Following up on yesterday's post,
One of the points raised in that post was that, in contrast to the Republicans...
While the members of the democratic establishment may disagree on many points, they all speak basically the same language, mostly hold common values, are inclined to follow the rules both inside and outside of the party, and at least in the Trump era, have proven surprisingly predisposed toward sticking together.Josh Marshall argues that the embrace of rule-breaking is a fundamental aspect of the MAGA GOP.
Eight years ago Will Saletan said, “The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord.” There’s probably no short summary, phrase or aphorism I’ve repeated more times on TPM. Because it’s that good. Today we’re seeing another permutation and illustration of that enduring reality.
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What we see here is the same core message of the last three weeks and in many ways the last dozen years. The only way to get to 217, the hold outs argue, is a coalition of the rule-breakers and the rule-followers. For years the latter group has mostly gone along with that. What happened last week is that a section of the rule-followers rebelled and wouldn’t have it.
This is more basic than a fractured caucus or any of the personalities involved. It is the logical end result of a party and political movement based on rule-breaking, as a central value and mode of operation. When rule-breaking becomes the norm, organizations and polities fall apart … without a strongman. For eight years Donald Trump has been that strongman. It’s Trump’s general indifference to the House Speaker debacle and perhaps focus on his unfolding legal woes that has allowed the chaos to drag on.
This is always the relationship between civic democracies and the broken states where strongmen thrive and dominate. Civic democracy operates through an organized competition between different stakeholders in society. It requires a consensus to litigate disagreements through a prescribed set of rules. The breakdown of those rules creates an opening for strongmen who traffic in raw power and sell their ability to impose order. It is both the cause and result of the species of civic and moral degeneracy we see as the mother’s milk of Trumpism.
Mark:
ReplyDeleteYes, and these are the Republican elites (members of congress) we're talking about. So I think this post is consistent with David Weakliem's claim that Trump's "continued strength in the party is mostly the result of Republican elites’ reluctance to challenge him, which is a mixture of genuine support and exaggerated ideas about his strength among Republican voters."
Andrew
The big given here is that it is extraordinarily difficult to take down a party's candidate at the primary level when he is the FrontRunner and has an enormous lead. My position is that it is probably impossible so the question becomes how can this dangerous candidate be defeated in the general election.
DeleteBecause this is an awfully complicated problem and I've been taking a piecemeal approach to addressing it, it's easy to lose sight of the specific points. Here's an overview.
There appears to be a discrepancy between Trump's poll numbers and his approval ratings, at least once you drill down. You and David read this as a sign of vulnerability. I'm not so sure but we'll get to that later.
Could the Republican elites take Trump down? Could they have done so in 2015? Answering this one requires answering a lot of other questions such as...
Who exactly are the Republican Elite in 2023? Do we count Candice Owens and Alex Jones and Charlie Kirk? How about the Huckabees? Don't they play a larger role in the party than do names like Bush or Cheney or Romney? Don't we have to count Trump himself? By what standard is he not the head of the party?
To the extent that we can define a more or less traditional Republican elite/establishment, are they strong enough and coherent enough to prevent such a clear front-runner from winning primaries? What have they already done to effect this and how much more could they do?
Finally, a bit of a side note. There is no question that the traditional Republican establishment, such as it is, allowed itself to be lulled into a false sense of security by the idea that Trump would fade away on his own. This happened both in 2015 and in 2022/ 2023. To what extent could this be blamed on them believing what they read in 538 and the New York Times?
Mark