Why Won’t The GOP Put Country Over Party?

White supremacists have always been loyal to white supremacy.

In the US constitutional system, Congress, the President, and the courts are supposed to provide checks and balances. Each branch is supposed to want to maximize its own power and fight for its own privileges. If (for example) the President wants to order troops to invade countries willy nilly around the globe, Congress is supposed to be pissed that the President has seized war powers and is supposed to try to stop him. If the President engages in an orgy of bribe taking or targets political enemies for death, the courts are supposed to restrain him. If the courts insist that states can disenfranchise whoever they want, Congress is supposed to push back. And so forth.

Instead, as Trump has shredded the Constitution, Republicans in Congress and the Supreme Court have largely rushed to hand him scissors and a flamethrower. When Trump broke law after law, the Supreme Court popped up to say it was fine since presidents are kings who can’t break the law anyway. When Trump seized appropriation power and unilaterally defunded US AID, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people so far, Republicans in Congress shrugged and/or surreptitiously giggled as they surveyed the piles of corpses. When Trump does occasionally face pushback, as when the Supreme Court blocked his efforts to deploy the National Guard to blue states without the approval of the governor, it seems like a weird aberration. Republicans in the courts and in the legislature do not fight for their own prerogatives or power. They seem to mostly fight for Trump’s right to rule over us as a king.

So, why are Republicans so deferential to presidential power? Why have they abandoned their Constitutional duty to the country and to their own institutions? Are they just uniquely sycophantic and craven?

Republicans are uniquely sycophantic and craven, obviously. But when you see mass collective cravenness of this sort, it seems to me that you are looking at something more than individual failures. When people abandon their duty, they generally do so because or structural or ideological reasons. In this case, I believe what is happening is that Republicans are choosing party over country because their primary loyalty is not to either country or party, but to white supremacy. And right now, the best way to serve white supremacy is to serve Trump.

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The Racial Contract

Americans generally like to believe that the US Constitution laid out a blueprint for freedom and equality. That blueprint was flawed in various ways, but it pointed the way to its own rectification, and we have followed that blueprint as we’ve expanded the franchise and granted expanded rights to Black people, to women, to Native Americans, to queer people, and to other groups formerly excluded from the Constitution’s benefits.

Political philosopher Charles Mills, however, argued that this account of the Constitution was flawed and self-serving. Liberal enlightenment values in general, and the Constitution in particular, he believed, were not established on universal values of equality and freedom. Rather, they were based on a racial contract—that is on white supremacy. The Constitution assumes that white people are equal to each other and that all others are inferior and should serve them. The entitlement to freedom is an entitlement for white people and a guarantee of white supremacy. Or as Mills puts it:

Once one starts instead from the assumption that the United States has historically been, and in some ways continues to be, a racial polity, a political system predicated on nonwhite subordination, then the pattern of promise and betrayal of black liberation can be explained with an elegance and simplicity impossible for the anomalists [ie, for those who think Black inequality is an unintended flaw in the Constitution].

For Mills, white supremacy is a core promise of the American Dream. When white people have historically pledged loyalty to the Constitution, they have implicitly, or not so implicitly, pledged loyalty to white supremacy. And, as Mills says, the actual intent of the Founders here is in many ways less important than the behavior of their heirs. That behavior (again, per Mills) is much easier to explain if we assume that the country is a racial polity than if we try to argue that it is not.

Parties change; white supremacy remains

In particular, if we see white supremacist loyalty as more important in many institutions than loyalty to party or country, the vicissitudes of US politics over the last 200 years are a lot more coherent.

Initially, at the founding of the country, virtually all white people were committed to white supremacy. As a result, partisan divisions centered on regional and class issues and were in general less stark. Over time, though, white supremacy, and especially slavery, became more contentious. When, the Republicans, a party explicitly opposed to slavery, emerged, white supremacy became linked to partisanship as it had never been before—and the country split apart because the party of white supremacy was more loyal to white supremacy than to the country.

Following the Civil War, the party opposed to white supremacy held power briefly. But massive white resistance won the day, and in Redemption, the Republicans agreed to abandon antiracism. For the next 100 years, the two parties agreed on white supremacy—which is why partisanship was once again not the major force in politics. The GOP and Democrats had a broad ideological agreement on white supremacy, and other issues were more negotiable. Even the New Deal, loathed though it was by the wealthy, retained broad support in large part because FDR refused to take a strong stand against Jim Crow.

Bipartisan white supremacy lasted until the civil rights movement painfully convinced Democrats to embrace their cause and to (fitfully) reject white supremacy. Since Johnson, the parties have become more and more ideologically sorted—so much so that Democrats now regularly elect Black people to office, and even elected a Black president.

Our problem is not partisanship. It is fascism.

As in the Civil War, however, the concentration of white supremacists in a single party has created a massive constitutional crisis—including a violent coup.

That coup is in many ways ongoing. And I think it is best understood as a fascist effort to restore white supremacy as the law of the land. The fascists see Democratic party power and Democratic rule as an insupportable threat to the white supremacist vision of cishet white male Christian patriarchal authority.

If we see loyalty to white supremacy as an overarching value for many American politicians and many American people, our current miserable status quo looks less anomalous. Yes, in the relatively recent past partisanship was a less powerful force, and (a few) more Republicans were willing to force Nixon out of office for his flagrant unconstitutional acts than are willing to stand up to Trump today. But what’s changed isn’t partisanship per se, but the relationship between partisanship and white supremacy. Fifty years ago, ideology wasn’t as clearly sorted because we hadn’t had the Reagan revolution, the Fox News Revolution, the Trump Revolution—or in other words, 50 years of white supremacists crowding into and seizing control of one party, as the other became more and more the party of Black people, immigrants, Latinos, women, Jews, queer people.

If we see the Republican choice as party over country, it seems like an individual failure of nerve, or some sort of mass tribal delusion. And it looks like it’s a problem of both sides, inasmuch as Democrats have also become more partisan. Then the tendency is to look to see what has changed in the past few years to bring us to this pass—which is why people tend to blame social media, which has supposedly created information bubbles and led people not to talk to each other across partisan lines.

But the mass tribal delusion that is at issue here is the same mass tribal delusion as ever. It’s just that white supremacy used to have bipartisan political support, and now, for the second time in history, it doesn’t. And, just like the first time, the white supremacists are abandoning the Constitutional order, because they believe that white supremacy is the core of the Constitution, and that the rest of it is worthless if it does not buttress white supremacy. John Thune and Mike Johnson and John Roberts do not see themselves as abandoning their duty to country or to their institutions. They see themselves as fighting loyally for their core values against a subversive and terrifying threat. That threat is the Democratic party. And those core values are white supremacy.

We can win

This is in some ways a bleak conclusion. If the Republican party is some sort of historical aberration, then you can be like Chuck Schumer and hope for them to eventually throw off the yoke of Trumpism and come to their senses. You can dream that tweaking social media protocols will lead GOP voters to realize that they have embraced fascism through an accident of the algorithm and then they’ll step back from the brink.

But if GOP partisanship is in fact just the latest iteration of a very long, very enduring white supremacist tradition, the way out seems a lot murkier. The Constitution, after all, did not end white supremacy. The Civil War did not end white supremacy. The Civil Rights Movement did not end white supremacy. The Obama presidency did not, alas, make us all color blind. What hope then do we have where so many other brilliant and noble fighters have failed?

And it’s true; the present, and the future, look pretty bleak. But if we acknowledge that our problem is a white supremacist partisanship, we should also note that there has never been a time in history when the forces of antiracism have had such a clear partisan identity, and thus such a clear path forward. Even after the Civil War, Republicans were not as committed to women’s rights, LGBT rights, minority rights, and even Black rights, as the Democratic party is—largely because the Democratic party is made up of, and very often led by, women, LGBT people, Black people, Asian people, Jewish people, Latinos, Native people, and all those who do not see fascism and white supremacy as their guiding star.

Obviously, the Democratic party is not some sort of saintly force for good; I just mentioned that Chuck Schumer is a fucking fool, and the party as a whole vacillates disgracefully on immigrant rights, trans rights, and anything else it can find to vacillate on. But even though Democratic politicians often seem to wish they were accountable to absolutely anyone but Democratic voters, the fact is that they are accountable to us and that, as a result, often despite themselves, they have little choice but to be the party of multiracial democracy.

The white supremacists are making a massive push for power now because, just as during the Civil War, they think that they are on the verge of losing. Our job now is not to bemoan partisanship and plead for compromise. Our job is to crush them and their white supremacist racist bullshit, and make a new compact for this country which is actually built on freedom and equality for all.