Trickle down Trumpism: How Pennsylvania's Republican Party radicalized against democracy

[marmar]

Trickle down Trumpism: How Pennsylvania's Republican Party radicalized against democracy
Pennsylvania's GOP has betrayed the best parts of the state's heritage by professing fealty to Trump

By MATTHEW ROZSA
FEBRUARY 8, 2021 11:00AM


(Salon) It was very, very chilly in my corner of Pennsylvania the morning of last fall's election. I live in Northampton County, a swing county in this very large swing state, a county so reflective of America as a whole that it has picked the president on all but three occasions since 1920. It was one of 206 counties out of America's 3,141 that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 before flipping to Donald Trump in 2016. In 2020 it would once again pick the winner by backing Joe Biden — but I didn't know that at the time, nor did Trump and many of his supporters, who would go on to act like sore losers on a historic scale — and betray our state's core values in the process.

At least one Trump supporter seemed to be trying to intimidate the waiting voters at my precinct, passing our polling place multiple times in a large truck covered in pro-Trump paraphernalia and blaring music. As it turned out, my precinct went to Biden by a very narrow margin, but more than two-thirds of those who voted in-person supported Trump. In a way, that moment encapsulates Pennsylvania politics. People in this county, part of an eastern region of the commonwealth known as the Lehigh Valley, are generally kind and laid-back folk regardless of their political views. As with the rest of America, however, there is a poisonous undercurrent emanating from the right-wing that is both tragic and dangerous. Sometimes it merely manifests itself in obnoxious boosterism, such as the macho posturing displayed by the driver of that pro-Trump truck. On other occasions, it becomes literally dangerous to democracy, as Americans saw earlier this month when a mob of Trump supporters (some of them Pennsylvanians) was egged on by the president to swarm the Capitol so they could overturn Biden's victory.

Unfortunately, that toxicity has trickled up, transforming the Pennsylvania Republican Party in the process.

As a recent Politico article noted, a state GOP that only a few decades ago was renowned for producing independent-minded moderates like Sens. Arlen Specter and John Heinz and Govs. William Scranton and Dick Thornburgh has now bent the knee to Trumpism. All but one of the House Republicans in Pennsylvania's congressional delegation voted to invalidate the commonwealth's electoral votes, which were won by Biden. They did this even though Trump lost all of the voter fraud-related cases he brought to court (many presided over by Republican judges), lost all but one of the overall legal cases he pursued and was told by his own attorney general, William Barr, that the Department of Justice's investigation into the election had found Biden's win to be legitimate. They did this even though Trump had incited a riot on the Capitol — making him the first of America's 11 incumbent presidents to lose a bid for another term and respond by attempting to stay in power through force — and despite the fact that Trump has undermined his own credibility for years by communicating as far back as 2016 that he only accepts an election's results if he is declared the winner. They did this even though Trump has not provided a shred of evidence of widespread fraud, much less on a scale necessary to give him a victory, and even though Trump was caught on tape threatening Georgia election officials to "find" the votes he needed to win there. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/08/trickle-down-trumpism-how-pennsylvanias-republican-party-radicalized-against-democracy/

[malthaussen]

1. Thaddeus Stevens and David Wilmot were pretty radical at the time...

... it's probably not too far out to consider them as radical and inflexible as the looniest of RWNJs today. They may have had the virtue of ideological purity -- if that is a virtue -- but they were not the sorts of politicians likely to compromise. A matter of principle, no doubt. Since they opposed slavery when it was not fashionable, we tend to forgive them their trespasses.

I'll take issue with the claim that Mr Buchanan's conduct was "analogous" to Mr Trump's. The former was, again, acting out of a sense of principle (however wrong-headed we might agree that principle was), with personalities secondary. Mr Trump is concerned only with personalities. Modern journalists tend to see all politics in terms of personalities, individual against individual. That is not an appropriate lens for viewing events of the 1850s (which is not to say that personal antipathies did not play a role, just that they were not a paramount concern. And personal antipathies often came as a result of principles espoused, whereas now principles are judged by the people espousing them).

-- Mal