No. of Recommendations: 20
One way to improve predictions about the future is to try to better understand the past.
Any analysis of the possible future actions of the Republican Party and its remaining politicians and members that starts with the premise that the current MAGA dynamic is a freak abberation from core Republican policies fostering "law and order," fiscal responsibility, a strong defense and <laissez-faire attitudes about business regulation is guaranteed to generate false predictions.
As mentioned in prior threads, many of the core elements of MAGA politics -- entitlement, fear of others, resentment, paranoia -- are rooted in Republican politics of the early 1970s. At first, it is easy to map those elements directly to Richard Nixon, in part because he demonstrated every one of them in spades his entire career but the danger they represented was harder to recognize and communicate in an active cold war. However, Nixon's run for President in 1968 wasn't the first opportunity Republicans had to recognize those dynamics for the dangers they posed. They had a chance fourteen years earlier courtesy of Joseph McCarthy and his four-year hysteria compaign about communists throughout the government and military. They pretty famously blew that chance as well.
These core MAGA tendencies seem to be inherent to the Republican political DNA, since at least the late 1940s. It seems as if the two political parties evaluated the nuclearized, post-WWII world environment attempting to find new angles to use in politics going forward and a sizeable portion of the Republican party locked onto doom, gloom, fear and annihilation to use in motivating their base. Nixon's unique contribution was exhibiting all of those tendencies in one person in the highest office in the land, committing numerous crimes to obstruct justice related to other crimes driven by these same tendencies, then being pardoned by his Republican replacement.
His pardon had two important consequences, whose magnitudes are not even fully clear today. One is that the American people never had the opportunity to see how the criminal justice system would handle a case where a person holding the highest office in the land committed crimes in office using the unique powers of the office. As a result, Americans have been left to wonder and worry for fifty years whether our criminal processes and our faith in them were really up to the task. Indeed, the 2024 Supreme Court seems to believe there are certain actions a President might take that so perfectly straddle gray areas that We The People are incapable of fairly adjudicating whether such actions are criminal or valid uses of Presidential power without paralyzing the country with partisan bickering.
The second consequence of the Nixon pardon is that it taught an entire generation of Republicans that it IS possible to do what you want in politics and actual government, regardless of the law, and escape consequences as long as you have the right people in the right positions of power at the right time. I would also argue the Ford pardon of Nixon had a "second derivative" impact by actually magnifying the Republican sense of entitlement to power. Rather than concluding that
* Nixon did wrong
* Nixon deserved to be prosecuted after leaving office
* Nixon deserved to do time in prison for his crimes
* Nixon was lucky Ford had compassion for him to pardon him
the Nixon pardon instead led Republicans to conclude that
* Nixon did nothing wrong
* the pardon only proves he did nothing wrong
* Nixon should have never been chased out of office
* Republicans shouldn't have lost the White House to a Democrat in 1976
This particular sect of Republicanism thus not only felt a sense of entitlement to power in general and the White House in particular, they then began to develop a sense of resentment that such power was "taken" from them, taking the existing paranoid vibe already present and putting it on steroids. That flawed conclusion arguably contributed to efforts beginning in the early 1980s to ensure every judicial appointment involved candidates who not only supported Republican policy positions regarding regulations, civil rights, etc. but Republican positions about executive power and so-called "unitary executive theory" which completely contradicts the concepts of checks and balances within the Constitution.
I was in second grade at the peak of the Watergate scandal and my only direct memory of the time involves watching the President climbing the stairs of Marine One, turning around and seeming to immitate Rich Little immitating the President with that stupid V peace sign / wave in a special news report on the television during summer vacation. However, looking back to the coverage at that time, I don't think the American public of 1974 had any problem contemplating the possibility of a President committing crimes in office or holding a Presidnet politicaly accountable via impeachment or criminally accountable via prosecution. The vibe I get from watching old news coverage is that of an entire country withholding judgement as the hearings progressed from late 1973 up to August 1974 and simply waiting for the facts to emerge. There didn't seem to be any contingent in the public or the leadership of the Republican party outright denying basic facts such as
* a break-in occured at DNC headquarters at the Watergate
* the burglars captured had contact information for White House aides
* the burglars were paid with cash traced to CREEP
Yet curiously AFTER Nixon's resignation, I remember a sense emerging in the years afterward that if you asked ten thousand Amercans at random in 1978 or 1982 who they voted for in 1972, McGovern would have won in a landslide. Of course, Nixon actually won 60.7% of the popular vote so already, some form of historical schizophrenia was taking root amongst Republicans. I would argue that any politician able to work in such an environment of political schizophrenia lacks at least some of the rationality one would expect in an elected official in any office. I would argue anyone willing to leverage such political schizophrenia as a means to obtain and retain power lacks the ethics required of an elected official at any level.
So what will happen within the Republican Party should the MAGA movement experience a loss in November 2024? It's impossible to predict what WILL happen but it is easy to predict what WON'T happen. A MAGA meltdown in 2024 will NOT result in whatever's left of the rational wing of the Republican Party suddenly grabbing the steering wheel and jerking the party back towards the middle of the road. Remember, 106 Republican House members signed the December 10, 2020 amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court arguing for the rights of state legislatatures to IGNORE the voters of their state and make any substitution of electors they desired for their own party's benefit. There's no silent majority of sanity suffering in silence within the Republican Party. Any vestiges of sanity have been systematically exorcised since 2008. Those that are left will not go quietly, regardless of how badly they may lose legitimately on election day. Elections and the will of the people mean nothing to them. The only thing that matters is power.
WTH
