Where We Stand 2 — The Republican Party

 What Shall We Do with the Republican Party – Part 2

David Hilfiker

On January 6, 2021, while the reverberations from the Capitol insurrection were still bouncing off the walls, 70% of the Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the certification of the 2021 presidential election results, part of a months-long unsuccessful effort to overturn the results of the election and re-elect Donald Trump president.  As I began to document in this previous post, this is neither the first nor will it be the last attempt by the Republican Party to subvert our Constitution.  The damage inflicted on our democracy will take years, perhaps decades, to heal.

Does the Republican Party have a place in the American liberal democracy*?  

Last March, I argued that it did not.  Since then much has happened that supports the argument.  Numerous pundits, for instance, Zaheed Fakaria, have come to the same conclusion.  In this post I will not repeat the reasons for condemning the Republicans that I made back then but expand them and add new ones.

If we are going to consider the future of our democracy, we must understand the Republican Party and what has happened to it.

Refusal to Disavow Trump’s Claims to Election Fraud

Since the 2020 presidential election, well over half of the Republicans in Congress have participated in an effort to overturn its results, claiming electoral fraud.  In fact, however, Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security declared that the election “was the most secure in American history.” There is no evidence for fraud.

Most Republicans initially defended themselves by saying that they supported Trump’s taking all legal remedies afforded him, which he did, filing over sixty suits claiming illegal voting.  He lost all of them.  Even after offering financial rewards for evidence,

Mr Trump and his allies … failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Mr Biden a victory that wasn’t his.

Did Mr Trump have the legal right to file all those suits?  Of course he did.  But did the Republican Party have the moral right to support Trump’s argument.  The election results were incontrovertible within days.  Several courts ruled Trump’s suits were “without merit.”  There were no innocent motives for other Republicans to support his efforts.  The only plausible motives were to discredit the 2020 election, cast doubt on the electoral process itself, or, most likely, simply show fealty to the President for fear of alienating his supporters.  These efforts culminated on January 6 with the Republican refusal to certify the vote, an extreme dereliction of duty.

The Republican attempt was, as all the lawmakers knew it would be, ultimately unsuccessful.  That does not, however, mitigate the seriousness of their action.  Unlike the support for Trump’s previous legal suits, it would have been unconstitutional at that point to overturn the results of the election by decertifying them.  Their effort alone disqualifies the national Republican Party as a legitimate political institution, even without the mounds of other evidence.

Several weeks later in Trump’s impeachment trial, most Republican Senators compounded the sin by not holding him responsible for the insurrection that he clearly incited.

Does It Matter?

There were Republican voices claiming that supporting Trump’s suits didn’t really matter.

Without clear Republican leadership, however, three in four Republican voters did not believe that Joe Biden won the election, even after the insurrection.

As the violent invasion of the Capitol vividly demonstrated, there are real-world consequences to millions of Americans’ belief that Biden is not (or may not be) our legitimate president.  The insurrection is only the most obvious; even more serious is the millions who have lost faith in the electoral process — the lynchpin of democracy.

History of Republican Party Racism

Missing from my original indictment last March was the 50-year history of blatant racism within the Republican Party.  The party was originally formed as an anti-slavery party prior to the Civil War.  It was re-formed, however, in the 1970s around President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” designed to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to their racism.  Democrat Lyndon Johnson had strongly supported the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), both of which passed with a minimum of Southern votes.  (Only one Southern Senator from Texas voted for it.)  Johnson knew his actions would deeply alienate large numbers of southern Democrats, even saying at the time, “There goes the South …”  He was right; the Southern Democrats were ripe for picking.  Nixon and other Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white Southerners' racial grievances in order to gain their support.  The Southern Strategy (see Kevin Phillips The Emerging Republican Majority) is almost certainly the primary force that transformed the South into a Republican bastion.  Since then, Republicans have counted on often-unspoken racism, eg Ronald Reagan’s anti-welfare campaign used only Black images (despite the fact that Blacks were a minority of welfare recipients) or George HW Bush’s notorious Willie Horton ad.  A long and continuing history of voter suppression (see below) and anti-drug laws are other examples.

Trump’s use of racism, then, is not new to the Republican Party, only cruder.  It has no place in a modern American political party.

Voter Suppression

Despite zero-evidence of significant modern individual electoral fraud, the Republican Party has made voter suppression targeting Blacks and minorities, an essential part of its political strategy.  (See my post from June 2019 and the next post in this series.)  According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, lawmakers in 33 states have crafted more than 165 bills to restrict voting so far this year.  Absent evidence for significant historical or modern voter fraud (despite President Trumps 65+ lawsuits trying to find it in the recent election), the original argument that measures to prevent voter fraud were necessary has largely fizzled.  The new argument is that these laws are necessary to reassure voters that the electoral system is secure, a doubt that has taken root only because of Republican (especially Trump’s) lies.  President Trump acknowledged the real purpose of the attempts at voter suppression when he argued against expanding vote-by-mail provisions: They would mean “you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Refusal to Convict

Despite the overwhelming evidence of then-President Trump’s responsibility for the January 6 insurrection, forty-three Republican senators voted not to convict him of the impeachment charges brought by the House.  Their fig leaf was that it was not constitutional to impeach an ex-president**,  a contention rejected by a bipartisan group of 150 legal scholars.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had it both ways, voting against conviction and then delivering a scorching diatribe accusing Trump of “a disgraceful dereliction of duty ….  [He] was] practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of [January 6]."

Tolerance for Extremists Within the Party

In their book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitzky and Daniel Ziblatt analyze the democratic countries that have fallen into autocracy over the last century (eg Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland).  They have done so not primarily by violent revolution but because the legitimate political parties were unable to control the extremists within until it was too late.  Finland, on the other hand, prevented right-wing takeover by the far-right Lapua parties in the 1930s because the legitimate Finnish conservative parties prevented their take-over before they became too powerful.  Others (eg Belgium and England) did the same.  The United States similarly stopped Father Coughlin and George Wallace.  

But the Republican Party did not act early on against Trump and has clearly been captured by the far right.  It is almost certainly impossible for the moderate Republican lawmakers to re-take control of the Party.  The voices of the few sane Republican lawmakers (eg Romney, Collins, Sasse) have been ignored.  The far right is firmly in control.  It’s too late for rehab.  Dismantling is the only option.

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* The term “liberal democracy” has traditionally been used to refer to governments with freedom of speech, of the press, of religion and so on.  In this context, the term “liberal” refers not to the current “liberal” vs “conservative” political divide but to the 18th and 19th century English philosophical systems based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.  Democracies that do not guarantee these rights are called “illiberal democracies.”
** Trump was no longer president in part because then-Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had delayed bringing the House impeachment papers to the Senate until Trump was no longer president.