abandonment of democratic principles in favor of a cynical and situational commitment to winning at any cost — a kind of “ends justifies the means” approach that is the antithesis of democratic process. The Republican party has embraced all of these threats. Indeed, it has weaponized them. And that embrace and weaponization mean that the Republican Party, particularly as it has metastasized into the Party of Trump, is itself a threat to the country’s ability to continue as a liberal democracy.

1. Rejection of Truth, Fact, and Science

For years, the GOP has worked in tandem with a febrile rightwing media controlled and/or funded by would-be oligarchs — such as the Mercers (Breitbart), Rupert Murdoch (News Corp/WSJ/Fox), the Kochs (the Daily Caller), the Smith family (Sinclair Broadcasting), and others — to undermine the notions of truth and fact, to sow distrust of scientific data and other forms of expertise, and to build distrust of secular, civic institutions including the government itself and the programs it supports, the press, and universities — all in order to promote and spread the Republican agenda. That GOP agenda is the agenda of these ultra-wealthy families who control the rightwing media: lower taxes for corporations and the ultra-wealthy (who tend to control them), elimination of regulations for the benefit of those same corporations, and permanently low wages for the middle and working classes (also for the benefit of those same corporations). The threats of this agenda to Americans other than the ultra-rich are hidden, minimized, masked, or lied about altogther, by the politicians that these oligarchs have bought and paid for, and by the media outlets they own.

Sowing distrust of the institutions and programs designed to benefit regular Americans, in order to reduce support for them (be those institutions the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, FEMA, the FDA, public education, universities, the Affordable Care Act, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and ad infinitum), or crippling them from within by defunding them, rejecting science, and hijacking their mission so that they serve the interests of the industries they are supposed to regulate rather than the public, are critical components of this coordinated rightwing attack. For when the public rejects the value of education, science, and assisting others, the public will not support taxes designed to provide for education, address climate change, or provide health care; and that means lower taxes and fewer regulations for the corporations and their owners.

The rejection of science, facts, truth, expertise, and evidence, and the celebration and embrace of ignorance and outright lies, are the key component of the Republican approach; they are integral to its success. Increasingly, and to increasingly devastating effect on our discourse and thus on our ability to address important and complex policy problems that threaten our livelihoods, rights, lives, and the very viability of our planet, this rejection of fact, and celebration of ignorance and lies, is integral to the Republican brand. The GOP has reached the point where it has made reality itself subject to partisan challenge. We see this in a multitude of contexts. Here are just a few:

• Climate change, in which the denialism of a fringe few on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry has been flogged by rightwing media and by Republican politicians, with the result that that denialism is now accepted by large numbers of rank and file Republican voters, poisoning our ability to address impending local, national, and worldwide climate-change-induced disaster and devastation. The consequences of this denialism will be far-ranging and affect the lives of the Republican base perhaps even more than those of us who recognize the threat and are seeking to address it. Among other things, the U.S. will lag (and is lagging) other countries in developing sustainable alternative fuel solutions, which negatively impacts our ability to create modern jobs, compete, and maintain our living standard, and renders us vulnerable not only to natural disaster but to competition and terrorist attack. Under the GOP and Trump, we now have a national “policy” of denying reality, which strips us of any ability to meet and address the overwhelming challenges of climate change. This excellent article about the political response to climate-change-caused flooding in Miami, illustrates how the Republican leadership’s refusal to acknowledge the cause of the problem has rendered politicians wholly unequipped to respond to or even talk about the crisis in a fact-based way, and as a result they are unable to propose any long-term means of dealing with it to their constituencies, to whom they have been lying, and have apparently convinced, that that problem of climate change is a liberal shibboleth invented by environmentalists. (For what purpose the “conspiracy” of scientists across the world? That they never explain.)
• Health care: The GOP’s histrionic lying about the evils of the Affordable Care Act has been well-documented. Those lies included not only the demonization of the legislation itself for purely partisan reasons, but the false claims for eight years that it did not work or was collapsing or that the GOP could repeal it and replace it with something better. The GOP’s messaging from the beginning was a lie, a lie designed to undermine Barack Obama and support for the legislation, but which ignored the reality that President Obama was elected on a mandate to address the lack of health insurance, the insurance companies’ refusal to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and a host of other health insurance related issues. The GOP leaders’ hysterical cries of “socialism” and comparisons to slavery and Hitler when the Democrats were simply attempting to solve a critical national problem, and to do so using a market-based approach (over the objections of the Democrats’ own left wing) just as Republicans preferred, meant that when the GOP was finally eventually in power again, it was never going to be able to repeal the legislation and come up with a replacement solution, because the ACA already is the Republican solution. Having whipped its base into a frenzy with its lies about the purpose and effect of the legislation, laced with racist attacks on President Obama himself, the GOP painted itself into a box where it “had” to lie about both the efficacy of the legislation and the likely effects of repeal.

And although the GOP cannot repeal the legislation without harming millions of Americans and upending the health care markets, it has nevertheless attempted to do so for close to a decade. It has continued with this exercise in political cynicism and cruelty despite the legislation’s increasing popularity, despite the consequences to the country, despite the unpopularity of the GOP’s position. It has continued with this charade on a near-monthly basis since Trump took office — all because, having lied for years, most of its caucus fears they cannot retreat from the lie now. So they adopted new lies, pushing deeply unpopular repeal legislation that was little more than a disguised tax cut for the rich, with the added kicker of stripping people of health insurance, upending the health care market, setting the U.S. on a path to total destruction of the social safety net — and then lying about those consequences. (Jimmy Kimmel did a nice job of calling out some of the lies of the O-care repeal bills on his late-night show.) And, of course, the GOP has attempted to rush through hateful legislation without CBO scores, without debate, without input from the medical and insurance communities, without hearings to educate the public, without listening to the voters, without any attempt at responsible governance. The upending of the democratic process purely to have a legislative “win” on the books, irrespective of the effect on constituents or the economy or the national welfare, has been both brazen and riddled with a propaganda campaign aided and abetted by Fox and its ilk.

The result of the GOP’s reprehensible conduct has been a roller-coaster of anxiety and fear for tens of millions of Americans. This party’s astonishing indifference to the needs and well-being of its constituents has required citizens and grass roots organizations and others to spend to millions of hours and dollars to mobilize against potentially devastating legislation — in effect to defend ourselves from a figurative assault by our own government. And after each extremely narrow defeat of the legislation, when terrified citizens have heaved a collective sigh of exhausted relief, the GOP has returned to sneak additional undermining legislation in elsewhere, as they have now done with the Senate’s proposed tax scam bill, which guts the individual mandate, strips millions of healthcare, cuts billions from Medicare, blows a huge hole in the deficit, and raises taxes on the working and middle classes to finance cuts for the uber-rich. The Affordable Care Act will fail without the individual mandate, because private insurance is only viable when low and high risk is pooled; to attack the individual mandate as the GOP does is in effect to lie about how insurance works. Unwilling to the solve the health care problem through the hybrid approach of Obamacare based off Romneycare and developed at the Heritage Foundation, and also unwilling to expand Medicare or Medicaid or support a public option or single payer or any other government-based solution, the GOP has nothing to offer Americans — except lies and the promise of lives that are nasty, brutish, and short.

• Taxation: Here, again, we see the same grotesque pattern. The GOP has been oddly transparent about the fact that its wealthy corporate donors have demanded a large tax cut, and that that is why they seek to deliver one. But at the same time they have pushed the fiction that this bill is not the boondoggle for rich and an attack on the poor — when it plainly is. The GOP has structured the cut as a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthiest, financed by a combination of tax increases on those who make far less, a trillion dollar increase in the deficit, and cuts to critical government programs such as Medicare. This bill is the scam through which the GOP will reach its holy grail of dismantling the social safety net, for the deficit will be exploited later as the basis for further cuts. The scam is being messaged as “reform” when in fact it is utter rapaciousness, robbery from the poor to give more to the richest, and at a time when the economy is doing well, unemployment is at 4%, and the wealthiest are raking it in through a booming stock market. (And of course the evidence suggests that tax cuts do not help the economy, though they do increase income inequality.)

Essentially every economist to consider the legislation says that in addition to increasing the deficit, it will vastly increase the deficit — in other words, there is no absolutely no economic justification for it. But the GOP is indifferent to this as well; the party of fiscal “conservatism” has a decades-old habit of invoking deficit concern only when it wants to block or gut Democratic legislative initiatives. When comes to handing over the public wealth to its donors on the backs of the poor, such conservatism is nowhere to be seen.

This legislation is also unpopular, but the GOP is once again seeking to ram it through, determined to reward its donors at the expense of its constituents and the national welfare. And once again, anxiety among the pubic is reaching a new crescendo, as it becomes clear that this monstrosity of a bill is the door through which the social safety net will be destroyed and individual states are kneecapped in their ability to spend on education, health care, social services, and infrastructure; the door through which fetuses are granted legal status; the door through which blue states are punished for their progressivism; the door through which churches can engage in politics without losing their tax exemptions — allowing pastors to paint Republicanism a mandate from Christ.

This legislation is crack for evangelicals, for the ultra-rich, and granny-starvers like Paul Ryan whose life’s goal appears to be the permanent impoverishment of the poor and working class. Devoid of economic justification, a massive windfall for the rich who already own the lion’s share of this country’s wealth, thrown together without regard for the public good, the bill is an object lesson in legalized corruption. And if, as seems likely, this bill passes, the narrative we will see in the press is about how the GOP scored a “much needed” legislative win, rather than a searing critique of the GOP’s cynical rapacity and refusal to listen to the concerns of its constituents. The story should not be that they “need” a win, but that in their desperation to clock a tax cut for winning’s sake, they are willing to sacrifice the lives of their own supporters to both the beltway narrative and to the moneylust of their uber-wealthy masters. This bill polls in the 20s and 30s even in deep red states, but the GOP senators are immune to the pleas and desperation of their constituents, indifferent to the pain they are about to inflict. They are moral monsters — despicable, liars, a party of Potters crushing the George Baileys, and then mugging for the camera in repulsive self-congratulation as if they have accomplished anything but an assault on lives and decency.

• Gun Safety/Gun Violence Prevention: The GOP’s refusal to address the gun violence in our country may be the most nauseating and shameful example of the GOP’s rejection of science and truth, married to deeply dangerous propaganda, the promulgation of myths and nonsense over fact, and flagrant, unapologetic hypocrisy. What bigger lie than the one that “nothing” can be done to address gun violence except to pray and to expand the presence of guns everywhere, putting the population in an ever-present state of terror? The GOP has systematically suppressed the collection of evidence that would enable the country to assess gun violence; blocked research into gun violence; opposed addressing the issue as the public health crisis that it is; blocked common-sense legislation such as universal background checks (supported by 90% of the public); passed legislation giving gun manufacturers and dealers immunity from lawsuits, i.e., from being held accountable for negligence; refused to create a national registry of gun owners (supported by over 70% of the public); and more. It has promoted the fiction that armed “good guys” can stop gun violence; it has rejected the imposition of mandatory training and registration and insurance; it has refused to support the development of technology that would make guns less dangerous (smart guns); it has blocked legislation to prevent suspected terrorists from having access to guns; it has bowed to the NRA’s opposition to close loopholes to prevent prevent domestic abusers from getting access to guns; it has refused to consider legislation that would require waiting periods for guns (supported by 70% of Americans); it has prevented the Centers for Disease Control from disseminating facts about guns, such as the fact that when guns are present in the home, the statistical likelihood of homicide increases, rather than decreases. And now the GOP-controlled House just passed a terrifying NRA bill on “concealed carry reciprocity”, which would force states with stricter gun laws preventing concealed carry to let people from other states where it is allowed do the same in their states. On the PR front, the GOP does not universally condemn and turn into pariahs the conspiracy theorists and gun lunatics who claim Newtown and Las Vegas were staged; it does not condemn Alex Jones; it says nothing when the man who occupies the presidency repeats Jones’ hateful and dangerous lies. It works hand in glove with the NRA, even though children cower in classrooms, traumatized during lockdowns. Rather than stop the madness, the GOP accepts money from the NRA and does its bidding to ensure that assault rifles and multi-round magazine clips remain legal and readily available, insisting every time — so many times — that attempting to address a national scourge is “politicizing” the issue.

It used to be that the GOP lied somewhat craftily, but with the advent of Trump their lies are increasingly brazen, matching his. An obvious example is the lies of Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Bill Cassidy, on full display in the GOP’s thrice-failed efforts to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. During the GOP’s first repeal effort, Pence claimed falsely that the proposed legislation would not kick 23 million people off Medicare. He went to Ohio and lied about wait lists in Ohio that do not exist. His lies were fact-checkable and he was checked, by John Kasich (admittedly also a Republican) and others, but that didn’t stop Pence. He flat-out lied. And the rightwing media that supports him did not call him out on it; they never do. In the third attempt, Bill Cassidy, co-author of the somehow-even-worse Graham-Cassidy bill, lied during the CNN debate. We are seeing the same pattern with this abomination of a tax bill. They lie about its purpose; what its effects will be. Notably, all 52 Republican senators voted yesterday for the bill to move forward to the floor; there was not one conscience of a conservative to be heard in opposition. No — what they call this horrendous bill is tax “reform.”

There is a reason that the GOP so often uses Orwellian language to mask the real expected outcomes of its proposed legislation. The reason is that if they were to come clean and level with their voters on those outcomes, they would not be re-elected. So they lie.

It is no accident that when the Republican leadership wishes to promote an agenda or deflect a crisis, its media stooges repeat those talking points in tandem from morning until midnight on every show on Fox News, the points amplified in other quasi-news outlets such as Breitbart or Infowars. It is through this mechanism that the talking points of the GOP (in effect the talking points of their billionaire handlers) are repeated and amplified, with no opposing views presented, influencing the opinions of millions of viewers.

The rightwing news media is owned by oligarchs who want popular regulations and programs eliminated, and they do not want their viewers/readers to know or understand that the GOP’s agenda is antithetical to their interests. So they don’t cover the issues and they help promote the GOP’s lies and obfuscate the truth. How do they do that? By sowing distrust of the facts put out by anyone but themselves. They build trust by focusing on the shared coded, and not-so-coded, language of white (male, hetero) supremacy and privilege, focusing on nonsense like whether Santa Clause is “white” or there is a war on Christmas, so that their audience feels a bond and trusts their word. And they serve up talking points from the Republican party — it is almost as if Priebus used to hand his list of bullet points to Ailes, O’Reilly, Hannity, and the rest of them, who would then all repeat it. Now the players are slightly changed (Huckabee Sanders), but the game is the same. And so the lies are invented and reinforced across the country in every Fox-watching household, and efforts of the mainstream media to debunk the lies and expose them for what they are fall flat — those who need to see the debunking are not watching or looking, and even when they do, they don’t believe what they see.

In this manner, for example, the White House’s lies that there were no relationships or contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians were repeated on Fox News and elsewhere even after actual journalists debunked those lies. When that lie stopped being viable, Fox did not call out the lies, or inform its audience that Trump and his surrogates had repeatedly lied; instead, just as Trump and his enablers switched smoothly over to stating that, rather than no contacts at all, those contacts were not collusion, Fox, et al switched over to repeating that there was no collusion; and then, as that talking point began to be less and less tenable, the White House switched over to stating that collusion is not illegal and that anyone would do it, and that it is merely opposition research to accept potentially stolen evidence from a hostile foreign nation — and sure enough, Fox et al then shifted to having its toadies repeat that collusion is just politics and that anyone would do it. They also started a smear campaign against Special Counsel Mueller and those who work for him, and a number of rightwing lackeys in the House have taken that ball and run with it, even calling for his resignation. The relationship between rightwing media and Trump and the GOP is a sickeningly symbiotic one; Trump watches Fox and tweets their nonsense; they defend his and spread more.

The Russia example is illustrative of the same deeply dangerous pattern that helps keeps the GOP in power. Because the people who tune into Fox all day long trust its stars to provide them with news from a worldview that they relate to, the Republican machine is able to undermine bipartisan outrage not only about critical legislation, but for Trump’s violation of democratic and constitutional norms — and in this manner the GOP works in tandem with Trump and the rightwing media to undermine support for those norms at all. Conduct of the Trump administration that ought to disturb and horrify people irrespective of political affiliation — because it is potentially criminal; because it is dangerous; because our national security and the very foundation of our ability to engage in free and fair elections has been undermined by a hostile foreign power whose goal is to weaken the United States specifically and democracy generally — instead is shrugged off. And the result is that Trump’s disgraceful, U.S.-endangering rejection of the Russian attack on our election, and his embrace of that Russian attack for his personal benefit, is met with disbelief and/or a “so what, it’s just politics” response from some Republicans, from the rightwing media, and from the intractable base of GOP support.

It used to be axiomatic that Americans stood for human rights and the rule of law and for democratic institutions and values, and against the notions of tyranny, autocracy, fascism, torture, state murder, suppression of speech and the press, nepotism, corruption, bribery, money laundering, and sexual assault. Rather than recoil from the possibility that Trump was installed with the illegal help of a hostile foreign government, Trump’s supporters do not care, and even welcome the interference. And rather than recoil from Trump’s own corruption, nepotism, attacks on the press, attacks on citizens, attacks on the vulnerable, adoption of fascist rhetoric and tactics, support for torture, likely money laundering, possible treason and obstruction of justice, and possible rape and other forms of sexual assault, they support and defend his conduct.

As for the GOP, beholden to this very base to get elected, beholden to the wealthy donors who fund their campaigns, it does nothing to stop Trump. The GOP establishment holds its nose and works with him, refusing to condemn him except for the occasional individual in the face of, say, his conduct concerning Charlottesville; when it comes to his race-baiting personal attacks, to sharing Islamophobic conspiracy websites or pathologically lying, they are silent. The Trumpists are all in, willing liars and stooges and operatives at the ready. When it comes to him leaking classified intelligence to Soviet operatives, the GOP are silent. When it comes to his corruption, they are silent and enabling. When it comes to the Congressional investigations of Russian interference with the election, they grill witnesses about Hillary Clinton and prop up Trump. They do not issue joint statements condemning Trump’s attacks on U.S. intelligence agencies. When it comes to confirming his science-rejecting, unqualified, corrupt nominees, they are all in. When it comes to fast-tracking his court picks after blockading Obama’s and stealing a Supreme Court seat, they are all in. They do not censure him; they duck the press when the press seeks comment on his latest depredations. Trump is the GOP’s creature; his lies are their lies because they are in the same party; his misconduct is their misconduct, because they work together, and they do not call those lies and misconduct out as a party. They do not even go to him in private and threaten a 25th Amendment solution if he does not stop. When he attacks Barack Obama or James Comey or Hillary Clinton or Special Counsel Mueller or individuals of color or the media or April Ryan or Colin Kaepernick or Elizabeth Warren or ….the list is endless….there is always a Republican ready to defend his hateful speech and spin it, from John Kelly to Kelly Ann Conway to Devin Nunes to Bob Goodlatte to Sarah Huckabee Sanders to Tom Cotton to Ted Cruz to Paul Ryan to Mitch McConnell. They spin the contents of Trump’s lies even though his statements are in black and white or on videotape. Up is down, black is white, tax cuts help the poor, destroying health care insurance markets will preserve them, there is nothing we can do about guns but pray, Trump cares about people, there is no problem with his endless golfing and touting his own properties and holding meetings at his hotel and golf course and hawking his hats to flood victims and denigrating the mayor of San Juan. Lie after lie after lie, attack after attack after attack. Normalized. The GOP does not say “Enough. No more.”

While the short-term victims of the GOP’s lies and enablement are the Democratic politicians who cannot get elected in areas in which radical gerrymandering and voter suppression enshrine the views of a minority of the population and enable the repeated election of “representatives” who vote for nominees dedicated to, and measures actively designed to, harm their own constituents, the ultimate casualties of this Republican approach are the the rights and lives of human beings, as well as representative democracy itself. And because it is one of only two viable political parties in a Constitutional system (i.e., the Electoral College) that makes it impossible for a multi-party system to succeed, and it now controls all branches of the federal government and a large majority of state governments, the GOP itself may be the single greatest threat to democracy that this country has faced since World War II.

I warned during the election that it was clear that the GOP would not act as a check and balance on Trump, and I have written repeatedly about the fact that Trump cannot destroy this country single-handedly; it requires the active complicity and support of the GOP for Trump to get away with the corruption, lies, and abrogation of Constitutional and democratic norms that he is getting away with. If the GOP wanted to stop him or hold him accountable, it would do so. A smattering of individual GOP members of Congress have occasionally professed a sporadic and isolated interest in doing so — but have not, in fact, done a thing. And so whether this country can survive as a democracy is an open question. Whether the GOP wants this country to survive as an actual democracy — rather than as a sham democracy in which the GOP has a lock on power — is also an open question.

2. Exploitation of Grievance

The racialization of grievance is not new in politics, nor its its exploitation for cynical gain. The “Southern Strategy” embraced by Nixon and the GOP ever since have been a longstanding and ugly staple of the party, even as that strategy was whitewashed with dog whistles in lieu of the unvarnished racism of George Wallace. Trump, 70 years old and mentored by a KKK-supporting father and McCarthyite Roy Cohn, has embraced a naked, unapologetic, celebratory racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, and misogyny, pitched as “authenticity”, that has given the rest of the country permission to express hatred without risk of societal opprobrium. Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists and the KKK with any degree of that same authenticity. His “both sides” response to the domestic terrorism in Charlottesville; his continuous personal attacks on black athletes and Muslims and women of color seem to be the products of both reflexive, in-his-bones racism and misogyny, and a calculated appeal to his racist, Islomophobic, misogynistic base. His vileness is both real and automatic — authentic, if you will — and at the same time deeply cynical and utterly exploitative: he uses people of color and Muslims and women as vehicles for grievance and receptacles of his bullying, emblems through whom he signals to his base not his personal power, but theirs. By performing for them his rejection of people’s humanity on the basis of their skin color or religion or gender, he shows his base that while their privileges — the privileges of whiteness, of maleness, of Christianity — are under threat, he has reclaimed those privileges, not just for himself, but for them.

Trump’s triumphalist embrace of the basest impulses in our culture is met with a shifty discomfort by a GOP “establishment” that needs GOP’s racist voters, but prefers its racism to be whitewashed. I have no doubt that most of the GOP leadership is repulsed by Trump’s hateful language and outrageous response to Charlottesville, but their condemnations of his words are thin, occasional, line-walking, and unaccompanied by any action to stop them. By way of example, Republicans in the House or Senate could introduce legislation to censure him for his racist and xenophobic and Islamophic statements. They do not. Most shrink from giving on-the-record quotes of condemnation, fearful of alienating his base, unwilling to lead. Tellingly, moreover, they take no issue with the Trump administration’s flagrantly racist, homophobic, islamophobic, misoygnistic, and xenophobic policies. These policies are not repudiated by the GOP. No corrective actions are attempted.

And increasingly, the GOP establishment, or what used to pass for it, does not exist. It is being overrun by extremists and ideologues. Roy Moore was a Trumpist before Trump, and he would be a hateful, racist, homophobic, misogynist, Christianist abomination even without multiple allegations of preying upon and sexually assaulting teenage girls. At least he is a bridge too far for the Establishment GOP to suborn, but the Alabama Republican party and governor have staunchly defended him, and if he is elected they will work with him. Kelli Ward is a Bannon and Mercer-backed Trump supporter who declared her challenge to Senator Jeff Flake before he resigned, falsely claiming he is not a conservative when he has voted in lockstep with his party and with Trump. There were scores of examples of racist statements and tweets and jokes made about Barack Obama by Republican state leaders during his presidency. “Establishment” candidates like Ed Gillespie embraced the anti-immigrant grievance machine of Trump.

Trump brought white supremacists and nationalists into the White House; he brought crass misogynist and utterly racist filth like Ted Nugent and reality show vulgarian and former-VP candidate Sarah Palin into the White House to defile a portrait of a former first lady; the GOP said nothing. Trump installed Bannon, Breitbart editor and promoter of the white nationalists and misogynists, into the White House. His ouster is meaningless. Bannon continues to work with and/or use Trump to further his own agenda of transforming the GOP and this country into his own anti-democractic and anarchic, dystopian vision of a “maga”-society that mocks the very notion of freedom for all but a few. He is a Moore supporter and planning to primary “establishment” Republicans with more Roy Moores. Establishment Repubilcans are retiring, knowing they will lose in primaries from their right flank. The Republican rightwing base is a cesspool of racialized and genderized grievance, and with Fox and Breitbart stoking that grievance and giving it a greater platform and greater purchase in Republican politics, establishment voices like the National Review have less and less impact and the GOP is increasingly Trumpified. The base embraces the politics of grievance and the GOP’s electoral “success” is cannot be unpacked from the racism that its base requires, the rightwing media gleefully stokes, and its increasingly degenerate primary candidates willingly deploy.

And because both that overt grievance and GOP policies are disliked by a majority of the American public (other than tax cuts for the rich, guns, and anti-abortion, it has nothing else to offer), the GOP’s electoral success is increasingly dependent on voter suppression, racialized gerrymandering, and other forms of legalized cheating (see below). The GOP uses racism to sell its undermining of democratic principles to a broader public that might otherwise reject its transparently undemocratic tactics: those people vote illegally. If those people vote illegally then efforts to prevent them from voting are transformed from suppression and disenfranchisement and racism into “fairness” — a neat trick that also allows its proponents to slough off any accusations of racism. And those who already blame people of color and immigrants for societal ills lap up the false/overblown tales of voter fraud (somehow always featuring people of color despite the fact that the rare instances of it seem primarily to be white Republicans), pitched regularly from GOP operatives and media (a Google search of “Fox news” and “voter fraud” yields an array of examples). The GOP depends on the exploitation of grievance for its very existence.

3. Abandonment of Democratic Principles and Norms

The GOP began undermining democracy years before Trump declared his candidacy. Particularly at the state level, Republican governors and legislatures have systematically sought to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters by enacting sweeping voter suppression statutes aimed at people of color after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Both parties have always gerrymandered for partisan political gain, but in recent years it has become so partisan and extreme, especially in states fully controlled by the GOP, that the practice has had a massive dilutive effect, enabling the GOP to win more seats than it should and allowing them to net additional seats even when they lose the popular vote by multiple percentage points. (This practice was challenged in the Supreme Court this term.) The shenanigans around redistricting and partisan gerrymandering go back many years, but until 2013, at least the GOP had the Voting Rights Act as a check on their tactics. No more. And these two practices — voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering have given Republicans a deep structural advantage, as they are able not only to disenfranchise and prevent Democratic votes from being cast, but also from counting when they are cast.

During Obama’s presidency, the GOP abandoned basic norms of governance at both the Congressional and state level. From unprecedented obstruction and slow-rolling of judicial nominees to flagrant disrespect (screaming “you lie!” at the State of the Union) and abuse of the fillibuster, the GOP took a hatchet to any pretense of bipartisanship and went after Obama with the viciousness its rabid base craved. It opened multiple repetitive, costly, needless investigations into Benghazi for purely partisan reasons — abusing the Congressional oversight power for the purpose of destroying Hillary Clinton’s viability as a presidential candidate. It stole a Supreme Court seat from the 66 million citizens who voted for Barack Obama, refusing to even hold hearings on a much-admired centrist Orrin Hatch had lauded. The GOP’s tactics paid off — both in the form of the email server that they, with a willing press, turned into an endless bludgeon against Clinton despite their rank hypocrisy ( Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell used private servers, George W. Bush illegally stored government emails on RNC servers and then deleted 22 million of them; several GOP House members use private servers), and Trump’s appointment to the Supreme Court of Neil Gorsuch, an extraordinarily rightwing federalist society choice whose dripping contempt for women during his confirmation hearings, where he blandly refused to answer any substantive questions, presaged the same disdain he reportedly evinces toward his colleagues at oral argument.

At the state level, in addition to its rush to return to Jim Crow-era obstruction of the right to vote targeted at minorities, the GOP in North Carolina refused to accept electoral defeat, stripping a newly elected Democratic governor of certain powers of the office to weaken his ability to govern. Similar statutes and dirty tricks and redistricting shenanigans occurred in Republican-controlled statehouses around the country: in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, for example.

Before Obama, the Bush administration engaged in a number of notorious anti-democratic practices, from politicizing intelligence to justify the Iraq war, to engaging in a stealth torture regime, to rounding up people in sweeps and incarcerating them without trial or due process at Guantanamo, to firing U.S. attorneys for partisan reasons and deleting 22 million emails relating to an investigation of those firings, among other things.

But with Trump the very notion of a liberal democracy is under complete assault. Trump’s campaign was a prelude to his presidency; those who thought he would pivot at inauguration simply ignored the evidence that was available, which made it plain that the campaign was who he was and how he would “govern.” And the GOP’s failure to address and deal with Trump’s abuses during the campaign reads like a blueprint for their failures during his presidency — a total abdication of moral leadership, and an abandonment of basic principle or commitment to the foundational notions of democracy. Remember: Mitch McConnell, during the election, threatened Obama with accusations of partisan interference by Obama if he were to inform the public of the extent of Russian interference. McConnell was willing to attack Obama’s legitimacy to hide from the American public Trump’s own illegtimacy and unprecedented boost from a hostile foreign government with whom Trump openly sought to do business (until he lied about that and pretended otherwise).

McConnell’s actions would have been unconscionable even if Trump had been Abraham Lincoln. But he intervened for Trump at a time that it was already clear that Trump was a national security threat and an abomination who would defile the presidency and undermine democracy.

I am referring specifically to Trump’s open calls for violence against protesters — usually minorities and Muslims; his specific support for torture, violence, and thuggery; his naked racism and misogyny and Islamophobia and xenophobia; his threats to investigate and imprison his opponent, Hillary Clinton, after the election if he won; his threat not to accept the results of the election if he lost; his encouragement of misogynistic, panting calls for Clinton’s imprisonment and even execution; his faux-joking encouragement of his supporters to assassinate Clinton; his faux-joking request to Putin to turn over Clinton’s emails; his lavish praise of Putin and other authoritarians; his bullying cruelty; his attacks on the free press; his pathological lies; his denials of his conflicts of interest, and later, his refusals to shed those conflicts; his refusal to release his tax returns; his abusive personalized attacks on anyone who criticized him; his penchant for nepotism; his ties to Russian oligarchs, money launderers, and mobsters; his consorting with and hiring of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and his elevation of their filthy messages through tweets and retweets.

None of this has abated since he was inaugurated; the lies, the racism, the anti-Semitism, the homophobia, the personal attacks, the attacks on the press have escalated, and been joined by attacks on the judiciary, attacks on the intelligence agencies, attacks on the former director of the FBI, attacks on sitting senators and House members; demands for loyalty, demands for personal thanks from cabinet members and ordinary citizens, demands for accolades, tirades against critics, hiring of his family, total refusal to divest his businesses, hawking his properties from the White House and while on official business. His advisers include his children and rich cronies. His advisers have violated the Hatch Act and touted his children’s businesses, his advisers have themselves lobbed racial slurs and defended his Charlottesville comments. He has attacked his predecessor by fabricating claims of “wiretapping” and then demanded the Department of Justice investigate and justify his false claims; he has impugned the integrity of the election to the extent that Clinton won the popular vote, falsely asserting she beat him due to voter fraud and forming a pretextual commission at taxpayer expense to justify his lies, collect personal data on voters, and suppress the vote; he has installed racists and nationalists in the White House and supported white ethno nationalists; he has lied multiple times a day; he treats the U.S. government as if it his — “my” military, “my” justice department, “I have the greatest intelligence”; he has gutted the state department and stripped the EPA of scientists; he has installed cronies, kleptocrats, hacks, stooges, weasels, and industry shills into cabinet positions; he has nominated unqualified rightwing partisan idealogue hacks to lifetime federal judgeships; he has attacked people of color on a near weekly basis to the delight of his base; he has called for the police to physically abuse people in their custody, especially if they are of color; he has earned money off the Secret Service and stretched it beyond its capacity; he has denigrated the citizens who do not support him and openly preferred white citizens over others; his cabinet members have treated themselves and their wives to boondoggles at taxpayer expense; he has instituted an unconstitutional attack on Muslims through his executive order travel bans; he has fomented violence, hatred, racism, xenophobia and bigotry across the country; he has turned the Department of Justice into an arm of oppression against people of color and immigrants and women; he is beset by conflicts of interest that he refuses to shed; he has obstructed justice; he has lied about Russia; he is barring gays and people of color from White House functions; he appears to be blocking a merger as a punishment to CNN for negative news coverage and actively attempting to sabotage their business; he has raged against not being able to use the Department of Justice as his personal lawyers; he has fired all U.S. attorneys and not replaced them, then sought to personally interview potential replacements; he has left critical positions unfilled but filled others with unqualified hacks; he has declared his critics “enemies” and treats the majority of American as such; he has asked Republicans to end the Russia investigations; he has fumed at Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation after lying to Congress in his confirmation hearings and openly flirted with firing him; he has mocked our allies and praised our enemies; and this is only a partial list of his ongoing depredations.

Writers like Masha Gessen, Sarah Kendzior, Amy Siskind, and others have chronicled the erosion of norms and the normalization of democratic violations that occur in the slide toward authoritarianism, and we have witnessed this with now-unstartling regularity since even before Trump took office. Most power is ceded without a drop of blood and so it goes here. With a Democratic minority close to powerless to stop Trump, it falls to the GOP to exert any check and balance on the man’s actions. To date there has been none, unless you count the passage of additional sanctions against Russia, as punishment for interference in the election, as a check on Trump.

McCain has given a speech against Trump — in Europe. Flake gave a speech against Trump — while announcing his resignation. Corker has had some negative words to say about Trump — but is also resigning. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are plainly uncomfortable with Trump’s flagrant racism and misogyny, but other than occasionally voice disagreement, they stand silent. There are a few other critical words uttered here or there — by Ben Sasse, or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham when it comes to Russia. I am not saying there is not a bit of criticism within the GOP ranks; it is plain that many of them are not fans of his. But that does not matter, because they do not act on their discomfort; few speak at all, and those who do speak, do not follow through on their words.

For, ultimately, the GOP is now the party of the Trump, and the GOP has stood by its man. The GOP has confirmed his unqualified nominees, rushed through his corrupt, perjuring cabinet members, limited debate on life-altering legislation and upended governing norms by failing to hold hearings or properly score legislation or even giving legislators time to read and understand the bills before holding votes. The GOP has excluded Democrats entirely from the legislative process and moved forward on purely partisan grounds to fulfill the agenda of a massively unpopular president, who lost the popular vote with the aid of the Russian government and unprecedented interference from the then-director of the FBI, and whose legitimacy has been in question from the get-go. Not a single Republican has crossed party lines to support bills requiring Trump to disclose his tax returns or business conflicts. Not a single elected Republican has called on him to disclose and/or divest his business interests, to disallow his children from acting as his advisers, to stop hawking his properties, to stop holding meetings at his hotels and golf courses and clubs.

Not a single elected Republican has drafted any resolution of censure for his hate speech, for his racism, for his Islamophobia, for his endless amplification of abhorrent conspiracy theories, for his attacks on our allies. While about 20 Congressional Republicans (out of nearly 300) decried the Muslim ban, not one did a thing about it. They have sloughed off his multiple efforts to obstruct the Congressional and Mueller investigations as merely the actions of a rube businessman who cannot be expected to understand the separation of powers — an utterly preposterous (and dangerous) defense of a president’s Constitutional violations. They know he lies pathologically, they know he threatens the press and civil rights and crosses all lines of decency. They know he has pressured them, and Comey, and Sessions, and Rosenstein. They know he has supported far-right, white nationalist, anti-democratic forces in Europe. They know he supports Putin and Duterte. They know his pissing contest with Kim Jong Un is deeply dangerous, debased, embarrassing, and unhinged to the point of lunacy. They know he may even have dementia. Still they do nothing. They do not call for his resignation, a mental health examination, an investigation into the sexual assault allegations against him, an inquiry into the extent to which his business conflicts are driving his “policy” toward Saudi Arabia, China, Qatar, the Phillipines, Russia. (All evidence suggests his hotel interests drive that policy, such as it is, but no matter how he destabilizes our allies and encourages our enemies, the GOP does nothing.)

It appears that no matter how horrible, how unfit, how unhinged, how reckless, how ignorant, how destabilizing, how racist, how abusive, how conflicted, how corrupt Trump is, the GOP will do nothing to stop him — unless, perhaps, Mueller gives them reason to, or Trump sets off a Saturday Night Massacre-type chain of events by firing Mueller. Even so, it is not clear that findings by Mueller will lead to impeachment by the GOP-controlled House or conviction by the GOP-controlled Senate. It is not clear that the GOP would seek to orchestrate Trump’s resignation to avoid impeachment if it were to come to that. It is not clear that if Trump were to fire Mueller, the GOP would intervene to reinstate the special counsel — though there are positive signs the GOP would do so. It is even less clear what, if anything, the GOP would do if Trump were to pre-emptively try to pardon himself, or to pardon others connected to him and the Russia inquiry, such as Manafort, Flynn, or his family.

And, critically, the GOP has not laid the groundwork with Republican voters and the rightwing media to reinforce democratic norms, to message to Republican voters that Trump’s conduct is norm-shattering and dangerous. If They do not blanket the rightwing talk shows to defend the Mueller investigation or push-back on the smear campaign the rigthwing media has begun against him, Comey, and others in connection with that investigation. They have not criticized Nunes for his shocking behavior in connection with the Congressional investigation into Russian interference. They duck news reporters, shy from giving opinions, refuse to comment on Trump’s words and threats — except for the occasional condemnation, such as with Charlottesville. They do not educate their voters; they do not go themselves or send their surrogates out onto Fox with talking points about the necessity of the Russia investigations to our national security and election integrity, or about the democratic process, governing norms, Constitutional principle, the necessity of Sessions’ recusal, the importance of Mueller’s work, the need to protect our election systems from foreign interference. They do no challenge Trump’s lies or Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ lies. They let it all go with very rare exceptions.

And this is a problem that may morph into a nightmare, for if Mueller’s work yields additional indictments and impeachable offenses, millions of Republicans will continue to defend Trump and they will turn even further on the GOP establishment, poisoned by months of Fox/Breitbart/Infowars rightwing media assault on the legitimacy of the work and repetition that it is all a “hoax.” The GOP’s reluctance to criticize Trump for fear of alienating his, and thus their, base will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because they have failed to take the necessary action to educate their voters on what it is really at stake; to push back strongly on the trial balloons Trump has floated to protect himself; to stand up for Constitutional principle and democratic norms and values. Having allowed Trump to bend those past the breaking point, having failed to check or largely even to criticize him, having left his lies unchallenged, having ceded democratic principle for tax cuts for the rich, the GOP “Establishment” will find itself severely constrained in its ability to convince Republican voters that Mueller’s findings are valid or warrant impeachment if he concludes Trump obstructed justice or worked improperly with Russia (or anything else).

The GOP is unwilling and/or afraid to deal with Trump without the cover of Mueller, that is clear. Our norms will continue to erode, on the GOP’s watch and with its tacit if not active support. Will this country survive as a liberal democracy? The tax scam takes us further down the road to oligarchic, illberal democracy with a permanent super-class of the rich and those who cater to them for survival, a kakistocracy similar to Putin’s. In their support for this outcome, the GOP and Trump are entirely sympatico. Trump is an ugly, crass embodiment of the Republican dream. And while that dream is a nightmare for the rest of us, the GOP is willing to stomach Trump as long as he delivers that dream and the Supreme Court to them. They will stomach Roy Moore for the same reason, and whoever comes after them both. We will see no repudiation, not unless the GOP feels that it has no choice. We have no way of knowing when, if ever, that will be. There is no way out but the ballot box — a sobering prospect given that voting rights is not a principle that the GOP is inclined to protect, except for its own supporters.