1/6 Happened Because Republicans Have Spent Years Demonizing Democrats
PLUS: Obnoxious fandom deserves Julius Randle's 👎
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Peter Meijer is a respectable member of Congress. He currently represents Michigan’s 3rd congressional district, which is situated in western Michigan and centered on the city of Grand Rapids. That means Meijer serves much of the area former president Gerald Ford represented during his 24-year tenure in the House.
Meijer, only 33 years old, is just over one year into his first term in Congress. He’s a Republican, so I obviously don’t see eye-to-eye with him on a lot things when it comes to policy. He also supported Trump’s re-election in 2020, which is a pretty big knock against him but not surprising since an endorsement of the president was practically a prerequisite for winning a Republican primary in the first place.
But after the 2020 election, Meijer stated he accepted the results and considered Joe Biden the legitimate president-elect. After 1/6, he was one of ten House Republicans—and the only freshman Republican—who voted to impeach Trump for instigating the insurrection. He also voted in favor of creating an independent commission to investigate 1/6 (although he did not vote in favor of establishing the House select committee ultimately assigned that task) and voted to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for defying the select committee’s subpoena.
These votes, of course, have drawn the enmity of Republicans. Within months of taking office, Meijer had primary opponents, one of whom has already received Trump’s endorsement. Two county-level Republican parties in his district voted to censure him. The chair of the Michigan state GOP once joked Meijer’s opposition to Trump could be solved via “assassination.”
Back in his district, Meijer tries to downplay his views on Trump, hoping his constituents will focus instead on his work in Congress and his conservative voting record. It’s not clear yet if Michigan voters are as eager to forget and move past Trump as Meijer is; in fact, it seems Republican voters are more dug in for Trump than they were a year ago. This has left Meijer in a state of political limbo: He is not afraid to condemn Trump when the topic comes up and believes his party should break with the ex-president, but he has no idea what he can do to meaningfully advance that cause in a party that has turned itself into a cult of personality. Assertiveness and forthrightness has not worked; neither has brushing it aside in the hope it just all goes away. Whatever the political temperature, Trump is there. (For more on Meijer, read this recent profile by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic.)
Meijer was on Meet the Press last Sunday to discuss the one-year anniversary of 1/6. You can watch his interview with Chuck Todd below. I’ve set it to begin as Todd asks Meijer why he believes the Republican Party did not abandon Trump after the Capitol insurrection. If you’d rather read the transcript, I’ve included it as well.
CHUCK TODD: Take a step back. I think you were among quite a few Republicans in the month of January, right after January 6th, who really thought, in the words of Lindsey Graham, “Enough is enough. I’m out of here,” right? “I’m done with this. The party’s going to move on. Trump’s going to be left behind.” Boy, did that not happen. Why do you think that didn’t happen?
REP. PETER MEIJER: There was no alternative. There was no other path. And given how President Biden when he was elected into office, you know, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions, and then after – and frankly, I blame the former president for this – after we lost the two Senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ or FDR-style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so. So that gave the rallying signal, that created a very steep divide. And at the end of the day, there’s no other option right now in the Republican Party –
CHUCK TODD: I –
REP. PETER MEIJER: – And that’s a sad test.
CHUCK TODD: Why is it on President Biden that the Republican Party can’t seem to kick their Trump habit? I mean, why isn’t it on Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and yourself?
REP. PETER MEIJER: Well, we have a two-party system. And in the best case scenario, each party challenges the other to do better, to be better, to have a scenario where iron sharpens iron. Instead, if you have one party plumbing the depths and the other just uses that as an excuse to go further, to go more to an extreme, to go more away from any sort of governing consensus and towards trying to enact, you know, whatever the will of the most extreme constituency they have is, you know, that is a recipe for both parties to drive further away from anything that resembles serving the American people as a whole.
CHUCK TODD: Look, I get our inability to sort of meet in the middle here. But do you accept what you heard in the last panel there, particularly from Fiona Hill, that this is not a political argument. You've got one party that’s being led by Trump here that seems to be trying to delegitimize our democracy. Does that concern you? Does that, do you share that fear and view?
REP. PETER MEIJER: I do. But I also see another party that’s trying to delegitimize our democracy in far less dramatic ways. At least, you know, not guys with Viking hats, you know, bare-chested, running into the Capitol, but calling for packing the Supreme Court, calling for abolishing the Senate. And frankly, doing the same thing, the same justifications that I saw from some members of my party after the riots last summer. They say, “Well, why is it so bad that we stormed the Capitol? You know, they were the ones burning down these cities.” The sense of riot envy. Now we have this delegitimizing envy where, again, it is creating a reciprocal reaction. I think this is all incredibly dangerous. I think the threat of violence is probably more pronounced on the right today. But that does not mean the left is not capable as well. And that is what we need to cease. We need to cease this opportunity that has been grabbed at to expand the field of contest and the field of play, where instead of working within institutions, we seek to destroy and delegitimize the institutions themselves.
My reaction:
Look, it’s got to be heartbreaking for sensible Republicans like Meijer to see what the GOP in Donald Trump’s time has done to this country and their party. They’re probably desperate to find a way to rescue American democracy and American conservatism from such dire straits. But comments like those made on Meet the Press by Meijer—himself a pariah in his own party—do nothing to help the fix the crisis the country finds itself in; instead, they only perpetuate one of the basic issues at the root of our current political dilemma.
Here’s the thing: The policies the Democratic Party has tried to enact are not “extreme.” The Democrats are not “trying to delegitimize our democracy in far less dramatic ways.” They are not (to use another word Republicans like to throw around when talking about their political opponents) “radical.” They are a mainstream center-left American political party. Meijer does not have to support their policies; I would not expect him to. But he could at least admit that while he believes the Republican Party offers a better way forward, the Democratic Party’s platform is fully consistent with the values and principles characteristic of American society and in no way out of step with other democratic nations with advanced economies.
Let’s go to the charts. Democrats have long advocated for paid maternity leave. Biden’s Build Back Better plan originally called for 12 weeks of paid leave after a mother gave birth. The most recent version of that bill passed by the House calls for 4 weeks of paid maternity leave. Where does the U.S. currently stack up in comparison to other countries when it comes to mandated paid maternity leave?
Yeah, you can’t call what Democrats are proposing “extreme.”
How about subsidized early childcare and pre-k? Democrats have been pushing for that, too. Here’s a chart showing how much countries spend per child each year for early childhood education.
By my back of the envelope calculations, the Build Back Better plan would raise spending in the United States on early childhood care to at most just under the OECD average. Again, you can’t call what Democrats are proposing “extreme.”
The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Democrats want to raise it to $15. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is willing to go to $11. How does the United States compare to other nations now in this regard?
So, yeah, $15 would definitely be on the high end (even though you have to admit the current $7.25 is definitely on the low end.) But then again, $15 is what Canada just raised their minimum wage to a few days ago, so unless you consider Canada extreme, it’s hard to think of a $15 minimum wage as “extreme.” (Germany also just raised their minimum wage to the $14 range.)
Biden has proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. You can probably predict where this next chart is going by now.
The United States used to have one of the OECD’s highest top-level corporate tax rates before Trump and the Republican Congress lowered it to a flat 21% in 2017. That previous high tax rate (as high as 39%) had stood for over two decades, including during the presidency of George W. Bush (R) (emphasis mine).
And how about an oldie but a goodie? Remember Obamacare? So radical! Sarah Palin said it included “death panels.” Senator Charles Grassley said it would lead to doctors “pulling the plug on grandma.” Where did the idea for Obamacare come from? This guy!
That’s none other than then-Massachusetts governor/2012 Republican presidential nominee/current Republican senator from (quite conservative) Utah Mitt Romney! Notice those arrows in his official governor’s portrait? They’re pointing at a folder embossed with a caduceus, which is a symbol not of radicalism but for medicine. The health care bill that Romney helped usher into law in Massachusetts that would later become the template for Obamacare was so important to the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee for president that he wanted it represented in his official governor’s portrait. Democrats want to use Build Back Better to shore up this not-extreme health care program.
Additionally, it’s not as though the American people consider the ideas in Biden’s Build Back Better plan “extreme” either. In fact, polling suggests they’re rather popular. This chart is a little over two months old and from an article highlighting support for paid family and medical leave, but it shows what multiple polls have consistently found: That the individual provisions of BBB are, for the most part, supported by solid majorities of Americans.
In fact, when you look at the level of support for issues like allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices or adding dental/hearing/vision benefits to Medicare, there has to be a pretty substantial number of Republicans who are in favor of those ideas as well. Again, it’s hard to claim what Democrats have proposed is in any way “extreme” when their ideas draw support from across the political spectrum.
Yes, the Democrats have put forth a big agenda. It is expensive. Given the narrow margins they’re working with in Congress and the ideological diversity within their own party, congressional Democrats face real political limits as to what they can accomplish legislatively. They will probably need to scale back their ambitions even further if they hope to get any of this legislation to Biden’s desk.
But Democrats are doing what they’re doing today as the result of some pretty serious soul-searching. Democrats have spent the time since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election trying to figure out why so many voters who should have been drawn to the party’s vision for America turned their back on the party. The Democrats concluded that, for various reasons, they had lost touch with working class voters who came to believe the Democratic Party was no longer responsive to their concerns. The Build Back Better plan is an attempt to address that problem head-on by delivering on policies that both independents looking for more populist-oriented economic policies and members of their base who had grown disillusioned with their party’s centrist drift could rally around.
Democrats also concluded they couldn’t stand for platitudes or half-measures. Trump won because he promised to shake up the status quo; Democrats needed to match that, but with policies that would actually improve the material well-being of Americans. So Democrats went big, and when they gained control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, they pushed to enact as much of their agenda as possible. They did this not only because they believed this was their way back to power, but because they believed the future of American democracy depended on them being able to prove to middle-class, working-class, and low-income Americans that the government could work, that it could work on their behalf rather on behalf of the wealthiest 1%, that economic inequality in America could be reduced, that communities in every corner of the country could be revitalized, and that voters could trust Democrats rather than a wannabe autocrat to accomplish this.
A year into the Biden presidency, the Democrats are still soul-searching. Some say their agenda and its price tag is too big; others say they’ve scaled it back too much. Some say they’ve been too aggressive trying to enact it; others say they haven’t pushed hard enough to turn it into law. Some say they need to reach out more to Republicans; others say any kind of bipartisanship at this point is a fool’s game. Some say they need to appeal more to moderates and independents; others say the way forward is by motivating their base voters. Some say they need to focus on policy; others say they need to focus on their messaging. Some say there’s so much more the party could be doing; others say the party’s political fate is out of its hands.
There’s so much riding on this Democratic soul-searching. It’s so important they get it right that it not only threatens at times to unravel the party but the psyches of its anxious members as well. But when it comes to soul-searching, isn’t the real onus on the party that nominated the wannabe autocrat, that indulged his ego, that ignored his misdeeds, that tolerated his gross incompetence, that propagated the Big Lie, that stoked an insurrection, and that remains beholden to their Dear Leader to this very day?
That’s why it’s pretty disappointing to hear a conscientious Republican like Peter Meijer say the Democrats’ “extreme” agenda threw Republicans back into the arms of Donald Trump or that Democrats are just as outrageous (albeit in a “far less dramatic” fashion) as an insurrectionist wearing a Viking helmet. If he did some soul-searching, Meijer wouldn’t just realize the Democratic agenda, designed in part to save democracy by proving democracy can still respond to the material interests of the American people, isn’t all that “extreme.” He’d also realize that portraying Democrats as “extremists” is the very wedge Trump and his most devoted followers use to split this country in half so that they can gain power. By turning to that sort of rhetoric, Meijer is doing Trump’s work for him.
It’s this “extremism” frame that underlies Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election,” which was published in the Claremont Review of Books two months prior to the 2016 election. Recall that Flight 93 was the hijacked plane that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11 after passengers had stormed the cockpit to prevent it from being flown into the Capitol that day. Anton argued voters had a choice in 2016: They could either sit back, let Clinton win the election, and allow her to guide the country to certain doom, or storm the polls, put Trump in the pilot’s seat, and hope for the best. In Anton’s formulation, Clinton (and soon enough, the Democratic Party) is a terrorist who cannot be tolerated and must be stopped at all costs. The frame justifies drastic action. At first it justified a vote for Trump. It ultimately justified an insurrection. (How ironic that Ted Cruz had to haul himself before Tucker Carlson on the anniversary of 1/6 to apologize for referring to the Capitol insurrection as a “terrorist act.”)
The same frame continues to justify fealty to Trump. In the minds of many Republicans, no other Republican leader is as willing to resort to the sort of measures—including undemocratic or even violent measures—needed to defend this country from Democratic extremism. That’s the wedge: So long as Republican voters regard Democrats as extremists, they will accept Trump as the leader of the Republican Party. Confronted by extremism, they can’t afford to lose.
I get what Meijer is trying to do. He can’t in good conscience support Trump, but that puts him on the outs with most Republican primary voters. He’s also trying to salvage the conservative movement from a cadre of political vandals. So he’s trying to prove his devotion to the Republican Party by affirming to Republican voters that, like them, he also views Democrats as extremists. He hopes that’s enough to get him through all the primary and general elections he’s going to have to run in before Trump finally fades from the scene and responsible conservatives can get back to the task of governing. But the ease with which he slides into the accusation of extremism suggests Meijer isn’t really aware of just how poisonous that sort of rhetoric has become within the GOP.
Trumpism will never fade until Republicans stop viewing Democrats as extremists. To that end, Meijer could have tried another tack. Meijer didn’t have to imply Democratic ideas were so radical that they were intolerable. He could have emphasized his policy differences with Democrats without demonizing them. He could have even said Democrats understand the problems facing this country but that he thinks there are better ways to address those problems. Meijer doesn’t have to support the Democratic agenda. Nor does he have to vilify it. He could simply voice disagreement with it.
That might, however, require some much deeper soul-searching on his part, which may lead Meijer to what he would probably consider to be a rather uncomfortable truth: That so long as Trumpism grips the Republican Party, democracy and what passes today as conservatism may be two mutually exclusive ideas, and that if both are to survive, conservatism—despite its merits—will probably need to spend some time in the political wilderness so that democracy can recover. If, on the other hand, democracy was exiled so that conservatism could prosper, democracy may have a hard time finding its way back into the fold. I think Democrats for the most part know that and are doing what they can within certain limits to keep American democracy alive. But so much will depend on reasonable Republicans looking into their own souls and coming to a similar conclusion.
—
Column of the Week
“How the Both-Sides Media Would Cover a Successful Trump Coup” by Greg Sargent (Washington Post, January 6, 2022)
This is a great column because it exposes the way in which presumably benign language can mischaracterize events. For example, it is accurate to describe the United States currently as “divided,” but that division needs context so that the ill-founded claims made by one side of that divide are not legitimized or put on an equal footing with the legitimate claims of their opponents.
—
Garbage Time: Obnoxious Fandom Deserves a 👎
(Garbage Time theme song here)
Thirteen years ago, I was out in the leftfield bleachers watching the Philadelphia Phillies play when a scuffle broke out in the stands. Some Phillies fanatics had been provoking a group of San Francisco Giants fans, tempers flared, and security had to intervene. The Phillies fans were deservedly escorted out of the park.
Oh, I forgot to mention, this happened not in Philly but in San Francisco, which, according to Google Maps is (give me a second here) about 2,900 miles from the City of Brotherly Love. As they say, Phillies fans travel…well, let’s just leave it at that. Phillies fans travel.
Philadelphia fans are notorious for being obnoxious. It’s kind-of endearing in a not-very-charming way. They once booed and hurled snowballs at Santa. They also booed the United States’ first hand transplant recipient after he bounced a ceremonial first pitch to the plate. They cheered when wide receiver Michael Irvin suffered a career-ending neck injury during a game. They have a tendency to throw batteries at players they don’t like. This is an isolated incident, but there was also that time a drunk fan intentionally vomited on an eleven-year-old girl.
“Some of those people would boo the crack in the Liberty Bell,” former Philadelphia Phillie Pete Rose once said. Yes, Philadelphia fans are just as hard on their own players as they are on visiting opponents. That’s a tendency not only in Philadelphia but in New York City and Boston as well. It manifested itself again this past week when New York Knick fans booed their team during a game against the Celtics. That led Julius Randle (pictured above) to give a thumbs-down to the fans after making a fourth quarter lay-up that cut Boston’s lead to four. Asked what he meant by that gesture after the game (which the Knicks ended up winning on a last-second shot by RJ Barrett; the fans went wild) Randle explained it meant, “Shut the f*** up.”
Randle was an all-star, all-NBA second team, and the league’s Most Improved Player last season and led the Knicks’ return to the playoffs after an eight-year absence. His numbers are down this season, though, and the Knicks are barely hanging on to the 10th seed in a much improved Eastern Conference. The Knicks aren’t title contenders and are maybe only a .500 team but they’re not phoning it in and are sincerely trying to figure out how to put their season together. That’s probably what led Randle to give the fans a thumbs down: He knows his team is fighting and deserves support, not disparagement.
A similar incident happened earlier this year with the Mets. Infielders Francisco Lindor (who was traded to the Mets in the offseason from Cleveland and then signed a lucrative long-term contract with the team) and Javier Baez (who was traded to New York from the Cubs midway through last season) repeatedly gave fans the thumbs down both during and after winning a game in late August. Baez even made the gesture after hitting a home run. Said Baez at the time
We’re not machines, we’re going to struggle. We’re going to struggle seven times out of 10. It just feels bad when I strike out and I get booed — it doesn’t really get to me, but I want to let them know that when we’re a success, we’re going to do the same thing, to let them know how it feels.
Because if we win together, then we’ve got to lose together and the fans are a really big part of it. In my case, they got to be better. I play for the fans and I love the fans, but if they’re going to do that, they’re just putting more pressure on the team and that’s not what we want.
Mets fans were understandably frustrated with their team. For years, the Mets have been a punchline and one of the most poorly-managed teams in MLB. They’re typically a pretty average team that doesn’t make the playoffs often (although they appeared in the World Series as recently as 2015.) They were supposed to be pretty good in 2021, but finished with a 77-85 record. Baez played all right after being traded there (perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s since signed with the Tigers) but Lindor struggled mightily (I know this well because he was my keeper on my fantasy league team for years until I dropped him midway through the 2021 campaign.)
Baez and Lindor both came into the Major Leagues in environments that differed significantly from the New York market. Lindor was nicknamed “Mr. Smiles” in Cleveland, where he brought a youthful exuberance to a game often over-populated with dour professionals. He always looked like he was having fun playing baseball. Baez was a free-swinging Cub whose frequently maddening play was balanced out by frequently brilliant play. (He gifted us this gem, after all, which I am going to spend the next fifteen minutes repeatedly re-watching.) Lindor and Baez faced off against each other in the 2016 World Series, which neither legendarily miserable team had any business winning and that the baseball gods tried to wash away in Game 7 with a rain delay as the game headed to extra innings. Cleveland fans always brought low expectations to the ballpark even when their team was good. Cubs fans are notorious for having no expectations for their team so long as the concession stand is serving beer and there’s someone to sing the 7th inning stretch.
That’s not how teams in Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston work though. Fans there are tough on their teams. Maybe it’s an east coast cultural thing. I suspect a big part of it has to do with the presence of long-established and highly-successful teams like the New York Yankees and the Boston Celtics—two of the crown jewels of America’s sports establishment—and the great expectations that come with playing in this megalopolis. Some teams, like the Boston Red Sox, the Boston Bruins, and the New England Patriots, have recently lived up to fans’ expectations. Others, like the Jets and the Mets, seem to have a permanent place on the blooper reel, or, like the Knicks, have been victimized by poor ownership and poor management. Philadelphia teams have had some success of late, but they’re just as likely to turn in underwhelming seasons or find themselves engrossed in ridiculous, season-wrecking dramas. (“Trust the process, they said.”) When teams turn in poor campaigns, like NYC’s otherwise beloved Giants this year, the vitriol can be vicious.
The hosts of Inside the NBA on TNT recently discussed the incident involving Randle. Recall that Kenny Smith grew up in the New York City and that Charles Barkley began his pro career in Philly.
I grew up a fan of the Iowa Hawkeyes, the Chicago Cubs, and the Chicago Bulls. With Michael Jordan playing, there was never any reason to boo the Bulls. I can’t recall ever thinking about booing the Hawks even when we were disappointed with the team; we just assumed they were always giving it the old college try. Chalk it up to Iowa nice. Cubs fans probably would not have needed to wait 100 years between World Series championships if they had just occasionally been a little more critical of their loveable losers.
Unlike us old-school Cubs fans, though, most fans expect their teams to win or at least perform well. It’s more than fair to criticize a team or a player’s performance or the moves made by the front office. Sometimes clubs—like the Jacksonville Jaguars— should be booed and mocked, particularly when ownership and team executives keep screwing up.
But obnoxiousness shouldn’t be seen as a fan’s birthright and a gameday habit. It’s clear the daily denigrations suffered by Randle, Baez, and Lindor weighed on them and likely affected their performance. (Lindor reported it took less than a month for Mets fans to begin jeering him. He couldn’t recall ever being booed by Cleveland fans.) Smith and Barkley may claim that NYC/Philly/Boston players should anticipate the abuse as part of the region’s sports culture, but that’s a strange formulation. Who should ever expect to be a regular target of verbal abuse? Who would ever want to step onto the playing field knowing their fan base is just as likely to boo you as they are the opposing team? Maybe that’s the way it’s always been in those cities, but then maybe it’s time for those cities to change their ways.
I’m not arguing fans ought to uncritically adore multimillionaire athletes. That sort of idolization can be a problem in its own right. But maybe the sports cultures of these cities could benefit if their teams’ fans didn’t come to their stadiums and arenas with a sense of entitled assholery. It doesn’t mean booing is always out of bounds. I’m just calling for an end to reflexive obnoxiousness.
Exit music: “No Matter What” by Badfinger (1970, No Dice)