Can Biden reconcile with a post-putsch GOP?

Trumpism may be its most boorish expression, but the threat to American democracy is rooted in the deeply racist power politics of the Republican Party

It was never a “coup”, because you can’t really organize a coup on Twitter. Trump certainly instigated a day of bedlam and thuggery on Capitol Hill, a storming of the symbolic citadel that revealed the deep and deadly rot of weaponized white privileged that continues to grow in U.S. politics, culture and law enforcement. But storming a symbolic citadel does not a coup make. Of course, it can create a pretext for a power grab — as Egypt’s Tamarod protests showed us in 2013 — but the power grab itself relies on some element of the state’s coercive forces stepping in and asserting extra-constitutional authority by force of arms. Coups have to be orchestrated, they require secrecy, discipline and organization; none of these is Trump’s strong suit. Incitement to riot and disrupt a ritual doesn’t cut it. If you tweet it, they will come — but “they” won’t be the ones you need to make a serious power grab.

Even the term “insurrection” seems too grand for what transpired when the white-supremacist mob breached the hallowed halls of Congress: They looted souvenirs and took selfies, though they also hurt people, killed a cop, and seemed to be seeking hostages or worse. Still, an insurrection is more than a violent disruption of an archaic ritual (the tallying of Electoral College votes two months after the election).

So, it’s important to question the “this-changes-everything” spirit that has pervaded the political class and its media auxiliary since Wednesday. On the contrary, this may have been a dramatic and violent exclamation point on the GOP narrative — a punctuation mark that suit-and-tie Republicans hastily dismissed as “not who we are” — but it’s the party’s narrative and its underlying strategy of power that poses the more profound challenge to democracy in America.

Consider: It’s safe to assume that the majority of Republican voters don’t condone Wednesday’s violent assault on a symbol held sacred in American public culture, but surveys show that 70% or more of Republican voters embrace the rioters’ core belief — that the election was “stolen” from Donald Trump.

When campaigning Joe Biden imagined a Republican “epiphany”, healing and bipartisan cooperation, he reminded us of how deeply the Democratic Party establishment has failed to confront the reality of what the Republican Party became after the Cold War ended. That establishment was so shocked by Wednesday’s debacle because it has been unable to comprehend — much less respond effectively to — the sources of GOP conduct.

The problem isn’t simply the rioters who imagined they could change the course of history by storming a building; the problem is the Big Lie shamelessly propagated the Republican Party — a lie that intimately ties the rioters to not only Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and other direct instigators, but to the entire party leadership and media infrastructure that perpetrated a patent falsehood out of ideological conviction, and for political gain.

Whether it’s media efforts to understand “how we got here” or Democrats considering terms on which they should engage with the GOP going forward, the key focus should not be on the kinetics of last Wednesday, but on why the majority of Republicans have refused to accept the verdict of the electorate.

Do they actually believe their Big Lie? Not really, but that’s not the point.

As Adam Serwer astutely noted a few weeks after the election, the GOP’s mobilization around the Big Lie reflects its essence as a white-nationalist party determined to hold on to power by any means necessary, absolutely certain in its conviction that it is America’s only legitimate ruling party — a kind of Chinese Communist Party with American characteristics, if you like. (Adam didn’t write that, of course; that was me.)

What Adam did write, was this:

“The majority of people who make such declarations [of a stolen election] understand that in fact, Trump did not win, that he received fewer votes than his opponent, and that the Electoral College result reflects that loss. But they support Trump’s claims that the vote was fraudulent, and his efforts to pressure Republican officials in key states to overturn the result. To Trump’s strongest supporters, Biden’s win is a fraud because his voters should not count to begin with, and because the Democratic Party is not a legitimate political institution that should be allowed to wield power even if they did.

“This is why the authoritarian remedies festering in the Trump fever swamps—martial law, the usurpation of state electors, Supreme Court fiat—are so openly contemplated. Because the true will of the people is that Trump remain president, forcing that outcome, even in the face of defeat, is a fulfillment of democracy rather than its betrayal.

“The Republican base’s fundamental belief… is that Democratic victories do not count, because Democratic voters are not truly American. It’s no accident that the Trump campaign’s claims have focused almost entirely on jurisdictions with high Black populations…Black votes are considered illegitimate even if they are legally cast... Demanding that Black votes be tossed out is not antidemocratic, because they should not have counted in the first place.”

So when you hear talk of a “steal”, what you’re hearing is a racist trope. We all know (and so do the authors of the Big Lie) that the “sinister” development that tilted the election to Biden despite the size of Trump’s vote and the enthusiasm at his rallies was simply that millions of BIPOC voters went to the polls for the first time in states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, despite years of epic Republican efforts to prevent them exercising their democratic rights. Once those voters had defied the GOP’s white supremacist agenda by casting a vote, the party’s priority became erasing that vote by casting doubt on its validity. Most of the Republican leadership was complicit in that effort, which culminated in Wednesday’s riot.

Serwer reminds us that there’s a precedent for this in the reign of racist terror that gripped the South during the brief Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War:

“In that era, Democrats and their paramilitary allies used their claims of fraud and conviction that Black participation had fatally corrupted democracy to justify a campaign of murder and terrorism. They overthrew their local governments on behalf of white men, who were the only ones capable of granting a government legitimacy. The fact that armed crowds menacing elected officials in swing states today are thankfully rare indicates that Republicans professing their belief that the election was stolen are aware, on some level, that Trump simply lost.

“The conviction that the rival political constituency cannot, under any circumstances, legitimately hold power has not yet resulted in widespread violence. But it remains incompatible with democracy, which requires the assent of its losers and the peaceful transfer of power between factions. Enough local Republican officials in 2020 have recognized that their civic obligations outweigh their partisan identities. But if Republicans continue to believe, and assert as a matter of their partisan identity, that the rival party’s victories are fraudulent, their claim to power illegitimate, and their holding office an existential threat, at some point, the tension between partisan identity and democratic function will become irreconcilable.”

Since long before Trump, Republican leaders have been well aware that the greatest threat to their ability to rule is democracy; the will of the majority of the citizenry expressed at the ballot box. And though they take comfort in the deliberate brakes on democracy bequeathed by an 18th century constitution drawn up as an instrument of power by and for rich white men, they know those brakes can’t always compensate for their demographic weakness – the proverbial “we are many, they are few” chant of social justice movements on America’s streets, and which we saw most clearly at work in shaping outcomes in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That’s why, since the end of the Cold War bipartisan national-security-state consensus, the GOP has developed a political mindset centered around its own power as a party rather than on maintaining the institutions and coherent function of the state.

The political contest in today’s America is not over competing policy orientations for governing a stable democratic community; it is, first and foremost, an existential battle over who comprises America’s “national” community, who it includes and who it excludes — a struggle for inclusion and democratic equality vs. white nationalism weaponized by billionaire interests aligned with middle-class rage. It’s not a new struggle, it’s been raging in different forms since the Civil War, actually.

I’m not for a moment diminishing the danger that Trump has posed in the White House, nor the huge amount of pain he has knowingly visited on tens of millions of people. Nor can we ignore the reality of white terror that he has legitimized and unleashed, which will likely escalate in the coming months

It’s precisely because the hate and ignorance he weaponized and sanctified will remain weaponized long after he departs the scene, that we need to understand how Trump happened. Forget the bipartisan “this is not who we are” chorus on Capitol Hill on Wednesday night; Trumpism is the maturation of a strategy that emerged in the 1990s of packaging the party’s traditional billionaire agenda in a Christian-nationalist (aka white) packaging to mobilize a mass base (those anti-abortion judges are also reliably corporate-friendly; they’re a win-win). And, of course, the corollary has been a scorched-earth politics when out of power, devoting its energy to delegitimizing every Democratic Party administration of the past three decades. Because as Serwer reminds us, Democrats are not a legitimate party of power in the dominant, nationalist Republican schema. (Even considered how bizarre it is that the most enthusiastic chant heard at any GOP national convention over the past couple of decades has been “USA! USA! USA!” Oh, and yes, that same chant was resonating through last Wednesday’s ransacking of the Capitol…)

If Biden imagines he will be excused this fate, he hasn’t been paying attention. The question going forward is not whether the Republican Party is willing to ritually denounce Donald Trump; it’s whether the GOP is willing to accept democracy in America — the right of every citizen to cast a vote of equal value. Until it abandons its systematic, generational effort to disenfranchise millions of Black, Brown and Indigenous Americans, it’s simply not a partner in American democracy, and reconciliation with it will come at the expense of the interests and rights of the very voters that won Biden the presidency.