What’s next?

sign saying "welcome to texas"

The short version is that the federal government will operate as red states like Texas or Alabama have for some time. It will do so in terms of policy agenda (reactionary, neoliberal, evangelical moral panic) and what might be called political structures and practices (competitive authoritarianism).

For some time, the GOP has claimed to be conservative, and to have a policy agenda grounded in principles. It isn’t, and it doesn’t. It’s a coalition taped together by a strategic rhetoric of resentment, demagoguery, and in-group favoritism (e.g., if you support drones, and look forward to nuclear war in the Middle East, you are not pro-life).

So, the policy agenda will have a lot of moral panic/purity items that the “evangelicals” advocate (federal ban on abortion, probably some kind of requirement for prayer in schools, restriction of marriage rights, public funding of sectarian education, etc.). Neoliberals (really just the latest incarnation of sloppy Social Darwinists) will get draining and redirecting of public funds to private profit, policies that buttress current wealth disparities, and deflecting or demonizing of any discussion of long-term or structural issues like racism of global warming, (e.g., much of “Project 2025”). Reactionaries will get unlimited access to guns, removal of restraints on police, and generally in-group exemption from prosecution for violence, corruption, and abuse of power (e.g., Kenneth Paxton).

At the Federal level, we’ll also have the kind of “competitive authoritarianism” that states like Texas have been establishing. Political scientists (and others) have been warning about competitive authoritarianism for twenty years. From a 2002 article:

“In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” (52)

More recently Levitsky and Way have defined it as “in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real but unfair.”

It’s interesting to me that scholars rarely mention the US South, but it’s a good example of competitive authoritarianism. There was a Republican Party, and, on paper, African Americans could vote. But, in fact, various structural and interpersonal practices (from lynching to refusing to register voters) ensured that neither African Americans nor Republicans were completely excluded from power. It was herrenvolk democracy. [1]

There are two ways that this will play out in the US. In purple states, it will mean gerrymandering, disparate access to polling places, formal and informal harassment of non-GOP voters, strategic voter registration requirements, and demagoguery about voter fraud rather than voter suppression. In other words, Texas.

For the nation as a whole, it will mean “The Great Divorce.” Purple states with the GOP in the dominant position will keep from going violet by passing laws that cause potential Dem voters to congregate either in cities (that can be gerrymandered out of power) or to leave the purple states entirely. If the latter happens, then high-population states may be overwhelmingly Dem (and the US as a whole might be overwhelmingly Dem), but the GOP will hold control of the Senate and Electoral College, and hence SCOTUS and the Presidency.

Levitzky and Ziblatt laid out the plan that Trump started to follow in his first term, and he’ll complete it this time. Important to competitive authoritarianism is control of the media, so we should expect that Trump will immediately go after Bezos (assuming he hasn’t already—hence WaPo’s refusal to endorse Harris). Putin used a combination of extortion and threats of prosecution for tax fraud to get rid of critical media—that’s probably the route it will take.

Not all critical media will be silenced; competitive authoritarianism is about looking like a democracy. But, they will certainly be corralled and underfed.

Friendly media will continue to promote a narrative of existential war (demagoguery), victimized “conservatives” (in-group favoritism), snobby elitists (resentment), and aggression/corruption as justified self-defense (projection).

Welcome to Texas.

[The wikipedia article says the term was first used in 1967, but Wilbur Cash used it in his 1941 Mind of the South.]

What is happening with the GOP and the Speaker election isn’t just karma—it’s causality. And it’s bad for everyone.

Bill O'Reilly claiming there is a war on Christmas
from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI



The GOP has been setting fire to democratic norms since the 80s. That isn’t a hyperbolic insult I’m throwing at them. It’s what Gingrich said he wanted to do. He said, quite openly (and still says), that he wanted to make government dysfunctional so that people would vote for the anti-government party, which would be the GOP. The GOP persuaded its base that they should abandon democratic norms and treat politics as war.

Let’s stop there for a second.

In the 80s, there was an internal GOP conflict among three kinds of elites. There were (and still are a few) Eisenhower-style conservatives who wanted a prosperous and stable nation, containment as a foreign policy, a moderate social safety net, and a reasonably protected working class (essentially the 1956 GOP platform), an end to de jure segregation. Then there was the group that had long dragged the Democratic party into the muck: a kind of toxic white evangelical populism that was rabidly racist, in favor of a social safety net only as long as didn’t threaten segregation, and committed to theocracy (that is, they believed that the government should promote and fund their very narrow notion of “Christianity”). The third group was neoliberal, Randroid, and selectively libertarian.

Two of those groups were Machiavellian.

Machiavellianism is often misunderstood. Psychologists use it to mean what used to be called sociopaths—that is, people who have no empathy, are amoral, and only look out for themselves—but that isn’t what Machiavelli advocated. He didn’t advocate a world free of ethical considerations, or amorality. He was deeply concerned with moral leadership, but morality, he and others argued, has two parts. There are means and ends. It is moral, he argued, to engage in actions we would normally consider immoral if those actions enable us to achieve a moral end.

He argued that the ends justify the means. That is, if you’re trying to do a right thing, there are no constraints on how you get there. (In other words, an important plot point of every action movie.) Thus, the only ethical consideration is whether your “ends” (your intention) are good. You can still think of yourself as an ethical person, even if you do or endorse actions that violate the ethical norms you claim to value, because you’re doing so for a good cause.

The easiest way to get people to behave like Machiavellians is to persuade them that they are threatened with extinction—there is an Out-Group that is trying to destroy Us. Then, they (we) will give ourselves moral license all the time feeling that we are the moral ones.

And that is the turn that pro-GOP rhetoric and pro-GOP demagogues (like Rush Limbaugh) took in the 80s. They weren’t the only rhetors who made that rhetorical choice. The claim that there is some “they” who is at war with “us” is a tiresomely popular rhetorical move. The argument that we must now abandon rhetorical, legal, ethical, and constitutional norms because we are faced with Evil is always present, and it’s always a bad argument.

And what’s happening with the GOP speakership shows why.

The choice that many pro-GOP politicians made in the 80s—and again, Gingrich is open about this—is that government itself was the Evil. So, the GOP made the government dysfunctional because they believed that it would gain power for them. I can’t say they’re wrong. It’s long been amazing to me how many GOP voters I’ve known who say, “Why should I pay taxes? There’s a pothole on my commute. We should cut taxes even more.”

In other words, cut resources to something (such as public schools or infrastructure), then, when those schools and infrastructure are crappier, mobilize the anger that people feel about the now crappier schools or infrastructure to argue for cutting taxes even more—because, clearly, the government can’t do a good job.

In the 80s and 90s, the GOP discovered that demagoguery worked to mobilize voters and support. As I’ve argued elsewhere, demagoguery isn’t specific to any place on the political spectrum, but it isn’t equally distributed. Demagoguery depends on the actively false notion that our complicated, nuanced, contextual, and uncertain realm of policy options can be reduced to a binary (or continuum) of two groups.

When a group (it’s never just an individual) decides that they will engage in demagoguery to gain or maintain power, they always do so by imagining an in-group, and then declaring that that in-group is already at war. This war is one already declared by The Out-Group (which is a fantastical nut-picked monstrosity of a villainous straw man) , and if you don’t realize it, you’re not really in-group.

Because The Out-Group is determined on our destruction, we are justified in anything we do, and breaking any norms. We can do the things we condemn The Out-Group for doing, while still claiming the moral high ground, because we have good intentions. We become Machiavellian.

Here’s one rhetorical problem. Imagine that you’re a media personality, ambitious political figure, Machiavellian with a lot of money, or person or industry that wants a specific policy. If you know that you couldn’t possibly succeed at getting your policy passed if you had to advocate in a realm of reasonable disagreement, then what you would do would be to demonize reasonable disagreement. You would say, “THEY are at war with us, so you should stop asking for reasonable disagreement and instead commit yourself to the policies that purify our community of Them.”

That’s what authoritarians do.

That’s what authoritarians with shitty policies do.

Deflecting the question of whether this policy is a good one (does it solve the need as reasonably narrated, is it the most reasonable in light of other options) to whether it means a win or loss for The Out-Group is always authoritarian.

If “conservatives” (who claim to be the “real Americans”) are threatened with extinction—the narrative of the GOP for forty years—then the correct response is to stand firm and reject all the democratic norms. That’s been the GOP rhetoric for forty years. The problem they’re now facing is that their rhetoric was persuasive. In other words, the GOP is now facing the logical and rhetorical consequences of its own rhetoric.

What is happening with the election of the Speaker of the House is a fight about exactly how to abandon democracy. And the fight is between two ways of thinking about authoritarianism: competitive authoritarianism (what McCarthy advocates) or a sloppy out-right authoritarianism (what Boebert advocates).

GOP candidates and pro-GOP media have spent years saying that Democrats/liberals/socialists (aka, anyone not purely committed to whatever the GOP happens to be advocating at that moment) are determined on the extermination of the in-group. Therefore, there is no such thing as a legitimate policy disagreement—every question, from whether you wear a mask to whether you are opposed to Russian hegemony of Europe, is not a policy question, open to policy argumentation, but an opportunity to demonstrate your determination to exterminate the “liberals” who want to exterminate Us.

As much as it may be pleasurable to watch Republicans in disarray, this is not a good situation. This is various levels of terrible. They are in disarray only because they disagree about what, exactly, constitutes the people of purity, and what, exactly, they should do to exterminate the unpure—that is, anyone who disagrees, in or out of the party.

Various powerful people in various times have thrown fuel onto the fire of a demagoguery they thought would benefit them.

That kind of demagoguery is never a controlled burn.