The Republican threat to democracy
"The greatest threat to Western Civilization today is not Russia," says Trump. "It's probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible, U.S.A. hating people that represent us."
… "It's the Marxists who would have us become a Godless nation worshipping at the altar of race, and gender, and environment."
Donald J. Trump, 3/17/23
“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them."
Ron De Santis, 3/23
This isn’t the first time the US has had public officials who openly or covertly serve the interests of an adversary power. Aldrich Ames, Alger Hiss, and all those other spies. General-in-Chief Jamie Wilkinson, on the payroll of the King of Spain. All those Hitler sympathizers we heard about in Rachel Maddow’s podcast. But as always, most seriously, 1860-1861. In the few months after South Carolina left the Union, in December1860, a high percentage of the country’s power structure – Senators and Congressmen, military officers, government officials – would face a decision whether to remain loyal to their oath or to their state. Basically, these men had four choices. They could:
1) Support the Union they had served, often for 30 years or more;
2) Temporize and hope things got sorted;
3)Resign and join their state;
4) Continue to hold a Federal office while serving the interests of the seceding states;
Four men in service to the United States made the worst call. They were:
Brigadier General David Twiggs (Louisiana), commanding in Texas. He surrendered the forts in Texas en masse to secessionist forces, ordering the garrisons to lay down their arms – and then resigned his commission and joined the Confederate army.
Secretary of War John Floyd (Virginia), who refused suggestions to beef up defenses of US forts in the southern states and shipped thousands of arms to the south from northern arsenals, before going south where he became a (very bad) general in the Confederate army;
US Senator Louis Wigfall (Texas) who, when Texas seceded said “so what?” and remained in the Senate, openly spying on actions taken by the North, before going south and becoming first a general and then a senator;
Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson (Mississippi), who stayed in the Cabinet for more than a month after accepting a position as secession commissioner for Mississippi, with the mission to convince North Carolina to secede.
Wigfall, Twiggs, Floyd, Thompson, disloyalty Hall of Shame.
What we have today is worse. First, the damage being done by Republicans is more severe and extends over a longer period of time. Until December 1860, the actions taken by eventual Confederates were within the political system on behalf of their region, not treason, and all of them were gone from the U.S. stage by mid-April 1861. Floyd and Twiggs both did real damage but their ability to take action against the U.S. was transitory. Today’s Republican traitors have been undermining our system for six years or more – Trump’s debasement to Putin in Helsinki was July 2018 – and show no signs of going away.
Second, today’s Republican traitors are engaging in a far wider series of actions to undermine the government and our system. The Civil War era traitors provided resources (arms, information, forts and prisoners, and diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Confederacy), but they didn’t launch congressional investigations of federal law enforcement agents carrying out their lawful duties. And they never undermined elections and election workers.
Russia is our adversary. They are still our foremost nuclear threat. They are a serious enemy of democracy worldwide and a direct threat to the post World War II structure that guaranteed peace in Europe from 1945 through last year. We are at war with them in Ukraine in every sense except the commitment of combat troops. They are openly interfering in our elections and undermining our democracy.
And the embrace of Russia and, more to the point, Putinism, by the Trumpist Republican party isn’t transitory. Former President Trump has been openly advocating pro-Russian and pro-Putin policies for the entire 8 years since he entered public life. There is little doubt tht in a second term he would abandon Ukraine and destroy NATO.
Now Trump’s only current serious challenger for the party nomination has joined him in parroting Putinish governing methods in his own state and Putinish attitudes toward Ukraine, characterizing Russia’s war of aggression s a “boundary dispute” and stating defense of Ukraine is not a matter of vital national interest.. In the halls of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gaetz may seem to be clowns but in today’s Republican party, they have replaced Jack Kemp or, more recently, Paul Ryan, as the party’s “thinkers.”
More dangerous yet is Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who is a nightly source of pro-Putin, anti-American talking points.“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? . . . Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?”
Tucker has referred to “the Russian port of Crimea” and, like Florida governor DeSantis, declared the war to be a “territorial dispute.” This isn’t anti-Biden; it’s anti-American.
George W. Bush and his bullying ‘with us or against us” foreign policy left our alliances shaken. Obama promptly did a “we’re back and you can trust us” world tour, only to be followed by Trump’s even more devastating and anti-American reign, which brought NATO to its knees. Biden has worked hard and done a masterful job of reassembling alliances, but the open Putinism of the Republican party – and Trump’s clear intent to leave NATO – has brought allied doubts to the fore again. Fear of Putin isn’t an abstract matter – and isn’t limited to high gas prices – for former Warsaw Pact or Soviet republics such as Poland, Estonia, or Latvia. And fear of unchecked expansionism isn’t a theoretical matter to Taiwan, either. Our failure to support Ukraine won’t just embolden Putin to further expansionist adventures, but is also likely to encourage China as well.
Yet, such a policy is the current reality for one of our two major parties. It's time to call a spade a spade: today’s Republican party is largely an anti-American, anti-democracy, pro-Putin, pro-autocratic party. They represent a clear and present danger – to the citizens of Ukraine … and Poland … and Germany … and Taiwan … and the United States.