The GOP has seen QAnon before under other names
Do QAnon believers really believe what the rest of us think they do?
That’s an important question for those of us who aim to steer friends, family or, for that matter, the nation’s voting populace away from the crackpot cultish movement.
If you believe the polls — which QAnon followers tend not to believe — the answer is, maybe not so much.
Only 18% of those who had heard of the movement in a new Morning Consult poll conducted at the end of January said that they believed QAnon’s claims were at least somewhat accurate — a six-point decrease since October.
And among Republicans alone, 24% of those who had heard of QAnon said they believe QAnon’s claims. That’s down 14 points from the 38% who said the same in October.
Maybe reality crept in, most dramatically with President Joe Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20. The anonymous “Q,” the pseudonym of an online persona claiming to be a high-ranking government insider, had predicted it wouldn’t happen.
“Q” also predicted that then-President Donald Trump would find a way to maintain power and arrest Hillary Clinton and other Democrats for running a secret and very grotesque human trafficking ring. Nope, didn’t happen.
But that’s not to say that Trump didn’t maintain some power in terms of influencing the politics of those who remain in office.
We care about this movement these days because of its ideological offspring, such as post-Trump Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Grand Old Party’s new congresswoman from deep-red northwest Georgia. The QAnon-quoting, Trump-like Trump ally was tossed off of both her committees by a 230-199 vote Thursday for spreading hateful and violent tweets from just about every rightwing corner of the internet.
All of which demonstrates the vise that post-Trumpian politics is tightening on Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who as recently as the day before the vote mispronounced QAnon as “Q-on” and claimed, “I don’t even know what it is.”
Facing the tough task of trying to keep his divided caucus together, he managed to avoid too many more GOP defections in the vote against Taylor Greene a day after helping Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney keep her GOP leadership position, despite her joining nine other Republicans and all of the Democrats in voting for Trump’s impeachment.
As John Kennedy famously told historian Arthur Schlesinger, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” It’s apparently too much for too many Republicans these days too.
Although the polls may hint at a softening of QAnon’s appeal, the quest for such old-fashioned niceties as facts and truth requires something more, like leadership.
That’s what it took when the party faced this sort of March hare madness before. National Review founder William F. Buckley, a pioneer of modern conservatism, dismissed the John Birch Society founder Robert Welch as “nuts” and tried to talk conservative presidential nominee Barry Goldwater out of accepting Welch’s support. Goldwater, sounding a lot like Trump, insisted that there were some “nice guys” in the Birch Society besides the embarrassing “kooks.” He lost in a landslide against sitting President Lyndon Johnson.
Maybe LBJ’s popularity in that first year after Kennedy’s assassination was just too much for anyone to beat, as many (including me) believe. But the reach of today’s QAnon movement, driven by social media, is far larger than the old Birch Society, which is still around.
On top of that, Trump’s success with his unorthodox P.T. Barnum media style has spawned publicitygrabbing imitators in Congress — Taylor Greene, Florida’s Matt Gaetz, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert and Ohio’s Jim Jordan, to name a few.
By contrast, we have the bright light of Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran who emerged as a tea party star in 2010 and who recently started a political action committee called Country First to help nudge his party back toward this galaxy. Predictably, he’s been censured by the LaSalle County GOP for his disloyalty to the Trumpian program.
Too bad, but he may be redistricted out of office by his Democratic-dominated state anyway. Sometimes party opposition asks too much too.
But, as the Republicans try to chart a post-Trump path back to power, they first need to find something that’s been too scarce in today’s national politics: courage.