Rick Perlstein on the infernal triangle

The great historian of the rise of the contemporary Republican party, Rick Perlstein, has started a newsletter via The American Prospect. The first installment, which you should read in full, makes the following points.

(1) The Republican party is an authoritarian ethno-nationalist cult of personality. I myself feel no hesitancy at all at this point to label it a neo-fascist party, but I understand that given the constant quibbling among academics and intellectuals about what exactly counts as fascism, it can make sense to avoid that label, since “it’s just sparkling authoritarian ethno-nationalism led by an aspiring dictator” doesn’t really sound all that reassuring.

(2) The extraordinarily powerful institutional norms of political journalism in the United States make it almost impossible to report on this situation accurately and adequately.

(3) The Democratic party is finding it extremely difficult to respond to this situation adequately.

Again, you should read his entire analysis, but here’s the concluding section:

 If one side in a two-sided fight is perfectly willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate without remorse in order to win, and journalists, as a matter of genre convention, must “balance” the ledger between “both sides,” in the interest of “fairness,” that is systematically unfair to the side less willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate. Journalism that feels compelled to adjudge both “sides” as equally vicious, when they are anything but, works like one of those booster seats you give a toddler in a restaurant so that they can sit eye to eye with the grown-ups. It is a systematic distortion of reality built into mainstream political journalism’s very operating system.

A recent example was one of NBC News’s articles in response to Donald Trump’s new turn of phrase in describing immigration. It was headlined: “Trump Sparks Republican Backlash After Saying Immigrants Are ‘Poisoning the Blood’ of the U.S.”

It took exceptional ingenuity for someone at NBC to figure out how to wrench one side’s embrace of race science into the consensus frame, where “both sides” “agree” that major presidential candidates should not imitate Nazis. That frame squeezes out any understanding of how Trump’s provocations rest along a continuum of Republican demonization of immigrants going back decades (“Build the dang fence,” as John McCain put it in 2010), and that most Republicans nonetheless support Trump (or candidates who say much the same things) down the line.

Pravda stuff, in its way. Imagine the headache for historians of the United States a hundred years from now, if there is a United States a hundred years from now, seeking to disentangle from journalism like that what the Republican Party of 2024 is actually like.

There is, simultaneously, another force that functions systematically within our deranged political present to render genuine understanding of encroaching authoritarianism so much more difficult. It is the opposition political party’s complex and baffling allergy to genuinely opposing.

These traditions include Democratic “counterprogramming”: actions actively signaling contempt for the party’s core non-elite and anti-elitist base of support. That’s a term of art from the Clinton years, but it has its origins as far back as the early 1950s, when Adlai Stevenson Sister Souljah’ed a meeting with party liberals by announcing himself opposed to Truman’s goal of a national health care program, derided federal funding of public housing, and came out in favor of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.

Another Democratic tradition associates political surrender with moral nobility. Al Gore, for example, had wanted to concede on Election Night 2000, based merely on network projections that had Bush up by 4,600 votes in Florida—and not even wait for the actual initial count, which ending up having Bush ahead by only a few hundred.

A third Democratic tradition imagines that reactionary rage can be sated with technocratic compromise. Like the response from Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jew, to Donald Trump’s incessant avowals that what Schumer and his party are really after is poisoning true America’s purity of essence: “What Donald Trump said and did was despicable, but we do have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve that problem, but in keeping with our principles.”

Or like what Bill Clinton said upon signing into law Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: “After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue.” Leaving office, he told a reporter, “I really believed that if we passed welfare reform we could diminish at least a lot of the overt racial stereotypes that I thought were paralyzing American politics.”

This is the infernal triangle that structures American politics.

In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism, refusing as a matter of bedrock principle—otherwise they are “Republicans in Name Only”—to compromise with adversaries they frame as ineluctably eviland seek literally to destroy.

In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to offer more compromise—because those guys’ extremist fever, surely, is soon to break …

And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the “sides” in a tragic folie à deux destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with itself because both sides stubbornly … refuse to compromise.

And here we are.

We can argue about what exactly the Democratic party ought to do about this situation at the institutional and individual level — an obvious point is we should avoid the green lanternism of imbuing Joe Biden with magical powers — but it seems undeniable to me that this is in fact the situation. Understanding that is critical to addressing it, and Perlstein’s most fundamental point is that our entire political and journalistic culture is biased toward not understanding this.