Tucker Carlson on Biden:
"It is galling to be lectured about democracy by a man who took power in an election so sketchy that many Americans don't believe it was even real."
Things are the way they are because of how they got there.
It is why people study history.
Yesterday this blog predicted that a challenge for future historians would be to figure out why so many "good Republicans" went along with Trump and his flagrant effort to overthrow an election. That consent for Trump weakened democratic norms. It sent the GOP on a path that would have seemed impossible to those very same Republicans a decade prior. What happened to them?
The crazy shock-jocks of the political-media world, from Marjorie Taylor Green to Alex Jones, are understandable. "Fringe groups" have always existed. A function of a political party is to win elections by creating a united front of ideas that are broadly acceptable to the public. That means that the crazy-crowd is kept a fringe. This time the GOP failed.
During the 2020 election and its aftermath, the gatekeepers of the Republican brand had a dilemma: Trump was in full election denial. The normal order of business would be to rebuild the party with concession rituals. Party leaders would pay respect to the rule of law, Constitutionalism, and respect for voters. Trump could go off a cliff on his own, but the respected leaders could consolidate the party around the civic virtues of flag and country. Had as few as a dozen Republicans with national reputations spoken up, American history would have played out differently. Who? Senators who represent the current and future GOP: Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Joni Ernst, John Cornyn, Rand Paul. That alone would probably have been enough. Adding a few present and former House Members--Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan--would have assured it.
The Georgia runoff elections interrupted the concession rituals. The partisan balance of the senate was at stake. The runoffs were on January 5, 2021, the day before the January 6 Capitol riot. Mitch McConnell needed to keep the GOP together and unified between November 3 and January 5. Since Trump was claiming he won, McConnell could not take the chance Trump-forever Republican voters would fail to show up in Georgia. The two months were fateful. Instead of the concede-and-regroup, Republican leaders enabled and validated the Trump stolen-election narrative. It grew in intensity in that period. The "good Republicans" this blog referenced yesterday--people who obey the law, stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, and who accept the verdict of elections--were led down a path of election denialism by the mumbling of GOP leaders. Leaders didn't want to rock the boat before the January 5 runoffs.
By January 6 the GOP was committed to a path. My Republican U.S. Representative, Cliff Bentz, said he voted to overturn the Pennsylvania election results because his Republican constituents expected it. They did, indeed. Even now, two years after the election, Tucker Carlson on Fox presides as the most popular opinion host on TV by continuing to question democracy in America. He calls the election "sketchy" with a sneer. Putin's government pushes political opponents out of windows, but Carlson says Putin is more legitimate than Biden.
History is full of turning points. The assassination of Lincoln, which put Andrew Johnson into office. The assassination of McKinley which put Theodore Roosevelt into office. France and Britain backing Poland in 1939, which gave Germany a western front and eventually brought the U.S. into the war. Those were turning points. At a critical window of time two senate seats in Georgia required Republican unity with Trump, not Republican concession. Two paths diverged, and the GOP took one.
The path taken encouraged a political party and its media megaphone to go the direction of autocracy and populist resentment. They heard and believed that a great crime had been perpetrated against them. People who disagreed became the fringe--Liz Cheney--not the center. This new consensus added fuel to a parallel fire, resentment over displacement of White heterosexual Christians as the default and only fully legitimate American. They are out to get us. They are picking on us. The election theft is a culture theft.
That fire is intensifying. GOP presidential candidates are following that path and adding fuel to that fire.
Good historical comparisons to the rises of Andrew Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt, two men who rose to the presidency because of fateful events. So also, McConnell’s perceived need to preserve GOP unity until January 5, caused McConnell to go mum and hope a unified GOP would win control of the Senate. The republic is paying the price for McConnell’s deal with the devil.
I have have realized at the time the deal that McConnell had made. However long McConnell hangs on seeking to regain his Senate majority, his legacy will never recover from his connivery.