January 6 hearings: Republicans will do it again
The January 6 hearings are about the events of a single day, but they implicate a much broader phenomenon: the Republican Party’s faltering commitment to democracy. The mob attack on Congress a year and a half ago was merely the most grotesque manifestation of Donald Trump’s rejection of democracy, and Trump himself merely the most grotesque manifestation of his party’s authoritarian impulses.
“Parties that are committed to democracy must, at minimum, do two things: accept defeat and reject violence,” wrote the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way earlier this year. Trump has built a movement that does neither. And while he is justifiably known for his petty egocentrism, he has finally and genuinely infused this movement with beliefs that are greater than his self-interest and whose power will outlast him.
The hearings, hoping to gain the widest possible approval, have devoted respectful attention to the perspective of the Republican Party’s mainstream. That perspective was expressed by Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien, who testified, “There were two groups. We called them kind of my team and Rudy’s team,” referring to Trump’s onetime personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “I didn’t mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal.” During his deposition, former attorney general William Barr, another member of Team Normal, colorfully heaped scorn on Trump’s claims to have been the victim of systemic voter fraud.
Nobody should dismiss the importance of Team Normal’s refusal to follow Trump’s conspiracy theories to the barricades, which might have averted a constitutional crisis. But the Republican mainstream has used the existence of Team Normal to dismiss Trump’s effort to overturn the election as little more than a prank gone wrong. The Wall Street Journal protested that the committee “makes it seem as if there was a chance of success. There wasn’t. It was an impossible plan hatched by screwballs, and it would have gone down as such if the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers hadn’t breached the Capitol.” Sure, Trump might have gone off the deep end along with a handful of advisers, but Team Normal always had it under control.
One flaw in the Team Normal theory is that it’s not always easy to detect who is on the team. [Continue reading…]