By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, December 07, 2023
Could President Ron DeSantis persuade grassroots
Republicans to support overturning an election that he lost?
Lay aside whether he’d be willing to stoop to such a
thing. Imagine that he, not Donald Trump, had lost the 2020 race to Joe Biden
and tried running the same “Stop the Steal” playbook. Do we think that episode
would have ended the same way, with moon-eyed goons punching cops outside the
Capitol on January 6 in hopes of breaking in and halting the count?
I do not.
Let’s try another hypothetical. Trump wins reelection
next fall and returns to the White House triumphant in 2025. But instead
of taking
“retribution” on his enemies, he surprises everyone by governing more or
less like a Paul Ryan Republican. Not entirely—there’ll be a crackdown on the
border in any Trump 2.0 scenario, however fanciful—but all of the nonsense
about defeating the “deep state” and rooting out “vermin” goes out the window,
possibly due to sheer laziness. Would most Republican voters consider a second
term like that to be a grave disappointment relative to what Trump had promised
them as a candidate?
I doubt it.
As regular readers of this newsletter know, I typically
take it as a given that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian
movement. If that’s so, how can it be that the party’s voters would be
satisfied with a non-authoritarian Trump and lukewarm toward an aggressively
authoritarian DeSantis? Am I wrong about how right-wingers would react in the
hypotheticals I’ve sketched—or are they less dogmatically authoritarian than we
(well, I) tend to assume?
Forget the hypotheticals. Consider two real-world
examples.
At Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, we
were treated to the spectacle of Ron DeSantis, of
all people, complaining about leaders abusing state power to discourage
dissent.
Six weeks before that, Vivek Ramaswamy took DeSantis to
task publicly for, er, abusing state power to discourage dissent.
DeSantis and Ramaswamy are the closest thing in the race
to post-liberal ideologues. (Trump is many things but an ideologue he is not.)
If anyone could be expected to defend policies designed to silence malefactors,
it’s them. Yet here they each were doing the opposite, doubtless expecting to
be rewarded for it by the Republican voters they’re wooing. Why would they do
that if those voters are as post-liberal in principle as I often suggest?
Is the American right truly becoming more authoritarian
or is it just enthralled by Trump?
The answer, of course, is yes.
***
The Republican base has a qualitatively different
relationship with Trump than with what we might call “lesser authoritarians,”
insofar as he has permission from them to be both more and less
illiberal in his policies than anyone else does.
Trump can threaten his political enemies with
government retaliation, speculate about suspending
the Constitution, chatter about using
the Insurrection Act in his second term, and get indicted for upward
of 100 felonies, all with impunity in polling. And with impunity among his
opponents too: The indignation evinced by DeSantis and Ramaswamy in the clips
above reliably deserts them whenever Trump floats an idea that’s plainly
nuttier and more draconian than forcing online commenters to post under their
real names. They’re free to scold each other for being illiberal, but not him.
On the other hand, Trump is also the guy who signed
a Romney-esque tax cut into law in his first term, provided
arms to Ukraine to fend off Russia in the Donbas, bombed
Syria to punish Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons, and has taken
to dismissing Florida’s six-week abortion ban as a “terrible
mistake.” Lately, he happily
accepted the endorsement of a member of Black Lives Matter. Any other
Republican with a track record like that would be annihilated onstage by
DeSantis and Ramaswamy as a traitor to populism. Instead, Trump leads
nationally by almost 50 points. That shouldn’t be possible in a party that’s
serious about authoritarianism.
A party that’s serious about authoritarianism would also
be better at actually electing authoritarians, one would think.
Kari Lake lost last year in Arizona. So did Blake
Masters. Doug Mastriano got crushed in Pennsylvania. The closest thing the
post-liberal right had to a success story in the midterm was J.D. Vance, who
settled for a 7-point victory in the same state that propelled establishment
Republican Mike DeWine to a 25-point landslide.
It’s a truism at this point that Republican enthusiasm wanes whenever Trump
himself isn’t on the ballot; why should that be the case if it’s ideology, not
his persona, that primarily motivates the right?
Granted, the fact that Lake, Masters, Mastriano, and
Vance each won their primaries is circumstantial evidence that Republican
voters do have an appetite for authoritarianism on the merits. But Lake,
Masters, Mastriano, and Vance were also endorsed by Trump, which only brings us
back to the question I posed above. Are Republicans voting for post-liberalism
or are they just voting for whatever their leader wants?
How do we explain the fact that celebrity RINO Mehmet Oz,
another candidate endorsed by Trump, prevailed in Pennsylvania’s
Senate primary over both Dave McCormick and populist firebreather
Kathy Barnette? In a party that was truly authoritarian, Barnette should have
had an easy time of it. Instead Trump got his way, as usual.
The ultimate proof that authoritarianism without Trump
doesn’t appeal much to Republican voters is the fate of Ron DeSantis 2024.
DeSantis’ presidential bid was practically a laboratory experiment in what
would happen if a candidate dialed Trump’s charisma waaaay down and dialed his
post-liberalism waaaay up. Could a much younger, much smarter rival usurp the
king by pushing
the populist envelope in ways Trump himself didn’t do while president,
building out an entire policy agenda around that strategy?
You know the answer. You’ve seen the
polls. The experiment is over. Insofar as Vivek Ramaswamy 2024 was an
experiment in the same vein, except
with the crazy dial turned waaaay up, that experiment has also been over
for a while.
And really, those results aren’t very surprising.
Most people aren’t ideological, after all. They may have
strong preferences about discrete issues, like securing the border, but to many
voters the philosophical conflicts between classical liberalism and
post-liberalism must be as gassy as asking how many angels can fit on the head
of a pin. Modern Republicans in particular have been conditioned for years by
right-wing infotainment to prize pugnacity and personality in their heroes over
ideological purity or serious governing chops, giving a talented performer like
Trump with all the right enemies an insuperable advantage.
By and large, I suspect, right-wingers want a leader
who’ll stand fast behind his agenda despite leftist resistance, who’ll expose
the flaws in leftism aggressively and unapologetically from his pulpit, and
who’ll keep them entertained in the process. They don’t demand gulags. They’re
not capital-A Authoritarians.
But they are, it seems to me, increasingly lowercase-A
authoritarians. They don’t demand gulags—but if a leader whom they’ve grown to
idolize volunteered to build some, only a fool would expect them to put up much
of a fuss about it.
Lowercase-A authoritarians are dangerous.
***
It’s the lowercase-A authoritarians who separate
successful authoritarian movements from less successful ones. Every such
movement has a charismatic strongman at its center surrounded by a phalanx of
fanatic capital-A Authoritarian apparatchiks, but it can’t break big until that
nucleus has convinced some critical mass of the population that its program is
the least bad option available.
The more desperate a nation’s outlook becomes, the more
plausible it is that that critical mass of lowercase-A authoritarians who are
willing to entertain dramatic change will materialize. They’re not
ideologues—again, most people aren’t—but they’ve reached a point of such
exasperation that they’ll give ideologues a try. Many, either not knowing or
caring much about civics, might not even perceive a meaningful difference
between the ideologues and the regime that preceded them.
They’re not pro-gulag. They’re “Whatever works. Just fix
it.”
In 2023, we have the
strongman. We have the phalanx of fanatic
apparatchiks. And we have a right-wing media industry devoted on the one
hand to catastrophizing America’s problems relentlessly, in order to create the
requisite sense of national crisis among its audience, and on the other to
dismissing complaints about populist misconduct on “whataboutist” grounds, the
better to weaken the audience’s sense of what’s truly politically “normal.”
It bears repeating: The capital-A Authoritarians may be
pro-gulag, but the lowercase-A authoritarians are not. The latter group remains
sufficiently non-ideological, in fact, that pushing too hard too soon on
radical schemes would risk spooking them about what they’re being asked to
empower. No wonder that figures on Fox News have repeatedly sought to reassure
viewers lately that fears
of autocracy in Trump’s second term are
overblown, never mind the obvious evidence that they
aren’t.
Tell Republican voters that Team Trump wants to start
throwing reporters in jail and some—emphasis: some, not all or even
most—will squirm. They might not vote for a program like that; having spent
most of their lives developing a healthy contempt for autocracy abroad, they
might even feel
embarrassed by it. Assure them that everything will be fine before the big
vote, though, and then start throwing journalists in jail
afterward …
… and they’re likely to shrug and rationalize it. They
committed to a program of trying “whatever works,” didn’t they? Maybe intimidating
the media will work. When, not if, Trump defies a court ruling in a
second term, maybe that’ll work. When he declares that it’ll be too
dangerous for America if he were to leave office on schedule in
January 2029, that too might work.
A lowercase-A authoritarian who trusts that he has the
country’s best interests at heart and that his enemies don’t will feel obliged
to support Trump. Especially if they’re one of the many, many, many Americans
who haven’t given things like “enumerated powers” or “judicial review” a second
thought since eighth grade.
I know otherwise decent people whom I’m reasonably sure
would side with Trump on persecuting “traitorous” journalists, not because
those people are committed to it as a tactic but because they just won’t be
roused to defend their political enemies for the sake of a principle. All a
lowercase-A authoritarian really needs to do to support the team is to shrug as
required, and Republicans have had lots of practice at that since 2016.
Various polls reflect the sense of crisis that Trump and
his propagandists in right-wing media have cultivated to justify
authoritarianism. One
survey published earlier this year found 48 percent of Republicans
agreed with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off-track in this
country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it
takes to set things right.” Only 29 percent of Democrats agreed by
comparison. Another
poll taken last year found that a strong majority of Republicans still don’t
believe Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was legitimate. And every day of primary
polling for the past seven months has confirmed and reconfirmed that Republican
voters don’t regard an honest-to-god coup attempt and subsequent impeachment as
disqualifying in a presidential nominee. To the contrary.
No wonder, then, that the clips I posted earlier of
DeSantis and Ramaswamy appearing to criticize their opponents for behaving
illiberally are more properly understood as illiberal critiques themselves.
DeSantis’ objection to banning anonymous posts online has
nothing to do with free speech, of
which he’s no great fan, and everything to do with pandering as usual to
populists. Alt-righters, anti-vaxxers, and post-liberals various and sundry are
the groups most likely to face reprisals professionally if forced to put their
names on their message-board musings. By scolding Nikki Haley with sonorous
references to The Federalist Papers, DeSantis is merely trying to
show those groups that he’s on their side. As usual.
Ramaswamy’s defense of pro-Palestinian groups on campus
is in the same vein. He routinely insists that he supports Israel, but he and
Tucker Carlson got together not long ago to worry about the IDF’s incursion in
Gaza touching
off World War III. During an address to the Republican Jewish Coalition,
Vivek warned that
“‘Destroy Hamas’ is not on its own a viable or coherent strategy.” There’s
a small
but influential cohort of America-First-ers in right-wing media who
have been testing how much criticism of Israel their audiences will tolerate;
at least one very
prominent member of that cohort has coincidentally also objected to
conservative criticism of pro-Palestinian protesters.
It’s unlikely in the extreme that a demagogue as
obnoxious as Ramaswamy cares sincerely about the state hassling student groups
on campus. What he cares about is convincing the post-liberal vanguard of the
New Right that he’s their champion in the race, so much so that he’s willing to
take an anti-anti-Palestinian position that’s destined to offend the
establishment pro-Israel consensus.
If the two post-liberal candidates in the race are
resorting to classically liberal arguments only when it serves post-liberal
priorities to do so, that’s a pretty strong clue that authoritarianism has
gained a meaningful foothold on the right separate and apart from the cult of
Trump.
***
Can an authoritarian movement last once it’s deprived of
its strongman? That’s the important question in all this.
Eventually, the GOP will lose Trump. If Republican
voters have learned to love authoritarianism on the merits, not just because
that’s their leader’s preferred mode politically, we should expect the
post-Trump future to be authoritarian as well.
But without Trump’s messianic magic to hold lowercase-A
authoritarians in his thrall, without him insisting hour by hour that America
is doomed unless he returns to power, it’s not clear that the right’s sense of
existential crisis and deliverance can persist. If it fades, and if their
vicarious sense of martyrdom through him fades along with it, does their
appetite for authoritarianism fade too?
There are many millions of true conservatives
disgracefully still participating in this rotten party because they believe
that even the worst Republican is preferable to any Democrat. That logic has
primed them to become lowercase-A authoritarians as Trump’s political needs
require. But if populists struggle to rally behind a new champion once he’s
gone, and if some charismatic new conservative emerges to lead the old guard,
it’s conceivable that those conservative voters will revert to form.
All they need to do is somehow discard the belief,
carefully nurtured every day by Republican leaders and their media, that
traditional civic norms are more of an impediment to making America great again
than an instrument of doing so. Get comfortable: It won’t happen soon.
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