A Horror of Their Own Making: The GOP, Fascism, and the Crisis that Refuses to End
Once more, immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before lawmakers this week and delivered sobering news. The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating in “the wrong direction,” and, if left unaddressed, we could see upwards of 100,000 new cases a day. To head off this continuing disaster, Dr. Fauci advocated simplistic measures like continuing to social distance and the wearing of masks to prevent transmission. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who previously gave President Donald Trump free rein to do anything he pleased, echoed Dr. Fauci’s recommendation about masks and even took a moment to express his wish that Trump might occasionally don a mask to show his supporters the importance.
Alexander, who has long been seen as a “reasonable” Republican, was drowned out his colleague from Kentucky, Republican Senator Rand Paul, who drilled Dr. Fauci and ludicrously said, “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best for everyone.”
In Alexander and Paul we see a clear line from where the Republican Party used to be and where it has arrived. Alexander has a long history of service and experience, having been the governor of Tennessee, Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, and serving in the Senate for nearly twenty years. He has been praised for his ability to collaborate with Democratic members, his belief and support of science, and his even temper. In contrast, Paul is a posturing firebrand who, despite his background in ophthalmology, regularly questions the scientific consensus and behaves as if he’s some swaggering maverick.
But even these two Republicans only scratch the surface of what has happened to the Grand Old Party and how we have arrived at this moment of crisis. You can see it in the slow and horrific realization from Alexander and even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the two of them urging Americans to wear masks even as top Republicans claim such requests are dangerous and unneeded, and even as Fox News, the propaganda organ of the party, derides any talk about the pandemic at all.
What it must be like for Alexander and McConnell to watch their party fall into this abyss. Their lives have been dedicated to building it up as a base of power and guiding it through one battle after another, each showdown taking another party of the party’s soul with it. To continue pursuit of power, they have compromised their ethics and morality time and time and time again, playing “hardball” politics, as the pundits would call it, but generally behaving as if rules and norms only apply if they work in your favor. To gaze out and see their own states consumed by a deadly pandemic and then listen as one of their colleagues extols the benefits of “positive thinking” must be a horror all of its own.
But they have earned this horror. For decades now the Republican Party has thrived by intentionally and strategically appealing to racist white voters in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, cultivating a voting base that consists of prejudiced Americans, paranoid, Neo-Confederate evangelicals, and obscenely wealthy oligarchs looking to collapse government oversight and power. This strange and oddly-fitting tent has been secured by the use of racist dog-whistling, appeals to inherent prejudices, and a strict diet of weaponized misinformation and pseudo-events.
One of the first casualties of the Republican obsession with power was objective reality. To maintain their stranglehold over this odd electorate, the GOP relentlessly attacked science, education, and history, making sure that voters could not tell their lies from truths. They partnered with corporations to cover-up studies, to elevate pseudo-science and paid-off scientists, all of it in an effort to hide what they and their partners knew was damning, objective reality. They slandered the scientific consensus on climate change even as they, and their corporate, energy partners, knew the science was airtight, real, and pressing. They urged their supporters to distrust experts, to “go with their guts,” to believe there was a conspiracy against them and that only one group could protect them.
It was game-theory. A tireless pursuit of advantage and power that never considered the future or imagined what could possibly happen as a result of their games. And what happened was that the Republican Party of the United States of America became a death cult that believed in nothing, achieved nothing, and pursued nothing except bold-faced power.
All of the work McConnell and Alexander and so many like them did got them here. To Donald Trump. To a new, fascistic Republican Party that does nothing more than scapegoat vulnerable populations, swim in conspiracy theories, threaten war and blatant oppression, and scoff at scientists as the country burns with a plague. They have destroyed this country, possibly permanently, and empowered an authoritarian who has presided over hundreds of thousands of deaths and the decline of the American experiment. Surely, between their exasperated sighs and attempts to walk back the president’s endorsement of white supremacy and blatant fascism, they must wonder what hell they’ve wrought.
And with the masks, that ship has sailed. They’ve taught their voters to distrust scientists. To distrust science. To distrust experts and people in power. It was inevitable that they would be cast off as well.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
