The Monmouth poll released this morning gaged favorability for the top congressional leaders, among other things. McConnell is easily the most hated leader among the four. The reason he is so much more disliked than the other top leaders is because, unlike the other 3, he’s so hated by his fellow Republicans. Pelosi and Schumer are very popular with Democrats and McCarthy is so-so with his fellow Republicans. But McConnell is underwater with Republicans— bigly. Another poll released today shows that 59% of registered voters-- including 20% of Republicans-- have a negative opinion of Trump. Only 25% of independent voters see Trump in a favorable light. In fact, 51% of registered voters say Trump should be disqualified from running for president in 2024.
Also this morning, New York magazine published an essay by Jonathan Chait that makes an important point: candidate quality isn’t the worst thing about the GOP— their own crackpot base is. What kind of people vote for these monsters and imbeciles? Personally, I always thought it was… monsters and imbeciles.
Chait wrote that “The most consistent theme articulated by the Republican Establishment in response to the midterm elections is a determination to solve what Mitch McConnell euphemistically called its “candidate-quality problem.”… Republicans are certainly wise to try harder next time to nominate candidates who live in the state they are running to represent, are not violent criminals, have avoided publicly calling for the overthrow of the government, and so on. That said, this advice is so blindingly obvious that one wonders why it became a question at all and why it took a cycle of election defeats for this lesson to set in. The answer is that the candidate-quality problem is merely the byproduct of a much more deeply rooted crisis of delusion that has spread up and down the ranks of the party. The GOP’s voters and its elites reside in a hermetically sealed world of paranoia so far removed from reality that it is often difficult for them to relate to the concerns of average people. The attempts by the likes of McConnell to address this problem at the level of the nominating process only scratch the surface of the predicament.”
I floated my own long-held views on Post this morning, a view that goes beyond just the Republican Party and indicts conservatives in general. Projectionism is the problem. They are ugly inside and assume everyone else is as well. And then they act on it against normal people.
The esteemed conservative critic Roger Kimball has written a column that inadvertently reveals the depth of the intellectual rot. Kimball begins his argument by recalling the closing message of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign: “Where’s the outrage?” Dole decided to end his campaign by harping on a collection of wildly overtorqued accusations against the Clinton administration. “Back then, the chief issue was the Clinton Administration’s use and abuse of 900 FBI files on their political opponents,” Kimball writes. “Imagine! An American president using the FBI as his secret police!”
In 1996, Fox News was just getting off the ground. Weird charges might burble up through the right-wing media— The Wall Street Journal editorial page spent years insinuating that Bill Clinton murdered his lawyer to cover up a cocaine-smuggling operation— but most Republicans still got most of their news from real media organizations. A candidate like Dole might cynically use some of these stories to crank up the base in the closing days of the election, but he almost certainly knew Clinton had not in fact turned the FBI into his secret police.
But a person like Kimball did believe this, and he seems to still believe this. And in the quarter-century since then, the conservative alt-news ecosystem has grown to the point where these paranoid beliefs are the predominant worldview among Republicans, not just a fringe. This explains why Donald Trump, insurrection and all, is a perfectly rational response. If you believe Democrats have been engaging in massive voter fraud, forming secret police squads, and so on, it only makes sense to fight back. Kimball uses the imagined “Clinton’s secret police” episode to ask why people aren’t literally staging armed demonstrations to protest Twitter’s content-moderation policies, which he sees as yet another element of the generational left-wing conspiracy.
The right-wing conviction that the Democratic Party is a Marxist cabal that does not operate by normal democratic principles is the central idea promulgated by Fox News and the conservative media. Responding to that belief is not just a messaging choice. It can’t easily be turned off because the voters and their nominees actually believe it.
Arizona’s recent Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, is one of the poster children for the candidate-quality problem. Running in a purple state against an uninspired opponent during a midterm race under an opposing-party president, Lake ought to have carried her race easily. Instead, she lost. Her intraparty critics blame it on her insistence on running on stop-the-steal themes rather than messages more congenial to persuadable voters.
A recent Washington Post postmortem on her candidacy noted that Lake refused to stop talking about how Joe Biden stole the 2020 election because she genuinely believed Biden stole the 2020 election. When her allies would privately try to steer her back on message, “she would never break frame,” a Republican said. “She’d sort of look at you with a puzzled face and be like, ‘But the election was stolen in 2020.’”
…The McConnell analysis is that Republicans nominated a bunch of kooks either because Trump endorsed them or because they felt compelled to endorse Trump’s kooky claims. And this did happen in some instances. But this implies Republicans need only to remove Trump from the equation and their candidates will become sane again. This ignores the grim reality that kookery took hold in the party because Republicans genuinely embraced it and, therefore, that Trump’s disappearance won’t make it go away.
Politics Professor John Kenneth White wrote American Political Parties: Why They Formed, How They Function, and Where They’re Headed. Today he noted at The Hill that Trump is today’s Joe McCarthy, though his point was more about the Republican Party than about either Trump or McCarthy. White wrote that “In many ways, the Republican Party’s history with Donald Trump harkens back to its experience with another demagogue, Joseph R. McCarthy. In 1950, the Wisconsin senator claimed to have in hand a list of 205 communists working in the State Department, a charge that catapulted the heretofore little-known McCarthy onto the national stage. Sen. Bricker (R-OH) McCarthy, “Joe, you’re a real SOB, but sometimes it’s useful to have SOBs to do the dirty work.”… Campaigning for the presidency in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower eliminated his planned denunciation of McCarthy after the Wisconsin senator accused General George Marshall of being ‘eager to play the front man for traitors.’ Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, remembers that McCarthy had an instinct for innuendo and ‘what is now called fake news [which] strengthened the senator’s power and influence.’ McCarthy’s downfall came in 1954, when he accused the U.S. Army of harboring suspected communists. His wild accusations led to a made for television moment when an exasperated Army attorney, Joseph Welch, admonished McCarthy: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?’ In that instant, Republicans were done with McCarthy. Republican National Party Chair Leonard Hall declared that he could no longer ‘go along’ with McCarthy’s sniping at ‘persons who are fighting communists just as conscientiously as he is.’ By a vote of 67 to 22, McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate. President Eisenhower privately vowed, ‘He’s the last guy in the world who’ll ever get [to the White House] if I have anything to say.’”
For years, Republicans refrained from criticizing McCarthy for fear of alienating their most loyal supporters. Eugene Pulliam, a conservative Republican and prominent newspaper publisher, declared that McCarthy “has the confidence of literally millions of people who think he is being directed by God.”
Members of the John Birch Society who, like McCarthy, saw a vast communist conspiracy working inside the U.S. government, were also ardent McCarthy admirers. By the early 1960s, the Society quickly grew to 30,000 members and was praised by prominent Republicans, including Barry Goldwater: “Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society. I’m not talking about commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks. I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.” Running for governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan said it was unfair to label all Birchers “crazies,” and he welcomed their support: “Any member of the society who supports me will be buying my philosophy. I won’t be buying theirs.”
A cardinal rule of politics is that no political party wants to alienate its base supporters. Republicans have slavishly adhered to that maxim. One exception came in 1950 when Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) broke with her colleagues when it came to dealing with Joe McCarthy. In her Declaration of Conscience speech, Smith declared that she did not want the Republican Party to ride to victory on the “Four Horsemen of Calumny-Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
But hers was a lonely voice. Today, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has issued her own Declaration of Conscience, and promises to “do whatever it takes” to make sure Trump never again enters the Oval Office. But, like Smith, hers is a lonely voice.
White, who never mentioned that McCarthy’s attorney, Roy Cohn, was not just Trump’s attorney but Trump’s first political mentor, wants to know if today’s Republicans will call out Trump by name, refuse to endorse him and finally purge him from their ranks? Or will they remain silent? Put another way: Will this be a moment when Republicans finally rid themselves of Donald Trump in the same way they did of Joe McCarthy, or not? Bare in mind, that ridding themselves of Trump, means ridding themselves of not just themas, but of the whole MAGA/Qanon movements and elected officials like Marjorie Traitor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Scott Perry, Lauren Boebert, Bob Good, Paul Gosar, Ted Budd, Ronny Jackson, Tommy Tuberville, Andrew Clyde, Matt Rosendale, Rick Scott, Andy Biggs… people whose careers and public images are so tied to Trump’s that the end of Trump means the end of them as well.