Last Tuesday’s Bulwark pod touching on the nearly-complete purge of Never-Trumper Republicans made me wonder, what generally happens with groups who are purged from parties?
Off the top of my head, some obviously immediately buddy up with the opposition, out of vengeful spite.
Others accept exile, whose nature varies depending on what kind of purge it is — violent, electoral, legal, etc.
And others stay in denial. Some eventually snap out of it and leave, of course, but more common is that they lie to themselves for so long that they pass the point of no return, and become enablers.
While it’s easy to look at historical examples and file them neatly into these categories, the reality is probably that every purge features a mix of these responses, and the modal (most popular) response is the one that we’d generally consider the purge’s “neat category”.
All of that is to say, the modal response in the GOP has thus far been “stay in denial and become enablers”, with a prominent group of Never Trumpers who have ostensibly joined the opposition, but made it clear that they haven’t given up their principles and will run right back to the right as soon as the GOP’s crisis is over1. Anyways, even the much-vaunted Mitt Romney falls into the enabler category! Many of these enablers will eventually succumb to electoral exile — Romney, Sasse, Toomey — as the purge gets completed. As alluded to in the lede, the rest of the GOP is clearly not just being purged, but the purge is almost complete, with The Big Lie as Trump’s vehicle for doing so. Even if Trump were to die before having the opportunity to reboot his coup in 2024, no alliance between Never-Trumper repatriates and what little remains of the GOP’s former establishment are going to win any putative Reconquistas of “their” party.
I’ll give the Bulwark this: They’re on the right side of history as far as their emphasis that Democrats absolutely need to focus on systemic reform rather than get bogged down in this stupid fight over a decade’s worth of social spending that could easily be undone by a future GOP reconciliation bill.
The irony is, in most “Entropy of Victory” situations like we’re stuck in now, it’s those in the Never-Trumpers’ “exile” role who are numerous and thus end up sabotaging the unity of the anti-authoritarian coalition, but as it turns out, both the Never-Trumpers and Manchinema are relatively few in number, and it’s not the exiles who are sabotaging the coalition’s unity.
But regardless, we absolutely need systemic change before the inevitable entropy-driven coalition crackup happens, before the center-right leaves to attempt its Reconquista of the GOP, before Trump reprises his coup attempt. Because even if Trump fails, failure on our part — on the part of the broad anti-authoritarian coalition — means that this crisis keeps going for several more cycles, and gives the Trumpists more time to consolidate their hold over the GOP and perpetuate their attempt to install a minoritarian, authoritarian, illiberal democracy, all in the name of their “freedom”.
On last week’s Pod Save America, the guys mentioned that we need to “keep reminding people about January 6”, because “memories have faded”.
The problem is, you can’t just “remind people” about it by “talking about it”. The media already does that. Vox has basically reoriented itself entirely from news coverage to just “reminding people” about all the dozens of things liberal activists fervently believe people need reminding about.
And none of it works! Or rather, it works on liberals, but come on, does anyone really think it’s working on our moderate friends?
What you really need is a current event to anchor the “reminder” to. And it can’t just be “the Jan 6 committee released its hearing schedule today, so NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT HOW BAD JAN 6 WAS!”. No, you need the new event to be as vivid, as dramatic, as morally clear-cut as the original event was. Otherwise, people just don’t care. They ask questions like, “Why are you bringing this up again?”, and you look crazy.
Think of it this way: I have a grudge about a grudge my eldest sister held against me from when I took apart her stupid… whatever it was… that she’d made out of my Legos in order to build a cool spaceship. Because spaceships are cool, right? And I always thought it was stupid that she then proceeded to hold a grudge for the next decade and a half about it.
Now, do I remind her and everyone around me about this every time I walk into a Lego store? Hell no! I’d look crazy. Anyone I was trying to convince, even my girlfriend who’s ostensibly the most sympathetic ear in the world to my cause, would chalk it up to me holding a petty grudge.However, if my sister brings it up. Or if my other sister makes some Lego thing, and the elder one hypocritically smashes hers apart. Whatever it is, if there’s some sort of new event that brings the original back into moral focus… that’s when I can score the most points, when I can convince the younger one, “Hey, yeah, that was really fucked up of her, maybe we do have a common cause here.”
Democrats need to learn these lessons. It’s not that hard. I’m not that profound of a writer, guys! The real question is, why are all those highly-paid strategists and consultants who almost certainly understand this better than I do, failing so badly at their jobs?
Noah Smith’s piece about deficit politics should be required reading in the political economy curriculum.
As Cold War II inexorably lurches towards us and the Chinese lie about another missile test, one scary epiphany that I had was that perhaps the next phase of warfare involves having the population and technology to withstand a nuclear barrage.
The hook here is that the Chinese tested this hypersonic missile that’s essentially a global cruise missile and could quite obviously be tipped with nuclear warheads, but isn’t covered by any nuclear arms treaties. If we’re not careful, this carries the risk of triggering an “arms-race-in-all-but-name”, where we develop countermeasures to the hypersonic missiles that may even lead to improvements in existing anti-ballistic-missile tech, or at least force us to spend a few trillion outspending the Chinese in a rehash of the Reagan Strategy2 that beat the Soviets. And even if we are careful, Xi may just push on ahead, mindful of his domestic imperative to use nationalism to reinforce his hold on power, forcing us into an arms race we don’t want — or worse, impotently negotiating for an arms treaty he won’t abide while he races ahead of us anyways.
Just a quick dunk for the “We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” crowd: China is technically a republic, too, y’know. In fact, practically any country with a constitution is technically a republic. Republicanism (small-r) means literally nothing in terms of the democratic rights you supposedly hold so dear.
Which can be somewhat worrying: How do we trust the people who were willing to pull the wool over their own eyes about what the GOP was becoming for the past several decades, to be able to accurately judge when the coast is clear?
Don’t come at me about whether he deserves the credit for it or whether it actually worked; I’m just invoking his strategy because it’s probably the first thing the foreign-policy establishment “Blob” will think to do when countering China’s increasingly aggressive posture.
Addendum: The Bannon criminal contempt charges are a great example of setting up a clear moral story and making it vivid. I mean, people so very rarely dare to provoke criminal contempt of Congress charges, and this guy is a legit thug who even many hardcore Trumpers don't really understand.