Never Trumpers' Republican revolt failed but they could still play key role
The Republican rebellion failed: Donald Trump won. “I was disappointed over the last few weeks to see what seemed like the Republican party waking up,” the Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger observed on NBC’s Meet the Press last week, “and then kind of falling asleep again”.
Kinzinger is among a band of Republican dissidents who openly defy the former US president’s continued dominance of the party. They are small, bullied and vastly outnumbered. But in a finely balanced Congress where antiTrump sentiment is wider than it first appears, they are likely to play an outsized role in the future of American politics.
The known “Never Trump” resistance consists of 10 members of the
House of Representatives who last month voted to impeach him for inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol. They include Liz Cheney, the most senior woman in the Republican caucus, who declared “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the constitution”.
Then there are five senators who rejected spurious process arguments and voted to press ahead with the impeachment trial: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. The group will soon shrink because Toomey has announced that he will not seek reelection next year.
But it is an open secret in Washington that they have many fellow travelers: Republican traditionalists who privately despise Trump, and may well convict him if only the vote could be held by secret ballot, but dare not speak out for fear of retribution from rightwing media and increasingly radicalized state parties. This can take the form of primary election challenges, heckling in public places and even death threats.
Charlie Sykes, editor-at-large of the Bulwark website and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “I would hate to see what the mailbox of someone like a Mitt Romney is. We’ll see more scenes of folks harassing the moderates at airports but, within the leadership ranks, they understand what the stakes are. I’m guessing that rather a large number of senators share Romney’s view and are probably telling him that they wish they could say the same thing.”
This well of tacit sympathy is one
reason why Romney and other senators are unlikely to face personal hostility from colleagues. Another is that, with the Senate evenly split at 50-50 – the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris, holds the tie-breaking vote – Republicans cannot afford to ostracize or alienate any members.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, explained: “Neither party can afford to shun a single member of their caucus in the Senate because to overcome a filibuster you need 51 votes – a legislative filibuster is 60 - so every party needs every senator.
“That’s why the Senate is, at least for now, a safer place to be a maverick than the House of Representatives, although now with the margin in the House, you need every vote on each side as well.”
The Republican caucus in the House is more overtly Trumpian, as evidenced by the newcomer Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has espoused racist and antisemitic views and expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. That indicates why Cheney – the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney – has faced a more severe backlash from Trump loyalists than any senator.
Although she survived an attempt this week to oust her as the party’s No 3 in the House as punishment for endorsing impeachment, an Axios-SurveyMonkey poll found that Cheney is far less popular than Greene among Republicans and those who lean Republican.
She could still face censure from the Wyoming state party and a primary challenge. The Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, a fervent Trump backer from Florida, even flew to Wyoming to urge supporters to vote her out. “Washington DC mythologises the establishment power brokers like Liz Cheney for climbing in a deeply corrupt game,” Gaetz told a rally of about a thousand people in Cheyenne. “But there are more of us than there are of them.”
Sykes observed: “When you have somebody like Matt Gaetz flying to Wyoming, he’s doing that because he thinks that that strengthens his brand in the GOP [Grand Old Party] to attack other Republicans, which tells you about the toxic nature of this civil war.”
It is debatable whether, as Kinzinger posited, the Republican party really was close to waking up from its Trumpian fever dream. Although the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, both stated that Trump bears responsibility for the deadly violence at the US Capitol, McConnell then voted against holding an impeachment trial and McCarthy visited the ex-president at his Florida redoubt to mend fences.
Taking McConnell’s cue, a further 44 Republican senators supported a resolution declaring the trial unconstitutional because Trump is now a private citizen. It meant that his eventual acquittal is all but certain, just as it was at his first impeachment trial a year ago when Romney was the sole senator to break from the party line.
Such is the Trump base’s hold on the party that while some establishment Republicans stay and fight, others often retire and walk away. In recent years they have included Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, senators from Tennessee and Arizona respectively, soon to be joined by Rob Portman, an Ohio senator who recently announced he would not run for election again. Justin Amash, a Trump critic in the House, left the Republican party in 2019.
But the current crop of Never Trumpers in the Senate are likely to keep speaking out because of a mix of pragmatism and principle. In November Collins and Sasse won the cushion of six-year terms; Murkowski comes from a state that uses ranked-choice voting, meaning that she could leave the Republican party and still have a strong chance of re-election next year; Romney is wealthy and has already had a shot at the presidency so has little to lose.
Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who ran a Senate campaign against Romney in Massachusetts in1994, said: “He’s a conservative: that’s clear from how he votes on issues, from how he’s reacted to the Covid-19 relief. But in terms of the norms and standards of democracy, he’s going to do what he believes and, if it turns out that it hurts him in Utah, I don’t think he cares.”
Similarly unapologetic, Kinzinger has announced a new political action committee called Country First, urging Republicans to cast off their mantle as the “Trump-first party” and “unplug the outrage machine”. In his Meet the Press interview, the congressman warned that the party had peddled “darkness and division” and “lost its moral authority in a lot of areas”.
Though they often seem like voices in the wilderness, the rebels can point to reports that thousands of people have quit the Republican party since the US Capitol riot on 6 January. They also have the support of former party officials and outside groups that worked for Trump’s defeat last year and continue to oppose him.
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney have been the standard bearers and we need to reinforce their leadership as much as possible.
“It’s not about establishment Republicanism versus pitchfork Republicanism – that’s just a false flag argument. The Republican party either is or isn’t something. Either Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney stand for what that something is or they don’t. Either Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan [a pro-Trump congressman] stand for what that is or they don’t. And that’s the battle.”
Steele, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, added: “I happen to think that Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney represent the opportunity for a governing majority in the future. I think Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all that Trumpist bullshit isn’t the future of the party. I stand with Adam Kinzinger. Let’s have that fight.”
I would hate to see what the mailbox of someone like a Mitt Romney is
Charlie Sykes
who asks her how she would describe her lifestyle – “Well, let me assure you,” she retorts, “I would neveruse the term ‘lifestyle’.”
One of the ironies of her newfound celebrity is that the young, who she professes to have little time for, have taken her to their hearts. She draws some of her biggest crowds on the American college campus circuit and, before the lockdown, found herself being regularly stopped on the street by youthful admirers.
“I have noticed that it is people in their middle-20s that come up to me the most,” she says, sounding intrigued rather than, as you might expect, irritated by the attention. “I don’t really understand why. I have never paid any particular attention to them. What I can tell you is that many of them seem incredibly fixated on New York in the 70s, which has somehow become very glamorous to them, even though it was anything but.”
Perhaps, I suggest, it seems somehow more authentic in its grittiness that today’s more homogenised Manhattan. “I think it’s more that glamour is always a distant thing,” she counters. “The further you get away from an era, the more glamorous it becomes. And, if you happened to be around then, the glamour gets attached to you.”
Back in the early 70s, Lebowitz was part of a cool, arty downtown New York scene that was more glam than glamorous and that has since, as she suspects, attained an almost mythic status in popular culture. She moved there in 1969, fleeing a constrictively traditional upbringing in Morristown, New Jersey, where her Jewish parents owned a furniture upholstery business. Their only ambition for her, she has said, was that she become a good wife.
“There is a huge difference between the relationship that young people have with their parents now and the relationship people of my age had with their parents. They don’t hate their parents. Their parents never disapprove of anything they do. There isn’t that divide. Put simply, our parents did not like us that much. I know that is a horrible thing to say. I’m not saying they didn’t love us, but they certainly didn’t like us. And it never entered their minds to be friends with us. My mother used to say to me very frequently, ‘I’m your mother, not your friend’, not that I would have mistaken her for a friend, believe me.”
Rebellious by nature, Lebowitz declared herself an atheist, aged seven, and, as a teenager, was suspended from one school for “unspecific surliness” and another for setting a bad example to her fellow pupils – she once turned up at a fancy dress party as Fidel Castro. In New York, she found work variously as a cleaner, a taxi driver – one of only two female cabbies in the city – and a writer of porn.
In 1970, having published several book reviews for a small underground magazine, she blagged a job at Andy Warhol’s glitzyInterview magazine by informing the editor, Glenn O’Brien, that she wanted to write funny reviews of bad films, would like her own page and did not want to be edited. Her byline granted her access to a hip and notoriously dissolute milieu, whose denizens included the young photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar, both of whom made portraits of her, and the louche and outrageously camp rock group the New York Dolls, whose lead singer, David Johansen, invited her to the group’s regular shows at the Mercer Arts Center.
“I got to know the whole band and went to see them a lot,” she tells me, “but, as far as the music went, I cannot think of a person I knew of my age who was less interested in rock’n’roll than me.”
Snapshots of her from that time show her hanging out at nightclubs CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, looking relaxed, but defiantly out of step in her stylishly preppie clothes. As she attests in Pretend It’s a City, she was much more at home in the company of jazz legends such as Duke Ellington and the mercurial Charles Mingus, with whom she had a tempestuous friendship – he once leapt off stage during a set and chased her through the astonished audience and several blocks down the street.
For me, her stories about those heady times are the highlights of the series, not least because you can sense the freedom she felt then. Raised in a conservative small town, she had found both her milieu and her adopted home as a gay woman in a city that, as she tells Scorsese, drew people like her who did not easily fit in elsewhere.
By the early 80s, Lebowitz had published two books of humorously insightful and well-received essays on New York manners, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), before she succumbed to what she refers to as her prolonged “writer’s blockade”, which continues still. Undaunted, she made the apparently seamless transition from writer to public speaker and the rest, as they say, is history of a particularly unlikely kind.
I ask her if she considers herself a satirist? “In a way, yes, but, American reality has been so extreme of late that satire is almost impossible. Anything you could possible imagine actually happens. It would stump Jonathan Swift.”
Her politics, she tells me, have remained constant throughout her life. “What I really am is a very old-fashioned New Deal liberal democrat, but the problem is that the Democratic party has moved so far to the right. It began when Bill Clinton became president. To me, his ideas were Republican ideas and that’s when it all started to get mixed up in a really bizarre way.”
Of late, she says, she has found herself “becoming more radical, more left” at a time in her life when she should be becoming more conservative. “It’s only because everyone else moved to the right,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been forced into it. I mean, I didn’t used to hate Republicans, I just disagreed with them.”
At 70, Fran Lebowitz still retains some of that instinctively rebellious spirit that so incensed her school teachers and it is her forthrightness that seems to have struck the deepest chord. Her comedy is essentially cathartic: she lets rip in a way that the rest of us – in particular, older people – don’t, but wish we could. In refusing to shut up or put up, she speaks for every beleaguered city dweller, whose default mode, unlike hers, is stoical silence and suppressed rage. Does it annoy her, I ask, that some people find her annoying?
“No, but it does baffle me. I am always surprised at how angry people get at me, given I don’t have any power. So, you don’t agree with me. So what? It’s not like I can do anything to you. To be honest, I really don’t care that people don’t agree with me, but I wonder why they care so much that I don’t agree with them.” Right now, the world having finally caught up with her wit, I suspect she doesn’t spend much time thinking about that at all.
Young people seem fixated on New York in the 70s, which is somehow very glamorous to them, though it was anything but
must happen everywhere in Europe. The museums and institutions of these countries must understand that we are determined.
“For the moment, we are concentrating on museums. We are optimistic governments will eventually cooperate. Then we will ask people who have objects in private collections to act with goodwill and return the things that have been stolen from us. But, eventually, it’s not just our artefacts but our land and our riches: the minerals, diamonds and gold; the animals, flora and fauna. And reparations – but that is another campaign.”
Diyabanza is not concerned if his movement leaves many European museums practically empty. He has described the removal of art and cultural objects from Africa between 1880 and 1960 as a “vast operation of theft and pillaging that came just after Africa suffered one of the greatest crimes against humanity: slavery”. He is not opposed to African and other objects being displayed in Europe. But he wants to see them returned first and then they can be lent on their owners’ terms.
“These museums are guilty of receiving stolen goods,” he says. “Perhaps they can be decolonised and give birth to something new.The current health restrictions mean our popular actions are restricted. But we have to continue so we can rebuild our own cultural heritage. These are our objects and we want them back.”
We will be looking at Spain, Germany, Portugal, the Vatican and – yes – the UK
Mwazulu Diyabanza