Loyal readers of Bad Dogs and Bakeries.com will recall that prior to the 2020 presidential election, I wrote in these pages about the anti-democratic actions most Republicans would accept — even support — in order to keep political power in the hands of the Republican Party if Donald Trump were to lose the 2020 presidential election — Would you rather live in a white country or a democratic country?
President Trump has been out of office for just over four months, but his grip on Republicans has tightened, and these supporters of his are even more willing than eight months ago to embrace authoritarianism and violence if in their view this is what is required to ensure the survival of the white, Christian country they believe the U.S. to be.
— The Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson recently surveyed Republican voters and found that:
19% believe politics is about “enacting good public policy”
51% believe politics is about “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it”
— Another recent poll found that:
A majority of Republicans agree with the statement “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”
— An American Enterprise Institute poll concluded that:
59% of Republicans agree that “if elected officials will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions”
— An Economist-YouGov poll asked Republicans which of these two statements is closer to your world view and found that:
33% chose “The world is mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other”
67% chose “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves from them”
In the views highlighted in these polls, the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was not a descent into lawlessness, it was a necessary rehearsal for the war ahead. A week after the siege, nearly a quarter of Republicans polled said violence can be acceptable to achieve political goals. There has been no Republican condemnation of the insurrection — not from the Trump White House while he was in office, and not from Republican leadership in the senate or house — the targets of the attack.
These polling numbers are quite remarkable. You would think that people in many instances wouldn’t admit to condoning violence when speaking to a pollster, even if they would. So these numbers may be an undercount of how much support there is for political violence among Republicans. Don’t forget that 75 million people voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Applying these poll numbers to that total equates to tens of millions of Americans holding the belief that violence would be justified in the pursuit of their political goals.
Will Saletin wrote in Slate: “The Republican base is thoroughly infected with sympathies for the insurrection.” The Republicans who were most vocal in urging their followers to come to Washington on January 6 to try to reverse by violence Donald Trump’s election loss, in pushing to overturn the election, and in stoking the grievance that prompted the deadly Capitol riot, have seen donations soar since January. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, far from being punished for encouraging the insurrection that turned lethal, have been rewarded with millions of dollars in donations from their conservative supporters. Working to undermine the outcome of a free and fair election while encouraging violence has proved to be lucrative work.
Many Americans on the right are growing more and more comfortable with violence as an instrument of politics, as a means to achieve their goals, as a way to defeat their enemies.
Do I think that the U.S. is headed for a violent revolution or some form of civil war? No. The people at the Capitol on January 6 were too cowardly, too clownish. But if those on the left fear right-wing violence, they will be more likely to accommodate nonviolent, anti-democratic actions which could ultimately lead to nondemocratic outcomes in 2024 and beyond.
