If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.A strange thing has happened: Our conservative party actually won democratically in 2024 -- the White House, the House, and the Senate -- yet it's rejecting democracy anyway. Republicans in Congress are very deliberately sitting on their hands while their party-mates, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, flagrantly violate laws passed by previous Congresses and signed into law by previous presidents. In our system until now, once a law was passed, it was in effect until it was repealed, amended, or declared unconstitutional by Supreme Court justices who were appointed by an elected president and ratified by an elected Senate. That's not good enough for Republicans now, even though they control everything.
Republicans won the 2024 elections, but they didn't win decisively enough to enact their full agenda, which is nothing less than overturning nearly every law ever enacted by a previous U.S. government in which liberals and moderates had any influence whatsoever, as well as overturning previous Supreme Court decisions that anger them (for instance, U.S. v. Wong King Ark, the 1898 decision affirming that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed birthright citizenship). This couldn't be done through normal channels, not with the filibuster still in place in the Senate and a very small GOP majoprity in the House.
Why do Republican politicians and voters find it intolerable to live in a country where some laws aren't exactly to their taste? Because for decades every Republican voter and politician has absorbed and internalized the central message of the right-wing media: that all evil in the world is the work of conservatism's enemies, and that those enemies actively seek the destruction of everything that is good and decent. Democrats and liberals are so evil -- so dedicated to evil, and so powerful in pursuit of evil -- that their howls of protest are all you need to hear to know that you're doing the right thing for America and civilization.
The David Frum quote above is taken from a book he published in 2018 called Trumpocracy; the link above takes you to an excerpt from the book published in The Atlantic. In that excerpt, Frum traces the lineage of Trumpism back to its previous incarnation: the Tea Party. Frum saw the Tea Party as a movement that believed in a zero-sum world: If the "bad" people gain, the good people lose.
In a close and careful 2011 study of the politics of the Tea Party, three Harvard scholars, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, remarked, “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” ...It's racial animosity, but it's also animosity against every other group identified with Democrats, liberals, and progressives: immigrants, LGBTQ people, feminists, academics, scientists, entertainers, journalists. It's a many-tentacled octopus and it's all evil. Liberalism is seen as providing special advantages to racial minority and all of these other groups, at the expense of "real" Americans. Republican voters know this because Fox News says it's true, as do Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Catturd.
In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution. I wrote those words after the 2012 election, and they apply even more forcefully after 2016.... As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.” ...
One [2017] poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified.
Republican voters think we're in a state of total war with them. They think we steal elections (though we somehow weren't powerful enough to steal the most recent one, or the one in 2016). They think liberal-aligned scientists deliberately unleashed the COVID virus on the world as a means of social control. They think the "fifteen-minute cities" we praise are gulags we intend to build so we can force suburban and rural patriots to live in them. They think every Jeffrey Epstein client came from our side. They think we're trying to dismantle whiteness, maleness, and ordinary heterosexual reproduction. They think we want to make Christianity illegal. They think climate change is a hoax and they think we know that.
You know how oppressed you feel right now thinking about how Trump and Musk are taking the American system of government apart brick by brick? That's how oppressed they've been ecouraged to feel by decades of right-wing propaganda -- even though most of them live perfectly satisfactory lives in red enclaves where they're free to own all the guns they want and drive the biggest coal rollers they can afford. They barely experience liberalism except through social media or TV, yet they believe they're among the most oppressed people in world history and they have to defeat us by any means necessary.
So Frum's condition for the GOP rejection of democracy -- they cannot win democratically -- has been met: they cannot democratically win the war they think they're fighting, which is a war to remove all liberal influence from American life. And even if we eventually find a way to stop the Trumpist slide into authoritarianism, even if we begin to reverse it, millions of Americans will believe they are still fighting this existential war. We'll never truly beat them until we understand how much they hate us and how hard they're willing to fight to beat us.
