There Are No Good Republicans In Congress-- But There Certainly Are Plenty Of Bad Democrats There

In case you couldn’t guess that an Atlantic column by Tom Nichols, titled The Source of America’s Political Chaos was about Señor Trumpanzee, maybe the subtitle would give it away: “The election of 2016 is still poisoning our politics.” Nichols wrote that “Most of America’s current political environment can be traced back to one moment: the election of Donald Trump. The bedlam continues— and, to understand the stakes in 2024, imagine how different the world would look if he’d lost… I am convinced that the chaos now overtaking much of the American political system was not inevitable: The source of our ongoing political disorder is because of a razor-thin victory in an election in 2016 decided by a relatively tiny number of voters.”

Trump’s win set up a series of cascading failures. Winning in 2016 turbocharged Trump’s claims of leading a movement. His victory encouraged other Republicans to go into survival mode and adopt the protective coloration of Trumpism just to win their primaries, a process that led directly to the crapstorm deluging the House at this very moment. Most Republicans in Congress, as Mitt Romney has told us, hate Trump, and many of them probably wish that someone could jump into the Time Tunnel, go back to 2016, and persuade a few thousand voters in three or four states to come to their senses.

At the least, a Trump loss would have let other Republicans avoid sinking in the populist swamp. Elise Stefanik might be a relentless political opportunist, but without Trump, she and other GOP leaders could have pronounced Trumpian extremism a failure and stayed in something like a center-right lane. On the Earth Where Trump Lost, Fox-addicted voters might still have sent irresponsible performance artists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to Congress, but the institutional Republicans would have had every incentive to marginalize them. (Remember, Jordan’s been in the House since 2007, but attaching himself to Trump has helped to put the speaker’s gavel within his reach.)

Had Trump lost, someone might even have bothered to read (and act on) the so-called Republican National Committee “autopsy” of 2013, which argued that the future of the party relies on better appeals to immigrants, women, minorities, and young people. With Trump’s win, that kind of talk went out the window. Instead, the Trump GOP chained itself to the votes of older white Americans— a declining population. Republicans thus had to squeeze more votes out of a shrinking base, and the only way to do that was to build on Trump’s bond with his personality cult and defend him at all costs.

Perhaps most important, a Trump loss would have prevented (or at least delayed) the normalization of violence and authoritarianism in American politics. This is not to say that the Republicans would today be a healthy party, but Trump’s victory confirmed the surrender of the national GOP to a sociopathic autocrat. There’s a difference between a dysfunctional party and a party that has decayed into a mindless countercultural movement, and that rail switch was thrown in November 2016.

The problem is worse by far on that side of the aisle, but that isn’t to say that it’s all hunky dory on the other side. Recently some folks at DSA put together a spread sheet— the Congressional Democratic Leftist Tracker worth considering when rating members of Congress. For the sake of this discussion, let’s just talk about the current session, the 118th Congress that the GOP has made such a hash of. Just 16 members— including 3 freshmen, listed first— have perfect scores:

• Greg Casar (D-TX)

• Summer Lee (D-PA)

• Delia Ramirez (D-IL)

• Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)

• Jamaal Bowman (D-NY)

• AOC (D-NY)

• Barbara Lee (D-CA)

• Ilhan Omar (D-MN)

• Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)

• Ayanna Presley (D-MA)

• Chuy Garcia (D-IL)

• Cori Bush (D-MO)

• Jim McGovern (D-MA)

• Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ)

• Raul Grijalva (D-AZ)

• Mark Pocan (D-WI)

In contrast, 8 Democrats have scores in the 118th Congress— including 3 freshmen— that can be termed as pure garbage (voting with progressives less than third of the time):

• Donald Davis (NC)- 12.3%

• Henry Cuellar (TX)- 18.5%

• Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA)- 22.4%

• Jared Golden (ME)- 22.4%

• Susie Lee (NV)- 29.9%

• Angie Craig (MN)- 27.7%

• Vicente Gonzalez (TX)- 32.3%

• Yadira Caraveo (CO)- 32.8

So yeah— the Republicans are worse but are the Democrats the salvation we’re looking for?