In the days and weeks after the attack on the Capitol, Republican leaders publicly acknowledged Donald Trump’s culpability. Last week’s January 6 hearings presented footage of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy declaring Trump should have “immediately denounced” the attack and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell accusing Trump of ignoring his duty as president. It was a striking reminder that immediately after the insurrection, elected Republicans as well as some of Trump’s allies in the rightwing media were rattled by what had happened, uncertain of how to continue.
But the moment quickly passed. January 6 obviously wasn’t enough for Republicans in Congress to actually impeach or for conservatives to break with Trump in any meaningful way. Instead, they closed ranks and rallied behind Trump: Republicans first acquitted him, then they started obstructing every attempt to hold him accountable, and now a majority of GOP candidates are running on the big lie, denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The few who broke with Trump have been fully marginalized or even ostracized from the party. Republicans did not come to see January 6 as the end of the line, the outrageous conclusion of the Trumpian experiment – they have come to see it as a blueprint: never concede an election, never accept defeat at the hands of what they see as a fundamentally “un-American” enemy.
Was there a viable alternative path after January 6? Was that road not taken ever as realistically an option as the statements by McConnell and McCarthy may suggest, at least at first sight? I’m skeptical. I have no doubt that many Republicans, like McConnell himself, personally despise Trump for summoning a mob to attack the Capitol. They may consider Trump too crass, just as they probably aren’t entirely comfortable with the rise of Trump-endorsed white Christian nationalist extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Doug Mastriano.
But they certainly don’t consider any of that a dealbreaker. That’s partly because Republican elites understand they can’t win without the base, and the base remains committed to Trumpism. But there is more to consider than just opportunism. Almost every time the right is at a crossroads, they choose the path of radicalization, even when it’s not at all clear that’s a reasonable choice from a purely electoral standpoint – even when, for instance, it makes winning statewide races on the west coast nearly impossible.
The problem runs a lot deeper than Trump. It is crucial to grapple with the underlying ideas and dynamics that have animated the Republican party’s path for a long time. They have led to a situation in which moments of brief uncertainty almost always result in a further radicalization of the Republican party and the right in general. What happened after the 2012 election defeat that shook conservatives to the core is an instructive example: the Republican National Committee famously released an “autopsy” report that called for moderation and outreach to traditionally marginalized groups. But instead, the GOP doubled down – and went with Trumpism.
There are ideological factors at play that severely restrict the realm of possibility and significantly privilege the more radical over the more restraint forces within the Republican party. It has become dogma on the right to define “us” (conservative white Christians) as the sole proponents of “real America” – and “them” (Democrats, liberals, “the left”) as a fundamentally illegitimate, “un-American” threat. Within the confines of such a worldview, it’s hard to justify compromise and restraint.
Every crisis situation only heightens the sense of being under siege that’s animating so much of what is happening on the right, legitimizing and amplifying calls to hit harder, more aggressively. There’s always permission to escalate, hardly ever to pull back. This underlying permission structure is absolutely key, and it is always the same: it states that “real Americans” are constantly being victimized, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics, besieged by “un-American” forces of leftism; “we” have to fight back, by whatever means. In the minds of conservatives, they are never the aggressors, always the ones under assault. Building up this supposedly totalitarian, violent threat from the “left” allows them to justify their actions within the long-established framework of conservative self-victimization.
It’s a permission structure that doesn’t allow for lines that can’t be crossed. It has proven remarkably adaptable, fully capable of handling even the most outlandish rhetoric, actions, transgressions, even crimes. As crass or radical or outrageous as some on the right might have initially perceived January 6, nothing Trump has ever done has betrayed the accepted dogma of conservative politics: that only white conservatives – and the party that represents them – are entitled to rule in America, that Democratic governance is inherently illegitimate.
And so, the permission structure of conservative politics remained fully intact and quickly allowed for a realignment behind Trump: anything is justified to fight back against the supposed onslaught from a radically “un-American,” extremist “left.” This fundamental logic of conservative politics was always likely to drown out everything else after a brief moment of shock. It is the reason why former attorney general William Barr, while leaving no doubt that Trump was responsible for an attempted coup and is completely detached from reality, still maintains that “the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party”. And it finds its most extreme iteration in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that it is time for “freedom-loving Americans” to fight back because “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they already started the killings”. Greene’s rhetoric constitutes a breathtaking assault on the very pillars of democratic political culture, on the demand that we accept the legitimacy of the political opponent and denounce the use of violence. But it is fully in line with, and justified by, the underlying logic of escalation.
Trump himself was never the cause, and always a result of these dynamics – this permission structure that overrides all else. It has shaped Republican politics for a long time and has almost always overwhelmed attempts to moderate since at least the 1990s, an era in which a more explicitly anti-democratic populism moved to the center of Republican politics. GOP elites and more “moderate” conservatives have often tried to harness the extremist, far-right popular energies on the base to prevent egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy from ever upending traditional hierarchies. And purely in terms of Trump’s legislative agenda, the Republican establishment has mostly gotten what it wanted – which is why Mike Pence, for instance, still doesn’t think he and Donald Trump “differ on issues”. But elites and “moderates” have never been able to control the accelerating radicalization that is now threatening constitutional government in America: not when the Tea Party rose after Barack Obama’s election, not when Trumpism came to dominate the GOP, not when militant white Christian nationalist extremists are reveling in the idea of using fascistic violence against their enemies.
We are now at the point where an attack on the Capitol was not nearly enough to break this logic of escalation. That dynamic continued to shape the right after January 6. And it not only explains past instances of radicalization in moments when it looked like there could have been an alternative path. It should also shape our expectations going forward and our understanding of what American democracy is up against.
Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer
