Reconciling after an Insurrection

I’ll start with a confession: In the 2000 presidential election, I voted for a third-party candidate. Living in Jesse Helms’ North Carolina, this wasn’t a particularly consequential choice, but my vote did put me on the wrong side of history. I wish I could say I cast a vote for the one candidate who could’ve defeated Bush and prevented much of what occurred during that administration, but I can’t. So, in this admittedly small way, I empathize with Trump voters who find themselves in existential crisis this week.

I have heard from people who voted for Trump, either in 2016 or 2020, who profess to be shaken by the Jan. 6 insurrection. That’s not what they voted for, they tell me.

Perhaps not, but it’s a hard claim to process, as the warning signals for this episode have been blaring since 2016:

• In counties where Trump campaigned in 2016, hate crimes increased by an average of 226% the following year, according to FBI data.
• White supremacists celebrated Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” rhetoric in Charlottesville and his more recent “Proud Boys stand by” comments in the first presidential debate.
• The Dallas-based El Paso shooter, who murdered 23 mostly LatinX shoppers in a Walmart, cited Trump’s rhetoric extensively in his manifesto.
• Anti-maskers stormed Michigan’s statehouse and attempted to kidnap the state’s governor in response to Trump’s “liberate Michigan” rhetoric.

I could go on, but my point is that Trump voters who profess shock and revulsion about Jan. 6’s events either ignored this gathering storm or massively discounted its significance in order to remain at their choice.

And while Trump’s defeat is official, his movement remains very much intact. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are making their 2024 plans in broad daylight. Indeed, Trumpism is a symptom of a disease that has metastasized throughout the GOP since Nixon implemented his Southern strategy.

To win elections, either in gerrymandered districts or nationally, the GOP has been, for my lifetime, fundamentally dependent upon aggrieved, exploitable whites, many of whom live in rural areas (or have rural roots) and often lack postsecondary credentials or other instruments of economic mobility. It’s important to avoid conflating two groups, poor whites whose economic mobility is tangibly blunted by external factors, such as geography, broadband access, public education quality, public health, etc., and those whose grievance stems at least in part from the growing fissures in what Ta-Nehisi Coates terms “white dreaming.”

This latter group has taken many forms over the years — Rush Limbaugh’s Dittoheads who put Newt Gingrich in power, the Tea Partiers whom Ted Cruz rode to power, the neo-fascists whom Steve Bannon assembled for Trump, etc. The clothes change, but the people underneath are the same.

To counter this claim, you’d have to show that the GOP has made measurable inroads with other voter segments, such as women, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, etc. But the decades-old gap between those groups and the GOP has instead grown to a Mariana Trench under Trump.

I know many GOP voters who do not meet this description, and who prefer to describe themselves as “principled conservatives,” but the reality is that they represent an impossibly narrow niche who cannot carry a primary, much less a general election.

In my experience, self-styled principled conservatives tend to skew white and wealthy. By definition — and in lockstep with the economic hollowing out of America — white and wealthy is a tiny voting bloc, however monied it may be. If we give principled conservatives the benefit of the doubt that a good faith effort has been made to extend their coalition beyond this segment, the effort has yielded precious little success in the national popular vote.

I’d love to believe that this coalition is unsustainable, but the scoreboard says otherwise. Since 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote in one national election, yet they’ve won three elections overall, which they used to achieve a 6–3 Supreme Court majority.

To win the White House and control the Supreme Court, they must overcome demographic shifts that portend a growing disadvantage in the popular vote by winning the electoral vote. Which requires courting the rural vote, where white grievance is acute. There has been sincere effort to wriggle out of this Faustian bargain, e.g., Never Trump, but Jan. 6’s storming of the US Capitol is but the latest measure of its ineffectualness.

What isn’t sustainable is the hope that aggrieved whites will continue to cast their votes and quietly return to their corners. Jan. 6 was a landmark event for what turns out to be a dense, varied hive of conspiracy theorists, neo-nazis, militias, and other angry whites who see a role larger for themselves than to continue to serve as ballast and cannon fodder for the GOP’s ultra-capitalist barons. Thanks to social media echo chambers, QAnon, and propagandist networks like Fox, Newsmax and OANN, white grievance fantasy has been radicalized into real-life sedition. For every insurrectionist who stormed the Capitol, how many others watched on TV and were galvanized?

We don’t know. But we have to assume that the large, malevolent genie that the GOP has been coaxing out of the bottle for a generation is all the way out now. The GOP’s principled conservatives wing, which has also incurred many notable defections under Trump (e.g., George Will), is thoroughly overwhelmed.

I’m happy to look for common ground with conservatives who are taking the measure of this genie. But Jan. 6’s cataclysm leaves us no room for milquetoast “agree to disagree” or “peace in our time” pacts.

When my kids apologize for a thoughtless action, I accept their apology but I also ask what they’re going to do differently the next time a similar situation arises. We have a clear line of sight on who, besides Trump himself, will carry Trumpism’s torch three years from now. We know that people like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are making their 2024 plans with aggrieved whites in mind.

Following similar logic, the question I think we should ask the chastened Trump voter is this: If Hawley, Cruz or someone of their ilk wins the GOP nomination, will you commit to supporting the Democratic ticket?

It’s a bit of a litmus test question, but an important one. It’s also important to be silent after we ask it. It shouldn’t take persuasion about the additional long-term, tough love benefits for the GOP. It’s just a way for both you and your conservative friend to gauge how serious their disavowal of Jan. 6 is.