If Stuart Stevens’ new book is correct, then those who believe our republican and democratic form of government will survive are like the frog dropped into a pan of water who is boiled to death because he failed to heed the slowly rising temperature. Stevens gives his book the title: Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.
Stevens writes with authority. He grew up in a leading Mississippi legal family. After film school, he returned home and helped an unknown Republican, Jon Hinson, upset Democrat John Hampton Stennis in a 1979 Congressional race. That victory demonstrated his skill and sparked Stevens’ meteoric career as a Republican political consultant and author. In 2012, he managed Mitt Romney’s national campaign against President Barack Obama. In his book he says of current Republican leaders: “I know many of these people …as dangerous as they may seem, they are worse.”
When he says that the modern Republican party has no principles other than loyalty to a would-be autocrat, his words command attention.
Drawing on various philosophers, Stevens defines autocracy as a system where loyalty to the leader “emptied of all content” governs all else. Because it recognizes no principles, it justifies law breaking, violence, and attacks on any institutions that get in the leader’s way, including law enforcement, the courts, the legislature, the universities and, most especially, the press. It is the system of government now found in China, Russia, and in Vicktor Orban’s Hungary. It begins in extremism and ends in dictatorship.
Autocracy is the opposite of a republican and democratic system where political parties compete on the basis of rival principles or philosophies and have faith that, win or lose, the country’s institutions will ensure a secure future. Autocracy takes away hope and substitutes fear.
Stevens brings together the many ways in which fealty to former President Donald Trump has led Republicans to abandon what used to be bedrock Republican principles:
Ronald Reagan celebrated America’s greatness. He called it an exceptional “City on a Hill” that benefited from immigration. Trump denies greatness, and sees only “carnage” and threats from nonwhite foreigners.
Reagan demanded that Russia tear down the Berlin wall. Trump got campaign help from Russia in 2016 and now wants to let Russia invade Ukraine.
George Bush stood for law and order and against domestic terrorism. Trump began his current presidential campaign in Waco, Texas, home of the Branch Davidian rebellion and Mecca to white nationalist extremists. He says he will pardon the mob that killed Capitol policemen on Jan. 6, 2021.
Republicans who have long advocated states’ rights now want to keep states from passing gun safety laws and want national laws on cultural issues like abortion.
Stevens lays out the recent chronology. In 2020, for the first time, the Republican National Convention adopted no party platform. It embraced no policy other than the election of Trump. When he lost, Trump demonstrated contempt for the 60 or so courts that rejected his false claims of election fraud. His “Stop the Steal” rally encouraged a mob to attack Congress in the hope of promoting a false slate of presidential electors. His followers now launch attacks on the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS and disloyal Congressmen so vitriolic that they make the left-wing “defund the police” movement in a few cities look like child’s play.
Stevens argues that a mistaken assumption of normalcy has aided Trump’s march toward autocracy along with the failure of Trump’s opponents and the public to take what he says seriously. We should be terrified when Trump says that non-existent fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Stevens primarily faults Republicans who admit in private that they know better but have refused to stand up to Trump. He likens them to the German aristocrats in the 1930s who thought a rabble-rousing former housepainter named Hitler could be controlled if they brought him into their government. He marvels at the cowardice of Congressmen, like our own Michael Guest, who fled the January 6 mob but then joined the conspiracy to overthrow the government by voting against the certified electors. He writes: “They need a strongman so bad that they have turned an obese old man in makeup into the masculine ideal.”
Stevens also criticizes the libertarian billionaires, like Peter Thiel and David Koch, who have funded Trump’s supporters. They are, he says “feeding the beast that is eating the free enterprise system.” Trump’s threat to pull the licenses of television networks that do not support him is one illustration of that appetite.
Stevens analysis rings true. But it is unlikely that his cry to the Republican party to wake up will have much effect. The fundamental problem today, as Kevin McCarthy said when he was ousted as speaker of the House of Representatives, is that the internet has made extremism more profitable than good government. The internet can create an “alternate reality.” It can bring money to anyone who can grab attention with some new fear, be it fear of people of color, or homosexuals, or, ironically, big technology. Trump’s view that “I alone can fix it” provides a simple but chilling answer to those fears.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
