Quo Vadis GOP?

[Razgovory]

I'm beginning to rethink my position on guns...

[Neil]

I said this on January 7th. The import of what happened on the 6th is NOT about what happened on the 6th, but where the next step will be once that is tolerated.

Is the Capitol Riot being tolerated though?  While there are many fools who try and justify their behaviour, it seems to me that there was a lot of condemnation, and the wheels of law enforcement are grinding them into paste. 

I suppose there's always the risk of escalation, just as there's always the risk of political beliefs becoming more extreme and violent.  But it's hard to see what more could be done. 

[Berkut]

I said this on January 7th. The import of what happened on the 6th is NOT about what happened on the 6th, but where the next step will be once that is tolerated.

Is the Capitol Riot being tolerated though?  While there are many fools who try and justify their behaviour, it seems to me that there was a lot of condemnation, and the wheels of law enforcement are grinding them into paste. 

I suppose there's always the risk of escalation, just as there's always the risk of political beliefs becoming more extreme and violent.  But it's hard to see what more could be done. 

It is absolutely being tolerated from the standpoint of the GOP rank and file and the GOP political figures. Indeed, the narrative is now that the 1/6 rioters were heroes.

So we are now seeing the aspiring up and comers taking the rhetoric to the next level.

It's not like 1/6 was the start of this chain - just a step in it. It was triggered by rhetoric from Trump and Guiliani, and that rhetoric built on the last 4 years of the GOP bending itself into pretzels to find anything Trump did as a commendable, no matter how heinous.

And Trump himself was just following the footsteps of hate and bigotry laid down by right wing media for the previous decades.

And what political cost has ANY GOP political figure paid during this entire process for taking that next step? None - not only has there been no cost, it is exactly the opposite. The political cost comes from them *refusing* to take that next step.

[Jacob]

Murdoch and his ilk have a lot to answer for.

[Neil]

Alright, so I found one of their websites, and it definitely reeks of apologism.  Articles about how the rioters are being treated poorly in prison, which is not something that One America News typically cares about.  Attempts to blame the whole thing on Antifa.  Now, those things aren't unusual, as extremist news will often seek to blame the excesses of their people on provocateurs and decry the consequences of their actions as being too harsh.  But there seems to be significant elements of the congressional delegation (James Comer was named, amoungst others) who think that the entire thing is somehow the fault of Democrats and their handling of Capitol Police. 

That said, traditional Republican bastions like the Wall Street Journal seem to be holding the line and heavily condemning the riot and are calling out the foolishness inherent in the Trump line that Nancy Pelosi is to blame. 

[Tonitrus]

If the WSJ is a bastion...it is akin to the bastion that was Constantinople in 1452.

[The Brain]

Yeah, "traditional Republican" is not very relevant to today's GOP.

[viper37]

I'm beginning to rethink my position on guns...

there's nothing better than an AR-15 locked in your basement to defend yourself against intruders in your bedroom.

[Sheilbh]

Via Adam Tooze - this is from someone on the left (I think he writes for Jacobin) but I thought this Twitter thread was an interesting theory of what's happened to the GOP:

Paul Heideman
@pmheideman
My article on the GOP's recent evolution is out in the new Catalyst. Short thread:
The GOP has, increasingly, become a party in conflict with American business. January 6 revealed this quite sharply, but it has been evident 2011 or so. How has this happened?
One answer is that it's becoming a working class party. In an updated version of Seymour Martin Lipset's working class authoritarianism thesis, the GOP is becoming a kind of populist mass party of the right, rather than the creature of Capital it has traditionally been.
In this article, I show that there just isn't much basis to this. The GOP is not becoming increasingly working class. Even among working class whites, the GOP doesn't have a clear plurality.
So what has driven the GOP's derangement? I point to two longstanding features of American society that have intensified since the 1970s: weak parties and disorganized capitalists.
It's a dirty secret of American politics that the strength of the two party system coexists with the weakness of the two major parties. The parties themselves can't choose their candidates, most fundraising doesn't go through them, and they have no real platforms.
As a result of this weakness, political money determines what happens in the parties more than any autonomous institutional decision-making by the parties themselves.
This might lead us to expect the parties to be even more subservient to American capital, given that it is obviously the major source of political money. But instead, the opposite has happened.
This is because American capital has become increasingly disorganized since the 1970s. In the 70s, capital organized on a titanic scale to smash the New Deal and make sure the crisis of that decade was resolved on employers' terms.
But once that was accomplished, unified action by capital became less common, and instead, capital's political interventions became far more sectoral and self-interested, rather than classwide.
The article traces this process through the history of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, both of which have undergone striking changes since the 70s.
Together party enfeeblement and corporate disorganization opened the way for right wing political entrepreneurs to pull the GOP ever farther to the right. The short-termism of capital was compatible with this. The GOP was happy to throw plenty of slop to the piggies along the way
But at the same time, the cultivation of deeply ideological conservatism in the party meant the emergence of currents who were fairly autonomous from the main bodies of capital.
They didn't listen to the Chamber of Commerce when it told them to knock it off with the government shutdowns. And they're not listening now as the Chamber and others try to get them to ditch the insurrectionism.
If this is the case, we shouldn't expect the GOP to act normal any time soon. The forces responsible for its move to the right are too deeply rooted in American society. Recognizing that fact is going to be necessary for left politics going forwards.

Obviously part of the reason it interested me was I think that does also work (to an extent) in the UK where employers/business is similarly disorganised so ended up in an election with Jeremy Corbyn as one option and Boris Johnson who was pushing for a very bad for business Brexit (and famously said "fuck business") on the other. I don't think either are quite like the January 6th insurrection or moving away from democracy because, being Britain, the scale is always smaller, grubbier and seedier, but the principle's similar.

[Razgovory]

Weak parties and confused capitalists are not what is driving this.  They may have failed to control or stop it but that isn't what is motivating Republican rank and file.

[Maximus]

Is the Capitol Riot being tolerated though?  While there are many fools who try and justify their behaviour, it seems to me that there was a lot of condemnation, and the wheels of law enforcement are grinding them into paste. 

I suppose there's always the risk of escalation, just as there's always the risk of political beliefs becoming more extreme and violent.  But it's hard to see what more could be done.

The mooks on the ground are being prosecuted, but the instigators have seen zero consequences and it's looking unlikely they will at the ballot box either.

[Razgovory]

Keven McCarthy is threating any company that complies with congressional subpoena for phone records.  McCarthy seems very, very scared of what might come out of this.

[Valmy]

Weak parties and confused capitalists are not what is driving this.  They may have failed to control or stop it but that isn't what is motivating Republican rank and file.

It's culture war.

[Jacob]

Weak parties and confused capitalists are not what is driving this.  They may have failed to control or stop it but that isn't what is motivating Republican rank and file.

The argument is, I believe, that because the parties were weak and the capitalists undisciplined, they aided and abetted the culture warriors' take-over of the party.

[The Minsky Moment]

Keven McCarthy is threating any company that complies with congressional subpoena for phone records.  McCarthy seems very, very scared of what might come out of this.

All the committee has done is sent notices telling companies to preserve (not destroy) records.  Subpoenas, if they are issued, are mandatory.  McCarthy should be censured for obstructing Congressional business, at a minimum - possibly investigated for witness tampering. Given the context was a notice to preserve records, McCarthy's threats against "cooperating" companies could be reasonably inferred as a direction to destroy evidence under threat.