Tag Archives: extremists

Will The Real Republicans Please Stand Up?

In MAGA land, no insult is more cutting–or more numerous–than “RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in Name Only.” It is routinely hurled by the extremists who have remade a once-mainstream, center-right party into a racist, misogynistic cult of personality.

The Republicans with whom I worked back when I was one of them have mostly responded by leaving the GOP. Interestingly, however, some of those “RINOs”–more accurately described as traditional Republicans–have chosen to fight, to try to retake their party, and in Idaho, of all places. According to the Washington Post, the rebellion is taking place in an area with a history that has informed the effort.

Locals prefer not to talk about the hate that took root here a generation ago, when the Aryan Nations and other militants built a white supremacist paradise among the tall pines and crystal lakes of North Idaho.Community activists, backed by national civil rights groups, bankrupted the neo-Nazis in court and eventually forced them to move, a hard-fought triumph memorialized in scenes from 2001 of a backhoe smashing through a giant swastika at the former Aryan compound just outside of Coeur d’Alene, the biggest city in this part of the state.

For much of the two decades since, civic leaders have focused on moving beyond the image of North Idaho as a white-power fiefdom. They steered attention instead to emerald golf courses and gleaming lakeside resorts where celebrities such as Kim Kardashian sip huckleberry cocktails.

Now, however, North Idaho residents are confronting that history head-on as a new movement builds against far-right extremism.

Northern Idaho’s traditional Republicans are reacting to the current leadership of the local Republican Party, which they say has lurched to the right, especially on matters of race, religion and sexuality, giving the bigotry of the past mainstream political cover.

A group of disaffected, self-described “traditional” Republicans has spent the past two years planning to wrest back control from leaders who they accuse of steering the local GOP toward extremism, a charge the officials vehemently deny.

Those officials may “vehemently deny” the charge, but quotations from several of them in the Post tended to support the accusation. (One politico insisted that women should be required to carry a rapists baby to term…)

The linked story was published prior to Idaho’s primary, which took place last Tuesday.  On Wednesday, I googled to assess the success of the traditional rebellion. The slate of challengers backed by the North Idaho Republicans won 30 spots on the central committee, but they needed 36 seats to secure a majority.

I also learned that 15 incumbent GOP state legislators lost their primary races. I was initially hopeful that the successful challengers represented traditional Republicans; however, further investigation indicated that, at the state legislative level, far-Right conservatives took control. (If anyone from Idaho has further information, please confirm or correct my impression.)

The effort in Idaho illuminates the challenge facing a once-responsible political party: Can genuine conservatives–voters and operatives holding center-Right policy positions on economic and social issues–take back the GOP, and return the racists and culture warriors to the fringes? If not, where will thoughtful, respectable Republicans go?

In the short term, an extremist GOP can win elections by deploying its demonstrable skills at voter suppression, abetted by the various mechanisms of the American electoral system that give rural voters and a handful of states disproportionate power, but–absent a wholesale takeover that includes revising/ignoring the Constitution– that dominance will have a limited shelf-life. The once Grand-Old-Party will either turn away from the White Christian Nationalists who currently control it (and who represent a distinct minority of Americans), or a new center-Right party will rise from its ashes.

That result, of course, is long-term. The short-term crisis we face is the November election.

If the GOP manages to retake the White House or Congress, all bets are off. A second Trump administration is publicly committed to removing any remaining legal or constitutional guard-rails, setting America on a path to autocracy and chaos.

The sanity vote has never been more important.

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Left, Right, Center–REALLY?

As the competition among Democrats vying for the party’s presidential nomination heats up, pundits are warning against taking the party “too far to the left,” or alternatively reminding readers that “centrists” are failing to connect with the party’s rank and file.

We are once again entering bullshit land, where labeling takes the place of analysis. Plop a label on a policy proposal and suddenly it is a call to arms: if the label says “left,” self-identified conservatives and centrists bristle and oppose it; if the label says “centrist” or “moderate,” it is reflexively opposed by self-identified leftists.

Needless to say, no one is considering the proposal on its merits.

This rush to categorize candidates and policies as right, left or center is not just misleading, it is lazy and often irrelevant (not every policy position can be crammed into a nice neat ideological box). This habit has irritated me for years– in fact, in 2003, I wrote about it.

Periodically, someone will respond to a column I have written with a statement beginning “well, you liberals always…” Being dismissed as a liberal always amuses me, because I hold precisely the same political values I held in 1980, when I was the Republican nominee running for Congress against Andy Jacobs, and a fair number of voters found me “too conservative.” The only thing that has changed is the label….

Well, to be fair, the GOP has also changed, galloping off to the radical far right, and pulling the “conservative” label with it. But I stand by the following paragraph:

This mania for labeling people so that we don’t have to engage with them on the validity of their ideas has accelerated during the past few years. Perhaps it is talk radio, with its tendency to reduce everything to name-calling sound-bites. Admittedly, it is much more efficient to call a woman a “feminazi” than to take the time and effort needed to discuss why her positions are untenable. And the tactic certainly isn’t limited to Republicans; Indiana’s very own Evan Bayh has solemnly warned the Democrats against the danger posed by “leftists” like Howard Dean. (I’m not quite sure when Dean’s support for gun rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget became “far left” positions. Perhaps when they were espoused by someone the Senator isn’t supporting.)

Labelling an opponent’s proposal as “extreme” (left or right) is a tactic to undercut that proposal without actually engaging with it.

Allowing citizens to opt into Medicare (i.e. making Medicare a “public option”) or advocating expansion of the program (“Medicare for All”) are hardly proposals to dismantle capitalism. They are proposed solutions to a real and growing problem. Imposing higher marginal tax rates on the rich would return us to tax policies that used to be widely endorsed by both parties. Doing so would hardly turn America into a communist gulag.

These and other proposals may or may not be sound policy. We won’t know if we refuse to   address the particulars of suggested policies and instead simply label and dismiss them.

Pundits notwithstanding, the truth of the matter is that America doesn’t really have the sort of leftists that have long been active in Europe. What passes for left-wing in the United States is moderately progressive. To the extent there is extremism in the U.S., it is on the radical right, and the most important task facing Democrats and Independents is to rid the nation of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.

Flinging labels at each other won’t get that done.

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