After a bad year for them, autocrats around the world must be delighted: on the eve of the second anniversary of the rebellion on the Capitol, the US presented a spectacle of democratic disintegration to a stunned global audience. The Republican faction that holds all of America hostage - the extreme right within the Republican Party that has de facto become the party of the right - wants to convince us that this is democracy: frustrating chaos that leads to a better outcome in the end. In the words of failed House Speaker candidate Byron Donalds, Groundhog Day-style procedures represent a "deliberative, open process" necessary in a "constitutional republic like America."
The fact is that the Republicans who blocked Kevin McCarthy's candidacy for Speaker of the House are right when they claim that debate within the same political party is beneficial for democratic order. The only thing is that their art of political performance is actually about refusing to accept defeat - which is the very core of Trumpist tactics. Democracy does not look like that; this is what the realization of the plan for minority rule looks like.
It is easy to mock internal party democracy. Oscar Wilde once said that the problem with socialism is that it takes away too many evenings out. What is called a "debate" often means that the last person to give up wins - or the one who enjoys spouting off about political philosophy the most: it's usually an educated white guy who won't have to get up tomorrow morning for little kids. Bickering within the parties repels voters as well. If even members, who supposedly agree on political principles, have objections to the party's program, why should anyone else accept it?
And yet, intra-party democracy is crucial to the health of democracy as a whole. People thus become accustomed to good-natured disagreement about policies; that they adhere to the same principles does not eliminate the possibility of debate, which ideally enables the emergence of new arguments and practices. Lyndon Johnson believed that "the wishes of the citizens do not require complex discussion of fundamental issues; they want a little medical care, a rug on the floor, a picture on the wall." However, his party paid a high price for insight into how contentious what constitutes "little medical care" can be for whom. No principle is automatically applied as policy; debates are necessary.
Moreover, intra-party democracy accustoms supporters to the idea that the other side might be right - and this is an attitude crucial to democracy: that the other side should be treated as an adversary, not as an enemy. The losers in the conflict learn how to adopt a stance of legitimate opposition and critical loyalty: they agree on principles but disagree on policies or even certain personalities; above all, they remain free to criticize the leadership. Sound naive? The absence of critical loyalty within the party paves the way for something like January 6: No one has been able to rein in Trump as he reshapes the Republican Party according to his cult of personality. It is no accident that right-wing populist leaders - such as Modi, Orban, Erdogan - run their parties in an autocratic manner.
But what the far right of the far right (or MAGA, Make America Great Again, Trump's election slogan: Let's make America great again) is doing in Washington has nothing to do with intra-party democracy. When characters like Byron Donalds and Kevin Hearn get their 15 minutes of fame, the public doesn't hear the real arguments. What Donalds lauds as an "open process" takes place behind closed doors; in addition, which is interesting for self-declared conservatives, they insist on blackmail, with the aim of radically changing the authority of the Speaker of the Parliament, while ignoring the constitution.
The behavior of this faction is the result of a strategy that the Republican Party as a whole has been gradually adopting since at least the 1990s: even if your views are unpopular and you don't have a majority, you still want to govern. The only thing is that this strategy is now consuming its own leaders; the revolution is consuming both its radical children and their parents, like McCarthy, who watched with fondness as children learned to run wild during the Trump administration.
In particular, the extreme right of the extreme right is looking for a position from which to force the speaker of the parliament to dominate the president of the state through blackmail and spite. So Newt Gingrich - the original model of these events - shut down the government to blackmail Bill Clinton; John Bonner and Paul Ryan didn't play hard enough and they paid the price. The basic assumption is that the other side is not legitimate and that its participation in the government is tantamount to treason. That's why people like Scott Perry portray Democrats not just as actors who make mistakes, but as villains (he suggested they look like Nazis) who want to destroy America.
The unpleasant spectacle we witnessed is not the debate that Americans "need" and are entitled to, nor is it an indication that the Republican Party is no longer fit to govern, as many scenes from the new composition of Congress show. This is proof that we still haven't stepped out of the original January 6.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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