There was a gut punch of an essay that rolled across my timeline sometime in the early part of the first Trump administration, when I had fooled myself into thinking this was all a phase, a blip.
Written by a political scientist with expertise in the rise and fall of empires, the essay, as far as I can remember, said this: In the final stages of a dying empire, the people and their ruling class swing wildly between political poles, desperate for anyone who can steady their sinking ship, until they land on the guy who refuses to give up his power and leads the empire to total ruin. The end.
I recall finishing the essay, closing my laptop, and thinking: Well, shit.
I would link you to that essay if I could find it. Alas, I can’t. Maybe, like everything else on the modern internet, it was purged because the site on which it lived was purchased by a venture capitalist who makes money by destroying valuable things. Anyway, I’ve thought about that essay of late — for agonizingly obvious reasons — and I’ve landed on the only real solution to stopping this terrible little lurching dance the American empire is doing on its way to collapse: Dissolve the Republican Party.
Any nation even remotely interested in maintaining a democratic republic can’t have one of its two major political parties embrace the sort of anti-constitutionalism that leads to all-out authoritarianism. It would be one thing if the Republican Party were one of four or six or 10 parties represented in Congress and in state legislatures. But it’s not. It’s one of two.
Our situation is terribly zero sum in nature: If the pro-democracy party doesn’t hold power, the anti-democracy party is in total control and gleefully ignores (most) constitutional limits on its power. This is the formula for collapse. It’s why you have low-simmering panic attacks in the lead-up to every election: The stakes could not be higher. A political party very open about its hatred for the country could take charge. And when they’re in charge, there are no rules.
The Republican Party cannot exist in its current form if the United States is going to have a sustained small-d democratic future. I don’t know what mechanisms would be necessary to dissolve this awful iteration of the GOP (other countries have so-called constitutional courts that make these decisions). I’m only certain of one thing: The fascist collaborators wielding unchecked power on the Supreme Court need to be neutralized via Court expansion and reform if anti-democracy elements are to be properly purged from the US.
It always, always, always starts with the Supreme Court, a captured institution by any measure.
Leaders in other democracies understand the unsustainable nature of such an arrangement. You can’t jump back and forth between incremental liberalism and blood-soaked fascism and expect to maintain a functional country. That’s why pro-democracy parties in Germany are pushing to ban the openly fascist party known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), which — like many modern fascist operations — has provided a 21st century makeover for the hideous ideology, if one can call it that. The AfD recently became the nation’s first fascist party to gain a state government majority with an assist from Elon Musk, the world’s foremost enemy of democracy.
German intelligence recently identified the AfD — rife with members who are open about their disdain for people of color, LGBTQ people, and, naturally, immigrants — as an extremist organization. The country’s intelligence agency, which can now legally monitor the AfD, released a 1,000-page report in May detailing the party’s radical stances and calls for violence. “Central to our assessment is the ethnically and ancestrally defined concept of the people that shapes the AfD, which devalues entire segments of the population in Germany and violates their human dignity,” the BfV domestic intelligence agency said in a statement. “This concept is reflected in the party’s overall anti-migrant and anti-Muslim stance,” it said, accusing the AfD of stirring up “irrational fears and hostility” toward marginalized people and groups.
It doesn’t come as a surprise then that Musk, the titular head of the international fascist movement when he’s not gooning to Grok-generated AI slop porn, has been an outspoken supporter of AfD, telling the party’s supporters to “move beyond” feeling guilt about the Holocaust. Musk has whined online about the prospect of his favorite fascist party being banned from German politics, calling it an attack on democracy, without a shred of irony.
German authorities can attempt to limit or ban public funding for AfD only if they can prove the “party is explicitly out to undermine or even overthrow German democracy,” according to Reuters. The case against the Republican Party for openly undermining democratic institutions in the US is open-and-shut. From limiting voting to promising to pay citizens to vote for their candidates to using the police to stop political opponents from casting a ballot to implementing egregious gerrymanders, Republicans check every box.
They are by any objective measure an authoritarian outlier in modern international politics, and they should be treated as such.
That mainstream media outlets have refused for close to two decades to cover the Republican Party as anything but a normal party in a normal democracy is baffling until you remember how important The Game has become to political journalism. Our politics is two evenly-matched teams in an eternal competition for power, not one exceedingly normal team versus a deeply radicalized insurgency that has dispensed with all rules of the game in its push for permanent victory. That framing — that lens — doesn’t lend itself to the horserace journalism that somehow, someway still defines American political coverage during our headlong plunge into fascist rule. So media outlets continue writing and talking about the Republican Party the way one would a normal, legitimate party in a high-functioning democratic republic.
It’s a failure without end, one that has created a tragically misinformed populace that has no idea what it’s voting for every two or four years.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Republicans know they have no place in a functional constitutional republic composed of parties that recognize democratic norms. Stephen Miller recently called for the Democratic Party to be labeled as a terrorist organization. I don’t believe Miller in his poisoned, blackened heart truly thinks Democrats are terrorists and that their party must be banned from national politics. Everything with these people is pure projection; Miller making this insane pronouncement only shows he understands how intolerable the modern GOP has become to small-d democrats.
The Republican Party could still exist in some form after its current iteration is dismantled. Perhaps more moderate elements of the party — as much as those exist today — could cobble together a coalition that would agree to abide by constitutional norms, stop ignoring judges’ rulings, and recognize free and fair elections as free and fair. I’m not going to be the nostalgic liberal who misremembers recent history and says the Republican Party used to be good. It was never good. It was always bad. But as recently as 2006 and 2008, there was no pushback to the results of elections in which they had their asses handed to them. There was bitter acceptance, and a renewed commitment to ratfucking American democracy into oblivion since the party could no longer compete on an even playing field.
So much as a mention of dissolving the anti-democracy Republican Party would of course spur the kind of backlash that might make January 6 look tame. A few Germans interviewed by The New York Times in the paper’s coverage of the push to banish the AfD said they loathed the party but were afraid of what their supporters would do if the AfD were booted from the country’s political environment. We would see the same kind of reaction in the US, and it’s exactly what opponents of democracy would want.
Giving into that threat, I think, would be a terrible mistake. It would only serve to validate the Right’s threats of violence — both implicit and explicit — and reinforce their approach to dominating American politics. They thrive on fear. It sustains them. Withholding your fear — and your despair — is what starves them and leaves them reeling. They have no other way of seeing the world and operating in it. They have no Plan B.
One German who backs the country’s fascist party told the Times that dissolving the anti-democracy organization would constitute a blow to German democracy, a flourish of bad faith that would surely seep into the American mainstream if we were ever to try to create a sustainable democracy and dissolve our own anti-democracy political party.
“In a democracy, you also have to be able to represent the opposition,” this AfD supporter told the Times. “We have 11 million people who voted for the party. Eleven million people who would simply be banned.”
That’s the thing: AfD supporters would in no way be banned from German politics. They could simply back a party that agrees to uphold the basic tenets of a workable democracy, or they could stay home on election day. There’s always a choice. One of those choices shouldn’t be the dissolving of democracy itself.
Only a criminal who knows he’s guilty would call for the dismissal of a judicial panel.
Trump calls on all ICC members to resign immediately
https://bsky.app/profile/reuters.com/post/3mw4krfbngl2m
Unfortunately you’ll never convince our Democratic leaders that the Republicans are anything but their “esteemed colleagues across the aisle” who need to be treated with civility and adherence to accepted institutional norms.