GOP Outlook: The Party is Over, Divided They Fall

In a scorching Twitter thread by Steve Schmidt – posted here by Ursula Faw – the lifelong Republican-turned-Democrat predicts the demise of a deeply divided Republican Party. But he’s not the only one declaring the end is nigh for the GOP.

Washington correspondent for Australian ABC-TV, Emily Olson, noted that 2020 “began and ended with political division.” That’s true, it did, but as the year dragged on, the fracture lines of division moved dramatically from external to internal.

At the beginning of the year, pundits were calling Trump’s impeachment a crisis. As Olson wrote:

Two sides of the country looked at the same [presentation of evidence] and came to two totally opposing conclusions about what was best for democracy.

Republicans and Democrats don’t just have different political beliefs, they’re living in two different realities.

But what was at stake then, paled in comparison to the crises that developed with COVID-19’s silent and virulent invasion.

At [this] point, 2020 stopped being merely a measurement of time and became a euphemism for suffering.

“I can’t wait for 2020 to be over,” Americans said, again and again and again

Just as water freezing to ice in fissures can split apart boulders, the cumulative pressures of deepening crises cracked apart divisions in the Republican Party that had been held together by little more than rituals and narrative fiction. As E J Dionne noted in his Washington Post column December 7, 2020:

[Trump was] the product of long-standing trends in Republican politics. Trafficking in racial division and racism, nativism, extremism, conspiracy theories and voter suppression did not start with Trump.

It didn’t. But what Trump did, because his narcissism has no social consciousness or social decency filters, was to bring those subcutaneous republican prejudices to the surface and confer upon them his public acceptance. His brazen bigotry and crassness was too much for one group who called themselves Never Trumpers.

E J Dionne:

[T]he Never Trumpers deserve our respect precisely because so many of them stood against these tendencies and, in more cases than not, undertook a deeper critique of their own side.

They were the first group to split from the party and those they left behind, already infected with Trump’s tacky coarseness, labelled them scum, traitors and much worse. It was a precursor to greater discord to come, though Dionne didn’t see how divided the party was at the time he wrote:

But what happens now? Some of the anti-Trump conservatives never lost their old faith and were simply repelled by Trump’s odiousness. For them, there is no temptation to join the other side. They are unlikely to give much support to Biden and will go off in search of a more conventional Republican to champion in 2024.

Andrew Cohen, writing for the Brennan Center for Justice, pointed out that Dionne wrote his piece before 126 House GOP supported a Texas lawsuit, before a Washington Post survey found that only 27 congressional Republicans would publicly acknowledge Joe Biden’s win, before Trump turned on the Supreme Court. In his December 15 article, Cohen wrote:

The selection of a “more conventional Republican to champion in 2024” also seems like a bad bet today given the silent, spineless way in which Republican officials acknowledged Trump’s Supreme Court defeat over the weekend and are said to be readying new, futile election challenges in Congress in the coming weeks. It also seems like a bad bet after a weekend in which pro-Trump protesters in the nation’s capital chanted “destroy the GOP” as they rallied against the two Republican senatorial candidates preparing for the Georgia runoff.

Much of the damage is being done by agitprop promoted by QAnon, Sidney Powell and Lin Wood. The descent of the Trump base into the morass of coup plots and crazed conspiracy theories is inevitably intensifying the dissonance within a divided GOP and driving its factions to breaking point.

What anti-Trump Republicans can no longer do in the wake of the party’s chilling embrace of Trump’s attempted coup is to pretend that their party can exist, “half free and half slave”, with its future held captive by a vengeful, unhinged ex-president and his many enablers and propagandists. If the events of the past five weeks have shown the reality-based world anything, it is that the Republican Party itself has been corrupted by Trumpism to the point where it endangers American democracy itself. The postelection period also has made clear that the Trumpists will never peacefully coexist with who’s left of reality-based Republicans.

In his Twitter stream 2 weeks later, Steve Schmidt’s thread not only accords with Cohen’s assessment of a divided Republican Party, he predicts a precise date for the start of its demise.

The party could not survive its factionalism. There could be no more accommodation, compromise and partnership between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Whigs. A new political party was born, the Republican Party. That party will divide into irreconcilable factions on January 6th. 2/

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) January 3, 2021

It won’t happen all on one day but Schmidt is right, on that day the fractures in the GOP will crack open as those on saner side of the party are confronted with, and affronted by, those who have embraced the lunacy, illegality and incivility of Trumpism. The breakup of the GOP won’t be chaotic or violent or visibly dramatic. It will be Theatre of the Absurd. There will be talk, probably loud and punctuated with a lot of finger stabbing; then the vote. Afterwards, the damage will be done. The breach will be obvious and demise inevitable.

You can have intra-party disagreements over policy details but, as Andrew Cohen wrote, “you cannot have an intra-party dispute over democracy itself.”