A few days ago I saw an interesting substack by Thomas Zimmer about the far right secession fantasy, which he worries is more serious than “just silly, pathetic cosplay from a bunch of grifters, buffoons, and lost souls…The trucker convoy fiasco also doesn’t change the fact that the border standoff is acting as a catalyst for the pervasive lusting for civil war and ubiquitous fantasizing about secession on the Right. This isn’t confined to extremist online fringes either. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, for instance, fabulated we would ‘have a war on our hands were president Biden to federalize National Guard troops. Kevin Stitt, the Republican Governor of Oklahoma, argued that the Texas National Guard was merely ‘protecting their homeland’ from the federal government. And Representative Clay Higgins posted on Ex-Twitter that ‘the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.’ These aren’t just outlier voices. Texas, with the explicit support from 25 Republican governors, is deploying precisely the argument slave states used to justify secession.”
Fantasies of a coming civil war and dreams of secession from a country that is supposedly being turned into a liberal hellhole are not a new phenomenon on the Right. Some parts of the Right were never content with accepting the post-1960s reality and railed against what they saw as the acquiescence and appeasement of the forces of multiracial pluralism. Far-right forces and ideas have always shaped modern conservatism as a political project, and they have been waging war, at least metaphorically, against pluralistic America for a long time: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Pat Buchanan infamously declared in his 1992 Republican National Convention Speech. Buchanan was a leading proponent of an ascending paleo-conservative tradition and a key figure in the mainstreaming of an emerging rightwing populism that took hold of the power centers of conservative politics after the end of the Cold War. There is a clear path from there to those on the Right today who believe “conservatism is no longer enough,” that a reactionary counter-revolution by the rightfully aggrieved defenders of “real America” against nefarious “woke,” “globalist” elites is urgently needed.
…[A]ll this secessionist fantasizing has been flanked by an increasingly violent political rhetoric— and open endorsement of political violence. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene campaigned on the idea that “Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings.” If someone were to truly believe that the president of the United States, the party in power, and the forces dominating a sinister “deep state” are engaged in a campaign to murder all members of the opposition party— what are they supposed to do? Just last week, Greene’s fellow Georgia Representative Mike Collins casually called for an extrajudicial killing styled after a foreign authoritarian regime’s terror campaign: “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride,” Collins posted on Ex-Twitter, referring to a man who had allegedly been involved in an attack on New York City police officers. This was a reference to the authoritarian military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. After overthrowing the democratically elected Allende government in September 1973, the Pinochet regime persecuted dissidents and “disappeared” them. One way of doing that was to throw them out of aircraft, usually into the ocean. The practice of “disappearing” people had been a key tactic of the military dictatorship in Argentina; it was the focus of an international human rights campaign against Chile in the 1970s. “Make Leftists Disappear Again” has been a meme on the Far Right for several years— you’ll see it on t-shirts that sport the slogan plus the silhouette of a helicopter. That’s what this translates to: Let’s kill those “leftist” enemies here in America, like Pinochet did in Chile.
The line between far-right extremism and the power center of conservative politics was always, at best, a permeable membrane. Now it has been completely eviscerated, to the point where no one should be surprised that a GOP congressman is openly propagating such ideas. The Republican Party doesn’t just tolerate such extremist figures in an attempt to appease the fringe— this isn’t simply a matter of acquiescence out of cowardice. This sort of radicalism is widely seen as justified on the Right. The GOP has abandoned and is now actively assaulting the foundations of democratic political culture. Accepting the legitimacy of the political opponent and denouncing the use of political violence: Republicans are delighting in crossing those essential lines.
He wondered if Noem, Stitt, Higgins, Greene, Collins, Abbott, and the other publicly endorsing secession really mean it? Or are they just playing to the crackpot, well-armed, rural base? And not just in Texas, Oklahoma and Wyoming. What about counties like Allegany, Orleans, Lewis and Orleans in New York, whose voters gave over 65% of their vote to Trump? Or, in California, where more than 65% of the voters in Shasta, Lassen, Tehama and Modoc counties went for Trump? Most of the counties in Illinois voted for Trump. There are 3,143 counties in the U.S. Trump won 2,497 of them spread out all over the country. Biden won only 15.2% (477), including counties in Texas, Mississippi, Wyoming… although none in Oklahoma or West Virginia.
It’s not entirely Trump’s fault, but he’s been throwing gasoline on the smoldering wreckage. Yesterday, McCay Coppins asked why GOP politicians do whatever he wants. He noted that “The story Donald Trump tells about himself— and to himself— has always been one of domination. It runs through the canonical texts of his personal mythology. In The Art of the Deal, he filled page after page with examples of his hard-nosed negotiating tactics. On The Apprentice, he lorded over a boardroom full of supplicants competing for his approval. And at his campaign rallies, he routinely regales crowds with tales of strong-arming various world leaders in the Oval Office. This image of Trump has always been dubious. Those boardroom scenes were, after all, reality-TV contrivances; those stories in his book were, by his own ghostwriter’s account, exaggerated in many cases to make Trump appear savvier than he was. And there’s been ample reporting to suggest that many of the world leaders with whom Trump interacted as president saw him more as an easily manipulated mark than as a domineering statesman to be feared. The truth is that Trump, for all of his tough-guy posturing, spent most of his career failing to push people around and bend them to his will. That is, until he started dealing with Republican politicians.”
For nearly a decade now, Trump has demonstrated a remarkable ability to make congressional Republicans do what he wants. He threatens them. He bullies them. He extracts from them theatrical displays of devotion— and if they cross him, he makes them pay. If there is one arena of American power in which Trump has been able to actually be the merciless alpha he played on TV— and there may, indeed, be only one— it is Republican politics. His influence was on full display this week, when he derailed a bipartisan border-security bill reportedly because he wants to campaign on the immigration “crisis” this year.
…One explanation is that Trump has simply achieved much more success in politics than he ever did, relatively speaking, in New York City real estate or on network TV. For all of his tabloid omnipresence, Trump never had anything like the presidential bully pulpit.
…Trump is not the president anymore— and there is also something unique about the sway he continues to have over Republicans on Capitol Hill. In his previous life, Trump had viewers, readers, fans— but he never commanded a movement that could end the careers of the people on the other side of the negotiating table.
And Trump— whose animal instinct for weakness is one of his defining traits— seemed to intuit something early on about the psychology of the Republicans he would one day reign over.
[Sam] Nunberg told me about a speech he drafted for Trump in 2015 that included this line about the Republican establishment: “They’re good at keeping their jobs, not their promises.” When Trump read it, he chuckled. “It’s so true,” he said, according to Nunberg. “That’s all they care about.” (Nunberg was eventually fired from Trump’s 2016 campaign.)
This ethos of job preservation at all costs is not a strictly partisan phenomenon in Washington— nor is it new. As I reported in my recent biography of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator was surprised, when he arrived in Congress, by the enormous psychic currency his colleagues attached to their positions. One senator told Romney that his first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?”
But the Republican Party of 2015 was uniquely vulnerable to a hostile takeover by someone like Trump. Riven by years of infighting and ideological incoherence, and plagued by a growing misalignment between its base and its political class, the GOP was effectively one big institutional power vacuum. The litmus tests kept changing. The formula for getting reelected was obsolete. Republicans with solidly conservative records, such as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, were getting taken out in primaries by obscure Tea Party upstarts.
To many elected Republicans, it probably felt like an answer to their prayers when a strongman finally parachuted in and started telling them what to do. Maybe his orders were reckless and contradictory. But as long as you did your best to look like you were obeying, you could expect to keep winning your primaries.
As for Trump, it’s easy to see the ongoing appeal of this arrangement. The Apprentice was canceled long ago, and the Manhattan-real-estate war stories have worn thin. Republicans in Congress might be the only ostensibly powerful people in America who will allow him to boss them around, humiliate them, and assert unbridled dominance over them. They’ve made the myth true. How could he possibly walk away now?
