Right-Wing Extremism and Alt-Right

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      An Early Trump Backer’s Message to the Republican Party: Dump Him

      by

      Tom Marino, one of the first members of Congress to support Trump, now says the G.O.P. “has to do whatever it has to do” to get away from him.The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party has always come from the ranks of his own supporters, rather than those who disliked him all along. So it’s significant that one of his earliest backers is coming out swinging against him.In February 2016, when Representative Tom Marino became one of the first Republican members of Congress to endorse Trump, he called the decision “one of my life-changing moments” and hailed the presidential candidate as a fresh voice who was not beholden to Wall Street.At the time, Trump was still locked in a tight nomination battle with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and he was struggling to attract support from elected officials. Marino, a former prosecutor who represented a rural district in northern Pennsylvania, didn’t just endorse him. He was a loud and proud Trump booster who helped steer his campaign in the state and joined his presidential transition team after he won.Trump expressed fondness for Marino and Lou Barletta, a fellow member of Congress and co-chairman of Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania, calling them “thunder and lightning.”As president, Trump tapped Marino to be director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, though Marino withdrew after questions about his record on opioids. He resigned from Congress in 2019 soon after beginning his fifth term, citing recurring kidney problems.During this year’s Republican primary for governor in Pennsylvania, Marino sharply criticized Trump for refusing to endorse Barletta, who lost that race to Doug Mastriano. Now, he is urging his fellow Republicans to move on.“I think the Republican Party has to do whatever it has to do to get away from Trump,” Marino said in an interview. “He certainly, I think, has cost the party losses in this election that we had in November. I’m deeply disappointed in him.”In an unpublished letter that he shared with The New York Times, Marino castigated Trump for “acting like a childish bully” by attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom the former president ripped as “Ron DeSanctimonious” as Republicans began to coalesce around a possible alternative for 2024.To secure his support, Marino wrote, Trump would have had to “grow up and act presidential and refrain from calling potential candidates derogatory names.”Trump, he added, “has thrown several people that were close to him under the bus”; “has no idea what loyalty means”; and “severely lacks character and integrity.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.“I will not support Trump, in fact, I will campaign against him,” Marino’s letter concluded. “Our country deserves a person who is mature, respects others and is honest to lead our nation.”Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Trump keeps sinkingThe evidence that Trump is getting weaker within the Republican Party is mounting by the day, and Marino’s letter is just the latest indicator.“G.O.P. primary voters are moving,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist, nodding to Trump’s worsening poll numbers in hypothetical 2024 matchups. “They are exhausted having to defend his every word and action,” he added, and want “similar policies and fight without all the drama.”Consider the party’s less-than-full-throated reaction to Monday’s big news: the Jan. 6 committee’s call to the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. The panel also issued a damning, 154-page executive summary of its final report, which comes out in full on Wednesday.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary reads. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”Trump responded with typical bluster. “These folks don’t get it that when they come after me,” he posted on Truth Social, “people who love freedom rally around me.”He went on: “It strengthens me. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”There are no signs of that so far. As Maggie Haberman writes in assessing the damage wrought both by the former president’s recent actions and by the committee’s investigation, “Trump is significantly diminished, a shrunken presence on the political landscape.”Two possible presidential contenders — former Vice President Mike Pence and Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas — took the position that Trump had acted recklessly on Jan. 6, though they argued that he should not be criminally prosecuted.In the Senate, Trump also didn’t get much political cover on Monday. Only one Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has endorsed his presidential bid.“The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, told reporters at the Capitol. “Beyond that, I don’t have any immediate observations.”Senator John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said the panel had “interviewed some credible witnesses.” Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, while criticizing what she called a “political process,” said that Trump “bears some responsibility” for the riot.And even in the House — which is still very much Trump country — the reaction was well short of thorough, orchestrated pushback.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House, perhaps mindful that he needs moderate Republicans to support his bid for speaker just as badly as he needs pro-Trump die-hards, said nothing.McCarthy’s lieutenants dutifully attacked the Jan. 6 panel, but there was no phalanx of pro-Trump surrogates holding court for reporters at the Capitol, no point-by-point rebuttal of the committee’s key findings.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who is in charge of Republicans’ message, put out a single tweet calling the Jan. 6 investigation a “partisan charade.” Representative Jim Jordan, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, complained that McCarthy hadn’t been allowed to put his allies on the panel, which he boycotted after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his first two choices. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia went after “communist” Democrats and attacked Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of just two Republicans on the committee, as “crybaby Adam.”More often, Republicans preferred to change the subject to anything else — the year-end spending bill that many on the right oppose, the recent surge of migrants along the border, Twitter’s handling of articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 or the effects of inflation.Trump appeared on a screen during the hearing of the Jan. 6 committee on Monday. A new poll suggested that the panel’s findings had at least some effect on the midterm elections.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesDid the Jan. 6 hearings hurt Trump?Democrats tend to view Republicans’ attitude toward Trump as cynical rather than principled in nature, remembering how a good chunk of the party rallied to his side in early 2021 — then eagerly sought his endorsement in 2022.“If the G.O.P. had won the House by a large margin and taken the Senate on the backs of Trump’s candidates, the reaction to these recent troubles would be very, very different,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama, wrote Tuesday in his Substack newsletter.What this misses, though, is that the Jan. 6 committee — especially its slickly produced prime-time hearings over the summer, which riveted millions of viewers — does seem to have been at least a minor factor in Republicans’ losses this year.One of the few polls to try to isolate the question came out this week. In surveys commissioned by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan watchdog group, 46 percent of voters in five battleground states said that the Jan. 6 hearings were a factor in their decision. And a larger group — 57 percent — said they had been at least some exposure to the hearings.The poll zeroed in on so-called ticket-splitters — Republicans and independents who voted for a Democrat in one race and a Republican in another. In Arizona, 20.9 percent of those ticket-splitters said that Jan. 6 was a top factor in their vote. In Pennsylvania, that number was just 8.5 percent. Those numbers are pretty modest, but every vote counts.When I recently asked Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who worked to defeat election deniers in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, to assess the role democracy played in the midterms, she was cautious.“I do think we’ve just won an important battle and sent a message to Republicans that election denialism and extremism is a loser with swing/independent voters in states that hold the keys to political power,” she said in an email. But it was too soon, she said, to say that American democracy was “out of the woods.”So far, the most potent argument within the base of the Republican Party has not been Trump’s behavior in office, but the increasingly dominant view that his obsession with the 2020 election cost the G.O.P. crucial seats this year.That could be the most powerful anti-Trump argument of all, said John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University: that election denial is a political loser.“All that matters is the interpretation,” Sides said. “If that perception takes root, then it really doesn’t matter what the real reason is.”What to readTop lawmakers in Washington unveiled a sprawling spending package that would keep the government open through next fall after reaching a compromise on billions of dollars in federal spending, Emily Cochrane reports. Congress faces a midnight Friday deadline to fund the government or face a shutdown.The House Ways and Means Committee today is considering the release of Trump’s tax returns. Such a move would risk reprisals from Republicans, Alan Rappeport writes.Congress has proposed $1 billion to help poor countries cope with climate change, a figure that falls significantly short of what President Biden promised, Lisa Friedman reports.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How Will History Remember Jan. 6?

      by

      Far-right groups stockpiling guns and explosives, preparing for a violent overthrow of a government they deem illegitimate. Open antisemitism on the airwaves, expressed by mainstream media figures. Leading politicians openly embracing bigoted, authoritarian leaders abroad who disdain democracy and the rule of law.This might sound like a recap of the last few years in America, but it is actually the forgotten story told in a remarkable new podcast, Ultra, that recounts the shocking tale of how during World War II, Nazi propagandists infiltrated far-right American groups and the America First movement, wormed into the offices of senators and representatives and fomented a plot to overthrow the United States government.“This is a story about politics at the edge,” said the show’s creator and host, Rachel Maddow, in the opening episode. “And a criminal justice system trying, trying, but ill-suited to thwart this kind of danger.”Maddow is, of course, a master storyteller, and never lets the comparisons to today’s troubles get too on the nose. But as I hung on each episode, I couldn’t help think about Jan. 6 and wonder: Will that day and its aftermath be a hinge point in our country’s history? Or a forgotten episode to be plumbed by some podcaster decades from now?When asked about the meaning of contemporary events, historians like to jokingly reply, “Ask me in 100 years.” This week, the committee in the House of Representatives investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot will drop its doorstop-size report, a critical early installment in the historical record. Journalists, historians and activists have already generated much, much more material, and more is still to come.In January, a Republican majority will take over the House and many of its members have pledged to begin their own battery of investigations, including an investigation into the Jan. 6 investigation. What will come from this ouroboros of an inquiry one cannot say, but it cannot help but detract from the quest for accountability for the events of that day.Beyond that, polling ahead of this year’s midterm elections indicated that Americans have other things on their minds, perhaps even more so now that the threat of election deniers winning control over voting in key swing states has receded. But what it means for the story America tells itself about itself is an open question. And in the long run, that might mean more accountability than our current political moment permits.Why do we remember the things we remember, and why do we forget the things we forget? This is not a small question in a time divided by fights over history. We all know the old saying: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But there is another truism that to my mind often countervails: We are always fighting the last war.The story that Maddow’s podcast tells is a doozy. It centers on a German American named George Sylvester Viereck, who was an agent for the Nazi government. Viereck was the focus of a Justice Department investigation into Nazi influence in America in the 1930s. For good reason: Lawmakers helped him in a variety of ways. One senator ran pro-German propaganda articles in magazines under his name that had actually been written by Viereck and would deliver pro-German speeches on the floor of Congress written by officials of the Nazi government. Others would reproduce these speeches and mail them to millions of Americans at taxpayer expense.Viereck also provided moral and financial support to a range of virulently antisemitic and racist organizations across the United States, along with paramilitary groups called the Silver Shirts and the Christian Front. Members of these groups sought to violently overthrow the government of the United States and replace it with a Nazi-style dictatorship.This was front-page news at the time. Investigative reporters dug up scoop after scoop about the politicians involved. Prosecutors brought criminal charges. Big trials were held. But today they are all but forgotten. One leading historian of Congress who was interviewed in the podcast, Nancy Beck Young, said she doubts that more than one or two people in her history department at the University of Houston knew about this scandal.Why was this episode consigned to oblivion? Selective amnesia has always been a critical component of the American experience. Americans are reared on myths that elide the genocide of Indigenous Americans, the central role of slavery in our history, America’s imperial adventures and more. As Susan Sontag put it, “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened.”Our favorite stories are sealed narrative boxes with a clear arc — a heroic journey in which America is the hero. And it’s hard to imagine a narrative more cherished than the one wrought by the countless books, movies and prestige television that remember World War II as a story of American righteousness in the face of a death cult. There was some truth to that story. But that death cult also had adherents here at home who had the ear and the mouthpiece of some of the most powerful senators and representatives.It also had significant support from a broad swath of the American people, most of whom were at best indifferent to the fate of European Jewry, as “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” a documentary series by the filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein that came out in September, does the painful work of showing. A virulent antisemite, Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, hosted by far the biggest radio show in the country. At his peak in the 1930s about 90 million people a week tuned in to hear his diatribes against Jews and communism.In some ways, it is understandable that this moment was treated as an aberration. The America First movement, which provided mainstream cover for extremist groups, evaporated almost instantly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Maybe it was even necessary to forget. When the war was over there was so much to do: rebuild Europe, integrate American servicemen back into society, confront the existential threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Who had the time to litigate who had been wrong about Germany in the 1930s?Even professional historians shied away from this period. Bradley Hart, a historian whose 2018 book “Hitler’s American Friends” unearthed a great deal of this saga, said that despite the wealth of documentary material there was little written about the subject. “This is a really uncomfortable chapter in American history because we want to believe the Second World War was this great moment when America was on the side of democracy and human rights,” Hart told me. “There is this sense that you have to forget certain parts of history in order to move on.”As anyone who has been married for a long time knows, sometimes forgetting is essential to peace. Even countries that have engaged in extensive post-conflict reconciliation processes, like South Africa and Argentina, were inevitably limited by the need to move on. After all, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.The aftermath of Jan. 6 is unfolding almost like a photo negative of the scandal Maddow’s podcast unfurls. With very few exceptions almost everyone involved in the pro-Nazi movement escaped prosecution. A sedition trial devolved into a total debacle that ended with a mistrial. President Harry Truman, a former senator, ultimately helped out his old friend Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a figure in the plot to disseminate Nazi propaganda, by telling the Justice Department to fire the prosecutor who was investigating it.But the major political figures involved paid the ultimate political price: they were turfed out of office by voters.Many of the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 riot, on the other hand, have been brought to justice successfully: Roughly 900 people have been arrested; approximately 470 have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges; around 335 of those charged federally have been convicted and sentenced; more than 250 have been sentenced to prison or home confinement. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge brought in any of these cases. In their report to be released this week, the Jan. 6 committee is expected to recommend further criminal indictments. One big question looming over it all is whether former President Donald Trump will be criminally charged for his role in whipping up the frenzy that led to the assault on the Capitol.A broader political reckoning seems much more distant. Election deniers and defenders of the Jan. 6 mob lost just about every major race in swing states in the 2022 midterms. But roughly 200 Republicans who supported the lie about the 2020 election being stolen won office across the country, The New York Times reported.What larger narrative about America might require us to remember Jan. 6? And what might require us to file it away as an aberration? The historian’s dodge — “ask me in 100 years” — is the only truly safe answer. But if the past is any guide, short-term political expediency may require it to be the latter.After all, it is only now that decades of work by scholars, activists and journalists has placed chattel slavery at the center of the American story rather than its periphery. What are the current battles about critical race theory but an attempt to repackage the sprawling, unfinished fight for civil rights into a tidy story about how Black people got their rights by appealing to the fundamental decency of white people and by simply asking nicely? In this telling, systematic racism ended when Rosa Parks could sit in the front of the bus. Anything that even lightly challenges finality of racial progress is at best an unwelcome rupture in the narrative matrix; at worst it is seen as a treasonous hatred of America.History, after all, is not just what happened. It is the meaning we make out of what happened and the story we tell with that meaning. If we included everything there would be no story. We cannot and will not remember things that have not been fashioned into a story we tell about ourselves, and because we are human, and because change is life, that story will evolve and change as we do.There is no better sign that our interpretation of history is in for revision than the Hollywood treatment. Last week it was reported that Steven Spielberg, our foremost chronicler of heroic World War II tales, plans to collaborate with Maddow to make Ultra into a movie. Perhaps this marks the beginning of a pop culture reconsideration of America’s role in the war, adding nuance that perturbs the accepted heroic narrative.And so I am not so worried about Jan. 6 fading from our consciousness for now. One day, maybe decades, maybe a century, some future Rachel Maddow will pick up the story and weave it more fully into the American fabric, not as an aberration but a continuous thread that runs through our imperfect tapestry. Maybe some future Steven Spielberg will even make it into a movie. I bet it’ll be a blockbuster.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

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      The Ideal of Democracy in a Jewish State Is in Jeopardy

      by

      Israeli elections can be dramatic, and its five elections within four years have been full of political surprises and firsts, including the first time an independent Israeli Arab party joined a governing coalition. This series of new governments and the sometimes tumultuous process of forming them are part of Israel’s proud tradition as a boisterous and pluralistic democracy.Yet the far-right government that will soon take power, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, marks a qualitative and alarming break with all the other governments in Israel’s 75-year history. While Mr. Netanyahu clearly has the support of the Israeli electorate, his coalition’s victory was narrow and cannot be seen as a broad mandate to make concessions to ultrareligious and ultranationalist parties that are putting the ideal of a democratic Jewish state in jeopardy.This board has been a strong supporter of Israel and a two-state solution for many years, and we remain committed to that support. Antisemitism is on the rise around the globe, and at least some of the criticism of Israel is the result of such hatred.Mr. Netanyahu’s government, however, is a significant threat to the future of Israel — its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland. For one, the government’s posture could make it militarily and politically impossible for a two-state solution to ever emerge. Rather than accept this outcome, the Biden administration should do everything it can to express its support for a society governed by equal rights and the rule of law in Israel, as it does in countries all over the world. That would be an act of friendship, consistent with the deep bond between the two nations.Mr. Netanyahu’s comeback as prime minister, a year and a half after he was ousted from office, can’t be divorced from the corruption allegations that have followed him. He is now doing everything he can to stay in power, by catering to the demands of the most extreme elements of Israeli politics. The new cabinet he is forming includes radical far-right parties that have called for, among other things, expanding and legalizing settlements in a way that would effectively render a Palestinian state in the West Bank impossible; changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, an action that risks provoking a new round of Arab-Israeli violence; and undermining the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court, thus freeing the Knesset, the Israeli legislature, to do whatever it wants, with little judicial restraint.Ministers in the new government are set to include figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in Israel in 2007 for incitement to racism and supporting a Jewish terrorist organization. He will probably be minister of national security. Bezalel Smotrich, who has long supported outright annexation of the West Bank, is expected to be named the next finance minister, with additional authority over the administration of the West Bank. For the deputy in the prime minister’s office in charge of Jewish identity, Mr. Netanyahu is expected to name Avi Maoz, who once described himself as a “proud homophobe.”These moves are troubling, and America’s leaders should say so. The Biden administration’s main response so far has been a cautious speech by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the liberal advocacy group J Street on Dec. 4, in which he declared that the United States would deal with Israeli policies, not individuals. The new government has yet to be formed, so it is not surprising that the State Department does not yet have a well-defined position, but the administration has already discussed, according to a report in Axios, how to manage its meetings with the most extreme members of the new cabinet and which core interests to focus on.This approach understates the potential consequences of the shift in Israeli politics that this government represents. The cabinet about to take charge is not simply another iteration of the unstable, shifting alliances that followed the past four inconclusive elections. Those coalitions, like many before them, often included fringe religious or nationalist parties, but they were usually kept in check by more moderate political parties or even by Mr. Netanyahu over the 15 years he served as prime minister.All that is now threatened. Right-wing parties have an absolute majority in the Knesset, and Mr. Netanyahu, hoping that the new government will save him from prosecution and potential prison time, is in their power. Among the targets of the new leaders is the Israeli Supreme Court, which, in the absence of a national constitution, has served to weigh government actions against international law and the Israeli state’s own traditions and values. The nationalists would diminish this authority by voting to give themselves the power to override Supreme Court decisions. Not incidentally, they have also proposed eliminating the law under which Mr. Netanyahu faces a possible prison term.As Thomas L. Friedman, a Times columnist who has closely followed Israeli affairs for four decades, wrote shortly after the election results were known, “We are truly entering a dark tunnel.” While Mr. Netanyahu in the past used the “energy of this illiberal Israeli constituency to win office,” Mr. Friedman wrote, until now, he had never given them this kind of ministerial authority over critical defense and economic portfolios.This is not simply a disappointing turn in an old ally. The relationship between Israel and the United States has long been one that transcends traditional definitions of a military alliance or of diplomatic friendship. A body of deeply shared values has forged powerful and complex bonds. A commitment to Israel, both in its security and in its treatment by the world, has been an unquestioned principle of American foreign and domestic policy for decades, even when Mr. Netanyahu openly defied Barack Obama or embraced Donald Trump. As Mr. Blinken said in his speech, the United States will hold Israel “to the mutual standards we have established in our relationship over the past seven decades.”Israel has been moving steadily rightward in recent years. That is, in part, due to genuine concerns about crime and security, especially after violence between Israeli Arabs and Jews last year. Many Israelis also express fear that the peace process has failed because of a lack of interest in peace among Palestinian leaders, a fear heightened by Hamas control in Gaza since 2007 and a sense that Mahmoud Abbas’s grip on the Palestinian Authority is coming to an end without a clear succession plan.Demographic change in Israel has also shifted the country’s politics. Religious families in Israel tend to have large families and to vote with the right. A recent analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute found that about 60 percent of Jewish Israelis identify as right wing today; among people ages 18 to 24, the number rises to 70 percent. In the Nov. 1 election, the old Labor Party, once the liberal face of Israel’s founders, won only four seats, and the left-wing Meretz won none.Moderating forces in Israeli politics and civil society are already planning energetic resistance to legislation that would curtail the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court or the rights of the Arab minority or the L.G.B.T.Q. community. They deserve support from the American public and from the Biden administration.Whatever the contours of the new Israeli government, the United States will continue to be engaged with it on many issues of shared concern. Negotiations on a new nuclear deal with Iran are all but dead, a situation that poses a threat to security across the region. The Abraham Accords, while not a substitute for peace with the Palestinians, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab nations. That is welcome progress, and the United States could play an important role in helping to expand them to include other countries, such as Saudi Arabia.While Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have long been moribund, the principle of someday achieving two states remains the bedrock of American and Israeli cooperation. Hopes for a Palestinian state have dimmed under the combined pressure of Israeli resistance and Palestinian corruption, ineptitude and internal divisions. Anything that undermines Israel’s democratic ideals — whether outright annexation of Jewish settlements or legalization of illegal settlements and outposts — would undermine the possibility of a two-state solution.America’s support for Israel reflects our two countries’ respect for democratic ideals. President Biden and Mr. Netanyahu should do everything they can to reaffirm that commitment.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

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Lauren Boebert, Far-Right Firebrand, Wins Re-election After Recount

      by

      Ms. Boebert defeated Adam Frisch in Colorado’s Republican-leaning Third District to win a second term in the House.After a recount in a remarkably close race, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, known for heckling President Biden during his State of the Union speech, arming herself on Capitol Hill and ignoring Covid mask rules, won her bid for a second term. Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, announced the results on Monday.Ms. Boebert, 35, staved off a fierce challenge from Adam Frisch, a Democratic businessman and former Aspen, Colo., city councilman, in the state’s Republican-leaning Third District.Mr. Frisch, who faced a deficit of roughly 500 votes out of more than 327,000 cast, gained just two votes in the automatic recount. In the end, Ms. Boebert won with 50.06 percent of the vote, to Mr. Frisch’s 49.89 percent.On Twitter on Sunday, before the recount was made official by the secretary of state, Ms. Boebert said: “Our conservative policies will help all Americans to overcome the challenges we face so each of us has the opportunity to live our very best life. Thank you for entrusting me to help lead the way. I’ll be working every day to prove I can get the job done right.”Mr. Frisch had sought to cast Ms. Boebert as a flamethrower in an increasingly polarized Congress, saying she was focused more on placating the Republican Party’s far-right Trump wing than on reducing inflation and adding jobs.He presented himself in a television ad as not a typical Democrat, saying that he would not vote for Representative Nancy Pelosi for House speaker and that he supported border security. He showed footage of himself hunting with a shotgun.But a disadvantage in name recognition and the makeup of voters in the district proved too much for Mr. Frisch to overcome against Ms. Boebert, who has drawn national attention for her incendiary actions.On Monday evening, he released a statement on his loss. “While we hoped for a different outcome,” Mr. Frisch said, “we defied incredible odds with the closeness of this race.” He added, “I am confident that the coalition of Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters we built throughout this campaign to reject hate and extremism in Southern and Western Colorado will grow into the future.”Along with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a fellow Republican also in her first term, Ms. Boebert brought a no-holds-barred brand of politics to the House, feeding off a social media echo chamber of loyalists who backed former President Donald J. Trump. That has put Ms. Boebert at odds with platforms like Twitter, which temporarily suspended her account after she spread the falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged.Her rhetoric and her style of politics also made her a target of Democrats during the Republican primary, many of whom crossed party lines to support her Republican challenger, driven by fears of her extremism.Ms. Boebert won her seat in Congress in 2020, when she unseated a five-term incumbent in the Republican primary before going on to win the general election. Until then, she had run a gun-themed restaurant in Colorado’s ranch country — the Shooters Grill — where she encouraged staff members to carry firearms and defied restrictions by staying open during the pandemic. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      America’s Toxic Gun Culture Is Invading Our Politics

      by

      .g-seriestitle-wrapper {
      width: 600px;
      margin: 0px auto;
      max-width: 100%;
      font-family: nyt-imperial;
      font-size: 16px;
      color: #696969;
      font-weight: 100;
      font-style: italic;
      line-height: 23px;
      border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
      padding-bottom: 15px;
      }

      section#violentextremism-seriestext {
      margin: 0px auto 15px;
      }

      .g-seriestitle-wrapper a:link, .g-seriestitle-wrapper a:visited {
      color: inherit;
      text-decoration: underline;
      text-decoration-thickness: 1px;
      text-underline-offset: 2px;
      text-decoration-color: #bbb;
      }

      This editorial is the fifth in a series, “The Danger Within,” urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.

      A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.” More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      What Are the Politics of Elon Musk? It’s Complicated.

      by

      Elon Musk has tweeted about political topics regularly since taking over Twitter, often belittling some liberal causes. But what he stands for remains largely unclear.He has called himself an independent and a centrist, yet “economically right of center, maybe.” He has said he was until recently a supporter of only Democrats and voted for President Biden. He’s encouraged people to vote Republican, which he said he did for the first time this year. Last year, he once even declared himself indifferent about politics, saying he’d rather stay out of it altogether.Elon Musk, ever a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies, has long made his politics tricky to pin down. To many of his critics, though, his relentless flurry of tweets in the six weeks since he took over Twitter has exposed his true conservative bent, and intensified their fears that he would make the social network more susceptible to right-wing misinformation.And at times, he’s made it hard to argue with that. He has said he’d welcome former President Donald J. Trump back on Twitter; suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was lying about the attack at their home that left him hospitalized; and reinstated accounts that have trafficked in offensive ethnic stereotypes and bigotry, including for the artist formerly known as Kanye West. (Mr. Musk later suspended Mr. West’s account again after the rapper-entrepreneur posted an image of a swastika.)His copious tweeting has generated huge amounts of attention. In a 24-hour period late this week, he tweeted more than 40 times, often with little rhyme or reason. He criticized the Biden administration’s deal with Russia that freed Brittney Griner, the Women’s National Basketball Association star. He asked Elton John to clarify his complaint about misinformation flourishing unchecked on Twitter. At times, Mr. Musk was acting like Twitter’s in-house customer service representative, boasting about new features and improved functions.And maybe that is a big part of the point — improving the image of his new $44 billion property, which he has said repeatedly is in dire financial straits.Yet Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, continues to defy easy political categorization. His views have been described as libertarian, though these days his politics seem more contrarian than anything else. He is more clear about what he is against than what he is for.It’s true Mr. Musk certainly sounds a lot like a Republican — and, sometimes, a lot like Mr. Trump — with his missives on Twitter against “woke” politics and Covid restrictions, his attacks on “elite” media and his efforts to draw attention to allegations that Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political clout.More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverAn Established Pattern: Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Twitter isn’t the first company that witnessed Elon Musk use those tactics.Rivals Emerge: Sensing an opportunity, new start-ups and other social platforms are racing to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Mr. Musk.The ‘Twitter Files’: Mr. Musk and Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, set off an intense debate with a release of internal Twitter documents regarding a 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Hunter Biden.Hard Fork: The Times podcast looks at Mr. Musk’s two-day clash with Apple, which he had accused of trying to sabotage Twitter before saying the “misunderstanding” had been resolved.But where Mr. Musk has seemed most in line with the G.O.P. of Mr. Trump is in the tenor of his political commentary, which if anything seems more spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right. While he has not been shy about sharing his disdain for many Democrats, his enthusiasm for Republicans has been more muted. He has stressed repeatedly that his problems are with extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.“To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year,” he wrote on Twitter the day before the midterm election. “And I’m open to the idea of voting Democrat again in the future.”As with many people who describe themselves as politically independent now, the hostility Mr. Musk harbors toward Democrats appears to have drawn him closer to the Republican Party over the last few years. He considers himself as part of the “center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh & engage in reasoned debate.”He has eagerly encouraged his followers to weigh in with their views on the country’s culture wars and traded tweets with some of the right’s favorite punching bags, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. When she criticized his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month to have a verified account with one of the social media service’s signature blue check marks — “Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” she wrote — he dismissed her.“Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8,” Mr. Musk shot back.Many of his recent tweets have had that kind of “own the libs” tone, the shorthand on the right for when conservatives think they’ve deftly, often sarcastically, swatted down a liberal. A couple of weeks ago, he posted video on Twitter of a closet full of T-shirts with the slogan “#stay woke” that he said he had found at the social media company’s headquarters. Then he followed up with a tweet that linked to a Justice Department report that undercut one of the central narratives of the mass protests against police brutality: that Michael Brown, a Black teenager killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo., had his hands raised when a white officer shot him.On occasion, his remarks have raised concerns that he has planted himself firmly among right-wing conspiracy theorists. When he tweeted about the attack on Ms. Pelosi’s husband, he shared the unfounded claim that there was “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He later deleted the tweet, which linked to an article from a fringe website.He also said he would support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president in 2024, though his endorsement was not especially resounding. He merely replied “Yes” when someone on Twitter asked him. Mr. DeSantis, a hard-line conservative, would be an odd choice for someone who professes to want centrist governance in Washington.Mr. Musk has always claimed his concerns with Twitter’s previous management were about the ability of a small group of the company’s employees whom he described as “far left” to censor content. And over the past week, he has cheered on tweets about internal communications before he took over. The communications, which were given to two writers who have posted their findings on Twitter, calling them the Twitter Files, showed how the company went about deciding what information got suppressed.It’s been a mixed bag of revelations. Some showed how Twitter employees made it harder to see tweets from a Stanford University professor who warned about how Covid lockdowns could harm children — a view many public health experts have come around to accept well after the fact. Other documents show how more conventional, conspiracy-theory-embracing conservatives were shut down, like Dan Bongino, the radio host who was one of the biggest amplifiers of lies about the 2020 election.Mr. Musk has not professed to have any profound attachment to Republican policies, though, which is consistent with his posture before taking over Twitter.He has been highly critical of climate change deniers and said he’s proud of how Tesla forced the rest of the automobile industry to embrace electric vehicles. In 2020, he revealed that he’d spoken to Mr. Trump numerous times about the importance of developing sustainable energy, which the former president dismissed in favor of traditional fossil fuel-based sources. And Mr. Musk quit Mr. Trump’s business councils after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate accord.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, he described his politics as “middle-of-the-road.” “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.”His political giving supports that claim. According to the Federal Election Commission, which reports spending in federal but not state races, he has donated just shy of $1 million since 2003 to candidates as conservative as former President George W. Bush and as liberal as Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. More recently, in 2020, he donated to senators of both political parties — including Chris Coons and Gary Peters, both Democrats, and Susan Collins and John Cornyn, both Republicans.Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy. He’s criticized the Biden administration, for instance, as “not the friendliest” and for excluding Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, from a White House summit on zero-emission vehicles in August 2021. His speculation on the reason for the exclusion: General Motors and the other car companies invited are union companies; Tesla is not. “Seems to be controlled by unions,” he complained at the time.Many of the views he has espoused on Twitter over the last two years have become popular in today’s Republican Party but are hardly exclusive to card-carrying Republicans. His criticism of progressives he views as overly censorious and sanctimonious is a sentiment many on the left have expressed. And his public condemnation of strict Covid containment measures in 2020 channeled what would become a growing skepticism of widespread public health restrictions. Though he was more exercised about them than most. “Fascist,” he once declared.Often, his tweets can seem to imply he leans in one direction when it’s just as likely that he is trying to court controversy. How to interpret, for instance, a post last week of what he said was an image of his bedside table? It had a revolver on it and a musket in a wooden case decorated with an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.“Greetings, I’m Musket, Elon Musket,” he wrote.A few days later, he sounded pleased with himself as he remarked on the way Twitter had changed since his purchase was completed in October. “So many interesting posts on Twitter these days!” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Is Unraveling Before Our Eyes, but Will It Matter?

      by

      In the weeks immediately surrounding the midterm elections, Donald Trump called for the “termination” of constitutional rule, openly embraced the conspiratorial QAnon movement, pledged support for the Jan. 6 rioters and hosted, over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, the white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes and Ye (once known as Kanye West), both of whom are prominent antisemites.Does every step Trump takes off the deep end make him a greater liability for the Republican Party, potentially leading to a second Biden term, the loss of the party’s precarious control of the House and an across-the-board weakening of Republican candidates up and down the ticket — from the U.S. Senate to local school boards?Will Trump’s wrecking ball bid for the presidency fracture his party? Will Trump’s extremism prompt the mainstream right — Mitch McConnell, Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Nikki Haley and all the rest — to rise up in revolt? How are the worsening intraparty fissures likely to play out over the next two years?Most of the strategists and scholars to whom I posed these questions outlined scenarios in which a Trump candidacy is mainly helpful to the Democratic Party and its candidates. They often cited the hurdles confronting those seeking to nominate a more mainstream candidate.“The Republican Party faces a lose-lose proposition as long as Trump is politically active,” Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote by email in response to my inquiry.“If Trump succeeds in getting the nomination again, it would seem that his brand is so damaged among Independents and some Republicans that he will be unelectable,” Wattenberg continued. “And if Trump loses his nomination fight, it seems highly likely that he will charge that he is a victim of voter fraud and damage the legitimacy of the Republican nominee.”If that were not enough to satisfy Trump’s thirst for vengeance, Wattenberg suggested that “it is certainly conceivable that he would mount an independent candidacy and split some of the Republican vote. Continuing his fight as an independent would enable him to continue to raise big sums of money and attract the attention that he so intently craves. All in all, it could well be a disaster for the G.O.P.”While Trump has suffered setbacks on both the political and the legal front, no one I contacted suggested that he should be counted out in the 2024 nomination fight. Instead, just as was the case in 2016, the most favorable situation in 2024 for Trump would be a multicandidate field, as opposed to a single opponent who could consolidate those opposed to him.“It is hard to see President Trump getting more votes in 2024 than he did in the 2020 general election,” Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, said by email:Still, if he has 16 primary election opponents like he did in 2016, his name recognition and loyal base will give him real advantages in securing the nomination. He will get 30-40 percent of every vote, leaving the other 15 candidates to split the remaining 60-70 percent. Unless someone like DeSantis can clear the others out quickly, Trump will maintain an advantage.The split in the Republican Party, Lupia continued,has been brewing for several decades. The Tea Party is a focal point and a precursor to the current populist movement. The evolving split within the G.O.P. represents a divide between people who believe in government but want to run it according to conservative principles and an approach that increasingly questions the legitimacy of government itself.Lupia argued that “Despite that split, there is little or no chance that either faction will split off into a third party”:The rules of the American electoral system are stacked against third parties at nearly every turn. The fact that the U.S.A. elects nearly all members of Congress and state legislatures from single-member districts makes it difficult for third parties to win elections. To have viable third parties, you typically need legislators elected from multi-member districts (imagine that your Congressional district sent the top three vote getters to Congress instead of just one).While exploring various scenarios, Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, warned that there was a substantial chance that unanticipated and unpredictable developments would radically change the course of politics over the next two years and beyond:I think we should consider the likelihood of something very different. Suppose for instance it turns out that DeSantis cannot attract G.O.P. primary election voters and is just another bland Scott Walker. What then? The aftermath would be hard to imagine.Instead, Erikson wrote by email,We should steel ourselves for the possibility that the G.O.P. future turns out like nothing like we imagine today. The same is true regarding the Democrats’ presidential nominee if Biden does retire before 2024. That outcome might be something we could not imagine today. Trump critics have continually predicted that his latest outrage would be his downfall. Not even Jan. 6 caused a revolt within the G.O.P. G.O.P. leaders are too fearful of Trump’s baseBut, Erikson argued,If the fall comes, it could be swift and decisive. The template is the fate of Joe McCarthy. He seemed invincible, with the full support of elements of the American right. Then, following Joseph Welch’s condemnation in his “Have you no sense of decency?” speech, McCarthy was defeated, and swiftly. The circumstances of McCarthy’s downfall may seem hard to believe today. But this is what can happen to a bully when they do lose their power of intimidation.I asked Erikson and others how serious the current divisions within the Republican Party are.“The fissures in the Republican Party are larger than usual, but still comparable to those that regularly occur in American political parties,” he replied, but “compared to the realignment of the parties in the civil-rights era, the current conflict in the Republican Party is mild.”Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, sees some potential for destructive intraparty conflict:Republicans have a real dilemma, because they can’t win without the MAGA faction and are having a hard time winning with it. It comprises at least half the party so they have no choice but to try to keep it in the fold. I think they will succeed; opposition to Biden and the Democrats unites them for the time being at least.Would the defeat of Trump in the primaries by DeSantis, Youngkin or another candidate provoke a damaging schism in the general election?Jacobson replied by email:Depends on how Trump reacts if he is denied the nomination. If it comes about because of his legal difficulties or because he appears to be increasingly off the rails (e.g., demanding we ignore laws and the Constitution to put him back in the White House NOW), then the MAGA faction may look to a DeSantis (if not Youngkin) to take up their banner. If it is an all-out battle through the primaries, then whoever backs the losing side might be disinclined to show up in 2024.But, Jacobson cautioned, “Never underestimate the motivating force of negative partisanship; you really have to hate Democrats and want your party in power to show up and vote for someone with Herschel Walker’s character, but the vast majority of Georgia Republicans” did so.Trump, Jacobson wrote,is still very popular in the party at about 75 percent favorable in the recent Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac polls. I think if the nomination took place now, he would certainly be the winner. But given his legal jeopardy and recent behavior that seems even more self-destructive than usual, on top of his damage to the Republican cause in 2022, I think Republican leaders and conservative pundits will be making every effort to keep him off the ticket to avoid losing again in 2024.A key question, according to Jacobson, is whether Trump’spursuit of self-preservation leads him to back away from the crazy tweets and wacko supporters or to embrace them even further. If the former, non-MAGA Republicans may treat him as they always have. If the latter, he will put them in a real bind. They’ve shown a capacity to put up with a lot over the years, but the combination of losing winnable elections and the constant humiliation of having to answer, or duck answering, for Trump’s latest folly may finally turn them openly against him. If he fights back as hard as he is capable of, the party will split.Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesI posed the same question to all those I queried for today’s column:Is it possible to quantify the size of the extremist vote in the Republican primary electorate? By this, I mean not only active supporters of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, QAnon etc., but also the presumably larger constituency of those who sympathize with the aims of these groups — those with high levels of racial hostility that they want to see expressed in the political system, and those who are particularly fearful that they will be, or already have been, displaced from their position of status?Only Jacobson offered an answer:I took a quick look at some survey data I’ve been gathering over the past two years. One set of questions (27 surveys) ask if people approve of or support or have a favorable opinion of the people who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. The results are quite consistent regardless of how the question is framed, with no trend over the two years: An average of 25 percent of Republicans have positive things to say about insurrectionists.Another question, asked 20 times by the Economist/YouGov poll in between August and December 2021: “How likely or unlikely do you think it is that Donald Trump will be reinstated as President before the end of 2021? An average of 22 percent of Republicans said it was very or somewhat likely that he would be reinstated. Finally, 20 percent of Republicans responding to an April 2022 Economist/YouGov poll said it was definitely true that “Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”My estimate is thus 20-25 percent of the Republican electorate can be considered extremists.The continued polarization of the two parties, especially at the extreme left and right, creates complex interactions within each party and between each party.Trump, according to David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, transformed the political environment in ways that have made it difficult, if not impossible, for other prominent Republicans to renounce some of the more extreme groups:The reason Republican politicians are often reluctant to explicitly separate themselves from the Proud Boys, QAnon, or other groups on the right-most fringe isn’t that those groups cast a lot of votes in either Republican primaries or general elections. It’s that denouncing those groups would make a candidate sound like a liberal, or at least like someone who buckles under pressure from liberals.Trump, Hopkins notes, “became a hero to Republican voters not just by adopting conservative policy positions, but also by refusing to make rhetorical concessions to Democrats, journalists, and other perennial conservative nemeses.”Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, contended in an email thatThe Republican Party is in the midst of an identity crisis. Traditional Republicans who push national defense, support for NATO and economic stability are fighting against insurgents who oppose these core tenets of the Republican brand. To these insurgents, isolationism and protectionism are the new mantra.In this struggle for the power to set the agenda in the House of Representatives, Westwood argued, the Republicans’ mediocre performance in the 2022 midterm elections empowered the party’s right wing:The great irony is that the defeat of the red wave gave more power to the extremes of the Republican Party. Had the red wave reshaped Congress, Republicans would have had a strong majority and could have governed with a more traditional policy platform, but because their margin of control is so narrow the new Speaker has no choice but to try to appease the Freedom Caucus and other extremes.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, suggested that Republican Party leaders could make a concerted effort to block a Trump nomination, but it might take more fortitude than they have exhibited in the past. “This is one plausible resolution: first and foremost, if Republicans are thinking rationally and give highest priority to winning, they should see that Biden would defeat Trump in 2024 since he did so in 2020,” Shapiro wrote, “and since then Trump has been damaged by Jan. 6 and other investigations, and election deniers got trounced in 2022. DeSantis has been polling better than Trump against Biden and Youngkin probably would too.”One crucial but politically difficult step party leaders could take would be to unite behind — and endorse — a single candidate while pressuring the others to withdraw and, in Shapiro’s words, leave “only one such candidate opposing Trump in the primaries — otherwise multiple candidates would split the vote and Trump would be the party candidate, as happened in 2016.”Eric Groenendyk — a political scientist at the University of Memphis and a co-author of “Intraparty Polarization in American Politics” with Michael Sances and Kirill Zhirkov, political scientists at Temple University and the University of Virginia — wrote me by email:As party elites polarize, extreme partisans have reason to like it and identify more closely with their party, but not all partisans feel this way. Less extreme partisans have reason to like their party less. The part that is often overlooked is that these less extreme partisans also have reason to like the other party less, since that party is also moving away from them. If these less extreme partisans perceive both parties to be moving away from them at the same rate, they will still be closer to their own party, forcing the less extreme voters to adopt a ‘lesser of two evils’ justification for sticking with their party. And even if the other party is not moving away from the less extreme voters at the same rate, rehearsing negative thoughts about that party will also help them to rationalize sticking with their own party.This, in Groenendyk’s view,seems to be where many Republicans are stuck today. They are frustrated with the Trump wing of the party, but they can’t stomach voting for Democrats. The key point is that this shared hatred for Democrats is what’s holding their coalition together.Most of those I contacted downplayed the possibility that Trump would run as a third-party candidate if he were rejected as the Republican nominee, citing his aversion to losing and the logistical and financial difficulties of setting up a third party bid. Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, disagreed.I asked Hetherington: “If a DeSantis or Youngkin were to defeat Trump for the nomination, would either of them alienate Trump’s supporters, or could either one keep those voters in the tent?”Hetherington replied, “As long as Trump doesn’t run as a third-party candidate or actively tell his supporters to stay home, I suspect they’ll still vote Republican. What motivates them is their hatred of the Democrats.”But, Hetherington wrote, “There is every reason to think that Trump might actually do those things” — tell his loyalists to stay home on Election Day or run as a third-party candidate — “if he’s not the nominee”:If he has proven anything over the years, it is that Trump cares about Trump. In deciding to contest the 2020 vote, he asked “What do I have to lose?” He didn’t think at all about what the country had to lose. If he thinks he benefits from splitting the party — even if doing so just makes him feel better because he gets to settle an old score — then he’ll do it.Westwood noted that “it is not clear what power Trump will have to fight with if he doesn’t get the nomination in 2024, especially if he happens to be in a prison cell, which is increasingly likely.”In fact, however, conviction and imprisonment would not, under the Constitution, preclude a Trump candidacy and might in fact provide additional motivation, both for him and his most zealous supporters. Zijia Song, a reporter at Bloomberg, laid out the possible criminal charges Trump could face on Nov. 15 and then posed the question, “Could any of this disqualify him as a presidential candidate?”Her answer:Broadly speaking, no. Article II of the US Constitution, which lays out qualifications for the presidency, says nothing about criminal accusations or convictions. Trump opponents see two possible avenues to challenging his eligibility, however. One is a federal law barring the removal or destruction of government records: It says anyone convicted of the offense is disqualified from federal office. This could conceivably apply to Trump if — and this is a big if — he’s charged and convicted for taking classified documents from the White House. The other is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which says that nobody can hold a seat in Congress, or “any office, civil or military,” if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”Which gets to the larger question that supersedes all the ins and outs of the maneuvering over the Republican presidential nomination and the future of the party.How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point at which there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills, a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward, and who, without remorse, continuously undermines American democracy?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

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Netanyahu Coalition Roils Israel Before Government Is Formed

      by

      Efforts by Benjamin Netanyahu to appease his extremist coalition partners have been met with a backlash from Israeli liberals.JERUSALEM — First he agreed to hand control over Israel’s internal security to an ultranationalist. Then he pledged to give a party that opposes gay rights and liberal values wide powers over some programs taught in public schools. Finally, he promised a religious party that seeks to annex the West Bank authority over much of daily life in the occupied territories.The backlash against efforts by Israel’s prime minister-designate, Benjamin Netanyahu, to form a new right-wing government has been swift, with liberal Israeli critics and even many conservatives saying that he is undermining the country’s democratic values.While Mr. Netanyahu is returning to power in a position of strength after the Nov. 1 election — his right-wing and religious alliance won 64 seats, a majority in the 120-seat Parliament — his path back has been far from smooth as he maneuvers the political land mines that come with working with his new allies.He has caused an uproar within the school system after last week promising Avi Maoz, the leader of the far-right Noam party who promotes policies that critics describe as homophobic, racist and misogynist, authority over extracurricular content and enrichment programs in the state school system. Within days, hundreds of teachers and hundreds of school principals, as well as dozens of city mayors and local councils publicly pledged to ignore any dictates from Mr. Maoz and to preserve the spirit of pluralism in their classrooms.Israeli soldiers in October on guard at a bus stop south of the West Bank city of Nablus with far-right election posters. Experts say Mr. Netanyahu will have to consider how much to rein in far-right coalition partners.Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInitial agreements with other potential coalition partners have also been contentious, underlining what the emerging government’s opponents describe as a struggle ahead to preserve the country’s liberal democracy, its independent judiciary and the status quo in matters of state and religion.Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is returning to office after more than a year in the opposition even as he is standing trial on corruption charges. Accusing the departing government of seeking to foster a rebellion against the incoming one, he has tried to reassure his domestic and international audiences that he alone will be responsible for his government’s policies.But despite his strong position in the new Parliament, experts say Mr. Netanyahu has been weakened by his legal troubles, leaving open the question of how much he will want to rein in his ultranationalist or ultra-Orthodox coalition partners.“On one side is what is good for the country,” said Reuven Hazan, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “and there is what is good for him on the other.”“Netanyahu might now be willing to consider things that are not in the country’s interest if they help him survive politically,” Professor Hazan said. “His partners know that and realize they can squeeze more from him.”What to Know About Israel’s Latest ElectionThe country held its fifth election in less than four years on Nov. 1.Netanyahu’s Return: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s opposition leader, is set to return to power with a new, far-right coalition that will once again make him prime minister.The Far Right’s Rise: To win the election, Mr. Netanyahu and his far-right allies harnessed perceived threats to Israel’s Jewish identity.What’s Next for the Left?: After a near wipeout, the leaders of Israel’s left-leaning parties say they need to change — but disagree on how.Worries Among Palestinians: To some Palestinians, the rise of Israel’s far right can scarcely make things worse. But many fear a surge of violence.The first deal that Mr. Netanyahu reached, with Itamar Ben-Gvir of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, would make Mr. Ben-Gvir minister of national security with oversight over the police and with the newly expanded authority to control additional forces, including the Border Police unit that operates in the occupied West Bank.Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, would have oversight over the police under the deal to make him minister of national security.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesThat led the departing defense minister, Benny Gantz, a centrist and a former army chief, to declare that the expanded powers “stemmed, in the best case, from a lack of understanding” of national security and “in the worst case, from a desire to establish a private militia for Ben-Gvir.”Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party, which ultimately seeks to annex the West Bank, has been promised control over the Defense Ministry agencies dealing with the construction of Jewish settlements and Palestinian and Israeli civilian life in the occupied territories. That would mean a division of powers with the future defense minister, which a former military spokesman, Ronen Manelis, said would lead to “chaos.”Professor Hazan said that the coalition promises should be treated for now as “conjecture,” and that it would not be unusual for there to be a gap between the written agreements and what happens in reality as the negotiations over the coalition makeup continue.Mr. Netanyahu has dismissed his critics as fear-mongers who do not accept the outcome of the election.Defending his actions, he wrote on Facebook on Friday: “I was elected to lead the state of Israel and I intend to do so on your behalf and in the spirit of the national and democratic principles on which I was raised in my father’s home and that have guided me my whole life.”Bezalel Smotrich, center, the leader of the Religious Zionism party, has been promised control over the Defense Ministry agencies dealing with the construction of Jewish settlements and Palestinian and Israeli civilian life in the occupied territories.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesIn another post on Monday, he wrote, “Over 20 years, I have responsibly led the state of Israel forward in all spheres, and I will also do so this time.”But Professor Hazan said that Mr. Netanyahu would be constrained by the fact that it will be difficult to rein in his far-right and religious allies by threatening to seek alternative coalition partners because other Israeli parties have refused to be part of a government with a prime minister under indictment.Mr. Netanyahu still has until Sunday to form a government, and he can request a 14-day extension. Laws must be changed to accommodate the shifting of responsibilities between ministries he has proposed. More thorny issues on the agenda include measures to curb the power of the Supreme Court and a new military draft law that will satisfy the ultra-Orthodox parties’ demands for broad exemption from service for Torah students.But Mr. Netanyahu’s future coalition partners have already been stirring up problems for him. Mr. Ben-Gvir publicly sided with soldiers who had been disciplined for physically and verbally abusing left-wing activists who were visiting the volatile West Bank city of Hebron, leading to a high-decibel dispute between senior officers, the departing government and the incoming one over the politicization of the army.Marching in the Pride parade in Jerusalem in June. Avi Maoz, the leader of the Noam party, has said he would cancel the event.Ariel Schalit/Associated PressMr. Maoz, who is expected to head an authority for national Jewish identity as a deputy minister in the prime minister’s office, and who opposes women serving in the army, told a small, religious publication last week that he intended to work to cancel the annual gay pride parade in Jerusalem, which he described as “an obscene abomination,” forcing Mr. Netanyahu to reiterate his commitment to protect gay rights.The largest outcry, however, has been over the plan to give Mr. Maoz the authority to approve or expunge external content programs from the list currently offered to Israeli schools, even though his party, Noam, which ran on a joint slate with Religious Zionism and Mr. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power, later broke with them, and only has one seat in Parliament.Yair Lapid, the departing centrist prime minister, wrote a letter to the heads of local authorities telling them not to cooperate with Mr. Maoz’s unit and to exercise their right to decide what content enters their schools.Dozens of City Council heads, including some from Mr. Netanyahu’s own party, Likud, said they would pay for any school programs promoting pluralism that Mr. Maoz canceled.“No party has exclusivity over Judaism, just as no party has exclusivity over pluralism,” Tzvika Brot, the mayor of Bat Yam, a Likud stronghold, wrote on Twitter, adding that the city would continue to educate its children in the spirit of “pluralism and acceptance of the other.”Children returning from school in Tiberias, Israel, last year. There has been widespread outcry over plans to give Mr. Maoz the authority to approve or expunge external content programs from the list offered to Israeli schools.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesMr. Maoz responded with a televised statement on Monday, saying: “This is a campaign by the minority that lost the election against the majority of the people who spoke clearly at the ballot boxes. This campaign is nothing short of sedition.”Some of his opponents said the deal was a wake-up call for liberal Israelis.“It made people understand that you can’t be indifferent,” said Orly Erez Likhovski, the executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center, a rights group of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism, which runs school programs promoting pluralism.“It even woke up mayors on the right who believe in liberal values,” she said. “It drew a line between the liberals and the zealots.” More