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      Republicans Who Voted to Impeach Trump Out-Raised Primary Rivals

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      Despite their pariah status in their party, House Republicans who broke with the former president have raised more than their G.O.P. foes.WASHINGTON — All seven House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump and are seeking re-election have out-raised their primary opponents, many of whom have received Mr. Trump’s backing, according to campaign disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission this week.In Wyoming, Representative Liz Cheney, who was all but exiled by her party for bluntly condemning Mr. Trump’s false election claims and has emerged as one of the lead lawmakers on the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, raked in $2 million during the last quarter, entering 2022 with nearly $5 million in cash on hand. Her opponent, Harriet Hageman, who has drawn the vociferous support of Mr. Trump and his family, raised $443,000 last quarter and has about $380,000 cash on hand.Representative Fred Upton, a centrist who has held his seat in southwest Michigan for more than three decades, brought in $726,000 and has about $1.5 million cash on hand, well ahead of the challenger Mr. Trump has endorsed, Steve Carra, a state representative who raised $134,000 last quarter and has $200,000 cash on hand.Joe Kent, a Trump-backed Army Special Forces veteran prolific on social media and conservative talk shows, appeared to come closer to matching the fund-raising totals of his opponent, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, but still trailed her in both quarterly hauls and cash on hand.The disclosures illustrate the foothold that establishment conservatives and well-funded political action committees still hold among the party’s donor class, despite Mr. Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican base. They also reflect how the former president’s endorsements, which he has dangled as threats over Republican lawmakers he deems insufficiently loyal to him, have yet to translate into significant donations for the candidates he backs.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Trump vs. DeSantis: Tensions between the ex-president and Florida governor show the challenge confronting the G.O.P. in 2022.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.By contrast, Mr. Trump’s political operation is doing far better than his party in raking in money, having raised more than $51 million in the second half of 2021 and entering 2022 with more than double the cash on hand of the Republican National Committee.“The massive fund-raising hauls of some of these incumbents reflects a lot of people’s support for the positions they took,” said Alex Conant, a veteran Republican political strategist. “There’s only a handful of them, but they have a huge donor pool to draw from. And Trump has always struggled to translate his political capital to others.”Even with their hulking war chests, the Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump last year for his role in inciting the Capitol riot are expected to face grueling primary battles after inflaming the wrath of conservative voters. Some may still opt to retire, joining three of their colleagues who also voted to impeach Mr. Trump and already said they would not run for re-election in 2022.Mr. Upton said in a statement on Wednesday that he saw his fund-raising numbers as evidence of a “hunger for restoring civility and solving pressing problems” that was “resonating with people across America,” but added that he was still deliberating over whether he would run for re-election.Some of the financial disparities reflect straggling primary fields that have yet to be narrowed or candidates who only decided recently to enter their races. In South Carolina, for example, Mr. Trump endorsed a primary challenger to Representative Tom Rice on Tuesday, elevating Russell Fry, a state representative, over Graham Allen, a conservative media personality who had raised the most money in a crowded primary. Mr. Rice’s latest disclosure showed him with five times as much cash on hand as Mr. Allen.“Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina, the coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the radical left, and who actually voted against me on impeachment hoax #2, must be thrown out of office ASAP,” Mr. Trump wrote in his endorsement.Mr. Rice shot back with a retort of his own: “I’m glad he’s chosen someone. All the pleading to Mar-a-Lago was getting a little embarrassing. I’m all about Trump’s policy. But absolute pledge of loyalty, to a man that is willing to sack the Capitol to keep his hold on power, is more than I can stomach.”For Trump-backed candidates, more help from the boldfaced names of the party’s right flank is likely on the way. On Tuesday evening, a day after campaigns were required to file their latest Federal Election Commission disclosures, Mr. Kent held a fund-raiser with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., at which couples that donated or raised $25,000 were invited to attend a private reception and take a picture with the former president.Mr. Kent has previously complained on Twitter that Ms. Herrera Beutler was “running on America Last PACs not grass roots donations,” referring to big-money political action committees that once dominated campaign fund-raising, rather than the small-dollar contributions that are a growing source of financing for Republican campaigns.But as Ms. Hageman’s fund-raising totals illustrate, Mr. Trump’s backing alone does not guarantee an immediate financial windfall. Mr. Trump has targeted Ms. Cheney as one of his most high-profile detractors in Congress, hammering away at her for months and vowing to depose her. Last month, his son, Donald Trump Jr., joined an elite fund-raiser for Ms. Hageman hosted by tech billionaire Peter Thiel at his Miami compound. The donations raised there were not reflected on the report her campaign submitted this week.Ms. Hageman has chalked up Ms. Cheney’s fund-raising prowess to support from Democrats and out-of-state Republicans. A spokesman for Ms. Hageman’s campaign said she had raised more than half of her funds from within Wyoming.Establishment Republicans have rallied to Ms. Cheney’s side. Former President George W. Bush gave her the maximum donation of $5,800, while Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, and former Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, have each helped raise money for her.Mr. Bush also gave to Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted to convict Mr. Trump at his impeachment trial and is also facing a Trump-backed primary challenger. Ms. Murkowski out-raised that challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, raising $1.2 million last quarter, while Ms. Tshibaka raised about $600,000.“If you’d seen 100 Republicans voting to impeach Trump, the donor pool would have been more diluted,” Mr. Conant said. “They’re in a unique position to raise a lot of money.”Rachel Shorey More

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      What America Would Look Like in 2025 Under Trump

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      What will happen if the political tables are turned, and the Republican Party wins the White House in 2024 and the House and Senate along the way?One clue is that Donald Trump is an Orban worshiper — that’s Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, a case study in the aggressive pursuit of a right-wing populist agenda.In his Jan. 3 announcement of support for Orban’s re-election, Trump declared: “He is a strong leader and respected by all. He has my Complete support and Endorsement for re-election as Prime Minister!”What is it about Hungary under Orban that appeals so powerfully to Trump?“Call it ‘soft fascism,’ ” Zach Beauchamp of Vox.com, wrote on Sept. 13, 2018:a political system that aims to stamp out dissent and seize control of every major aspect of a country’s political and social life, without needing to resort to “hard” measures like banning elections and building up a police state. One of the most disconcerting parts of observing Hungarian soft fascism up close is that it’s easy to imagine the model being exported. While the Orban regime grew out of Hungary’s unique history and political culture, its playbook for subtle repression could in theory be run in any democratic country whose leaders have had enough of the political opposition.In “How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary,” in The New York Times Magazine, Elizabeth Zerofsky quotes Rod Dreher, the combative conservative blogger, on Orban’s immigration policies — building a fence on the border to keep Muslims out, for example. “If you could wind back the clock 50 years, and show the French, the Belgian and the German people what mass immigration from the Muslim world would do to their countries by 2021, they never, ever would have accepted it” Dreher remarked.In contrast to conservatism as practiced in the United States, Zerofsky writes about Hungary under Orban: “Here was this other, European tradition of Catholic conservatism, that was afraid neither of a strong state, nor of using it to promote a conservative vision of life.”In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon, political scientists at Barnard and Georgetown, argue that Orban has “emerged as a media darling of the American right,” receiving high praise from Tucker Carlson, “arguably the single most influential conservative media personality in the United States.”The Conservative Political Action Conference, “a major forum of the American right, plans to hold its 2022 annual meeting in Hungary,” Cooley and Nexon write. What has Orban done to deserve this attention?The two authors briefly summarize Orban’s record: “Orban consolidated power through tactics that were procedurally legal but, in substance, undercut the rule of law. He stacked the courts with partisans and pressured, captured, or shut down independent media.”Cooley and Nexon demonstrate a parallel between what has taken place in Hungary and current developments in the United States: “Orban’s open assault on academic freedom — including banning gender studies and evicting the Central European University from Hungary — finds analogies in current right-wing efforts in Republican-controlled states to ban the teaching of critical race theory and target liberal and left-wing academics.”In an email, Nexon elaborated:There is definitely a transmission belt of ideas between the U.S. and European right; for various stripes of conservatives — reactionary populists, integrationists, ethnonationalists — Hungary is becoming what Denmark is for the left: part real-life model, part idealized dreamscape.Trump and Orban, Nexon continued,are both opportunists who’ve figured out the political usefulness of reactionary populism. And Trump will push the United States in a broadly similar direction: toward neo-patrimonial governance. During his first term, Trump treated the presidency as his own personal property — something that was his to use to punish enemies, reward loyalists and enhance his family’s wealth. If he wins in 2024, we’re likely to see this on steroidsTrump, in Nexon’s view, will be unable to match Orban — by, for example, installing a crony “as president of Harvard” or forcing “Yale to decamp for Canada” — butIt’s pretty clear that he’ll be better at installing absolute loyalists at the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense. So, if Trump succeeds, we’ll be able to find a lot of similar parts, but it won’t be the same model. I suspect it will be worse. The U.S. is a large federation with a lot of capacity for private violence, a major international footprint, and a multi-trillion-dollar economy. Hungary is a minor player in a confederation dominated by democratic regimes.Cooley stressed in an email the “active networking among right-wing political associations and groups with Orban,” citing the Jan. 24 endorsement of Orban’s re-election by the New York Young Republican Club:Today, both the United States of America and countries in Europe like Hungary face an existential crisis. The ruling elite and political establishment’s failed leadership and ideology have eroded the meaning and purpose of citizenship. For those against this ideology and for the preservation of Western civilization for all countries in the West, it is imperative that we stand in support of one another as national communities.Orban’s appeal to the right flank of the Republican Party, in Cooley’s view, lies in anideology — which rests on redefining the meaning of “the West” away from liberal principles and toward ethnonational ideals and conservative values — and his strategy for consolidating power is to close or take over media, stack the courts, divide and stigmatize the opposition, reject commitments to constraining liberal ideals and institutions, and publicly target the most vulnerable groups in society — e.g. refugees.Orban has described Hungary under his rule as an “illiberal democracy.” In 2019, Freedom House downgraded Hungary from “free” to “partly free,” making it “the first country in the European Union that is not currently classified” as “free,” according to the Budapest Business Journal.I asked a number of European scholars about the agenda Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress would be most likely to push in 2025.In a March 2021 paper “Authoritarian Values and the Welfare State: The Social Policy Preferences of Radical Right Voters,” Philip Rathgeb, a professor of social policy at the University of Edinburgh, Marius R. Busemeyer and Alexander H. J. Sahm, both of the University of Konstanz, surveyed voters in eight Western European countries to determine “what kind of welfare state do voters of populist radical right parties want and how do their preferences differ from voters of mainstream left- and right-wing parties.”Rathgeb and his co-authors found that populist European voterswant a particularistic-authoritarian welfare state, displaying moderate support only for “deserving” benefit recipients (e.g., the elderly), while revealing strong support for a workfare approach and little support for social investment.Rathgeb wrote in an email:From an ideological perspective, it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump prioritized Medicare over Medicaid, given that the former is targeted at the “deserving” poor, i.e., the elderly and disabled. A pro-elderly outlook is very typical of the radical right in Europe too, because the beneficiaries of schemes like Medicare are typically native (white) citizens who have demonstrated their willingness to “work hard” over their lifetime, thus being deserving of welfare support. By contrast, I expect little support, perhaps even cuts, for Medicaid.Rathgeb noted that populist parties oppose social investment policies because such programs are often based onprogressive gender values and a commitment to “lifelong learning.” For example, public provision of childcare helps working women to reconcile work-family life (vs. the male breadwinner model), while training and education foster social mobility in the “knowledge economy” (e.g., high-end services). These ideological considerations are reinforced by material interests, as the main target groups of social investment policies (i.e., the new middle classes, including women and the young with high levels of education) are distant from the typical radical right voter, who usually displays lower levels of formal education.In an email, Busemeyer described some of the differences and similarities between Trumpism and European populism:In Europe, the welfare state and social policy more generally are much ingrained in people’s minds. This means that in the U.S., Trumpism goes along with criticism about the welfare state in general (see the attempts of the Trump administration to get rid of Obamacare), whereas in Europe, it’s really more about “welfare chauvinism,” i.e., protecting the good old welfare state for “deserving” people, namely hard-working natives.In addition, Busemeyer wrote, “there is a strong ‘corporatist’ element in the Trump movement (i.e., business elites), whereas in European right-wing populism that’s typically not the case.”The right-wing populist movements on both continents, he continued,are similar in their rejection of a liberal attitude toward globalization, both regarding the economic side as well as the identity part of globalization. Also, they both subscribe to a traditional role model in the family and traditional gender roles.Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford who studies French politics and the far right, wrote in an email:If in 2024 Trump or a Ron DeSantis wins the presidency and Republicans control both the House and Senate, the general agenda would be a backlash against any anti-discrimination, against inclusive policies implemented by the Biden administration, for an attempt to shift further the Supreme Court pendulum toward anti-abortion, for Originalist constitutionalists, for implementing voter suppression policies and for federal funding limitations on some forms of speech (critical race theory, the teaching or research of segregation, anti-Semitism or racism in the States) as well for as a return to extremely restrictive anti-immigration policies (rebuilding the Wall; for curbing down further visa and green cards, and for increasing deportations).The Republican agenda, Alduy argues,would be fueled by increased moral panic about white America’s decline, a professed sense of having been spoliated and ‘stolen the election,’ and a renewed sentiment of impunity for his most extreme backers from the Jan. 6 insurrection. My bet is that there is an active plan to reshape the political system so that elections are not winnable by Democrats, and the State be run without the foundation of a democracy.Trump has made it clear that he is a Viktor Orban superfan.Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Attila Kisbenedek/AFP,Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images, Cooper Neill for The New York TimesTrump signaled his intentions at a rally last week in Conroe, Texas, declaring that in the case of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, “If it requires pardons, then we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”Trump went on: “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.”Or take Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who may challenge Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. On April 10, 2021, DeSantis signed the Combating Public Disorder Act into law, which his office described as “a robust approach to uphold the rule of law, to stand with those serving in law enforcement and enforce Florida’s zero tolerance policy for violent and disorderly assemblies.”On Sept. 9, 2021, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, issued a 90-page opinion declaring that the law’s “vagueness permits those in power to weaponize its enforcement against any group who wishes to express any message that the government disapproves of” and that “the lawless actions of a few rogue individuals could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding Floridians.”On Dec. 15 DeSantis proposed the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act,” which would give parents the right to sue school systems if they believe their children are being taught “critical race theory” with a provision granting parents the right to collect attorneys’ fees if they win.The enactment of laws encouraging citizens to become private enforcers of anti-liberal policies has become increasingly popular in Republican-controlled states. Glenn Youngkin, the newly elected governor of Virginia, has created a “tip line” that parents can used to report teachers whose classes cover “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.”Youngkin told an interviewer:We have set up a particular email address, called helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov, for parents to send us any instances where they feel that their fundamental rights are being violated, where their children are not being respected, where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools. We’re asking for input right from parents to make sure we can go right to the source as we continue to work to make sure that Virginia’s education system is on the path to reestablish excellence.“We’re seeing dozens of G.O.P. proposals to bar whole concepts from classrooms outright,” the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote earlier this week:The Republican governor of Virginia has debuted a mechanism for parents to rat out teachers. Bills threatening punishment of them are proliferating. Book-banning efforts are outpacing anything in recent memory.In a parallel strategy focused on abortion, Texas Republicans enacted “The Texas Heartbeat Act” in May, legislation that not only bans abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected but also turns private citizens into enforcers of the law by giving them the power to sue abortion providers and any person whoknowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion, including paying for or reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance or otherwise, if the abortion is performed or induced in violation of this subchapter, regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of this subchapter.Winners of such suits would receive a minimum of $10,000 plus court costs and other fees.Not to be outdone, Republican members of the New Hampshire legislature are pushing forward legislation that proclaims thatNo teacher shall advocate any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America in New Hampshire public schools which does not include the worldwide context of now outdated and discouraged practices. Such prohibition includes but is not limited to teaching that the United States was founded on racism.The use of citizens as informants to enforce intrusions of this sort is, to put it mildly, inconsistent with democratic norms — reminiscent of East Germany, where the Stasi made use of an estimated 189,000 citizen informers.One of the early goals of a Trump White House backed by Republican congressional majorities, in the view of Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown, would be the immediate rollback of legislation and executive orders put in place by the Biden administration:The first priority of a Trump or DeSantis presidency would be to undo any major changes Biden had implemented through executive orders. That would include a vaccination/testing mandate for health care workers, environmental regs, bolstering A.C.A. and anything Biden had done on race relations or immigration.A critical issue for both Senate Republicans and a second Trump administration would be whether to eliminate the filibuster to prevent Democratic Senators from blocking their wilder legislative plans.Holzer remarked that he is “sure” thatthey would love to pass laws outlawing mask mandates in schools, the teaching of Critical Race Theory or liberal voting rules, but they won’t have 60 votes in the Senate for that unless they also manage to kill or limit the filibuster. If they kill the filibuster, they might try to outlaw abortion, although Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and others would balk at that.Herbert P. Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, emailed a selection of likely Republican initiatives:The new government will use regulatory measures to support the sectors and industries that support it most in terms of electoral votes and party funding: carbon industries, the construction sector, domestic manufacturing.The Republican regime will exit from all participation in efforts to stop global warming.The politics of a populist Republican administration will aim at undermining American democracy and changing the “level playing field” in favor of a party-penetrated state apparatus.Kitschelt cites Orban as a model for Trump in achieving the goals ofUndermining the professionalism and neutrality of the judiciary, starting the with Attorney General’s office.Undermining the nonpartisanship of the military, using the military for domestic purposes to repress civil liberties and liberal opposition to the erosion of American democracy.Redeploying the national domestic security apparatus — above all the F.B.I. — for partisan purposes.Passing libel legislation to harass and undercut the liberal media and journalists with the objective to drive them economically out of business, while simultaneously consolidating conservative media empires and social websites.The politics of cultural polarization, Kitschelt argues, “will intensify to re-establish the U.S. as a white Christian-Evangelical country,” although simultaneouslyefforts will be made to attract culturally traditionalist strands in the Hispanic community. The agenda of the culture war may shift to gender relations, emphasizing the “traditional” family with male authority. At the margin, this may appeal to males, including minorities.Kitschelt’s last point touches on what is sure to be a major motivating force for a Republican Party given an extended lease on life under Trump: the need to make use of every available tool — from manipulation of election results, to enactment of favorable voting laws to appeals to minority voters in the working class to instilling fear of a liberal state run amok — to maintain the viability of a fragile coalition in which the core constituency of white “non-college” voters is steadily declining as a share of the electorate. It is an uphill fight requiring leaders, at least in their minds, to consider every alternative in order to retain power, whether it’s democratic or authoritarian, ethical or unethical, legal or illegal.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Who Believes in Democracy?

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      “There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”The author of this sentence is the former Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary these days.So let’s subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the current liberal relationship to democracy as well.First, there’s a sense in which conservatism has always had a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in many different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power that stamped the segregation-era South.Because all these influences touch the modern G.O.P., conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of American politics long before Trump came along — and some of what’s changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing tendencies.Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope — that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power have raised the salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s countermajoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.And that idea and self-image has remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grassroots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing “Yankee Doodle.”Against this complicated backdrop, Donald Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image. In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there’s actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy weren’t so good at cheating.So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trump’s deceptions isn’t just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival can’t defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting, and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could potentially win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already — one that would hold up no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally. Because however much the right’s populists get wrong about their claim to represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who’s currently threatening to cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless they reverse course.Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins. And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is democratic idea, whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does suffer from a democratic deficit.Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values. So just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism would need to first democratize itself.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      What’s Happening on the Left Is No Excuse for What’s Happening on the Right

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      American democracy has often confronted hostile forces from outside the United States; rarely has it been under as much of a threat from forces within the nation. The danger arises from illiberalism on the left and the right. Both sides are chipping away at the foundations of the American Republic; each side seems oblivious to its own defects.Again and again, we have heard conservatives argue that even if you believe that Donald Trump is flawed and the MAGA movement is worrisome, the left is much more dangerous. We disagree. Fears about the left’s increasingly authoritarian, radical tendencies are well grounded; but they have blinded many conservatives to the greater danger posed by the right, which we believe is a threat to our constitutional order and therefore to conservatism itself.We come to our view after writing and warning about the illiberal left for much of our careers. One of us wrote a book nearly 30 years ago criticizing those who would limit free thought by restricting free speech; the other has been sounding alarms about left-wing ideology since his days as an official in the Department of Education during the Reagan years.Since then, the left has grown more radical, more aggressive and less tolerant. With the help of social media and influence in academia — and sometimes in newsrooms and corporate H.R. departments — a small number of die-hard progressives (they make up only about 8 percent of the public, according to one recent survey) exert a hugely disproportionate influence on the culture. Progressives are “often imposing illiberal speech norms on schools, companies and cultural institutions,” the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait writes. There have been many examples of squelching arguments that although controversial deserve full and frank airing in a free society. Universities have attempted to kick off their campuses Christian ministries that require their leaders to be Christian, and we have written in these pages about efforts to weaken protections for religious liberty.Structural racism — the perpetuation of de facto discrimination by ingrained social arrangements and assumptions — is a reality in American life. But the hodgepodge of ideas in the bucket that has come to be known as “critical race theory” includes radical claims that deny the enduring value of concepts like equality of opportunity and objectivity and reject “the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy” as “a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” The most extreme versions of these ideas might not be taught in high schools (yet), but their influence is undoubtedly being felt.The progressive movement, then, is increasingly under the sway of a totalistic, unfalsifiable and revolutionary ideology that rejects fundamental liberal values like pluralism and free inquiry. And conservatives aren’t hallucinating about its influence. Surveys show that 62 percent of Americans and 68 percent of college students are reluctant to share their true political views for fear of negative social consequences. A Cato Institute study found that nearly a third of Americans — across the political spectrum, not just on the right — say they’re worried about losing a job or job opportunities if they express their true political views. Another study suggested that the level of self-censorship in America may be three times what it was during the McCarthy era.The left is not solely responsible for creating these fears, but it has played the most significant role. Yet even granting all that, the threat from the illiberal right is more immediate and more dangerous. If that wasn’t clear before the last presidential election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it should be clear now.Any account of the malignancy of the American right has to begin with Mr. Trump, whose twisted sensibilities continue to define the Republican Party. It was he who attempted what no president had ever tried: overturning an election. He based his effort on a huge campaign of disinformation. Mr. Trump pressured the vice president, governors, secretaries of state, election officials and appointees at the Department of Justice to join him in his efforts. One of his lawyers reportedly proposed a plan to nullify the election. Congress’s Jan. 6 committee will reveal more and possibly worse.The Republican Party, rather than spurning Mr. Trump and his efforts, has embraced them. Around the country, prospective Republican candidates, far from opposing #StopTheSteal lies and conspiracy theories, are running on them in 2022, according to a Washington Post tally. Any prominent Republican today who disputes #StopTheSteal can expect to be targeted by the base, booed at any large gathering of Republicans, censured by party apparatchiks and possibly threatened with physical violence.Dismayingly few Republican leaders stand foursquare against the base’s insistence that any election Mr. Trump and his followers might lose is rigged. The result is that Republicans are shattering faith in the integrity of our elections and abandoning their commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — the minimum commitment required for democracy to work. This is an unforgivable civic sin, but it hardly exhausts the lists of concerns.Many Republicans are now openly hostile to the processes Americans rely on to separate fact from fiction. There’s also the deepening cult of despair that has led some on the right to believe that all means of resistance are appropriate. In fact, catastrophism is quite fashionable on the American right these days. Every election is a “Flight 93” confrontation against an apocalyptic enemy; every effort, no matter how extreme, is justified. That attitude is not merely at odds with reality; it is incompatible with liberal democracy’s foundational requirement that Americans compromise and coexist civilly in order to share the country.Partly as a result, the MAGA movement is drifting toward authoritarianism. The most important media personality on the right, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, released a disingenuous three-part documentary in November suggesting that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation. He and others in MAGA World, including Mr. Trump, also promote Hungary, which Freedom House said in its 2018 report is “sliding into authoritarian rule,” as a model for the United States. The Republican Party is also drifting ever closer to the open embrace of political violence and martyrdom, not merely excusing but defending actions like Ashli Babbitt’s effort to break into the House’s inner sanctum on Jan. 6 — actions that came within seconds of succeeding.In a recent survey, nearly 40 percent of Republicans said that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Around the country, Republican officials who defend the election and count votes honestly have been threatened and have needed to leave their homes or live under guard. Josh Mandel, a Republican running for the open Senate seat in Ohio and leading in the polls, said in the aftermath of President Biden’s vaccine mandate: “Do not comply with the tyranny. When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”Intimidating election officials, lying about elections and storming the Capitol are not actions promoted among mainstream Democrats. And while the progressive left undoubtedly has influence in the Democratic Party, if it exercised the near-total dominance that Republicans claim, Joe Biden would not have won the Democratic nomination. Conservatives certainly have their disagreements with President Biden, but he has not defunded the police, attempted to pack the Supreme Court or promoted the Green New Deal or Medicare for All.But assume that your threat assessment is different from ours; that as a conservative Republican you believe the danger to the nation is greater from the far left than from the MAGA right. You should still speak out against what is happening to your movement and your party for two reasons: The sins of the left do not excuse the sins of the right; and what is happening on the right is wrecking authentic conservatism in ways the left never could.In his new book, “We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy,” a Wheaton College historian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, shows that the founders took a deeply conservative view of human nature. They believed that humankind is flawed and fallen, distracted by passions and swayed by parochial interests. Americans, the founders believed, were no exception. Yet they also believed that what John Adams called a “well-ordered Constitution” could go a long way to compensate for human flaws.In classic conservative fashion, they designed the U.S. Constitution, and its attendant institutions and norms, both to constrain us and to help us be our better selves. The MAGA right has no love for those institutions and norms. It inflames ugly passions and warps reality. It is profoundly anticonservative, capable of twisting in any direction for the sake of raw power. It represents a profound break with the American conservative tradition.And so to regard the radical left as a reason to excuse, minimize or ignore the malign movement on the right is an abrogation of conservative duty and principle. If MAGA prevails, conservatism will be gravely injured — and American democracy will be, too.Jonathan Rauch (@jon_rauch) is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell a Lie

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      Why is Donald Trump’s “big lie” so hard to discredit?This has been a live question for more than a year, but inside it lies another: Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots — the same ballots that put so many Republicans in office — and if they do believe it what are their motives?A December 2021 University of Massachusetts-Amherst survey found striking linkages between attitudes on race and immigration on one hand and disbelief in the integrity of the 2020 election on the other.According to the poll, two-thirds of Republicans, 66 percent, agreed that “the growth of the number of immigrants to the U.S. means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity” and the same percentage of Republicans are convinced that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world.”Following up on the UMass survey, four political scientists — Jesse Rhodes, Raymond La Raja, Tatishe Nteta and Alexander Theodoridis — wrote in an essay posted on The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage:Divisions over racial equality were closely related to perceptions of the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol attack. For example, among those who agreed that White people in the United States have advantages based on the color of their skin, 87 percent believed that Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate; among neutrals, 44 percent believed it was legitimate; and among those who disagreed, only 21 percent believed it was legitimate. Seventy percent of people who agreed that White people enjoy advantages considered the events of Jan. 6 to be an insurrection; 26 percent of neutrals described it that way; and only 10 percent who disagreed did so, while 80 percent of this last group called it a protest. And while 70 percent of those who agreed that White people enjoy advantages blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6, only 34 percent of neutrals did, and a mere 9 percent of those who disagreed did.According to experts I asked, Republican elected officials who either affirm Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was corrupt, or refuse to call Trump out, base their stance on a sequence of rationales.Mike McCurry, President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, sees the origin of one rationale in demographic trends:I believe much of the polarization and discord in national politics comes from changing demographics. Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. writes about this in “The End of White Christian America” and I think this is a source of many politico-cultural divisions and plays out in electoral politics. There is an America (“American dream”) that many whites were privileged to know growing up and it now seems to be evaporating or at least becoming subservient to other cultural ideals and norms. So that spurs anxiety and it is translated to the language and posture of politics.McCurry went on:I think otherwise well-meaning G.O.P. senators who flinch when it comes to common sense and serving the common good do so because they have no vocabulary or perspective which allows them to deal with the underlying changes in society. They feel the changes, they know constituents whom they otherwise like who feel the changes, but they cannot figure out how to lower the level of angst.Some maintain that another rationale underpinning submission to the lie is that it is signals loyalty to the larger conservative cause.Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia, pointed out in an email that acceptance of Trump’s false claims gives Republican politicians a way of bridging the gap between a powerful network of donors and elites who back free trade capitalism and the crucial bloc of white working-class voters seeking trade protectionism and continued government funding of Social Security and Medicare:Embracing the Big Lie is an empty approach to populism for a lot of these politicians. It allows them to cast their rivals, and the system itself, as corrupt — to cash in on that widespread sentiment — and to cast themselves as exceptions to the rule. It allows them to portray themselves as allies of “the people,” but without actually changing anything in terms of the policies they advocate for, in terms of how they do business.For those Republicans leaders, al-Gharbi continued, “who are the swamp, or could be reasonably construed as such, it is important to create an apparent distance from ‘the establishment.’ Flirting with the Big Lie is a good way of doing so.”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at Brookings, noted in an email that “fear of electoral retribution from Trump — and from Republican voters — drives Senate G.O.P. reluctance to break with Trump.”The former president, she continued,has succeeded in reshaping the G.O.P. as “his” party. This electoral dynamic applies in spades to Republicans’ unwillingness to challenge Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection — or like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell to back down from their initial criticisms. It seems as if fealty to Trump’s alternative version of the events of Jan. 6 is the litmus test for Republicans.The underlying policy agreements between Republican incumbents and Trump reinforces these straightforward concerns over re-election, in Binder’s view:For all of Trump’s nativist immigration, trade, and “America First” views, he was lock step with Republicans on cutting taxes and regulations and stacking the courts with young conservatives. In that light, certainly while Trump was in office, Senate Republicans held their noses on any anti-democratic behavior and stuck with Trump to secure the policies they craved.Along similar lines, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, observes that Republican elected officials make their calculations based on the goal of political survival:What perhaps looks like collective derangement to many outside the party ranks is really just raw political calculation. The best strategy for regaining Congressional control is to keep Trump and his supporters inside the party tent, and the only way to do that is to go along with his myths in order to get along with him.This approach, Cain continued, “is the path of least political resistance. Trump in 2016 demonstrated that he could win the presidency” while rejecting calls to reach out to minorities, by targeting a constituency that is “predominantly white and 80 percent conservative.” Because of its homogeneity, Cain continued, “the Republican Party is much more unified than the Democrats at the moment.”While there was considerable agreement among the scholars and strategists whom I contacted that Republican politicians consciously develop strategies to deal with what many privately recognize is a lie, there is less agreement on the thinking of Republican voters.Lane Cuthbert, along with his UMass colleague Alex Theodoridis, asked in an op-ed in The Washington Post:How could the “Big Lie” campaign convince so many Republicans that Trump won an election he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of “expressive responding,” a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief.In their own analysis of poll data, Cuthbert and Theodoridis concluded that most Republicans are true believers in Trump’s lie:Apparently, Republicans are reporting a genuine belief that Biden’s election was illegitimate. If anything, a few Republicans may, for social desirability reasons, be using the “I’m not sure” option to hide their true belief that the election was stolen.Al-Gharbi sharply disputes this conclusion:Most Republican voters likely don’t believe in the Big Lie. But many would nonetheless profess to believe it in polls and surveys, and would support politicians who make similar professions, because these professions serve as a sign of defiance against the prevailing elites, they serve as signs of group solidarity and commitment.Poll respondents, he continued,often give the factually wrong answer about empirical matters, not because they don’t know the empirically correct answer, but because they don’t want to give political fodder to their opponents with respect to their preferred policies. And when one takes down the temperature on these political stakes, again, often the differences on ‘the facts’ also disappear.One way to test how much people actually believe something, al-Gharbi wrote, “is to look out for yawning gaps between rhetoric and behaviors.” The fact that roughly 2,500 people participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection suggests that the overwhelming majority of Republicans do not believe the election was stolen no matter what they tell pollsters, in al-Gharbi’s view:If huge shares of the country, 68 percent of G.O.P. voters, plus fair numbers of Independents and nonvoters, literally believed that we were in a moment of existential crisis, and the election had been stolen, and the future was at stake — why is it that only a couple thousand could muster the enthusiasm to show up and protest at the Capitol? In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (i.e. more than 50 million people, roughly 1 out of every 5 adults in the U.S.) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of Jan. 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.Whatever the motivation, Isabel V. Sawhill, a Brookings senior fellow, warned that Republican leaders and voters could be caught in a vicious cycle:There may be a dynamic at work here in which an opportunistic strategy to please the Trump base has solidified that base, making it all the more difficult to take a stance in opposition to “whatever-Trump-wants.” It’s a Catch-22. To change the direction of the country requires staying in power but staying in power requires satisfying a public, a large share of whom has lost faith in our institutions, including the mainstream media and the democratic process.Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, noted in an email that the “big lie” fits into a larger Republican strategy: “In an economically unequal society, it is important for the conservative economic party to use culture war politics to win elections because they are unlikely to win based on their economic agenda.”“There are a number of reasons why some Republican elites who were once anti-Trump became loyal to Trump,” Grumbach continued:First is the threat of being primaried for failing to sufficiently oppose immigration or the Democratic Party, a process that ramped up first in the Gingrich era and then more so during the Tea Party era of the early 2010s. Second is that Republican elites who were once anti-Trump learned that the Republican-aligned network of interest groups and donors — Fox News, titans of extractive and low wage industry, the NRA, evangelical organizations, etc. — would mostly remain intact despite sometimes initially signaling that they would withhold campaign contributions or leave the coalition in opposition to Trump.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, took a different tack, arguing that Republican members of Congress, especially those in the Senate, would like nothing better that to have the “big lie” excised from the contemporary political landscape:I disagree with the premise that many senators buy into the “big lie.” Congressional Republicans’ stance toward the events of Jan. 6 is to move on beyond them. They do not spend time rebuking activists who question the 2020 outcome, but they also do not endorse such views, either. With rare exception, congressional Republicans do not give floor speeches questioning the 2020 elections. They do not demand hearings to investigate election fraud.Instead, Lee argued, “Many Republican voters still support and love Donald Trump, and Republican elected officials want to be able to continue to represent these voters in Washington.” The bottom line, she continued, is thatRepublican elected officials want and need to hold the Republican Party together. In the U.S. two-party system, they see the Republican Party as the only realistic vehicle for contesting Democrats’ control of political offices and for opposing the Biden agenda. They see a focus on the 2020 elections as a distraction from the most important issues of the present: fighting Democrats’ “tax and spend” initiatives and winning back Republican control of Congress in the 2022 midterms.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, argues thatTrump lives by Machiavelli’s famous maxim that fear is a better foundation for loyalty than love. G.O.P. senators don’t fear Trump personally; they fear his followers. Republican politicians are so cowed by Trump’s supporters you can almost hear them moo.Trumpism, Begala wrote in an email, “is more of a cult of personality, which makes fealty to the Dear Leader even more important. How else do you explain 16 G.O.P. senators who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, all refusing to even allow it to be debated in 2022?”Begala compares Senator Mitch McConnell’s views of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — “America’s history is a story of ever-increasing freedom, hope and opportunity for all. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 represents one of this country’s greatest steps forward in that story. Today I am pleased the Senate reaffirmed that our country must continue its progress towards becoming a society in which every person, of every background, can realize the American dream” — to McConnell’s stance now: “This is not a federal issue; it ought to be left to the states.”Republican politicians, in Begala’s assessment,have deluded themselves into thinking that Trump and the Big Lie can work for them. The reality is the opposite: Republican politicians work for Trump and the Big Lie. And they may be powerless to stop it if and when Trump uses it to undermine the 2024 presidential results.It is at this point, Begala continued, “where leadership matters. Trump stokes bigotry, he sows division, his promotes racism, and when other G.O.P. politicians fail to disavow Trump’s divisiveness, they abet it. What a contrast to other Republican leaders in my lifetime.”Like Begala, Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T., was blunt in his analysis:There’s generally a lack of nuance in considering why Republican senators fail to abandon Trump. Whereas Reagan spoke of the 11th Commandment, Trump destroyed it, along with many of the first 10. He is mean and vindictive and speaks to a set of supporters who are willing to take their energy and animus to the polling place in the primaries — or at least, that’s the worry. They are also motivated by racial animus and by Christian millennialism.These voters, according to Stewart,are not a majority of the Republican Party, but they are motivated by fear, and fear is the greatest motivator. Even if a senator doesn’t share those views — and I don’t think most do — they feel they can’t alienate these folks without stoking a fight. Why stoke a fight? Few politicians enter politics looking to be a martyr. Mainstream Republican senators may be overestimating their ability to keep the extremist genie in the bottle, but they have no choice right now, if they intend to continue in office.Philip Bobbitt, a professor of law at Columbia and the University of Texas, argued in an email that Republican acceptance of Trump’s falsehoods is a reflection of the power Trump has over members of the party:It’s the very fact that they know Trump’s claims are ludicrous — that is the point: like other bullies, he amuses himself and solidifies his authority by humiliating people and what can be more humiliating than compelling people to publicly announce their endorsements of something they know and everyone else knows to be false?Thomas Mann, a Brookings senior fellow, made the case in an email that Trump has transformed the Republican Party so that membership now precludes having “a moral sense: honesty, empathy, respect for one’s colleagues, wisdom, institutional loyalty, a willingness to put country ahead of party on existential matters, an openness to changing conditions.”Instead, Mann wrote:The current, Trump-led Republican Party allows no room for such considerations. Representative Liz Cheney’s honest patriotism would be no more welcome among Senate Republicans than House Republicans. Even those current Republican senators whose earlier careers indicated a moral sense — Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, Robert Portman, Ben Sasse, Richard Shelby — have felt obliged to pull their punches in the face of the Big Lie and attempted coup.Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic:In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused into a single entity — one that poses serious threats to the stability of the United States.The unwillingness of Republican leaders to challenge Trump’s relentless lies, for whatever reason — for political survival, for mobilization of whites opposed to minorities, to curry favor, to feign populist sympathies — is as or more consequential than actually believing the lie.If Republican officials and their voters are willing to swallow an enormous and highly consequential untruth for political gain, they have taken a first step toward becoming willing allies in the corrupt manipulation of future elections.In that sense, the “big lie” is a precursor to more dangerous threats — threats that are plausible in ways that less than a decade ago seemed inconceivable. The capitulation to and appeasement of Trump by Republican leaders is actually setting up even worse possibilities than what we’ve lived through so far.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Anti-Trump Republicans Diverge on 2022 Midterms

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      Disaffected conservatives broke with their party to oust a sitting president. Some still hope to have a say in the G.O.P.’s future.For those Republicans who dare to publicly oppose Donald J. Trump, politics can be a lonely place.Both Jeff Flake, the former Senator from Arizona, and Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, landed ambassadorships in the Biden administration, but has anyone heard from the former senator from Tennessee, Bob Corker, lately? As for the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year, the former president has succeeded in pushing them out, or else frightened most of the rest into silence, with the fates of a few others — notably, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming — yet to be written.As for the broader network of disaffected Republican strategists and activists who worked to defeat Trump in 2020, the upcoming midterms are highlighting a conundrum: With Trump not on the ballot, what should they be doing in 2022?Some still hope to change the Republican Party from within, while others have determined that the entire institution has become a danger to American democracy. Many are increasingly frustrated, too, with the direction of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, and have peppered their new allies with advice, both publicly and privately.The result is a Never Trump movement that finds itself splintered as the election season begins, with various groups pursuing their own strategies and no discernible central organizing hub.“I think there’s a fair amount of burnout, to be honest,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of the Republican Party and vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank. Many disaffected Republicans, he added, are “retreating into their cocoons.”The G.O.P.’s congressional leaders, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, have toggled between enabling and resisting Trump to various degrees — leading to competing assessments of whether they should be returned to power.Sarah Longwell, a prominent anti-Trump strategist, described her approach to 2022 as “a little from Column A and a little from Column B.” Her group, the Republican Accountability Project, is planning to raise and spend $40 million to bolster “pro-democracy” Republicans and target candidates who say the 2020 election was stolen.Others have decided to focus on supporting Democrats outright, making the argument that a Republican Party led by Trump must be defeated before it can be rebuilt.“People are taking the fight in different directions, and that’s OK,” said Mike Madrid, a co-founder of the defunct Lincoln Project, which supported Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. “Nobody in the Never Trump movement has any idea how this plays out.”The change agentsChristine Todd Whitman, a former governor of New Jersey, is one of the Never Trumpers who have decided to try boosting centrist Republicans — a vanishing breed in a party still dominated by Trump and his allies.Whitman is a co-chair of States United Democracy Center, a bipartisan effort to counter Trump’s attempts to subvert elections, and an adviser to the Renew America Movement, another anti-Trump group led by Miles Taylor, who wrote an anonymous Op-Ed essay in The New York Times while serving as a Department of Homeland Security official in the Trump administration.“​​I’m a Republican, and so I’m hoping that we’re going to be successful in primaries,” Whitman said in an interview, referring to her fellow centrists. Her hope, she added, was to help elect enough moderate Republicans to “give backbone to some of those who want to stand up and just are so afraid of party leadership.”The Senate, however, where Democrats have a stronger chance of preserving their majority, is a different story. There, she’s working to help Democrats “at least so they can push back against some of the worst, the most egregious things that are going to happen in the House,” she explained. In Arizona, for example, she plans to support Senator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent.Asked if she wants Republicans to win congressional majorities, Whitman said, “If we’re going to see the dominance of the far right, no.”Frustration with DemocratsSeveral anti-Trump Republicans expressed exasperation with the left wing of the Democratic Party, which they believe misunderstands the political moment and too often embraces causes, such as defunding the police, that poll badly with swing voters.“I think there’s a lot of angst out there about the Democrats,” said Charlie Sykes, the founder and editor-at-large at The Bulwark, which has become a congregating ground for anti-Trump commentators and activists.In recent months, Sykes and like-minded conservatives have grown despondent over President Biden’s dismal poll numbers and other issues, such as New York City granting noncitizens the right to vote. They have urged Democrats to return to the middle-of-the-road approach that won them the White House in 2020.Describing his message to Democrats, Sykes said: “We are trying to give you tough love because the next two elections are not going to be decided in Burlington, Vt., or the faculty lounge at Oberlin,” the liberal arts college in Ohio. “The fate of democracy is not going to be decided by the MSNBC green room,” he added.Sykes and others fear Republicans and right-leaning independents who voted for Biden last fall will become similarly disillusioned, and usher Trump’s enablers in Congress back to power in November.“Democrats have been renting their loyalty,” Kabaservice, the Republican historian, said of Republican voters who supported Biden. “They don’t own them.”The inside playMike Duhaime, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Trump, argued that abandoning the G.O.P. is shortsighted. “By walking away from the party, you lose influence on what the party is going to look like,” he said.One point in favor of supporting fellow Republicans is to take advantage of the possibility that voters might sour on Trump, said David Weinman, executive director of An America United, an advocacy group founded by supporters of Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland.“Obviously, Trump still has a stranglehold on the party, but things can change quite quickly in politics, in ways you don’t always expect,” Weinman said.It’s too early to say what sort of Republican Party the G.O.P.’s expected takeover of the House might yield. A large class of new freshman Republicans, some speculated, might dilute the influence of pro-Trump members like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and strengthen more moderate lawmakers.Madrid, the Lincoln Project co-founder, described that view as delusional, however. He favors maintaining Democrats in power until the pro-Trump fervor in the G.O.P. subsides.Wait too long to exorcise Trumpism from the Republican Party, he said, and “it’s going to get harder to dig the tick out of the body.”What to readThe Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers, though it allowed the administration to require health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated. Adam Liptak dissects the ruling.In a blow to Biden’s agenda, Senator Kyrsten Sinema said she opposed making an exception to the filibuster to pass federal voting rights legislation. “While I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” the Arizona Democrat said.The panel investigating the events of Jan. 6 is weighing whether to compel Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, to testify. “Congressional investigators have rarely confronted a situation that carries such hefty stakes for their institution,” Luke Broadwater and Charlie Savage write.The F.B.I. arrested Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, on charges of seditious conspiracy for his involvement in the Capitol riot. It’s the first time that prosecutors have invoked “sedition,” Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman note. Last January, Jennifer Schuessler wrote a helpful explainer on the term.Maggie Haberman reports that the Republican National Committee is preparing to break with the Commission on Presidential Debates.Harry S. Truman gave his first news conference as president in 1945.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesOne more thing …It’s been a tough week for President Biden — soaring inflation, setbacks on voting rights and vaccine mandates, lousy poll numbers, a deepening showdown with Russia.Harry S. Truman could relate.During one particularly difficult stretch of his presidency, in July 1946, Truman unloaded his frustrations in a letter to his mother and sister.“Had the most awful day I’ve ever had Tuesday,” he began. “Saw somebody every fifteen minutes on a different subject, held a Cabinet luncheon and spent two solid hours discussing Palestine and got nowhere. Today’s been almost as bad but not quite.”Several days later, he sent another lament to his wife, Bess, back in his native Missouri. “I still have a number of bills staring me in the face,” Truman began, before going into detail on some of his legislative headaches. “It sure is hell to be President.”Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      The Republican Party Is Succeeding Because We Are Not a True Democracy

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      The Jan. 6 attack would not have happened in a genuine democracy.The attack was the most acute symptom — so far — of the political crisis that Donald Trump incited by refusing to admit defeat in the 2020 election. But the roots of the crisis run deep into the undemocratic features of our constitutional system.The arcane scheme that Mr. Trump’s lawyers hatched to disrupt congressional certification of the vote and perhaps persuade Republican state legislatures to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in states like Pennsylvania was conceivable only because the Electoral College splinters presidential elections into separate contests in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia and skews the totals toward small states. In a simple system of majority rule, Mr. Biden’s thumping margin of more than seven million votes would have been the last word. For that matter, so would Hillary Clinton’s national margin of nearly three million votes in 2016: Mr. Trump would not have had a 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address in which to barricade himself in 2020.Would Mr. Trump’s big lie about election fraud have sent the rioters to the Capitol anyway, even without his lawyers and fixers trying to overturn the results? Maybe. But there would have been no constitutional machinery to jam. And even the big lie received a huge constitutional assist. Thanks to the Electoral College, Mr. Trump could have tied Mr. Biden and forced the election into the House of Representatives by flipping just 43,000 votes in three close states, a gap narrow enough that any number of toxic fables can claim to bridge it.At a more basic level, today’s Republican Party succeeds only because the Electoral College, the Senate and the Supreme Court all tilt in its favor. That system has handed conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that only one Republican has won the presidential popular vote after 1988. A party doesn’t have to persuade majorities that it has the best vision for the country. It only has to persuade a selective minority that the other side is a mortal threat. Its grasp on power may be too tenuous for the party to govern effectively, but it has offered conservatives a fine perch to weaken economic and environmental regulation, appoint conservative judges and launch attacks on the democratic system itself.In a more democratic system, the Republican Party’s extreme elements would have been sent packing long before they stormed the Capitol because they couldn’t muster enough votes to win a national election. Instead, they have perfected minority rule as a path to political success. An antidemocratic system has bred an antidemocratic party. The remedy is to democratize our so-called democracy.James Madison boasted that the Constitution achieved “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity.” Its elaborate political mechanics reflect the elite dislike and mistrust of majority rule that Madison voiced when he wrote, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Madison’s condescension has never gone away. Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most prominent intellectual of the short American Century, reckoned that citizens were ignorant, confused and emotional. Democracy brought “an intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance” to whatever it touched. If Madison and Lippmann could have seen the “QAnon Shaman” break into the Capitol, then meander around like a tourist whose phone has lost its signal, they would have muttered, “This is what democracy looks like.”Democracy receded from the popular imagination during the blandly optimistic decades that followed the Cold War’s end around 1989. American leaders predicted that the world would inevitably come to embrace some combination of elections, capitalism and personal freedom. Serious thinking about what democracy meant, and what could threaten it, seemed more like intellectual history than practical politics. We live in the shipwreck of that unearned optimism.Jan. 6 and the four years before it were a forcible reminder that democracy is a task, not a birthright. Having rediscovered that we must take democracy seriously, we should now put it first in our politics.Majorities of the people, not the Electoral College, should be able to pick the president and decide who controls the House and Senate. All who make their lives in the United States — including the incarcerated, people convicted of felonies and noncitizens — should be allowed to vote.This might sound alarming to inland Republican voters who imagine themselves besieged by a permanent coastal majority. But in a working democracy, there are no permanent majorities or minorities. Forging partnerships in a truly democratic system, inland conservatives would soon find new allies — just not ones determined to break democracy itself.Some of these changes probably require amending the Constitution. Hard changes have come through constitutional amendment before: Shortly before World War I, activists successfully pressed state legislatures to ratify an amendment giving up their power to choose U.S. senators. Maybe we can revive mass movements for amendments, starting with one that would make the amendment process itself more democratic. If the public supports a constitutional amendment to limit money in politics, restrict gerrymandering or enshrine a core abortion right, a committed majority should be able to say what our fundamental law is by popular vote, rather than having to go through the current, complicated process of ratifying amendments through state legislatures or dozens of constitutional conventions.This may sound wild-eyed. But it would not always have. James Wilson, one of the most learned and thoughtful of the Constitution’s framers, believed that as a matter of principle, “the people” may change the Constitution “whenever and however they please. This is a right of which no positive institution can ever deprive them.” Even Madison conceded that if we thought of the Constitution as a national charter rather than a federal arrangement among sovereign states, “the supreme and ultimate authority” would reside with the majority, which had the power to “alter or abolish its established government.” It is hard to deny that, since 1789, the Constitution has become a national charter in the minds of most Americans.Do we really think that establishing fundamental law is too much for us, something only revered (or reviled) ancestors could do? More likely we are afraid of one another and the decisions majorities would make. Thinkers like Madison associated democracy with majority tyranny, but history tells a different story. Even our terribly flawed legacy is rich in examples of majoritarian emancipation: New Deal programs, the Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare. Majorities can change the world for the better, when they have the chance. Giving one another that chance, over and over, is how equals share a country.But are we willing to give, and take, that chance? Maybe more than fearing majority tyranny, we suspect that the country is already too divided and mistrustful to make basic choices together at all. One thing Democrats and Republicans share is the belief that, to save the country, the other side must not be allowed to win. Every election is an existential crisis. In our current political climate, any proposal to democratize the system would immediately be coded as partisan, and half the country would reject it from the start. In such an anxious and suspicious country, the current system can be seen as a kind of peace treaty. Maybe that was what Mr. Biden meant when, just after taking his oath of office two weeks after the Capitol riot, in a Washington guarded by 26,000 troops, he praised “the resilience of our Constitution.”But the Constitution is not keeping the peace; it is fostering crises. Far from being resilient, it is adding to our brittleness.Resilience would come from a shift to more constructive politics. Majorities should be able to choose parties and leaders to improve their everyday lives, starting with child care, family leave, health care and the dignified work that still evades many even at a time when employers are complaining of difficulty hiring workers and there is upward pressure on wages after decades of stagnation. Democracy matters not because there is something magical about 50-percent-plus-one in any given vote but because it gives people the power to decide how they will live together. If we don’t claim that power, the market, a court or a minority government will always be pleased to take it off our hands.Aristotle called democracy “the rule of the poor,” and he was onto something. Democracy, when it works, puts the ultimate political power in the hands of the people who work, worry and wish they could promise their loved ones more than they can. It gives us back a bit of our world.Of course, we must not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Our Constitution deserves to be defended against lies about election fraud and antidemocratic schemes to double down on minority rule. But it also deserves cleareyed efforts to make it better.If Jan. 6 was a symptom of a crisis of democracy, the best answer we can give is more democracy. We might not be capable of that, in which case the future is bleak. But the only way to find out is by trying.Democracy’s vitality is not handed down from on high. It comes from actually ruling and being ruled in turn and learning to live with both. It comes from the constant search for new majorities, new coalitions, new ways to avoid disaster and even make life better. That is how we learn to believe, with Walt Whitman, that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The way to save democracy is to make it more real.Jedediah Britton-Purdy is a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of six books, most recently, “This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth.” His next book, on American democracy, will be published this fall.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Will Trump Undercut a Red Wave?

      by

      Former Senator David Perdue knows how to crash a party. When he announced that he would seek the 2022 Republican nomination for governor in Georgia, challenging the incumbent, Brian Kemp, he did more than enter a primary race. He illustrated the dangers facing the G.O.P. in the coming year.Georgia Republicans are divided over former President Donald Trump and torn between mainstream credibility and the conspiratorial fringe. Mr. Perdue — an ally of Mr. Trump — has made these divisions worse. The beneficiary? The Democrat Stacey Abrams.Republicans worry about internal strife and outlandish messages that turn off swing voters because everything else is going their way. The party did well in last month’s elections. President Biden’s low approval ratings endanger Democrats in Congress, where Republicans must net only five seats in the House and one in the Senate to seize control.Republican strength at the state level gives the party an advantage in drawing new maps of congressional districts, which will amplify their slim lead in the FiveThirtyEight estimate of the congressional generic ballot.Yet history shows how expectations can be thwarted. Republicans have experienced hopeful times before — only to have the moment pass. They believed that disapproval of President Bill Clinton’s conduct would expand their majorities in 1998. They ended up losing five House seats. They believed that Mr. Trump would rally the base to support two incumbent senators during runoffs in Georgia last January. They lost both seats and control of the Senate.Time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasn’t been the Democratic Party. It’s been the Republican Party.Republican victories in the midterms next year are far from preordained. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia may be much harder to replicate elsewhere than it looked on election night. Republican leaders continue to fear Mr. Trump and his supporters, and they are divided over candidate selection, message and agenda. The result is a unique combination of external strength and internal rot: an enthusiastic and combative Republican Party that despite its best efforts may soon acquire power it has done nothing to deserve.It will be hard for the party to appeal to the suburban independents who decide elections, though Mr. Youngkin’s success suggests a path. He is the first Republican elected governor of Virginia in over a decade because of his emphasis on kitchen-table issues like rising prices and school closures. He ignored immigration, encouraged vaccination while opposing government mandates and stayed clear of Mr. Trump during the general election. He focused on parental involvement in education and planted himself firmly in the center-right of the political mainstream. When asked about a Trump rally where the Pledge of Allegiance was recited to a flag supposedly connected to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Youngkin called it “weird and wrong.” One Republican senator joked in private that Mr. Youngkin had figured out how to hold Mr. Trump’s hand — under the table and in the dark.Other candidates won’t be as skilled or as lucky as Mr. Youngkin. Republicans lost winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 because of flawed nominees like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Past may be prologue if Republicans nominate Trump allies whose record or rhetoric are questionable and extreme. Last month, one Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate, Sean Parnell of Pennsylvania, suspended his campaign after he lost a custody battle against his estranged wife. The Trump endorsees Kelly Tshibaka of Alaska and Herschel Walker of Georgia are untested on the campaign trail. In races where Mr. Trump hasn’t yet endorsed, Blake Masters of Arizona, Eric Greitens of Missouri and J.D. Vance of Ohio may secure the MAGA base by forfeiting viability in the general election.Mr. Trump remains the central figure in the G.O.P. Party elites try to ignore him as he spends many days fighting Republicans rather than Democrats and plotting his revenge against the 10 Republican House members who voted for his second impeachment, the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him and the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Mr. Trump targets his enemies with primary challenges, calls for “audits” and “decertification” of the 2020 presidential results and howls at Mitch McConnell for not being “tough.” His imitators within the party are a font of endless infighting and controversy, and they undermine the authority of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Trump would have it no other way.The former president was content to keep a distance in this year’s races for governor. He won’t be so quiet next year — especially if he concludes that a successful midterm is a key step to his restoration to power in 2024. A more visible and vocal Trump has the potential to help Republicans in solid red states but doom them in purple or blue ones. Yet control of the Senate hinges on the results in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — states Mr. Trump lost in 2020.Mr. Youngkin showed that a positive message attuned to middle-class priorities repels Democratic attacks. If Republicans campaign on a unified message that applies conservative principles to inflation, the border, crime, education and health care, they might be able to avoid being tagged as the party of extremism, conspiracy and loyalty to Mr. Trump. Their problem is that they have no such message.Mr. McConnell has reportedly told Senate Republicans that they won’t release an agenda before the midterms. He’s worried that specific proposals are nothing but fodder for Democratic attacks. What should worry him more are rudderless Republican candidates who allow their Democratic opponents to define them negatively — and then, if they still win, take office in January 2023 with no idea what to do.In an ideal world, more Republicans would think seriously about how best to provide individuals and families with the resources necessary to flourish in today’s America. They would spend less time attacking one another and more time offering constructive approaches to inflation and dangerous streets. They would experiment with a ranked-choice primary system that played a role in Mr. Youngkin’s nomination in Virginia and in the law-and-order Democrat Eric Adams’s win in New York City’s mayor’s race. Interested Republicans would declare today that Mr. Trump won’t deter them from seeking the presidency — reminding him that renomination is not guaranteed.But that’s not the world we live in. Republicans appear either unwilling or unable to treat the former president as a figure from the past whose behavior has done the party more harm than good. They take false comfort in the idea that midterm elections are “thermostatic,” the inevitable repudiation, climatic in nature, of the governing party. They assume they will win next year without doing anything of significance. And they may be right.Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the forthcoming “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More