Thread by @areidross

I keep wanting to say this and it keeps getting stuck in my throat, but here it goes. The GOP has effectively built a combat party. It's not a political party that you see in a system in which communicating ideas matters. It's a mass party with a paramilitary function.

https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1588131576688230401

Read @DavidNeiwert to learn how the militia movement was kept at bay from the general Republican Party for a while but started to seep in, particularly with Reagan's hat tip to the Sagebrush Rebellion, Newt Gingrich's support, and the big Tea Party breakthrough.

The Trump movement was the accumulation of all that, bringing paramilitary groups fully into the GOP to the point of praising them as the heroes of the summer of 2020 and calling on them to stop the peaceful transfer of power on J6. It's now metastasized to terrorist violence.

When it was paramilitaries performing vigilante functions throughout the US, they could strike the defensive pose, and when it was the J6 putsch, they could pretend like it was a Constitutional duty, but in this phase, it is stuff like covering for and making light of terrorism.

So what's a combat party? I first heard the term while reading Lenin's collected works. His idea was that the Party wouldn't just try to get elected but would also foment strikes and man the barricades during workers' insurrection. Political pressure had to be more than polls.

Bannon obv drew this comparison by comparing himself to Lenin, but if you go back, Mussolini came out of the Socialist movement and was committed to a similar idea of the Party as a vehicle for elections, as well as violent, mass revolutionary movement-building in the streets.

So he took that idea and grafted it onto the Fascist Party, effectively forming a counter-revolutionary combat party that cared far more about putting down Socialist movement-building in the streets than winning at the polls. He used the same features—mass rallies, putsches, etc.

Ignoring this would be foolish. It's wise, in my view, to view the large amount of stochastic terrorism directed against the left and liberals not as isolated incidents but as emerging from the base of the GOP and compelled by ideologues who have captured the Party through Trump.

Perhaps it's possible to persuade individuals away for a moment, but involvement in the GOP at this point funnels into Trumpism, which is itself the ideology of a combat party. Of course, while it means that community defense is going to be an unavoidable necessity...

it also makes apparent the need for much, much more in terms of security and welfare of communities directly and indirectly targeted by this massive force of violence and hatred in the US.