Monday
In an important debut article for the Atlantic, former New Yorker writer George Packer mentions a Bertolt Brecht poem to illustrate the threat that the GOP currently poses to democracy. The article contends that Donald Trump is the logical culmination of the Republicans’ 50-year descent into an authoritarian, white identitarian party.
According to Packer, the descent began with Barry Goldwater’s rejection of Republican moderation and his embrace of extremism in 1964. Goldwater lost but the idea took root in Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, Ronald Reagan’s attack on government itself, and Newt Gingrich’s scorched earth Congressional tactics. Revulsion over having a black president gave rise to the Tea Party and ultimately to Trump.
Now Trumpified Republican legislatures in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan are stripping power from in-coming Democratic governors, leading Packer to conclude,
[The GOP’s] leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
Ex-Republican David Frum has made a similar observation:
If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
Packer turns to Brecht’s “The Solution” to capture the conservative mindset. Observing East Germany’s Stalinist government putting down a workers’ uprising in 1953, Brecht secretly wrote a sarcastic critique. In the poem, the Writer’s Union secretary is a party apparatchik while Stalinallee was a major Berlin boulevard, later renamed:
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
With 2018’s blue wave election, the American people forfeited the trust of their Republican president and Congress. To get back into Trump’s and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s good graces, they must begin voting Republican again.
But why should the government attempt to persuade voters? Wouldn’t it just be easier to dissolve democracy altogether?