Asymmetrical warfare

Why are Republicans — a party supported by a distinct minority of American voters, that advocates policies that themselves are far more unpopular than that minority status would itself suggest — in a good position to recapture all three elected branches of government over the next two and half years? (They of course already largely control the fourth branch, the federal courts).

Here are a few reasons, some obvious, some a bit more subtle:

(1) Republican voters are completely indifferent to real Republican scandals, while being obsessed with largely if not wholly imaginary scandals on the Democratic side.

Now why is that? My friend Michael observes:

Trump and his family breed so many gross scandals that it’s hard to focus on just one for any period of time. At present (i.e. the last few weeks), we have Jared getting a massive bribe from the Saudis, Trump’s expressions of support for Putin, the missing phone logs from 1/6, the missing list of gifts received by the Administration from foreign powers, Trump’s vocal support for manifestly unqualified Senate candidates, and probably several others.

The MSM does not have the orientation of conservative media in that its goal is to report the news, not to act as the propaganda arm of one of the two parties. Conservative media is great at taking a story and never letting it die through endless repetition, regardless of the merits. The MSM doesn’t do that because it’s not its goal to push voters in a certain direction.

We Don’t Care And You Can’t Make Us is GOP policy at this point because they are so solid in their position that they don’t need to worry about little things like the leader of the party’s son-in-law taking a massive bribe. They have the courts, they will have Congress soon, they have unassailable advantages in state legislatures in several purple states because of gerrymandering, and they have a structural advantage in the Electoral College. All of the anti-majoritarian elements of the American system reinforce themselves to aid a party that dominates rural voting. They don’t need to care about basic principles regarding corruption. All they care about is power and the deck is slanted in their favor.

(2) The American right wing doesn’t care about legality, at all. It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of this factor. The right wing in this country thinks of the the law as the corrupt product of corrupt elites, that should be exploited in a purely instrumental fashion when it’s useful to do so, and ignored when it’s in any way inconvenient. Jerry Bruckheimer will make a movie better than The Godfather before any centrist or establishment liberal ever understands this.

Politics in this country is a radically asymmetrical game, because the entire moderate, liberal, and left bands of the ideological spectrum, to the extent these are in any way represented in powerful political and cultural institutions, are playing by rules that simply don’t bind their right wing opponents. (An example of this is the pitiful pearl clutching about whether the DOJ has taken enough time to build a sufficiently airtight legal case against Trump and the other leaders of the 1/6 insurrection).

This isn’t a sustainable situation. Either the opponents of authoritarian ethno-nationalism, in both its theocratic and plutocratic guises, start playing by the same rules as our enemies, or we’re going to lose — and not “lose” in the sense of “lose elections,” unless “lose elections” means “lose having real elections.”

(3) Contemporary evangelical Protestantism and integralist Catholicism aren’t compatible with liberal democracy. The liberal commitment to tolerating ideologies that are inimical to the survival of liberalism is a contradiction at the heart of liberal ideology that has no satisfactory theoretical solution (Karl Popper makes this point forcefully in The Open Society and Its Enemies ).

As what to do about all this, the first step as always is to recognize the nature of our situation, so that we can respond appropriately to an existential threat with something other than half measures.