Trump will be gone: Now begins the struggle to rebuild US democracy

Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of an election that he lost have been shameless and incompetent. Thank the gods for that: one wonders whether a less buffoonish effort to overturn constitutional government might have succeeded.

The motley army of conspiracy nuts, cranks, braggarts, dead-enders and outright lunatics who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday was reminiscent of the AWB troopers who smashed their way into Kempton Park’s World Trade Centre in June 1993 with an armoured vehicle while the Codesa negotiators, including Cyril Ramaphosa, took cover under desks.

Both groups were deluded into believing that a storming of the Bastille moment of theatre could stop history in its tracks, but they were ridden over instead.

Unlike the AWB, the MAGA crowd were incited to launch their violent coup by a man who for the next few days remains President of the United States and still speaks for tens of millions of Americans who believe the lie that he was cheated out of the election.

The seriousness of the moment drove people to seek comfort in the words, of all people, of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who found Trump’s loyalty test to declare him the winner of the election a bridge too far.

McConnell said that if Congress chose to overrule the election and the courts “it would damage our republic forever... If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again.”

This is the same Mitch McConnell who has been responsible for some of the most damaging violations of democratic norms and has turned the Senate into an instrument of naked partisan power.

The Republican Party is now split between Trumpist fascists and run-of-the-mill conservatives. A vicious civil war in the party appears inevitable as Trump is not the kind of man to forgive or forget those, including his own Vice-President Mike Pence, who stabbed him in the back. The “revolution” is about to eat its children.

For now, Trump controls the base of the party, the majority of the 75-million who voted for him in November, and at least 140 congressmen, a smattering of senators and elected representatives throughout the country.

But the outcome is far from settled. The Republican Party is not a normal party that represents a specific ideology or even a set of values. The glue that holds it together is something deeper and more tribal in nature. Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy in the 1960s laid the basis for the Republican Party to become the movement of white identity politics.

The party has varied constituencies such as evangelical Christians, rich people who dislike taxes, corporations opposed to environmental regulation, militarists wrapping themselves in the flag and a range of special interest groups such as gun nuts. But its fundamental purpose is the pursuit of power which, as the country changes demographically and becomes more diverse, increasingly means minority rule. The rejection of democracy did not start with Trump.

In order to win elections, the party depends on the base — largely white working-class and rural people, many resentful of big cities, liberal politics, immigrants and black people — which has now been hijacked by Trump. It is this cohort that lost its mind when a black president, Barack Obama, was elected in 2008 and, spurred on by opportunists in the Republican Party, became a populist horde identifying as the “Tea Party”.

They and others have morphed into the Trump cult, attracted by the Dear Leader’s pungent racism, authoritarian charisma and incessant lies. If there is to be a civil war, the nature of the combat will more closely resemble a fight to the death between Dr Frankenstein and his monster. It is an open question whether there can be a Republican Party without Trump.

The victories of both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the final act of the 2020 election, showed that Trump’s post-election tantrum drove middle-class suburban voters away from the Republican Party, but Warnock’s win was especially sweet.