America's Last Wake-Up Call

Will we hear it in time?

(Note: This is an archive post from my pre-Substack “Weekend Reading” newsletter.)

Immediately after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we were warned by those who had studied authoritarian and fascist movements around the world that he met nearly all, or all, of the universal criteria for authoritarian leaders. At the time, experts sometimes connected his authoritarian tendencies to the decade or more of democratic backsliding that had preceded his election. However, especially at the beginning of his administration, the media and “serious people” clung to the conviction that “it can’t happen here,” ignoring what eventually became obvious to all. (Do you remember how many times in the first year or so some wise pundit declared, “Today Donald Trump became President of the United States?”) 

By November 2020, those not trapped in the Fox echo chamber fully acknowledged that Trump was indeed an authoritarian. Unfortunately, too many conceived of the authoritarian threat as originating with Trump, and now are in the same kind of denial about the MAGA-dominated Republican Party that they were about Trump in 2017. The truth is that Trump became president because an authoritarian MAGA movement has been gaining strength rapidly since the Great Recession and the 2008 election. Before it is too late, it is time to recognize that whatever we believe to be true about Trump is now just as true of the MAGA-dominated Republican Party. 

The January 6th Committee hearings make this clear in two ways. First, nearly everything that the January 6th insurrection has proven about Trump’s criminal conspiracy against America is just as true of the Republican congressional leaders at the time. At critical moments, they provided the oxygen Trump needed to start his post-election dumpster fire, and then poured gasoline on it. Second, Republican congressional leaders, and nearly the entire slate of Republicans on the ballot in November, are prepared to go along with Trump’s criminal conspiracy to overturn elections, even if they are not flagrant election “deniers.” Authoritarian movements, like authoritarian leaders, are irreducibly defined by their refusal to accept the results of elections they lose and their refusal to reject the use of violence. 

The mainstream MAGA Republican position is that any elections they lose to Democrats are suspect at best and an illegitimate hoax at worst. Thus, the stakes this November are nothing less than whether America decides to empower an openly authoritarian political faction that, in its rhetoric and actions, has made unambiguously clear its intentions. With the January 6th hearings dominating headlines, this may be the last wakeup call for America.

#TheyAllKnew 

So far, the January 6th Committee has laid out a thorough and devastating case that Donald Trump is guilty of many crimes – that even after the results of the election were certified in every state; after all of his efforts to challenge the results in court failed; after his (until November 3rd) sycophantic attorney general told him that his claims were “bullshit” and “nonsense”; and after his own daughter more politely told him the same thing, Trump persisted in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the election that eventually led to the deadly attack on the Capitol, which was carried out by paramilitary groups he summoned and incited. Moreover, we learned from jurists esteemed by conservatives that Trump was also well aware that his Plan B – having Mike Pence overturn the results of the election – was “rubber room stuff,” as Pence himself put it. It is truly no wonder that none of the Republican Party’s Legal A team showed up for this one. 

But what has not fully dawned on us is what it means that the Republican leadership in Congress knew and encouraged all this too  – or that now, nearly every Republican running for office in November is either abetting the criminal conspiracy or refusing to condemn it. 

Make no mistake. Especially after what we have learned in the last two weeks, any politician who continues to doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election is promising to do the same whenever MAGA Republicans lose to Democrats.  

Let’s go back to December 15th, the day after the Electoral College certified Biden’s victory. But instead of remembering it as you do now, relive the following three weeks knowing that every Republican leader was as aware as Trump was that there had been no fraud in the election. 

On December 15th, Mitch McConnell¹ went to the floor of the Senate with a carefully worded congratulatory speech that has since become a blueprint for “reasonable” Republicans: A grudging acknowledgement of the reality that Joe Biden was the president because the Electoral College had determined it, without acknowledging the legitimacy of the election that made this so. 

Until December 30th, there was an understandable hopefulness that all of this was the last fever dream of the Trump years – that, while it was too much to hope that Republican leaders would suddenly gain the courage to stand up to Trump’s lies, it was just temporary political theater that wouldn’t matter once Biden took office. Very many Republicans, including almost certainly McConnell himself, hoped that on January 21st, they could put Trump behind them. Indeed, according to reports, McConnell urged his caucus not to lodge formal objections to the Electoral College vote on January 6th. 

But on December 30th, Josh Hawley announced that he would join Representative Mo Brooks to formally object on January 6th, meaning that for the first time since the 19th century, the usually routine congressional process of accepting the results of the Electoral College would be disrupted. 

Over the next several days, Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy, and others publicly joined the ranks of senators and representatives who vowed to disrupt the proceedings on January 6th, thus reinforcing Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen. By doing this, they were not just democratic cowards; they were the billows fanning oxygen into the fire that Trump had sparked. 

Without their efforts, the week leading up to January 6th would have been much quieter. Recruitment efforts for January 6th would not have been energized by the certainty of a congressional showdown and the possibility of Pence overturning the result. Instead, thanks to the actions of these leading Republicans, what might have seemed at first like an ordinary protest quickly gained steam on social media as a plausible opportunity to overturn the election results. 

Remember that at that time, just like Trump, these leaders had already been told that the whole thing was “bullshit,” “nonsense,” and “rubber room stuff.” Most or all of them likely had contact with William Barr directly, who, again, was vocally rejecting Trump’s conspiracy theories by this time. And Trump’s legal challenges had already been rejected by every court they were heard in, including by judges Trump himself had appointed. 

We know that Ted Cruz received pushback from multiple advisors who urged him to accept the results and resigned when he refused, including Chad Sweet, who chaired Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, and communications director Lauren Bianchi. Michael Luttig, a judge that George W. Bush considered too conservative to nominate to the Supreme Court, and for whom Ted Cruz had clerked, told The Washington Post in March that: 

“Once Ted Cruz promised to object, January 6 was all but foreordained, because Cruz was the most influential figure in the Congress willing to force a vote on Trump's claim that the election was stolen.”

Time Is Running Out

We are now just four months from an election in which nearly every Republican candidate for Congress, governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and state legislature has failed to affirm that the 2020 election was legitimate, and failed to condemn as culpable for the deadly violence on January 6th anyone beyond the assailants on the grounds that day. If they gain a majority in the midterms, the likely Republican leadership team will consist entirely of those who voted against accepting Electoral College results in 2020, even after the deadly assault on the Capitol.² And those GOP leaders have already announced a platform of retribution–promising to impeach Biden at the federal level, and overturn the 2020 election results at the state level. 

There are virtually no Liz Cheney-style Republicans running for office who are willing to forcefully condemn Trump’s election lies, respect our electoral process, or speak out against the growing influence of white supremacist militia movements in the Republican Party. Furthermore, of the ten Republicans who voted for the second impeachment, four have retired, one has been defeated, and four face stiff primary challenges, including Cheney. Even Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp, who resisted Trump’s pressure to change election results in Georgia and drew his fire as a result, have pushed voter suppression measures under the pretense of improving “election integrity” and solving the nonexistent problem of voter fraud. Debating David Perdue, Kemp felt compelled to say the quiet part out loud: “I was as frustrated as anyone else with the results, especially at the federal level. And we did something about it with Senate Bill 202.”

Meanwhile, an alarming number of Republicans running for office – including offices with authority over how state elections are run – are MAGA candidates who fully embrace the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, at least 108 candidates for statewide office or Congress have won the GOP nomination while repeating Trump’s lies about a stolen election in 2020. CNN also found that numerous January 6 participants have won Republican primaries in states across the country. This is already reflected in legislative trends at the state level. As the NYT tallied last month, “357 lawmakers took concrete steps to discredit or overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.” (For more detail on election-denying Republicans who have now won their party’s nomination, see the Appendix at the end of this edition.)

It’s Time to Acknowledge that MAGA Is an Authoritarian Movement

Like all authoritarian movements seeking to take over democracies, and like Trump himself, MAGA competes in elections, but will accept as legitimate the results of only the elections they win.³ And once in power, they systematically make it more difficult for their opponents to win subsequent elections.  

To see the MAGA movement most clearly, it’s necessary to understand that its foundation is the combination of several reactionary movements: 

• The segregationists who left the Democratic Party beginning in the late 1940’s and at a much greater pace after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; 

• White Evangelical churches who were politicized by the secularization of the 1960’s and 1970’s legal rulings threatening their tax exempt status; and 

• Revanchist wealthy and business people who refused to accept the New Deal settlement, along with wealthy libertarians who migrated from fringe groups to the Republican Party to back Goldwater. 

Out of the ashes of the Goldwater debacle, Nixon successfully married those reactionary elements to a Republican Party that had been principally the party of moderate big business to launch the Republican coalition that captured the White House for 20 of the next 24 years, a dominance matched only by FDR/Truman and Lincoln/Grant. 

We are all infected by an American exceptionalism that makes it difficult to see in our country what we can see easily in other countries. In that spirit, imagine that you were told that in a country with a two party system, over the last 13 years one party had: 

• Made it more difficult for other party’s constituencies to vote by: 

  • Gutting the voting rights laws that had been instrumental in breaking down the system of electoral apartheid doggedly left standing for nearly a century.

  • Enacting laws and using executive action to limit the number of polling places, drop boxes and hours available for voting in largely Black and Brown precincts.

  • Purging voter rolls in ways that disproportionately removed voters of color. 

  • Exploiting partisan gerrymandering through a high court ruling. (SCOTUS)

• Stacked the courts by: 

  • Refusing to consider the other party’s nominee to the nation’s high court on the grounds that it should wait for the election of the next president, and then: 

  • Ramming through their own party’s nomination to the high court, weeks before an election they were expected to lose – and when their presidential candidate argued that haste was necessary, as that court might be called on to decide the outcome of the election.

  • Drawing its judicial nominees from lists of “acceptable” candidates made by interest groups with extreme agendas. 

  • Flooding the judiciary with unqualified ideological fellow travelers to the extent that only about 70% of the justices he appointed had a “well qualified” rating according to the until then relied on non-partisan national bar association.   

• Undermined the credibility of free and fair elections by: 

  • Continuously repeating the lie that the other party regularly committed fraud, including allowing non-citizen immigrants to vote. 

  • Conducting sham “audits” to sustain doubt in the results of the last presidential election.

  • Challenging the official national vote count without any evidence of fraud whatsoever. 

• Advocated for a fantastical theory that insists sitting lawmakers can overrule the votes of their local citizens for president ( "independent state legislature" theory).

• Made it easier to overturn the results of elections they lose by enacting laws to shift authority for oversight and certification of elections to entities they control. In 2021, state legislatures in 17 states enacted 32 laws granting themselves authority to “politicize, criminalize, or interfere with elections.”

Since the 2008 elections, a MAGA Red Curtain has descended on the country at the state level. Consider that in 2008, just 22 percent of Americans lived in a state in which Republicans had trifecta control (control of both chambers of the state legislature and governor) and 29 percent in states in which Republicans controlled both chambers of the state legislature (that 22 percent plus 7 percent with Republican controlled legislators and a Democratic governor).⁴ In 2020, that had nearly doubled to 41 percent living in states with Republican trifectas and 57 percent living in states in which Republicans controlled both chambers of the state legislature. 

With control of state legislatures in those states, MAGA enacted its decidedly authoritarian agenda, including strict voter ID requirements, Right to Work, pre-viability abortion bans, stand your ground laws, and loosed restrictions on guns. Unified MAGA Republican state governments routinely override decisions made locally, as when Kemp banned cities from ordering people to wear face masks. This excellent piece in the Washington Post details how Republican state governments strip power from localities when African Americans gain power in them. And in North Carolina in 2016, and in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2018, MAGA Republican state legislatures used lame duck sessions to strip newly elected Democratic governors of important executive powers. 

Political Violence

Political violence has always been an important feature of authoritarian movements. During his 2016 campaign, Trump famously encouraged his supporters to assault protestors at his rallies, promising to pay their legal bills. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinszinger were the only Republicans to vote to 

censure Paul Gosar after he posted a photoshopped anime video to social media showing him appearing to kill Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden. And, of course, Trump and several members of Congress assisted the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to mount the January 6th assault on the Capitol. Not only has Trump (and most Republicans) not categorically condemned the attack, he has suggested that if he is elected in 2024, he might pardon those prosecuted for their crimes. 

Over the last decade, right-wing violence has surged: 

The Anti-Defamation League has counted nearly 450 US murders commited by political extremists since 2012. Of them, about 75 percent were committed by right wing extremists, and half were specifically tied to white supremacists. (Only 4 percent were attributed to the left.) 

An increasing number of terrorist attacks and mass murders have been motivated by right-wing conspiracy theories, white supremacist beliefs, anti-abortion extremism, and “alt-right” groups (including misogynist incels) who have been radicalized on the internet. However, MAGA politicians have generally refused to condemn these ideologies or debunk the conspiracy theories in the wake of violent attacks – and many MAGA politicians have actively encouraged  acts of political violence. 

Some of these attacks have been incidents of stochastic terrorism (statistically predictable, but individually unpredictable, acts of ideologically motivated violence that are provoked by mass media and violent political rhetoric by public figures). Others have been organized acts of political violence or threats of violence, such as the armed occupations of state capitol buildings that were a precursor to January 6. 

A hardly exhaustive list of these incidents includes:

• 2009: May 31 - Murder of Dr. George Tiller in church, Witchita, KS

• 2013: March 19 - Colorado Dept of Corrections head Tom Clements assassinated by white nationalist prison gang.

• 2014: May 23 - The Isla Vista college shooting in Santa Barbara by an incel. April - Bundy ranch standoff in Nevada; the Bundys get off without punishment for this and subsequent occupations, a loud signal of impunity. 

• 2015: June 17 - Charleston AME Church shooting by a white supremacist. Nov 27 - Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting. (One Colorado state representative blamed it on Planned Parenthood.)

• 2016: February - The Bundys occupy Mahler National Wildlife refuge in Oregon. Dec 4 - An armed man threatened a DC pizza parlor over the Pizzagate conspiracy theory; while he didn’t kill anyone, it was a leading indicator of where QAnon would go.

• 2017: Aug 11 - Charlottesville white supremacist rally at which demonstrator Heather Heyer was murdered, and whose participants Trump defended as “very fine people.” 

• 2018: Feb 14 - Parkland high school shooting (the shooter wore a MAGA hat in videos, and survivors call him a Trump supporter, although he had many other problems). June - A QAnon follower blocked the Hoover Dam road in an armed standoff. Oct 27 - Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburg, PA directly linked to Trump caravan rhetoric.

• 2019: April 27 - Poway synagogue shooting by a white supremacist. Aug 3 - El Paso WalMart shooting motivated by the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

• 2020: Spring - Anti-lockdown protests lay the groundwork for January 6 and other later violence. Summer - Right-wingers incite fires and violence through George Floyd summer protests. Notably, these three incidents. Aug 25 - Ammon Bundy occupies Idaho statehouse. Nov-Dec - Escalating tactics by right wing, including an Oregon state rep letting rioters into the Capitol in December. Nov 20 - Federal judge Ester Salas’s husband and son are killed. 

• 2021: January 6 - The Capitol insurrection. 

• 2022: May 14 - Mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket by a white supremacist, who was motivated by the Great Replacement Theory and wanted to kill as many Black people as possible. 

We should be disturbed by the trend of MAGA political leaders (at best) refusing to condemn the violent ideologies and conspiracy theories that spark these incidents, and (at worst) actively participating in or encouraging political violence. As political violence experts Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason have demonstrated, we know that what leaders say significantly influences how their base feels about political violence. In addition, many of the most horrific mass shootings in recent years have been self-professed imitations of prior mass casualty events that inspired white supremacists to further the cause. The white supremacist who went out of his way to hunt down Black people as they shopped for groceries confessed that part of his intent was to “inspire others to commit similar attacks.”

Conclusion

The violent January 6 insurrection was the logical extension of not just Trump’s authoritarian presidency, but decades of escalating authoritarian tendencies in the Republican Party. The MAGA movement, which has wholly consumed the Republican Party, is a clear and present danger to American democracy and the rule of law. It is an overtly authoritarian, white Christian supremacist, and patriarchal movement that abuses its existing power to insulate itself from future electoral defeats. It tolerates and even encourages political violence to perpetuate its toxic ideology, intimidate its opponents, and reinforce its illegitimate victories. 

The majority of Americans do not support MAGA or its values. But with four months to go before what could be the last set of reliably free and fair elections in the United States, media narratives about politics are still dominated by stories about inflation, a possible recession, and petty Democratic infighting. The January 6 hearings may represent our last, best hope to turn the corner and remind the American public what is at stake in November.  

1. It is important not to confuse McConnell’s desire to be rid of Trump with his long-standing commitment to break democratic norms to achieve his political aims. 

2. McCarthy, Scalise, Stefanik and Palmer. 

3. In this connection it is worth noticing that Republicans do not dispute their primary election defeats, which are to other MAGA candidates, as opposed to Democrats. Unstated, and what gives the Big Lie force, is that what makes defeats to Democrats illegitimate is the votes of people of color. 

4. These calculations do not include Nebraska, which has a unicameral state legislature that is officially non-partisan, but could be considered Republican.