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Florida, as edatists put it, is “where America is going to die.” It’s also where the Republican party goes to live again. From Palm Beach, Donald Trump and his court consider another race to the White House in 2024. Miami confuses the rule that big international cities are axiomatically left. As for Orlando, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have used it this week as safe space from where to chart a medium-term comeback.
The way it favors them: the two previous Democratic presidents lost Congress the first time they asked. So does the demographic disarray which picked up the 2020 census. Florida and even more conservative Texas will win seats at the expense of New York and California. After a more respectable defeat than expected last November, House Republicans need no act from God to avenge it next year.
A party that is so consistently successful or, in any case, competitive, has no incentive to change. Indeed, it does not.
This week marks the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency. But the top 100 Republican opposition was always going to say more about the future of the United States.
How sad are the omens. Trump remains the unofficial leader of the Republicans. Congresswoman Liz Cheney is among the apostates who face a major challenge and censorship for her state party. Marjorie Taylor Greene, her new most populist colleague, raised about $ 3.2 million almost credible first quarter. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a liberal star, got a quarter of her own debut in Congress.) What hope was there after January? Siege of the Chapter of the end of zeal and charlatanism is now curious to remember.
I could cite other signs of a hardened Trumpism, but as of now, the incorrigibility of Republicans is well known. The question is to explain it. Too often, the drift to the right of the party is fixed on variables as complicated as Fox News (first-hour audience: 2.5 m) and Trump’s “base,” as if a lucky sect was doing all the work.
It is about exonerating an electorate that does not punish extremism as it once did. After four years in which he lived low for all but the most serious expectations, Trump lost the presidency by a margin that was a little less than a landslide. Twenty-seven of the 50 states, and not just the obvious ones, they still have Republican governors. Now, shortly after most House Republicans have contested Biden’s electoral victory (i.e., defying public will), they can come together with a reasonable confidence of glory in the medium term. If these are the wages of extremism, they are eminently affordable.
American voters used to throw the book at the bigheads or even the eccentrics. A madness of thought and style cost Barry Goldwater 16 million votes defeat in the 1964 election, when there were fewer than 200 million Americans. For the crime of a wet, meandering liberalism, Walter Mondale lost all but one state twenty years later. If Republicans had savored something like crushing a result in November, they would now spend six months in a process of reform, or at least of a constructive civil war. As it is, there is minimal incentive to reflect, let alone change. In an era after landslides, neither side is ever further away than one more feature of power.
It is certainly reassuring to believe that a fervent, drunken cult misinformation, is what threatens US democracy. It gives the problem manageable dimensions. It also avoids blaming the general public. But no sect, however vehement, can prosper without complacent multitudes. They don’t share the stridency of a few, as such, but they don’t care enough either. The problem is in the tens of millions, not in the low millions.
If the gerrymandering of Congress exaggerates Republican popularity. So do the polling station and other anti-majority peculiarities of a constitution drawn up in another world by the earthly nobility. Even adjusting to these, however, the GOP finds itself in an incredibly high support floor after Trump, after the Incursion to the Capitol, after all. Not only the House, but also the Senate, are plausibly recoverable in a short time. At some point, the blame for modern republicanism must shift from the party to an electorate that could cure it while imposing tougher political costs.
Until then, the strictly tactical case for renouncing Trump or his famous ismism will remain weak within the party. Moderate Republicans are left asking for consciences and principles from their colleagues. Just read this sentence to despair of its possibilities.
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