Why the GOP Has No Real Dissent
They are afraid of the MAGA Brown Shirts.
I read this today from the NY Times Editorial board:
Mr. Trump’s ability to solidify control of the Republican Party and to quickly defeat his challengers for the nomination owes partly to the fervor of a bedrock of supporters who have delivered substantial victories for him in nearly every primary contest so far. Perhaps his most important advantage, however, is that there are few remaining leaders in the Republican Party who seem willing to stand up for an alternative vision of the party’s future. Those who continue to openly oppose him are, overwhelmingly, those who have left office. Some have said they feared speaking out because they faced threats of violence and retribution.
I hadn’t really reflected on the behind-the-scene threats against those standing up to Trump and his acolytes.
The second of those links leads to a Zack Beauchamp piece, 2024 election: How death threats influence Republicans to follow Trump, where he relates a story about Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer:
In early 2021, Richer was an Arizona Republican official who regularly attended local party events. At the time, he was the newly elected county recorder of Maricopa County. The job was a new level of prominence — he was now the most important election supervisory official in the state’s largest county — but going to Arizona Republican events was routine: the kind of thing that Richer, like any state politician, had done hundreds of times before.
But at one event, the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?
I think he should worry.
The first of the two links in the NY Times Editorial Board piece reveals similar stories from other GOP officials and how they responded to this same dread. Here’s Liz Cheney:
“If you look at the vote to impeach, for example, there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives,” she told CNN in May. “And that tells you something about where we are as a country, that members of Congress aren’t able to cast votes, or feel that they can’t, because of their own security.”
The most stark example is this, from Kim Ward in December 2021, then the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate:
Asked if she would have signed it [a letter urging the state’s congressional delegation to reject President Biden’s win], she indicated that the Republican base expected party leaders to back up Mr. Trump’s claims — or to face its wrath.
“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said about signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”
So, the normal diversity of opinion we have been lucky to experience over the past 100 years in U.S. political parties has been squeezed out of the GOP. Dissenters who don’t line up to follow the dictates of Trump and his cronies are threatened — their families are threatened — by the simmering anger of the innumerable Brown Shirts out there, eager to bomb someone’s house if they say the wrong thing, make the wrong vote, or contradict the banana-split ramblings of the Great Leader.
Dark days, and I fear they could get darker.