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No One Expects Civility From Republicans - The New York Times [1]
['Michelle Goldberg']
Date: 2020-12-07
After that autopsy, Reince Priebus, then the Republican Party chairman, called for a more “inclusive” G.O.P., saying, “Finding common ground with voters will be a top priority.”
Trump would prove that wasn’t necessary. In 2016, he got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did four years earlier, but still won the Electoral College. And while widespread revulsion toward Trump was a problem for him this November, down-ticket Republicans performed far better than almost anyone expected.
As a result, the effect of right-wing fanaticism on mainstream public opinion has become a non-issue. It doesn’t matter if Biden voters don’t like paranoid militants, many of them armed, menacing civil servants. The structure of our politics — gerrymandering in the House and the rural bias in the Senate — buffers Republicans from centrist backlash.
One thing would change this dynamic overnight: a Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Republicans might learn that there’s a price for aligning themselves with a president trying to thwart the will of the electorate. They might regret the arrogance of Senator David Perdue, who didn’t deign to show up for a Sunday night debate with his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. Trumpism might come to be seen as an electoral albatross, and Republicans would have an incentive to rejoin the reality everyone else operates in.
But unless and until that happens, few will be able to muster much surprise when Republicans condone the most outrageous right-wing thuggery, because few will expect anything else.
The uproar over shunning Sanders was an outgrowth of an old liberal quandary — how a tolerant society should treat those who conspire against tolerance. The people screaming outside Benson’s house raise an entirely different question, about how long our society can endure absent any overlapping values or common truths. You can condemn an anti-democratic party for behaving anti-democratically, but you can’t really argue with it.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/opinion/republicans-civility-benson.html
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