A Very Republican Riot
The Republican Party is toxic and poisons every institution it touches. There can be no separating Wednesday’s horrifying pro-Trump raid on the U.S. Capitol from the political organization that reared these self-described “revolutionaries.”
We have more than four years of evidence revealing what Trump is and who is attracted to his ideas. Nobody in American politics is confused about the danger he represents to democracy. The accumulated evidence includes a murderous Charlottesville, Virginia, neo-Nazi riot in 2017 and a shoutout to a fascist street gang from the presidential debate last fall.
Most Republicans, we know, are not torch-bearing fascists. GOP leaders have been especially keen to draw a distinction between respectable business-class conservatism and the MAGA mob. And yet they have bet their careers and the country on an alliance with Trump’s authoritarianism.
Wednesday’s attempted coup is the price Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), tea party darlings Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), nouveau nationalist Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and arch-militarist Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) were willing to pay to advance their policy priorities under Trump’s banner.
Nor were the standard-bearers of the conservative movement ever confused about what they were doing. Explaining his decision to vote for Donald Trump in 2020, conservative debate-me icon Ben Shapiro ― once a Trump critic in the far-gone days of 2016 ― declared that he had been “wrong” to think Trump would stand in the way of right-wing policy priorities.
As for the rest, well, how bad could it get? “I wasn’t really wrong about Donald Trump on character, but whatever damage he was going to do, he’s already done, and it’s not going to help if I don’t vote for him,” Shapiro said.
The alliance between these cufflinkers and the catastrophists has proved overwhelmingly successful for the conservative elite. McConnell...
