A Republican “Soul-Searching”? Highly Unlikely.

Don’t trust people who keep promising a GOP pivot that never comes

The 2022 midterm elections are finally over. They ended on Tuesday with another Democratic victory over a Trumpist candidate in another high-stakes, high-profile race in another purple state. Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker in the Georgia senate runoff – that’s good news for Democrats, good news for (small-d) democrats, good news for anyone who values having reasonably qualified people in political office.

Is this, finally, the moment the Republican Party will break with Trumpian extremism? If the nation’s leading newspaper is to be believed, that’s what we should expect. On Wednesday, the New York Times published an article entitled “Warnock defeats Walker in Georgia’s Senate runoff” – mostly a fairly standard report with some numbers and lots of quotes from all sides. But it also contained this rather remarkable prediction:  

“Walker’s loss will almost certainly lead to soul-searching for a Republican Party that must decide how firmly to tether itself to a former president who has now absorbed powerful political blows in three successive cycles.”

Since election day in early November, is has certainly seemed like Republican elites, party operatives, and the conservative intelligentsia would rather prefer someone other than Trump to be the GOP standard bearer going forward. There has been a lot of talk from “moderate” conservative circles about Ron DeSantis being a more “respectable,” “normal,” “electable” alternative to Trump (a topic for another day); some have apparently set their sights on Georgia governor Brian Kemp who at least has the looks of what the mainstream media considers the platonic ideal of a “normal” Republican politician.

Now that Walker has lost in Georgia, giving the Democrats two senators, one Jewish, one Black, in a Deep South state, those rumblings are only going to get louder. Does that mean the New York Times reporters are right that “Walker’s loss will almost certainly lead to soul-searching” and moderation? Because the prediction here is not that this “soul-searching” will lead to further radicalization. The implication is that this process will finally end in a pivot away from Trumpism, back to the (small-d) democratic center. Where’s the evidence for that? It’s definitely not in the report.

Is there any empirical basis for such an assertion? It’s certainly not supported by the Republican Party’s recent track record – nor is there any serious indication that the GOP is willing or able to dramatically change direction. Instead of clinging to the idea that, surely, a return to “normalcy” must be imminent, we should grapple honestly with the ideas and dynamics that have animated the Republican Party’s anti-democratic radicalization for a long time. They have led to a situation in which moments of brief uncertainty almost always result in a further radicalization. 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 it makes winning eminently winnable races a lot harder.

What happened after the 2012 election defeat is instructive: After Mitt Romney was soundly defeated by Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee famously released an “Autopsy” report that called for moderation and outreach to traditionally marginalized groups, for a softer approach to issues that affected these communities most directly. 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 an illegitimate, “Un-American” threat. Within such a worldview, it’s hard to justify compromise and restraint. If the nation is in mortal danger, besieged by evil forces, how can anyone suggest that compromise with such evil could be the way forward? Arguing for restraint is seen as inherently suspicious – those who demand purity can always claim the mantel of the nation’s true defenders.

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. The underlying permission structure 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. 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. And even electoral defeats.

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. 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. 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.

Add to these underlying ideological dynamics some more opportunistic elements. Republican elites aren’t bound by the media’s impetus to sanitize the discourse: They recognize that Trumpian authoritarianism, fueled by white reactionary grievance, has significant support on the base. There is also the fact that all the reasons why Republican elites united behind Trump, specifically, in the first place still apply - they wanted a brawler to fight back against the “leftist” menace. They still do. And strictly in terms of the actual legislative agenda, they mostly got what they wanted.

All of those factors – the electoral, opportunistic concerns and the ideological convictions – have enabled Trump’s rise and blunted the Republican elite’s resistance to Trumpism. One shudders to think what would need to happen for them to ever fully break with Trump and the far-right factions that are now defining the center of their coalition. Remember that an attack on the Capitol was not nearly enough to break this logic of escalation. That dynamic has continued to shape the Right since January 6. All the incentives that have led to Trumpism’s rise remain in place; the permission structure remains intact.

This 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. Our default assumption should be that this fundamental logic of conservative politics is likely to prevail after a brief moment of shock – not that a return to moderate “normalcy” is imminent.

But then why are we getting insinuations of serious “soul-searching” instead in mainstream media reporting that might as well come from a parallel Earth in which things aren’t quite the same? It’s probably best to read such claims not as empirically-based analysis, but ideological statements that tell us how these New York Times reporters think the world *should* work. The fact that the “soul-searching” prediction is almost casually thrown into the report with seemingly little thinking behind it in some ways only underlines the point: It’s reflexive, manifesting a long-held assumption about what should *normally* happen next. It’s conventional wisdom that has long become obsolete, applied as paradigm in a (willfully?) ignorant or naïve way. There is something almost defiant about this: As long as we cling to these rules and expectations of how politics is *supposed* to function, about how political parties behave and what they are, we can still pretend that “normalcy” exists, or at least that a return to normalcy is right around the corner. Promise. No need to question or even modify any of the dogmatic assumptions and guidelines on which political journalism has been predicated for a long time. Just stick with the paradigm, keep reaffirming it over and over again, regardless of what happens – actually, keep reaffirming it especially when what is happening doesn’t conform to what is *supposed* to happen. At some point, the chasm between the paradigm and observable empirical reality will presumably become so vast that it necessitates a paradigm shift in mainstream media journalism. But apparently, we are not quite there yet.