Eric Levitz: ‘House G.O.P. Admits It Opposes Democracy, Not Voter Fraud’

 

Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy (R-California)

 

From New York magazine:

The conservative movement has been xenophobic, intellectually bankrupt, and proto-authoritarian since well before the phrase “President Donald Trump” ceased to be a Simpsons reference.

Mitt Romney’s “compassionate conservative” pedigree did not stop him from demanding the self-deportation of “illegals” in 2012 (nor, for that matter, did not prevent him from kissing the birther king’s ring). The GOP’s disregard for deficits under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did not stop it from fomenting anti-debt hysteria under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; nor did the repeated failure of supply-side tax cuts to pay for themselves stop Republicans from insisting that the next round would. Meanwhile, through aggressive gerrymandering, the Roberts Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and various voting restrictions aimed at combating nonexistent mass voter fraud, Republicans have been chipping away at the foundations of our liberal democracy for more than a decade.

But they used to have some sense of decorum: Conservatives insisted that their opposition to “amnesty” was rooted in a commitment to the rule of law and concern for native-born workers, not racial animus against nonwhite immigrants; that their support for regressive taxation derived from macroeconomic models and not plutocratic avarice; and that their apparent attempts to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning constituencies reflected earnest concern about safeguarding the integrity of election results, not a conviction that their opposition had no legitimate right to govern.

Donald Trump had no patience for such politesse. For five years now, the mogul has been waging total war on the American right’s (im)plausible deniability about its own true nature. There were plenty of immigration restrictionists in the 2016 GOP primary, but the Republican base opted for the one who’d declared that Mexicans were rapists and that no Muslims should be allowed to enter the United States. By manically oscillating between contradictory economic proposals — calling for universal health care and higher taxes on the wealthy one day, work requirements for Medicaid and supply-side tax cuts the next — Trump revealed the policy nihilism of the self-styled “party of ideas.” The high priests of supply-side voodoo may have disdained empirical rigor, but only Trump broadcasted contempt for the very concepts of ideological coherence or reasoned argument.

Now, in his presidency’s final chapter, Trump has torn away the conservative movement’s most precious fig leaf — the one concealing its naked contempt for democracy.

 

Read the full article.