Politics as Blood Sport and the Degradation of Democracy

 By Ron Berger

Before Donald Trump, the “take no prisoners” politics of Joe McCarthy found one of its most influential heirs in Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich, who served in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 1999 and as Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999. This so-called conservative once described himself as “the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times” and told a gathering of college Republicans that “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” 

According to Gingrich, Republicans needed to learn to “raise hell” and realize that politics is a cutthroat “war for power” where compromise is a sign of weakness that grants the Democratic opposition legitimacy and muddles the contrast Republicans need to make between the two sides. Local and state elections should be thematically nationalized by leveraging social divisions, grievances, and resentments to build a coalition for obtaining political power. Once in power, in the words of journalist McKay Coppins, “blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself.” In this way, anti-government rhetoric that claims that government does not work becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Outside of tax cuts for corporations and plutocrats and appointments to the federal judiciary, political power at the national level is to be gained in order to nullify federal authority and return power to the states.

 Under Gingrich’s tutelage, the Democratic opposition was to be demonized as the enemy, and vilification of them a normative form of political debate. In this vein, Gingrich encouraged the use of nicknames, such as the “loony left” or “Daffy Dukakis,” that is the calling card of Donald Trump. Gingrich’s goal, Coppins observes, “was to reframe the boring political debates in Washington as a national battle between good and evil … a fight for the very soul of America.” In this way, too, the stage was set for President George W. Bush to assert that “if Democrats win, the terrorists win,” and for Sarah Palin to accuse Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”

 Of course, this blood-sport style of politics has been put on steroids by the rise of right-wing talk radio, cable television, and digital media, which Al Gore describes in The Assault on Reason as “a new generation of media Machiavellis”—the most historically influential of whom have been Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Roger Ailes. Working in tandem with these media are the hyper-partisan “think tanks” funded by libertarian plutocrats such as Richard Mellon Scaife, Lynne and Harry Bradley, John Ohlin, and Charles and David Koch. These organizations, writes Jane Mayer in Dark Money, attempt to sow doubt about “areas of settled academic and scientific scholarship” and undermine “genuinely unbiased experts” in order to give pundits and “politicians a menu of conflicting statistics and arguments from which to choose.” 

 In this media ecosphere, there are always two sides to every issue regardless of the evidence or distortions and outright lies. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous aphorism, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” has become a quaint notion that has dissolved into the presentation of alternative facts, half-truths, fanciful conspiracy theories, and “big lies”—most recently that the election was stolen from Trump—that are circulated and regurgitated with impunity. Clearly, a democracy cannot function under these conditions. As historian Tim Snyder writes in On Tyranny, “To abandon fact is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

 It is a challenge, to say the least, for those who are committed to the discovery of what Carl Bernstein described as “the best obtainable version of the truth” to negotiate a communication environment in which the mainstream media is rebranded by Sarah Palin and her ilk as the “lame stream media.” But Stuart Stevens, a disaffiliated anti-Trump Republican, asks, “What is the mainstream media? It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors.” In contrast, in the world of Trump and his allies, we are being asked in Orwellian fashion to deny what we see before our very eyes. In other words, we are being lied to in plain sight and dared to do something about it. Stevens believes that most of the Republican office holders who pretend to go along with this “are not stupid men and women, though more than a few do a fair imitation. They all have their own justifications that amount to a personal Faustian bargain predicated on the self-delusion that some particular issue or cause is more important than their oath of office.” 

 This brings me to the Tea Party, which emerged almost as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated as president and was forced to embark on a massive government spending program to bring the country back from the brink of the financial collapse that was inherited from the Bush administration. The initial purported goals of the Tea Party were essentially a rebranding of traditional Republican opposition to taxes and calls for reducing the size of the federal government. This was the main agenda of the libertarian plutocrats who funded the movement, but the populist appeal was based more on racial animas fueled by the election of a Black president, prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities, and xenophobic opposition to immigration. It was a movement, as Palin had asserted, of “real Americans” who were fighting to save the country from those they claimed were destroying the nation. From here it was only one small step to supporting a demagogue who wanted to “Make America Great Again,” who spread the racist lie that Obama was not born in America, and who declared that illegal aliens composed of criminals and rapists were invading the sovereign borders of the United States.

 Even more dangerously, this reactionary politics of grievance and resentment has been leveraged by Trump and his Republican allies to undermine democracy itself. It is not an exaggeration to say that the primary electoral and governing strategy of the contemporary Republican Party has been to maintain power, not by offering policies that garner the support of a majority of voters, but by making it more difficult for Democratic constituencies to vote—the poor and people of color, those who change residential addresses, and college students. Restrictions on early voting and mail ballots have now been added to this agenda. Moreover, radical gerrymandering and opposition to impartial methods of drawing legislative districts all too often mean that Republicans are able to garner a solid majority of Congressional and state legislative seats even when Democrats receive a majority of votes in these elections statewide. 

 In their book How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Liblatt point to a number of nominally democratic nations around the world that have become de facto authoritarian one-party states not as a result of a military coup but of the gradual erosion of democratic norms and practices. In addition to the concerted program of voter suppression that is being pursued by the Republican Party, the United States has now even witnessed a violent insurrection, incited by an outgoing president, to overthrow a legitimate election. This insurrection was unsuccessful, but the country is by no means out of the woods. Even before the Capitol riot, Levitsky and Liblatt were concerned that Trump’s continued denial of his defeat, aided and abetted by his Republican allies, and the plethora of lawsuits filed by his attorneys, were ways to probe for fault lines in our constitutional structure. They worry that the whole post-election process has been a “dress rehearsal” for more to come and that we cannot have a democracy in a two-party system when one of the parties is not fully committed to this form of government. Journalist Fintan O’Toole puts it this way: “How do you govern where one of the two main parties is incapable of escaping its own willing embrace of despotism and anarchy, and where such a party—through the system of grossly unequal representation in the Senate, the gerrymandering of House districts, the packing of the courts, and the suppression of voters—is able to embed itself as a minority that can frustrate the will of the majority.”

 Not surprisingly, the rise of Trumpism in American politics and its association with White supremacy has raised the question of fascism, with scholars having a sobering debate about whether what we’ve been witnessing constitutes the real deal. To be sure, fascism as a term has been bandied about in a rather careless manner, and authoritarianism might be a more judicious concept to use. This is not the place for a full deliberation of this issue, other than to note historian Robert Paxton’s observation that fascism should be understood as a process that moves through successive stages—from an incipient social movement to a full-blown fascist state. While comparisons are often made to the European-style fascism of the twentieth century, Paxton suggests that “the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan.” Paxton does not think that contemporary fascism should be expected to resemble classical European fascism “in its outward signs and symbols. … While a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic.” It would not be cloaked in a swastika but in the American flag.

 This article is adapted from Ronald J. Berger, “The Devolution of Conservatism: From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, International Social Science Review, June 2021.