That someone is ludicrous doesn’t stop them being dangerous, as Donald Trump and now Marjorie Taylor Greene have demonstrated. The new Georgia congresswoman has not only repeatedly spread racist and antisemitic statements; she has suggested a Jewish banking family might have been involved in starting wildfires with “space lasers”, repeatedly endorsed QAnon conspiracy theories and questioned whether the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11. Her views are no less poisonous and extremist for being so bizarre.
The most frightening and extraordinary thing about her, however, is that she is now welcome at the heart of the Republican party. Though Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has described her “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as “a cancer for the Republican party”, his diagnosis comes much too late. Kevin McCarthy, his counterpart in the House, boasts of a “big tent” – so large that it now includes those who have supported the killing of political opponents. It took Democrats to strip Ms Greene of her committee positions via a House vote on Thursday, an unprecedented move that should never have been necessary. They are happy to seize the opportunity to portray the GOP as Ms Greene’s party. But they are not so wrong to do so.
All but 11 Republicans in the House thought a woman who had described two school shootings as false flag operations and hounded a Parkland survivor was fit to serve not only on the budget committee but on that for education and labour too. The supposed justification is that she expressed her noxious views before she was elected. She has apologised (though only in private) for some of them, and walked back from some others publicly, stating that “school shootings are real” and “9/11 absolutely happened” – while boasting of raising $1.6m through her calls for support against a “Democratic mob”.
The real reason is her popularity with the party base. Trumpism is flourishing. Mr Trump may have left the White House, but Mr McCarthy takes care to pay respects at his court in Florida. Meanwhile, the same colleagues who offered Ms Greene a standing ovation lambasted Liz Cheney for backing the former president’s impeachment for inciting violent insurrection; the ultra-conservative is now portrayed as a spineless liberal. Americans who align with the Republicans are far more likely to support Mr McCarthy and Ms Greene than Mr McConnell or Ms Cheney.
To call this a battle for the soul of the Republican party, as many have done, is generous; it is a calculated set of choices about its long-term viability, the political ambitions of those within it, and the fundamental clash between its radicalised base and grassroots political operatives, and the broader national electorate. (That renewed efforts at voter suppression are already under way is a reminder that the party’s primary response to a shrinking demographic base has been to rig the system.)
Ms Greene is less the cause of their dilemma than the result of it. This week’s events both echo and spring from the Republican response to Mr Trump’s candidacy, his sins as a president, his attempts to overturn the election result, and even his incitement of sedition and the storming of the Capitol: feeble expressions of distaste, but ultimately acquiescence and complicity – throwing a cloak of political respectability over the ugly and intolerable. Some of the party would now like to turn back, but can no longer find the old path. The rest are travelling further and faster along their new road, and taking others with them.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
