CNN
Quote:
Congressional Republicans have crystallized an ominous question by rejecting consequences for Donald Trump over the January 6 riot in his impeachment trial and welcoming conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia into their conference: Has the extremist wing of the GOP coalition grown too big for the party to confront?
Sanctioning Trump or Greene offered the party an opportunity to draw a bright line against extremist groups and violence as a means of advancing political goals. But the vast majority of congressional Republicans conspicuously rejected the opportunity to construct such a barrier through their decisions to oppose impeachment or conviction for Trump over his role in the US Capitol attack and to support Greene during the recent Democratic effort to strip her of her committee assignments.
Those choices unfolded against a backdrop of recent polls that found a stunningly high percentage of rank-and-file Republican voters endorsed anti- small-d democratic sentiments, including the belief that "the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it."
In a survey released last week by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, not only did a majority of GOP voters endorse that statement, but nearly one-third of them also embraced the convoluted QAnon conspiracy theory Greene has espoused alleging that Trump is defending the nation against a global ring of influential child sex traffickers.
While Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has called conspiracy theorists like Greene a "cancer" on the party and denounced Trump's role in the riot, the recent decision by House Republicans to accept the Georgia Republican into the conference, and the overwhelming refusal by House or Senate Republicans -- including McConnell -- to sanction Trump, suggests the party has very limited appetite at this point for any serious effort to excise that disease. And that could provide more oxygen to the White nationalist extremist groups that have viewed Trump as a galvanizing figure and already gained strength during his presidency.
The fact that threats from Senate Republicans to tie up legislative business helped persuade Democrats to withdraw their demands for witnesses at Trump's trial only underscores how difficult it will be to resist the infiltration of extremist ideas and tactics into the political system so long as the GOP is determined to avoid confronting it.
That deference inside the GOP "is a sign, a recognition, that this ideology, this belief, this tribalism is the ascendant part of the Republican coalition," says longtime Republican consultant Michael Madrid, who became a staunch Trump critic over the past four years. Elected Republicans bowing to Trump and Greene, he says, "are feeding the beast" of the growing party faction drawn to extremist beliefs and tactics.
"I don't think most of them believe it; but they know that's where the party is at," Madrid adds. "They have fed the monster for so long that even when it turns on them, when the barbarians are literally at the gate ... when they were the targets and they were prey, they still will not turn on it. That's how dangerous is the societal threat that we are facing."
The inner circle are the extremists actively participating in potentially violent White nationalist extremism. Neumann recently told me that number might total about 75,000 to 100,000 people.
But polling has found a larger group of Republicans expressing sympathy for the attack on the Capitol -- and a much larger group than that expressing sympathy more generally for the belief that the threats to American society as they define it have grown so great that force or violence is justified to respond to them.
One-sixth to nearly one-fifth of Republicans have praised the January 6 attack in polling from PBS NewsHour/Marist and Quinnipiac.
The share of Republican voters who express support for the use of force to advance their political goals in general is considerably larger. In the American Enterprise Institute survey, 55% of Republicans agreed that "we may have to use force to save" the "American way of life." Roughly 4-in-10 agreed with an even more harshly worded proposition: "If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent actions."
Neumann, the counterterrorism expert, notes that by accepting Greene into their conference, Republicans have sent a clear signal to extremist groups that they do not consider it disqualifying to engage in extreme behavior such as her belligerent harassment of David Hogg, the teenage survivor of a school shooting and gun control activist.
"They just legitimized a person that used tactics I would say 10 years ago, even five years ago, would have been abhorrent to the Republican Party," Neumann told me.
The new American Enterprise Institute study underlines his conclusion, according to previously unpublished data provided to CNN. In that survey, a striking three-fourths of Republicans agreed with the statement that discrimination against Whites is now as great a problem in the US as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities.
Nearly three-fifths of White evangelical Christian Republicans said Antifa was mostly responsible for the attack on the Capitol, Cox found.
In all their actions of the past few weeks -- or more precisely the inaction against Trump and Greene -- GOP leaders have signaled their unwillingness or inability to confront those sentiments too forcefully. Blum says that what appears to be happening inside the GOP is "an internal renegotiation that has dramatically changed which coalition members matter." The pre-Trump traditional Republicans are losing influence, she says, while the party is responding to the hard-core Trump voters motivated by a "sense of [cultural] threat, White grievance." It is, she adds, "like George Wallace rose from the grave" and imposed his priorities on the GOP.
These attitudes don't suggest large numbers of Republican voters will pursue violent actions themselves; but, as the past few weeks show, they make it less likely that Republican leaders will clearly excommunicate such extremism.
"Without drawing that bright line, you are ceding your party to this: a party of not living in facts, that bullying is acceptable behavior and that violence is acceptable behavior if you are trying to preserve your 'way of life,' whatever that means," says Neumann. "
Madrid, one of the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, agrees. The biggest challenge for the country, he argues, is not "the extremists" themselves but "the enablers" inside the GOP who are creating more oxygen for extremism to gain strength.
This tacit acceptance of extremists and violence carries a clear political risk for the GOP: a continued loss of support among racially moderate voters in the white-collar suburbs who already moved steadily away from the party under Trump.
But if conspiracy theorists and other extremists solidify, or even expand, their beachhead in the GOP, the risk for the country could be much greater. The growing racial and religious diversity that triggers the retreat from democratic values among a growing number of GOP voters will only accelerate in the next decade. If the Republican Party does not find more will to explicitly renounce the dark forces circling around Trump, persistent outbursts of White nationalist political violence could be the deadly drumbeat for the years ahead.
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“Self Acceptance is a process not a performance”
“You are autistic enough. And you always have been”
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity.
16 Feb 2021, 3:18 pm
