Actions and words, we're told, have consequences. And we're told that because they do.
During Trump's rise to power and during his administration his biggest ally in the press has been Fox News, which for the most part has reliably been on Trump's side. That started to come apart after the election during which Trump's increasingly extreme efforts to deny the reality of his loss grew, but even then they still supported him when they could conscience it.
A couple of days ago a Fox commentator, Ainsley Earhardt made this observation on her show Fox & Friends:
There are 75 million people that voted for President Trump. And they are scared. They are worried about what the future of this country looks like. They are confused and heartbroken that their candidate didn't win and they don't want to be forgotten.
She was pretty rapidly shouted down in the media.
That doesn't mean that Earhardt isn't right. Indeed, she largely is, although the 75,000,000 figure for the brokenhearted and scared isn't correct. Donald Trump did receive 75,000,000 votes, but some of those votes were from lukewarm supporters who won't cry over his departure now. Quite a few conservative voters felt that Trump was the only option they had, which doesn't mean that they otherwise were his fans. Catholic and other Apostolic Christian voters often felt they had to vote for him as, ironically, his Catholic opponent seems to stand for principals that are deeply contrary to their moral beliefs, but quite a few of them otherwise found the President to be repulsive. And Donald Trump's actions following his November defeat have turned quite a few of his former supporters definitively away from him.
That doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't have a lot of support. The down ballot results for the GOP show that the populist wing of the Republican Party definitely had a lot of support going into the November election, although it lost some in formerly Republican Georgia as a result of Trump's behavior. It's no doubt lost more now.
Still, Earhardt has a point.
Populist and conservative voters, and the two may overlap but are not the same, have a real reason to be scared, worried, confused and heartbroken.
And the reason for that is that Donald Trump's post election behavior has brought in a united Democratic government that's not only united by party, but united against Trumpism, and licensed for radicalism to a large degree.
In other words, since the election, Donald Trump has machinated for reasons that are difficult to discern, but which seem rooted in narcissism, to bring about the very situation which he claimed to be the one who was protecting against it.
Early after the election we did a series of "post mortems" on where it appeared things were headed, but we did note that the Georgia election would determine a lot of that. What we didn't see was an insurrection and an administrative support for it that has caused some overseas to regard it as an attempted coup.
And that changes everything. . . probably.
We really only have three examples of something like this, with one so old as to be probably not worth really discussing in this context. The three would be the post Revolution government of the United States, the second the post Civil War, and the third being the post Watergate.
The post Watergate is the most analogous.
We don't remember very much of what occurred in the US after the American Congress won the war against the United Kingdom. What we do tend to recall is the prolonged effort to work out a form of government, which was messy and which involved a lot of infighting. We won't go into it in detail, but it's worth noting that we commonly hear about the American Revolution was that it was a "conservative revolution".
It wasn't.
The American Revolution was a radical revolution based on the concept, by its end, if the people being sovereign. It was framed, however, by a largely common culture that had largely shared values and a preexisting governmental structure. It's overall thesis; monarchs meant nothing and the rights of individuals as expressed through legislators was radical. The country rejected the concept of monarchy and the rights of monarchs entirely. It also adopted a type of nationalism that is prior sovereign had not expressed and would not for many years. It went so far as to see the severance of the dominant church, the Church of England, which claimed apostolic succession, from its acknowledged head, an act of near schism that went along with the Revolution.
Following the Revolution the country did adopt an orderly form of democracy that we retain, with modifications, today. But it also expelled Loyalist through community action and kept them out through legal process after the war, turning large numbers of Americans into refugees simply because they took loyalty to the legitimate government seriously. It's not well remembered now, even though it was a dramatic hostile act at the time, and it formed the real origins of Canada, through loyalist refugee communities.
Moreover, Donald Trump has actually managed to make Richard Nixon look good. Nixon was paranoid but he didn't attempt to retain power and actually resigned, rather than be impeached and convicted. He didn't have the support of his party at that time, of course, and he knew it, but Trump has rapidly lost much of his support in Congress as well and doesn't seem to acknowledge that other than to lash out at those who have left him. Nixon's GOP, however, remained largely intact in 1976 and reorganized, with an insurgent wing that still remains, by 1980. That new party, part establishment and part populist, just ripped apart and is only barely a single party. There's a good chance that it will split into two.
So, here's what I think follows.
At this point, Biden has no reason not to go as left as he wants to and there will be no real hindrance to him going as far in that direction save his own inclinations and those of Democrats who are really in tightly contested regions. All the warnings and crises about "Socialism" and the like mean utterly nothing whatsoever right now, and they won't for the rest of the year. Ironically, therefore, Donald Trump has brought about the very situation which he used to stoke the flames of his support.
Moreover, Biden is beholding to his party's left and has now lost the argument he had for not giving it much of what it wants. He can't maintain that a divided government forces him to play ball with the GOP in the same way he could have before last week. He can still make that argument, but it's much weakened as the Democrats can get their legislation through unless they themselves do not support it.
And this means that we're going to get a lot of pent up Democratic legislation. There will be new environmental regulation and it will go much further than anything prior to it. There will be gun control. Policies favoring abortion and new categories of sexual identity are going forward. The courts are now going to take a giant leap to the left in terms of new appointments.
The country isn't going to be completely made over, but much of it is. And the people the country can thank or blame for that are those who stormed Congress last week.
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