Wayne O'Leary

The Disloyal Opposition

The political question of the hour is this: What’s to become of the Republican Party in the aftermath of Donald Trump? Will the GOP disintegrate and disappear like the Federalist and Whig parties before it, or will it revive, reinvigorated, and return to power none the worse for wear?

Assuming it survives intact, questions arise about what kind of party it will be going forward, whether moderate, conservative, fascistic populist, or something else. Will it, in fact, be a viable mainstream party at all, or merely a political outlier, a faction, a cult of personality dedicated to the once and future dear leader, our 45th president?

The answer to all of this is that we don’t yet know, but the outlines are becoming clearer. In all likelihood, what emerges from the rubble of the Trump administration will be a coalition of some sort, whether called the Republican Party or not, and it will be an entity combining conservative economic, social and cultural interests. It’s also almost certain that this party will be dominated in the short run by ex-President Trump himself and either members of his family, several of whom are eyeing public office, or devoted political acolytes admitted to the inner circle after ceremoniously kissing the sovereign’s ring.

Since the Washington insurrection of Jan. 6, the Trumpian stranglehold on what remains of the GOP has appeared unbreakable. Polling data indicates a majority of Republicans not only endorse Trump’s record as president, but approve of his actions leading up to the attack on the Capitol, want him to remain as head of their party, and favor him as the GOP standard-bearer for 2024.

Virtually all agree with his claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, a viewpoint reflected in the concurring opinions of close to 150 Republican congresspersons, or over two-thirds of the party caucus. And 43 of 50 GOP senators, defying public opinion, voted in their own political self-interest to acquit Trump at his impeachment trial, despite overwhelming evidence pointing to his guilt in fomenting the Jan. 6 rampage — a near unanimous pledge of allegiance from the party’s highest-ranking elected leaders.

The Trumpification of today’s Republican Party is actually the culmination of a multi-year trend that began with the presidential-election season of 2016, which kicked off a grassroots movement of radicalization arising from the Tea Party revolt of a few years earlier. Tea Partiers never went away; they simply lacked national leadership and a figurehead to rally around. Trump filled that vacuum, and since his capture of the White House, 91 (or 54%) of the 168 seats on the Republican National Committee have turned over, with virtually all the newcomers elected, according to news reports, by Trump-aligned state parties.

The Trumpian takeover of Republican state organizations explains the latest firestorm in GOP politics, the persecution of senior party leaders who have exhibited insufficient fealty to the monarch of Mar-a-Lago. Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) have already been formally censured by their state parties for voting “guilty” on impeachment; Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), whose cases are pending before the star-chamber tribunals of their respective state committees, could join them shortly.

In Arizona, GOP victims of the Trumpist purge include so-called moderates Cindy McCain, wife of the late senator, Gov. Doug Ducey and former Sen. Jeff Flake, each censured for criticizing Donald Trump and denying the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It should be stressed that none of these GOP stalwarts is a liberal; they’re all conservatives, just not conservative enough to satisfy their party’s fevered fringe element.

Throughout much of the country, the GOP base has put forward leaders in the mold of Michigan’s Meshawn Maddock, a firearms enthusiast chosen in February as co-chair of her state Republican Party. Maddock, who has pushed spurious claims of voter fraud, organized buses to carry like-minded Trump partisans to the then-president’s Jan. 6 “stop-the-steal” rally in Washington, then marched with them to the Capitol.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the celebrated QAnon congresswoman from Georgia with the crazy eyes, is another of the breed. She’s attained prominence in GOP circles by embracing delusional conspiracy theories, hate speech, and threats of violence against political opponents, yet has retained the support of her caucus in the House of Representatives. In the absence of the subdued moderates and departed Never Trumpers, such extremists have emerged as the public face of the Republican Party.

However, there’s more to their ascendance than meets the eye. While the version of the GOP currently dominating the headlines projects an image of reactionary culture-war Republicanism — of an irreconcilable, conspiracy-driven coalition of gun nuts, white nationalists, religious fanatics, militia sympathizers and antidemocracy activists — another GOP lurks in the shadows, waiting out “the Storm” and preparing to reassert direction and control. This would be the eternal party of economic conservatism, the party of corporate tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, and the supremacy of the market — the plutocratic party of privilege, whose god is money and whose church is Wall Street.

If Marjorie Taylor Greene personifies the first GOP, ex-Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) might best personify the second. While she was publicly absorbed in QAnon craziness, he was quietly engaged in massive insider stock trading on the job, adding to his accumulated millions with over 2,500 questionable transactions during his term in office. Notwithstanding his January defeat, it’s economic elitists like Perdue, a former corporate CEO, who represent the real core of the Republican Party, year-in and year-out, and whose interests will inevitably be served.

This is a recurring pattern in the GOP. History records how the party of Lincoln, founded to abolish slavery, morphed in the immediate post-Civil War period into a big-business party, the successor to the antebellum Whigs, becoming the behind-the-scenes vehicle for vested economic interests (banks, railroads, corporations) while the public was diverted by dramatic “bloody-shirt” oratory about Reconstruction, civil rights and Southern intransigence.

The Trump zealots of today, useful distractions from Republican business as usual, will wake up, once the sound and fury have subsided, to discover that they, too, have been subsumed by the party’s permanent governing elite, which represents the true natural order of things.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2021

Populist.com