Republican politics is now defined by the threat of violence
You may have heard this aphorism about the parties: Democrats hate their base, and Republicans fear their base. We must now confront a sinister new reality. Republicans are no longer just afraid that their base will force them to defend the politically indefensible or send them packing in a primary challenge.
They’re afraid their base, or at least certain elements of it, will literally kill them.
Each party has its own complex internal dynamics as different factions jockey for influence and attempt to convince the party as a whole to adopt their own perspectives on ideology and tactics. In the GOP, that dynamic is now being shaped by QAnon, the new face of the Republican opposition. As The Washington Post reports:
“Even as Trump is set to exit the White House, QAnon’s grip on the conservative psyche is growing. Two freshmen Republican members of Congress, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, have voiced support for QAnon, while others have tweeted its slogans. State legislators across the country have further lent it credence while backing Trump’s claims of electoral theft despite a lack of evidence and dozens of swift rejections in court.”
QAnon is deranged in its beliefs about the world, opposed to the operation of the American democratic system, and built on the threat of deadly violence against anyone it considers an enemy.
This has now been incorporated into the thinking of every Republican navigating each new controversy: not just “Will this vote anger my constituents and get me a primary challenge from the right?” but also “If I oppose my party’s base on this, will they murder me and my family?”
This is not an exaggeration or a metaphor. In December, the minority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate said that if she did not support Republican efforts to nullify the state’s electoral votes, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” With the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the murderous threat to the life of every elected official came home for members of Congress.
Don’t forget that just hours after Trump supporters rampaged through the Capitol to overturn the election through violence, eight senators and 139 members of the House – two-thirds of the GOP caucus in the lower chamber – voted to reject legitimate electoral votes, essentially telling the rioters that they were right.
Why did they do it? Some may actually believe the conspiracy theories, while others are contemptible opportunists. But others did it because they feared for their lives.
Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 Republicans who later voted to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the riot, wrote about a Republican colleague who knew GOP efforts to overturn the election were wrong but joined them anyway. Why? “My colleague feared for family members, and the danger the vote would put them in. Profoundly shaken, my colleague voted to overturn.”
The same fears were at play a week later on the question of impeachment. Rep. Jason Crow, D-Co., said on Wednesday
that his GOP colleagues are “paralyzed with fear,” noting that in his conversations with Republican members, “A couple of them broke down in tears, talking to me and saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.” Tim Alberta of Politico confirmed as much, tweeting that “I know for a fact several members *want* to impeach but fear casting that vote could get them or their families murdered.”
For many months, the way QAnon and its lunatic beliefs about a global conspiracy of Satan-worshipping pedophile cannibals were steadily infecting the Republican Party was bizarre and disturbing. But now it is defining the party’s relationship with its base – and the threat of violence is at the core of that relationship.
The public confrontations we now see between conspiracy-minded Trump supporters and members of Congress (Republican and Democrat) now have an undercurrent of potential violence that they didn’t have before. Interactions that used to be spirited or even angry now hum with the threat that they could end in murder.
You may recall how in the summer of 2009, tea party activists mounted a coordinated disruption of town meetings held by members of Congress, in which they shouted loudly that the Affordable Care Act would destroy the last vestige of American liberty. It was unruly and unpleasant, and many members of Congress simply stopped holding town halls.
Nobody likes to get yelled at, or show up on the news looking besieged by unhappy constituents. But back then, most members weren’t literally fearing for their lives. Now they are.
Nevertheless, there are some Republicans, such as Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who seem to believe that the energy of the QAnon base can be contained and directed, that it’s possible to express just enough sympathy with them to point them where you want them to go while not being so explicitly supportive that you destroy your own credibility. The problem is that that enhances the extremists’ standing in the party.
Yes, some Republican officials have from time to time condemned QAnon. “There is no place for QAnon in the Republican Party,” said Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., in August. But he said that while defending Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who now says she no longer supports QAnon as she once did, but did announce on Twitter that “On January 21, 2021, I’ll be filing Articles of Impeachment against Joe Biden for abuse of power.”
The relationship the party has to Greene and her equally QAnon-curious colleague Boebert shows how they’ve dealt with the extremists in their ranks: First reluctant, then when their support became too great, indulgent, welcoming the QAnon-adjacent despite some misgivings.
It was because they were afraid: afraid that if they denounced the conspiracy theorists who supported Trump then he would punish them, afraid that their own constituents might turn on them, afraid that their careers would fall victim to another rightwing uprising.
Now they really know what fear is. And we should all be afraid.