Thread by @SethCotlar

1. This video got me thinking about the distinction between mobilization and incitement. American politics has long been about mobilizing your supporters, inspiring them to knock on doors, register voters, talk you up amongst their friends, and cast their vote for you.

https://twitter.com/Newsweek/status/1095303506666442754

2. Mobilization inspires citizens to utilize the existing institutions of civil society to persuade other voters to get behind their chosen candidate or policy. Mobilization policizes people, it changes how they think and behave. Incitement is mobilization gone rogue.

3. Incitement is when a political leader inspires citizens to take the law into their own hands, to circumvent the political process so as to bring a politicians view of the world into existence right here, and right now.

4. Mobilization against "fake news," let's say, would involve formulating a policy that would do the hard work of protecting the 1st Amendment while ensuring citizens had access to accurate information...the @gop has little interest in (or track record) of doing that.

5. Instead of formulating compelling policy and mobilizing people behind it, Trump's strategy has been to incite his supporters to take action themselves. To send pipe bombs to CNN. To attack or spit on journalists.

6. He knows what he's doing. He knows he can claim plausible deniability (I never said he should do that), and he knows the media and his supporters will eat up the "but the violent left does the same thing, there are bad people on both sides" narrative.

7. For decades the @gop mobilized voters around conservative identity issues. Goldwater and Nixon ran against the civil rights movement. The 90's @gop doubled down on the anti-gay "family values" rhetoric.

8. Oftentimes this mobilization faded into incitement, like the nasty racism of the 1964 @gop convention which inspired Jackie Robinson (a lifelong Republican) to say that he finally "understood what it was like to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany."

@GOP 9. When historians look back upon the political culture of Trumpism, I think "incitement" will be a major theme they will discuss--the way Trump took voters who had been mobilized by the pre-Trump @gop, and incited them to enact their beliefs more aggressively, even violently.

@GOP 10. Part of the reason why incitement has become such a significant dimension of @gop political culture is that the party has taught its voters to deeply mistrust institutions like journalism, science, and the entire apparatus of the federal government.

@GOP 11. Working through "the system," in the eyes of most contemporary Trump supporters, is pointless because "the system" is utterly bankrupt. Therefore, the logic goes, if you want to make change, you've got to go rogue.

@GOP 12. "Incitement," ultimately, is the logic of Trumpian political culture. His administration is incapable of formulating policy around which one could build a consensus. Thus, their only recourse is to incite rage to try to intimidate others into bending to their will.

@GOP 13. Finally, the reason the @gop has difficulty mobilizing people is that most of their longstanding policy positions have become increasingly unpopular. The culture war stuff doesn't really work. Trickle down economics is defunct.

@GOP 14. So if you can't mobilize a diverse coalition to build a consensus, the only tactic you have left is to incite your base to take extreme actions on their own. In that way, Trump was the perfect candidate for the 2016 GOP.

@GOP 15. But this is also why the future looks pretty scary to me. What happens to the tens of millions of citizens who have been incited by Trump over the past 3 years (with at least 2 more to come)? Where do such people channel these energies as the Trump storm abates?