Another tricky day

(1) Today is the day of the Million MAGA March in Washington DC:

Members of the far-right group the Proud Boys will attend the “Million MAGA March” in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, according to their leader, Enrique Tarrio. They won’t be the only attendees with alleged links to the extreme right or white supremacy.

The march is part of multiple events set to take place at Freedom Plaza in D.C. some time around noon. They’ve been billed as “Stop the Steal” and “March for Trump,” in reference to the unsubstantiated claims that the presidential election was stolen from President Donald Trump.

Million MAGA March appears to take its name from the 1995 Million Man March of African American men on Washington. A Civil Rights march, it was led by controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

This event is of some real significance, in that if the turnout is embarrassingly low (say 5% or less than ONE MILLION MARCHERS), that will be a strong signal that there really isn’t much stomach for any kind of actual mass protest movement in MAGA land at this time. If it’s legitimately well into six figures I’d be somewhat concerned.

(2) Whatever happens today and the 67 to follow, the Myth of the Stolen Election is pretty much here to stay. Anne Applebaum has an interesting diagnosis of how and why the Republican party has been slipping toward right wing authoritarian populism:

There is one sentiment, I think, that links the people who were once part of the center-right — the anti-communist movement in Poland or Reaganism or Thatcherism — and who began to change in a different direction over the past decade or so: disappointment.

These are very often people who are disappointed, and they are almost always disappointed with their society. Whether it’s the superficiality of modern democracy, the demographic change that they don’t want or like, the decline in morals and values that they see all around them, or, in the case of Britain, England’s loss of its voice in the world. It’s a feeling of loss or disappointment, and sometimes it’s quite an extreme form of disappointment — a kind of despair. “My society has ended.”

I think anybody who has that view of the contemporary world — that it’s over, it’s finished, my civilization is dead and gone, my society is decayed — leads you almost inevitably into a kind of radicalism. If you have that feeling that it’s over, then why wouldn’t you try to smash everything?

I think this is partially correct, but understates the extent to which Trumpism is merely a continuation of Reaganism in a curdled and overtly pessimistic form, as opposed to Reagan’s relentlessly upbeat cheerleading for what were the same essentially revanchist ethno-nationalist ideas, wrapped in a gauzy haze of nostalgia for an imaginary past. (I can’t speak to the Polish or British analogies).

But I think Applebaum is definitely right about the stolen election myth:

I think that — certainly on Trump’s part, and other Republicans are probably coming to see this the same way as well — this is an attempt to create a new kind of base: an enraged receiving base, which will always think that the election was stolen and which will always assume that something went wrong and will always feel that they were deprived of something. And this base will then have uses in the future.

I don’t believe it will be all of the Republican Party. I can’t tell you right now how many of them it will be. But it will be a significant number of people. And in some congressional districts and some states, it could even be a majority. And this will be a base that is usable. This will be a base that not only dislikes the Democratic Party or disagrees with them, it will think that the Democratic Party is evil and anti-democratic — that they have stolen the election.

Think about what that means. That means that they aren’t even a legitimate political party. It means that there is a base of people who will be not just skeptical of mainstream media — whatever you think mainstream media is, which may even include Fox now. They will be not just skeptical of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. They will think all of those institutions are part of a deliberately constructed conspiracy to steal the presidency. And that kind of feeling — that conviction that the other side isn’t just wrong, it’s evil and traitorous — that’s then a useful group of people who can be motivated politically and maybe in other ways in the future.

Again, I think that Applebaum — a semi-apostate conservative — understates the extent to which the radicalization of the Republican base had already taken place prior to the arrival of Trump on the political scene, let alone prior to this election. But both he and his treatment of the election and its aftermath have intensified that radicalization.

Whether that radicalization is manifested in any significant concrete way over the next two months is a separate question from how it will play out over the next two or three decades. Today’s DC march is far more relevant to the former question than the latter, but the latter is the more important one.