A Question About the Insurrection
Ironic, isn’t it? The sentiment for which Hillary Clinton was pilloried the most, that may have cost her the Presidency, turns out to be a simple fact: a certain fraction of Donald Trump’s supporters really are deplorable. I refer, of course, to the MAGA mouth-breathers who stormed the Capitol this week, armed and bearing IEDs but without the wit to conceal their identities.
Call me a hopeless optimist, but I really want to believe that these goons don’t truly represent the body of Trump supporters. There must be a spectrum with the seditious mob on one end, and, on the other, their opposite number: respectable conservatives and patriots who voted for Trump, perhaps with nostrils pinched shut, because he has been the only available repository of their priorities.
The crucial question, then, is: How many of each? There must be a cadre of rational, calm, informed conservatives on the right who have been languishing, forgotten, in the shadow of the hyenas and QAnon cultists who get all the time on comedy news. But what’s the mix? Which group truly represents today’s Republican party?
The polls are not encouraging to the charitable mind. Something like 80% of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen, despite the idea’s dismal failure where the rubber hit the road: in court. And now, three times as many Republicans think that Joe Biden is “A great deal to blame” for the Capitol insurrection as Donald Trump is.
In this context, trying to maintain respect for Republican thinking is swimming upstream…but I’m still skeptical. Polling itself is losing ground rapidly as a source of data, and I have to ask myself if these responses are less a matter of actual conviction than an expression of tribal identification/virtue signaling. I’m still clinging to hope.
So, my call: open question. No good data to be had.
There’s a parallel question to be asked about the Republican leadership. For the last four years, the Republican party has been in thrall to Donald Trump. Why? One explanation, popular on the Left, is that they are just as corrupt, venal and power-mad as the man himself, and he has come along to provide their one, true voice. The explanation I prefer, though, is that he has dragged them down with him; that the Cruz’s and the Rubio’s meant what they said about him in the 2016 primaries; that there is a deep strain of ambivalence about Trump and the damage he has done to the Republic — said sentiment squelched by the fear he instils in his allies of turning his base against them.
Thus: another open question: willing collaborators or reign of terror?
Why am I raising these unanswered questions? Not just because the answers matter powerfully to the state of our nation, but because the insurrection in the Capitol offers a glittering, golden opportunity to answer both of them with surgical precision. How, you ask? By posing a third question to both the Republican leadership and Trump’s non-demented supporters:
Are you with us, or are you with them?
Do you favor giving a free pass to the man who fomented this insurrection and did nothing to stop it? Or do you support impeaching Donald Trump and removing him from office for his role in this horror?
This is the chance for respectable Republicans, who come to their conservatism honestly via values of mutual respect, patriotism and civic order — among others — and honest, sober reflection on priorities. This is their chance to show that the Capitol mob who couldn’t care less about those things does not speak for them, does not represent them. We’ve heard for years how unfair it is to lump them in with the deplorables who only share with them some willingness to support the President, however reluctantly. This is their chance to show that they’re actually different, that they’re the temperate “silent majority”: by rejecting the man who has exposed himself as an enemy of the America they purport to love.
It is also the chance for the Republican leadership to shed themselves of Donald Trump’s reign of terror, if they want to. By supporting Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, they would dispel the shadow of a 2024 run — the certain shadow, assuming Trump’s fast-food diet doesn’t kill him first. Unlike in the prior impeachment, the prospect of giving Trump the mantle of martyr just doesn’t work here — at least not for the sane. A certain fraction of his supporters will follow him into exile, but they would no longer hold an iron fist over the Republican party, and it would cast a light of virtue and principle on the real patriots who remain.
It would also give the Republican leadership a chance to, you know, lead. Because leadership doesn’t mean following the will of the people as shaped by their views; it lies in inspiring the will of the people and working to shape those views. Those polls I reviewed earlier? They would be very different without Donald Trump shaping the opinions of his base. Get him out of the way — or at least stick him with his cultists in a back alley — and who knows how the clearheads of the party could guide its future?
As I said, it’s a question of numbers. If the Republican party really has been taken over by the mob, it will go one way. But if, as I, in my bottomless optimism, truly hope, the Grand Old Party of today really is a pony buried in poo**, then it will go the other way.
Stay tuned for later developments.
** For the young’uns, this is a Reagan reference: There’s Got to be a Pony in Here Somewhere
