The Republican political base is crazy

Lennart Gabel

Jonathan Chait:

Even after four years of Trump abusing power, fomenting violence, and actively attempting to rig the vote while claiming any prospect of defeat must be fraudulent, his supporters denied any danger. 

“I have a lot more concern about Democrats accepting the results of a Trump reelection than Trump accepting results of a loss,” argued Republican adviser Josh Holmes, ignoring the fact that the only candidate who had questioned the 2016 election result was Trump himself. “Say what you will about Trump violating norms, he has never tried to redo the balance of power by irregular means,” insisted Ari Fleischer in an October column endorsing Trump.

The debate came to a sudden end last week, when Trump directed a mob to storm the Capitol to pressure Mike Pence and the Senate to carry out a wild plan to nullify the results of the election. 

George Orwell once wrote, “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right,” but “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” 

In this case, the battle took place not on a field but the marble halls of Congress....What did the anti-anti-Trumpers get so wrong?

The case for complacency consisted of two major themes. First, it defined the danger as “fascism,” a hyperbolic term used by some of Trump’s more reckless opponents, which obscured the more subtle threat he posed. (“So much for Donald Mussolini,” scoffed a 2017 Wall Street Journal editorial.) 

Second, it insisted Trump was too lazy and incompetent to do any serious damage to the democratic system. “If authoritarianism is looming in the U.S., how come Donald Trump looks so weak?” asked left-wing columnist Corey Robin, whose argument consisted of an extended, favorable comparison of the climate of dissent in Trump’s America in 2018 to that of Germany circa 1934.

What frightened so many scholars of democracy about Trump was the danger of eroding the health of the system along a broad array of fronts, from encouraging political violence to undermining the legitimacy of elections.

Their fear was less a sudden plunge into dictatorship than a slow process of democratic backsliding of the sort engineered by authoritarian leaders in places like Hungary and Turkey. The anti-anti-authoritarians, by contrast, liked to imagine government as a flip switch with two modes: “democracy” and “Nazi Germany.” 

And since Trump obviously did not have Hitler-like control of the government, then the authoritarian scare must be a figment of the liberal imagination...

See also Paul Krugman: This Putsch Was Decades in the Making: "G.O.P. cynics have been coddling crazies for a long time."

Rob's comment:

For years the Republican Party has essentially been a party of "crazies." Trump got more than 74 million votes in November from our unhinged fellow citizens:

A strong majority of Republican voters still approve of Mr. Trump — more than seven in 10 in the Quinnipiac survey — and similar numbers have bought into his baseless accusation that last year’s election was riddled with fraud. And Mr. Trump’s handpicked choice to lead the Republican National Committee for another term, Ronna McDaniel, won re-election virtually by acclamation last weekend.

See also The two parties are not the same and The real reason for Trump's rise.