Meet Trump's Pro-Insurrection "Intellectuals"

[DonViejo]

We should have known January 6 was coming, because Trumpism’s “intellectual” wing called for it, for weeks.

by CHRISTIAN VANDERBROUK JANUARY 25, 2021 5:09 AM

Last December, Ross Douthat suggested that “there are two Republican Parties.” One of them governs dutifully, “certifying elections, rejecting frivolous claims and conspiratorial lawsuits, declining to indulge the conceit” that Donald Trump’s defeat could be overturned anti-democratically.

The other GOP, Douthat argued, “is acting like a bunch of saboteurs.” However, these Republicans “are doing so in the knowledge—or at least the strong assumption—that their behavior is performative.”

He called it dreampolitik, “a politics of partisan fantasy that . . . feed[s] gridlock and stalemate and sometimes protest but not yet the kind of crisis anticipated by references to Weimar Germany and our Civil War.”

Douthat wondered—naïvely in retrospect—if “certain kinds of partisan fantasy might actually be stabilizing forces, letting people satisfy their ideological urges by participating in a story.” Or perhaps “once enough politicians have endorsed dreampolitik, the pressure to make the dream into reality will inexorably build.”

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