Jonathan Chait: House Republicans Purge Liz Cheney and Join Trump’s War on Democracy

Trump and conservative media have not stopped promoting his election lies. The scale of his success is astonishing. Seventy percent of Republicans believe Trump legitimately won the election; of those who believe this, a Republican poll found, half attribute Joe Biden’s stolen election in whole or in part to hacked vote-tabulation machines. Another poll, asking Trump supporters what happened on January 6, found three-fifths blamed antifa.

Virtually the entire party has tried to co-opt Trump’s lies by diverting the effort into voter-suppression bills premised on his fantasies. Almost none of them will admit Joe Biden legitimately won the election. Instead they will concede he simply is the president right now and immediately change the subject. Asked if Biden is the legitimate president, Representative Jim Banks said only, “Yes, Joe Biden was elected. He was inaugurated.” Asked the same question, Representative Elise Stefanik, Cheney’s replacement, replied, “President Biden is president and the focus is on defeating his radical agenda.”

Convenient as it may be to focus on questions that poll better, there’s no avoiding the democracy question in the Republican Party. Cheney has decided to oppose Trump’s authoritarianism. Her party’s leadership has decided to abet it. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/republicans-purge-cheney-and-join-trumps-war-on-democracy.html

Chauncey DeVega: Why the Republicans' Big Lie works so well: A sociopathic party, and a damaged country

What can be done to counter the Republican Party and Trump movement's powerful weaponization of lies against American democracy and a healthy society? This new post-Trump world, in which neofascism is not a hypothetical possibility but is ascendant and growing in power, requires pro-democracy forces to adopt new ways of thinking.

Democrats, the news media and the American people need to accept that when Republicans, Trumpists and their allies and followers lie it is not a miscommunication, an error, a misunderstanding, a moment of confusion or honest disagreement about questions of public policy and politics. When Republicans and other members of the right lie, it is a weapon — and part of a determined strategy to undermine democracy and reality itself.

Democrats and the media also need to accept and understand that today's Republican Party and right-wing movement are not engaged in "normal politics," where the rules and norms of a healthy, functioning democracy are respected by all sides, where there is give-and-take, honest negotiation and then final compromise in the service of the public interest.

Ultimately, the struggle for American democracy in the Age of Trump and beyond is existential. It will be decided around basic questions of what is true and what is not — and the public's willingness to know the difference and then act accordingly. Based on the historic power of the Big Lie, the forces of democracy are fighting at a great disadvantage. https://www.salon.com/2021/05/18/why-the-republicans-big-lie-works-so-well-a-sociopathic-party-and-a-damaged-country/

Maureen Dowd: Liz Cheney and the Big Lie

I miss torturing Liz Cheney.

But it must be said that the petite blonde from Wyoming suddenly seems like a Valkyrie amid halflings.

She is willing to sacrifice her leadership post — and risk her political career — to continue calling out Donald Trump’s Big Lie. She has decided that, if the price of her job is being as unctuous to Trump as Kevin McCarthy is, it isn’t worth it, because McCarthy is totally disgracing himself.

That trademark Cheney bluntness made Liz the toast of MSNBC and CNN, where chatterers praised her as an avatar of the venerable “fact-based” Republican Party decimated by Trump.

But if Liz Cheney wants to be in the business of speaking truth to power, she’s going to have to dig a little deeper.

Let’s acknowledge who created the template for Trump’s Big Lie.

It was her father, Dick Cheney, whose Big Lie about the Iraq war led to the worst mistake in the history of American foreign policy. Liz, who was the captain of her high school cheerleading team and titled her college thesis “The Evolution of Presidential War Powers,” cheered on her dad as he spread fear, propaganda and warped intelligence.

In her Post piece, Cheney wrote that her party is at a “turning point” and that Republicans “must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

Sage prose from someone who was a lieutenant to her father when he assaulted checks and balances, shredding America’s Constitution even as he imposed one on Iraq.

Because of 9/11, Dick Cheney thought he could suspend the Constitution, attack nations preemptively and trample civil liberties in the name of the war on terror. (And for his own political survival.)

Keeping Americans afraid was a small price to pay for engorging executive power, which the former Nixon and Ford aide thought had been watered down too much after Watergate.

Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it’s done. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/opinion/liz-cheney-donald-trump.html

Eli Merritt: Trump’s place in history? He is the supreme American demagogue

Donald Trump’s tear across the democratic and constitutional landscape of America is not over. The latest collateral damage of his lies and attacks is the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position as House Republican Conference chair. The Republican caucus threw her out because she dares to speak the truth about Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Trump is not going away. The Republican leaders who have disregarded the truth to enable him should know what future historians are going to say about the former president — and them, by association. He will be showcased for decades to come as the greatest symbol of American demagoguery of all time. Compared with Trump, demagogues like Huey Long and Joseph McCarthy will become footnotes.

There is little unique about Trump’s methods — which mirror those used by other demagogues — but he has been able to deploy them all in the most powerful office in the world. A personality cult, anti-democratic consolidation of power, populist lies, ceaseless attack on critics, and support for white supremacy are part of the formula Trump employed to gain the presidency and secure near-total control of the Republican Party.

Trump’s fate in history is to become the superstar in a cast of dishonored political figures. He will be remembered as the first full-blown demagogue in the White House, one who incited seditious violence on the U.S. Capitol — and for little else. Over time, Democrats and Republicans will unite in this historical understanding of Trump, just as they have long since reached consensus about Democrat Huey Long and Republican Joseph McCarthy.

The judgment of Trump will not be a partisan matter. If Republican leaders care about how history will judge them, they need to join Cheney in the determined fight to put truth and the health of our democracy above party and power. In the long arc of history, truth always wins over demagoguery. Donald Trump’s tear across the democratic and constitutional landscape of America is not over. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-05-12/donald-trump-demagogues-american-history

Max Boot: There are no Marjorie Taylor Greenes in the Democratic Party

There is no clearer indication of the gulf between the two parties than the confrontation last week between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a star of the left who is known as AOC, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a star of the right who is known as MTG. Last Wednesday, two Post reporters observed Greene accosting Ocasio-Cortez as the latter was exiting the House chamber. Greene was badgering Ocasio-Cortez, loudly demanding, “Why do you support terrorists and antifa?” (Short answer: She doesn’t.) Greene came across as a creepy stalker; Ocasio-Cortez as a grownup who refused to engage.

This is only the latest example of Greene harassing Ocasio-Cortez. CNN uncovered a video from February 2019 showing Greene and some of her friends — including a man who would later enter the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection — taunting Ocasio-Cortez from outside her office door. “We’re going to go see, we’re going to visit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Crazy eyes. Crazy eyes. Nutty. Cortez," Greene says to the camera, sounding pretty nutty herself.

Greene wrote in Ocasio-Cortez’s guestbook, “You’re a traitor,” with a smiley face. Speaking through a mail slot, she berated Ocasio-Cortez for “bringing God’s judgment on our country” by supporting abortion rights. “If you want to be a big girl,” she added, “you need to get rid of your diaper and come out and be able to talk to the American citizens, instead us having to use a flap, a little flap.” One of her companions taunted Ocasio-Cortez’s staff with a line that sounds as if it could have come straight from a horror movie: "You can’t stay in there forever. Come out and play.”

These confrontations are all the more menacing because, during last year’s campaign, Greene appeared in a campaign ad holding a rifle with pictures of Ocasio-Cortez and other liberal lawmakers. Greene also expressed support on Facebook for executing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Her violent rhetoric led House Democrats to strip her of her committee assignments over the opposition of nearly all Republicans. Journalist Windsor Mann is right: “Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t belong in the House. She belongs in a home.”

And yet Greene isn’t really that much of an outlier in the House Republican caucus alongside the likes of Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Louie Gohmert (Tex.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and other cuckoo Freedom Caucus members. Many Republicans have promoted the “big lie” that President Biden’s election victory was fraudulent and that the storming of the Capitol was either benign or the work of leftist provocateurs. (They can’t seem to get their story straight.) Last week, Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) suggested that the mob invasion was actually “a normal tourist visit” (do tourists normally carry nooses?) while Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) expressed outrage that the FBI was tracking down the terrorists.

Such extremist views, sadly, do not place these members beyond the pale of a Republican caucus that just voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from its leadership for refusing to go along with the “big lie.” (Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C.) celebrated the purge with a tweet revealing his mental age: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney.”) A majority of the House GOP caucus — including all of its current leaders — voted to overturn election results even after the mob assault. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/17/there-are-no-marjorie-taylor-greenes-democratic-party/

Eric Levitz: We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying

Today’s best-case ecological scenario was a horror story just three decades ago. In 1993, Bill Clinton declared that global warming presented such a profound threat to civilization that the U.S. would have to bring its “emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by the year 2000.” Instead, we waited until 2020 to do so; in the interim, humanity burned more carbon than it had since the advent of agriculture. Now, it will take a historically unprecedented, worldwide economic transformation to freeze warming at “only” 2 degrees — a level of temperature rise that will turn “once in a century” storms into annual events, drown entire island nations, and render major cities in the Middle East uninhabitable in summertime (at least for those whose lifestyles involve “walking outdoors without dying of heatstroke”). This is what passes for a utopian vision in 202If we confine ourselves to mere optimism — and assume that every Paris Agreement signatory meets its current pledged target for decarbonization — then warming will hit 2.4 degrees by century’s end.

The reality of our ecological predicament invites denial of our political one. Put simply, it is hard to reconcile the scale of the climate crisis with the limits of contemporary American politics. Delusions rush in to fill the gap. Among these is the fantasy of national autonomy; the notion that the United States can save the planet or destroy it, depending on the precise timeline of its domestic decarbonization. A rapid energy transition in the U.S. is a vital cause, not least for its potential to expedite similar transformations abroad. But the battle for a sustainable planet will be won or lost in the developing world. Although American consumption played a central role in the history of the climate crisis, it is peripheral to the planet’s future: Over the coming century, U.S. emissions are expected to account for only 5 percent of the global total.

There is also the delusion of “de-growth’s” viability. The fact that there is no plausible path for global economic expansion that won’t entail climate-induced death and displacement has led some environmentalists to insist on global stagnation. Yet there is neither a mass constituency for this project, nor any reason to believe that there will be any time soon. Freeze the status-quo economy in amber, and you’ll condemn nearly half of humanity to permanent poverty. Divide existing GDP into perfectly even slices, and every person on the planet will live on about $5,500 a year. American voters may express a generalized concern about the climate in surveys, but they don’t seem willing to accept even a modest rise in gas prices — let alone a total collapse in living standards — to address the issue. Meanwhile, any Chinese or Indian leader who attempted to stymy income growth in the name of sustainability would be ousted in short order. It’s conceivable that one could radically reorder advanced economies in a manner that enabled living standards to rise even as GDP fell; Americans might well find themselves happier and more secure in an ultra-low-carbon communal economy in which individual car ownership is heavily restricted, and housing, healthcare, and myriad low-carbon leisure activities are social rights. But nothing short of an absolute dictatorship could affect such a transformation at the necessary speed. And the specter of eco-Bolshevism does not haunt the Global North. Humanity is going to find a way to get rich sustainably, or die trying.

Thus, the chasm between the ecologically necessary and the politically possible can only be bridged by technological advance. And on that front, the U.S. actually has the resources to make a decisive contribution to global decarbonization — and some political will to leverage those resources. Unfortunately, due to some combination of fiscal superstitions and misplaced priorities, the Biden administration’s proposed investments in green innovation remain paltry. An American Jobs Plan with much higher funding for green R&D is both imminently winnable and environmentally imperative. U.S. climate hawks should make securing such legislation a top priority.

The technological progress of the past decade was not sufficient to compensate for tepid climate policy. But real techno-utopianism has never been tried: As of 2019, global spending on clean energy R&D totaled $22 billion a year, or 3 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget. Increasing spending on such research — while expediting cost-reductions in existing technologies by deploying them en masse — should be twin priorities of American climate policy. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/climate-biden-green-tech-innovation.html

 Gabriel Debenedetti: This Time, the Craziest Election Doesn’t Have Trump A circus versus Gavin Newsom.

Aat each turn in this young race, the Republicans trying to unseat Newsom — or, more realistically, trying to make a point against him — have made a hash of what ought to have been a political opportunity, almost always because they’ve misread the moment, and misgauged their exhausted voters’ appetite for spectacle and celebrity.

Maybe it was obvious after perennial candidate John Cox launched his latest gubernatorial bid in Sacramento next to a rented Kodiak bear named Tag, only to complain that all anyone cared about was his 1,000-pound guest. Cox, who lost his last statewide campaign to Newsom by 24 points, then held an event without Tag. No one showed except for one photographer.

Or maybe it became clear the next day, when Caitlyn Jenner debuted as a candidate on Sean Hannity’s show inside her private Malibu airplane hangar by explaining that the owner of a neighboring hangar left California because he didn’t care for its homeless population. In the first polls after she announced her campaign, which is led by former senior Donald Trump staffers, she drew just 6 percent support.

At some point last week, California Republicans engineering the recall and some incorrigible swaths of the political media-industrial complex faced an inescapable truth: They can’t expect anything more than hollow attention and anemic support if they’re just going to rely on reflexive provocations, spectacle, and a splash of celebrity to beat Newsom. They have misslearned some fundamental lessons if they think that’s how Trump won — and these performative antics had little to do with Schwarzenegger’s 2003 success, either.

While Faulconer, Cox, and Ose may have found some reason to cheer in a poll showing them with double-digit support, more than two times as many Californians say they’re not inclined to support each of them than back any of them. As for Jenner, who came in at 6 percent just after launching her campaign? Over three-quarters of voters said thanks, but no thanks.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/california-recall-is-craziest-election-since-trump.html