The Dangerous, Irrational Path Forward

The radical right GOP is struggling with how to maintain power and not lose too much public support. There is a split among hard core supporters of the president and the rest who appear to be uncomfortable to some degree with what he stands for, says and does. 

Regardless, the GOP will continue to act in the GOP's best interest first and in the public interest second. The fundamental struggle stays the same, i.e., concentrated power and wealth (autocracy) on the political right vs. distributed power and wealth (democracy) on the political left. What also looks to be constant is the irrationality and incoherence the radical right seems destined to continue to rely on in its messaging (dark free speech). 

A couple of recent articles support that assessment of the game going forward. A New York Times article discusses GOP thinking about upcoming the impeachment trial. The NYT writes:

But it remained unclear whether the 17 Republican senators whose votes would be needed to convict Mr. Trump by the requisite two-thirds majority would agree to find him guilty. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, worked feverishly to whip up opposition to a conviction, arguing that it would only further inflame a dangerously divided nation.

Senators considering breaking with the president needed to look no further than Ms. Cheney to understand the risks.

In a petition being privately circulated among Republicans on Capitol Hill, a group of lawmakers led by Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, and Matt Rosendale of Montana, claimed that Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach the president had “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.”

“As we figure out where Republicans go from here, we need Liz’s leadership,” Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, said, praising her for being “unafraid to clearly state and defend her views” even if they were unpopular. “We must be a big-tent party, or else condemn ourselves to irrelevance.” 

The internal split is obvious. So is the radical right's incoherence and autocratic attitude. Graham's concern about further inflaming a dangerously divided nation is nonsense. The truth is that the GOP has relied heavily on dark free speech to successfully inflame and divide Americans. The radical right needs Americans to be inflamed and divided. By now it is clear that an impeachment is not going to significantly change that. 

The radical right's autocratic core ideology is on display in the rationale attacking Cheney because she “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.” What Biggs and the other hard core radical right authoritarians cannot tolerate is dissent within the party. They had their RINO hunts to get rid of internal dissent. The only disrepute to be found in what Cheney did is in the radical right tribe itself. With the rest of the public, what Cheney did created some credibility for the GOP and tended to reduce division, not foment it.

For context, it appears that the insurrection of last week is causing some loss of support for the president. Given that, convicting him of insurrection arguably would be more socially unifying than divisive. 

Disapproval is approaching an all-time high 

In another NYT article on the impeachment, the radical right's heavily biased perceptions of reality and thinking is apparent. That is highlighted in the following:

That the comparisons were apples and oranges did not matter so much as the prisms through which they were reflected. .... But [the president's] allies complained that he had long been the target of what they considered unfair partisan attacks and investigations. “Donald Trump is the most dangerous man to ever occupy the Oval Office,” declared Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “The left in America has incited far more political violence than the right,” declared Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida. The starkly disparate views encapsulated America in the Trump era.

Gaetz, a hard core supporter of the president and radical right autocrat, points to political violence of the left as if that somehow justifies what the president did. In this case, two wrongs do not make a right. Gaetz is reduced to blatant irrationality in his attempt to defend and deflect attention from what the president did.  

Assuming that people like Biggs and Gaetz represent the majority of the GOP leadership, the way forward looks to be irrational, reality-detached and dangerous. So far, Cheney's dissent is not the controlling mindset among radical right elites, which Cheney is part of. The threat her mindset poses to rationality and democracy is somewhat less. That appears to be the better part of the radical right.