The Number One Threat to American Democracy is GOP Extremism
Reflections on Theda Skocpol Lecture
I attended an excellent lecture delivered by the acclaimed political scientist, Theda Skocpol yesterday on the rise of Republican extremism. She is great, and her subject matter is so engaging. I would have loved to be that grad student at Columbia at the time the Tea Party came to prominence to work with her.
More importantly, I think she is right in her diagnosis of what ails the American political system. The number one threat to American democracy is not Russian interference in our elections or any other problem that you can come up with but GOP extremism. The GOP wants nothing less than the complete restoration of executive privilege (to the point Skocpol “joked” about monarchy), subvert democratic participation, and eviscerate the capacity of government. Following the work of Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, Skocpol notes that all these pathologies of GOP operational strategy align with the concept of asymmetric polarization. The country has indeed became more polarized in the last 20 years and fostered gridlock in Washington, but that polarization is almost entirely due to the drift of the GOP from a mainstream center right party to one that is operationally and ideologically extreme.
How the GOP lost its mind— and conscience— is an important question that produces confusing answers because there are two parallel strands of GOP extremism, the elite and popular prong. These strands are in fact separate— she takes great pains to emphasize that the popular strand is not the same or caused by the elite prong—but they both share conservative DNA. The elite prong had successfully outflanked congressional party committees, resulting in both the plummeting resource shares of these committees and the emergence of the Koch network. But the Koch network’s influence in shaping public opinion of rank-and-file GOP voters is limited, especially on core issues such as immigration and reflexive support for law enforcement. The Koch network clearly did not create the Tea Party at the grassroots, Skocpal alleges. In fact, the elite capture of the GOP by free market ideologues arguably made it more vulnerable to populist revolt. Yet these two separate strands have combined to produce an explosive synthesis in the Trump administration, keeping many American liberals (and patriots) up at night.
Her last interesting remark came in an interaction with an Oxford professor when she criticized the view proposed by many racial essentialists that the fundamental driver of Trumpism—and extremist conservativism more generally—is the sins of America’s racial history. While I generally agree that we shouldn’t think of race as the only thing that matters, I am reluctant to be as dismissive of this fundamental question that defines the American experience. The question that every student of American politics and society must contemplate is why is the U.S., and particularly the U.S. Republican Party, such an outlier compared to their counterparts in the rest of the world, especially on issues like climate change?
The question of course has an essentialist bias, but the only answer I can come up with is there exists no other country where freedom and unfreedom are so inextricably interlinked. We are a colony in a nation, to borrow the title of a great book by the TV personality, Chris Hayes.
Our inability to address this problem and achieve more perfect unity has allowed a cancerous growth to fester unattended and that growth has a chance to become fatal if it metastasizes any further into a more competent form of authoritarianism. The problem is that any attempts to heal the cancer and reconcile our fraught racial history may also weaken the country to the point it may not survive.
Yet I believe that we are left with no other options. The only way to extinguish GOP extremism— the strain of conservativism Murray Rothbard so accurately predicted in 1992— is to acknowledge that a house divided cannot stand.
Progress in this country will only be durable if it takes this form. No matter how many good government policies liberals institutionalize, it will always be vulnerable to reactionary backlash unless the reactionary impulse itself is eradicated. I am at once skeptical and optimistic that such a noble enterprise is possible. My skepticism arises from the fact that people are creatures of habit, and will participate in immoral systems and delude themselves into believing that they are moral if the action required to change them is too great of a burden. But my optimism stems from my basic faith in people to do the right thing if they are given the chance.
That chance must be centered on reversing the only major conservative party’s contempt for basic norms and science so as to create a community of values that is the only hope for saving ourselves and the planet from GOP extremism.