“The GOP attempt to overturn the election doesn’t pose an imminent threat to the Republic - Biden will be sworn in Jan 20 regardless - but it’s hardly meaningless. We’re watching another iterative stage in the party’s long evolution into authoritarianism” nymag.com/intelligencer/…
“Trump’s authoritarianism is a combination of his unique sociopathy and worship for authoritarians, and a tendency to accept it in his party. The Democratic Party as it currently exists could not produce a Trump. Nor could have the old Republican Party until perhaps the 1990s”
“Conservatives inclined to lay the blame on a lone madman president, should mull over the fact that their two most respected leaders from a quarter-century ago, Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr, have both thrown themselves enthusiastically behind Trump’s abuses of power.”
“Gingrich and Starr represented in embryonic form a will to power that grew into the current Trumpist form. After winning power in 1994, Gingrich declared the GOP the sole legitimate representative of the public will, and shut down govt to compel Bill Clinton to accept GOP plans”
“After that failed, Starr led a moralistic crusade to impeach Clinton for perjury after Starr maneuvered him into being asked under oath about a secret affair with his intern. Conservative elites hailed both as principled defenders of constitutionalism and the rule of law.”
“a more clear-eyed assessment is that they each carried out, in different ways, extraordinary new political methods borne of a refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic Party–held presidency.”
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